Anti-fragile?
Posted on March 24, 2020 by Mohsen Zargaran, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
Do challenges and pains really make you stronger?
You may have heard this proverb, “no pain no gain.” When I was a child we had a very similar Persian saying in our books. However, I hardly could believe this until I turned to 12 and was bullied at school. I was not able to square up to him and it was really frustrating, so I decided to exercise hard and do heavy workouts on a daily basis and get stronger. I should do all workouts at home because I didn’t have enough facilities (including money) to go to the gym. It was really exhausting and tough but I didn’t give up due to the fierce motivation I had. At the time, I watched No Retreat, No Surrender, a 1986 American martial arts film, by chance, and I got deeply impressed and more motivated to keep exercising. After a few years and when all the bustle in the middle school had been gone, I saw myself a self-confident and physically strong teen who is invincible, but it was not the only thing I gained from day in day out hard work, I realized that achievement is (a) gradual and (b) painful.
From then, I was thinking why the path to success is interwoven with difficulty until I got familiar with the concept of “antifragility”. Nassim Taleb in his page-turner book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, explains:
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. […] Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. […] And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk. The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors”
Oh! What an expression! so we are antifragile and this should be the answer to my whole life question.
It means that we, as human beings gain from pain, disorder, challenge and randomness. So, let’s step into the new challenges, make some mistakes and even fail, it will make us much stronger and content.
Happy new challenges!
