Dealing With The Unknown

If you’ve endured a few bumps and detours in the game of life, don’t be disheartened – these events might just make all the difference

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When Katherine Prani got cancer in her first year of university, it turned her plans upsidedown. However, surviving Hodgkin’s lymphoma also cultivated skills for her to deal with challenges that would prove crucial in her later years.

Like Katherine, who is now 40 and working as a freelance copywriter in Sydney, most of us experience unexpected trials – with our health, relationships, finances or career. While most of us probably prefer a smooth-sailing life, life rarely works that way. However, we can benefit from disruption and thrive.

In 2012, scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb released a book detailing why things benefit from randomness and risk. Called Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim’s work describes anti-fragility as beyond resilience or robustness. “The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better,” he writes.

“The anti-fragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means – crucially – a love of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them – and do them well.”

The idea of “anti-fragility” has been applied to various fields, including economics and engineering. In psychology, it describes a way of thinking and living that, in an uncertain world, allows people to recover from mistakes and grow stronger because of them.

Benefit of taking risks