The Antifragile Age

If You’ve Endured A Few Bumps And Detours In The Game Of Life, Don’t Be Disheartened. Sophia Auld Tells Us Why Those Random Events And Changes Could Be The Making Of You

- Sophia Auld

When Katherine Pranic got cancer in her first year of university, it turned her plans upside-down. Surviving Hodgkin’s lymphoma also cultivated skills for dealing with challenges that would prove crucial in 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 smooth sailing, life rarely works that way. Some things even benefit from disruption and thrive when exposed to change.

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 antifragility as beyond resilience or robustness. “The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better,” he writes. “The antifragile 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 ‘antifragility’ 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