Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s  landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty,  probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t  understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension,  and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many  things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil.  What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of  things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and  flourish. 

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even  necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner.  The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists  shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and  protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the  nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call  “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social  policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write  your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the  sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by  trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal  finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to  the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of  ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are  loud and clear.

Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.

Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.