Excerpted from: https://zenhabits.net/antifragile/
Anti-Fragility as We Train Ourselves to Improve
BY LEO BABAUTA
Here’s the problem when we try to train ourselves to change:
1. We set out to do something regularly — exercise, meditate, write, create something, etc.
2. We fail at it.
3. Then we fall apart. We might beat ourselves up, get discouraged, and give up.
This is a fragile, non-resilient approach. Maybe we try this half a dozen times, and eventually we think something is wrong with us.
There’s nothing wrong with us. The problem is with the fragile approach of falling apart when we fail.
Instead, I’ve been training people with the idea of anti-fragility built into our training system.
Anti-Fragility, in Short
The idea of anti-fragility comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Black Swan: the basic idea is that many human-made systems are fragile. Something comes to stress the system, and it falls apart. Some systems are robust or resilient, which is much better than fragile.
But even better is the idea of being anti-fragile: stress makes the system stronger.
Human systems are anti-fragile — when we exercise, we’re stressing the system, and after we recover, we’re stronger and better able to handle that stress. Bones get denser with impact. Lots of natural systems have anti-fragile mechanisms built in.
We can make human-made systems more anti-fragile by designing ways that stress will make the system better able to handle stress. Failure helps the system get stronger.
Let’s look at how to apply this idea into our training — any kind of learning, habit formation, physical or mental training, anything where we’re trying to improve something.
Key ideas for Anti-Fragility
Before we get into specifics for training systems, let’s look at some key ideas I’ve found to be useful:
1. Expect stress, failures, crashes.
2. Design the training system to not only be resilient, but to get stronger with stresses & failure.
3. Start by removing fragility from the system. Examples: smoking, debt, having too many possessions, or being super hurt or pissed when you get criticism or failure.
4. Take small risks often. Small experiments designed to help us learn from failure. Example: every day, I try to get better at doing hard work, with each day being a mini-experiment. I fail often, which means I learn often.
5. Embrace uncertainty, risk, failure, discomfort. These become things to help you grow, rather than things to be avoided or complain about, or things that cause you to collapse entirely. Embrace variability, noise, tension.
6. The attitude is to always learn & get better from failure. Don’t bemoan it, embrace it and learn, improve, grow stronger. Love error. When your system gets stressed, how will it respond to get stronger?
7. Intentionally inject stress into your life – do sprints, lift heavy weights, fast, take cold showers, take on challenges, experiments and adventures.
Questions to Ask Ourselves
With those things built into the system, it’s good to ask ourselves questions such as:
1. What are the things that are making me (or my business) fragile? Smoking, unhealthy foods, negative thinking, inability to receive feedback, too much debt, too many possessions, etc.
2. What is mission-critical that would cause me to fail if it failed? How can I create redundancy there — have 2 of them? Can I create a Plan A, B and C?
3. What kind of support network can I create (or do I have) that can help me recover quickly when a stressful event or failure happens?
4. How can I optimize for the worst case instead of the best? Not try to be in comfort all the time?
5. How can I see an opportunity in every difficulty?
I highly encourage you to build these ideas into whatever training and self-improvement efforts you’re taking on!