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Going Beyond Resilience to Be Stronger
A Bite-Sized Read for Your Health and Waistline
Have you heard the term “antifragile”? It means we become stronger after exposure to stressors and challenges. Coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor, former trader, and hedge fund manager, he mostly talks about it in the context of business, infrastructure, and systems. For me, and the work with my clients as health coach, there’s something quite interesting when we apply this to individuals, to ourselves.
If our objective is to be antifragile, not just resilient, it lends itself to a growth mindset and progress, ever evolving.
The first step in understanding antifragile, according to Professor Taleb, is recognizing three classifications: fragile, robust, and antifragile. Fragile systems are proportionally harmed by the size of the event; this is more harm from a large event, less from a small one. For instance, a car that crashes at 50mph versus a car that crashes at 1mph 50 times, there’s fragility there. The one car going faster will have a huge impact, yet the other would barely have a scratch even after experiencing multiple accidents. Robust is a system that can withstand challenges. Antifragile, however, goes beyond robustness: it means something doesn’t merely withstand the shock, but truly improves because of it.
