Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well.

anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us (say with “advice”) but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

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If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution—so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.

“Men feel the good less intensely than the bad”

invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us—not good deeds and acts of virtue.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”