Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile (Incerto, #3) (Romans, Essais, Poesie, Documents)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West

Tough times don't last. Tough people do.

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

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

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.

'The hottest thinker in the world' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Reviewed by adamfortuna on

3 of 5 stars

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This one had interesting points, but as someone who focuses around systems and order, it was hard for me to imagine structuring systems in this way. The examples were interesting -- things like the human body and vaccines as an example of a system that grows stronger after trauma.

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  • Started reading
  • 2 April, 2016: Finished reading
  • 2 April, 2016: Reviewed