No one has done a better job of explaining the harm of avoiding stressors, risks, and small doses of pain than Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese-born statistician, stock trader, and polymath who is now a professor of risk engineering at New York University.
In his 2007 best seller, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that most of us think about risk in the wrong way. In complex systems, it is virtually inevitable that unforeseen problems will arise, yet we persist in trying to calculate risk based on past experiences.
Life has a way of creating completely unexpected events—events Taleb likens to the appearance of a black swan when, based on your past experience, you assumed that all swans were white.
In his later book Antifragile, Taleb explains how systems and people can survive the inevitable black swans of life and, like the immune system, grow stronger in response.
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Fragile
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Resilient
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Antifragile
Taleb asks us to distinguish three kinds of things. Some, like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves.
Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Parents usually give their toddlers plastic cups precisely because plastic can survive repeated falls.
But Taleb asks us to look beyond "resilience" and recognize that some things are antifragile. Many important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow.
Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously.