Thriving in Chaos - Not Surviving

This June was the first time I came across this word - Antifragility. Grant Rawlinson mentioned it as a strategy he applied during his adventures. Recently, more people started to mention it and I got curious. The story is simple. When we are fragile, we break under pressure. We start to be resilient; that means we don't break under pressure - we are surviving. The idea of antifragility is that we are growing and becoming stronger under pressure. Nassim Taleb defines it as:

"Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty."

How can we become thriving under pressure? Buster Benson summarised ten principles based on Taleb's book. Here are my thoughts around it:

1. Stick to simple rules; we can create a set of simple principles that guide us on our journey; they allow us to navigate complexity and to stick to what we value.
2. Resist the urge to suppress randomness; I think this also related to creativity which is based on diversity; let's go out and observe and see what we learn.
3. Make sure that you have your soul in the game; when we define our collective dream, we are creating a purpose and we trigger our passion to follow a certain path.
4. Experiment and tinker - take a lot of small steps; let's try things out and validate our assumptions; one assumption at a time.
5. Avoid risks that, if lost, would wipe you out completely; take small steps, right?
6. Focus more on avoiding things that don't work than trying to find out what does work; for me, this goes along with experimenting, iterating and learning - we will never achieve perfection.
7. Build in redundancy and layers (no single point of failure); isn't this a combination of 3. & 5.? Different paths contribute to the same journey...
8. Don’t get consumed by data; data might simply be a form of guidance and not the decision-maker itself
9. Respect the old — look for habits and rules that have been around for a long time; only because something is old, doesn't mean it is out-of-date

In order to create lasting success, we might want to build a collaborative foundation and have a clear direction where we want to go. Then, we can combine this with curiosity to experiment and with a common understanding who are we creating value for. This might be a formula that avoids the trap of short-term thinking and shortcuts that ruptures our strength over time.

Source: ​10 Principles to Live an Antifragile Life