Antifragile–what doesn’t break you makes you stronger

Our body is the results of millions years of biological evolution. It naturally builds in feedback systems to make it succeed and improve over time. Challenged, give it enough time to recover, it often emerges stronger than it was before. Vaccine exactly uses this. By injecting our body with a small dose of virus—our body responds by building up and increasing the number of antibodies to fight that stream of virus. As a result, we will be protected even in a virus-filled environment.

In the 1970s, Derek Clayton, the Australian athlete rested for a whole month after an injury. He was devastated that the one-month no training would ruin his performance in the coming Fukuoma marathon in Japan. In a test run, to his surprise, he beat his personal best by more than eight minutes after a month without running. In the month-long rest, his body overcompensates for the damage done and makes him a faster runner!

For common people, strength training damages muscles, weight causing small tears in muscles. Given time, the body not only repairs the tears but overcompensates by creating more muscle mass.

To avoid visual fatigue, our roads are often built with curves, turns, and inclines. Straight, even, uncrowded roads are monotonous. Driving too long on such roads, drivers will soon let their attentions dispersed, become bored and even sleepy. The occasional stress caused by bends in the roads, merging and splitting of traffic keeps drivers on their toes, therefore alert and reducing the chance of an accident. In assembly lines of a factory, repeated doing the same tasks will cause worker fatigue. To overcome this, management often rotates workers’ tasks and routines to make them feel afresh and focused.

How does a sage define “hell”. It is a place all your wishes fulfilled at an instant. The famous Indian Sadhguru has a joke about it.  His joke goes like this, ” a man sitting under

In the real world, an environment closest to a “hell” in this word is the concentration camp of jews in world war II. A study found that a group that had survived the genocide lived on average six month longers than a peer group that had not experienced it.

Antifragile system is like suspension system/buffer/flexibility/ that enables a system to adapt, given the variability of the condition/environment. The diversity of our bio environment is due to stochastic/uncertainties in the environments, inside or outside us. Identical twins have identical genes, but they may have different tempers/hobbies/preference due to the small biochemical variations at fetus stage in their mother’s womb. The variation of environment causes difference in translating DNAs. The external environment after they are born also plays a role in shaping identical twin’s characters, values and believes.

In business, exercising control over natural uncertainty may be counter productive. Demin/Duran designed several experiments to demonstrate this point: red/white bead experiment. Red bead represents quality issue due to natural variation. The management punishes those with too many red beads but rewards those with few.  This over management can only make the productivity go down, because natural variability is unavoidable. It has nothing to do productivity/efficiency.