The only negative thing I can say about the book Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is that it hasn’t existed for years. The book is a monumental study of chaos and its effects on the world around us, with a focus on what makes certain actions or ideas less fragile – what features make some things incrementally more resistant to the ravages of time and nature.. Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, coins the term ‘antifragile’ to describe these resilience-bolstering features.

Antifragile lays out concepts that are both thought provoking and immediately useful.  Taleb lays out an intellectual framework both broad enough to change your worldview, and detailed enough to be readily applicable to specific situations. The key takeaways are that nature and time persistently erode and eventually subsume what man creates; that against this backdrop one should seek to identify small risks linked to large rewards; and that the linkage between tangibility and persistence can be described as the Lindy effect.

Nature and time are the ultimate promoters of chaos. They do it slowly but surely, like water eating away rock, but eventually everything created is taken back. Buildings will eventually crumble, roads will be taken over by foliage, and the manmade world will disappear into the jungle. This is not news, nor is it a reason to fret. We intrinsically know that nothing can last forever and eventually we will lose the things we think are ours. Nature has unleashed terrible disasters on the world that have shattered the egos of many men. “Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event is excusable; building something fragile to them is not (p. 136.)” You can’t control nature and time, nor beat them; nor project their future impacts with certainty. All you can know is that they exist and they will eventually create enough disorder to break anything that can be broken.

Antifragility is not about pessimism; instead it provides a framework for successful risk taking. Everywhere around us there are small risks that have potentially disproportionate rewards. Look for those, and take as many as you can stomach, and then some more. Most of them do not have to pay off for you to succeed; oftentimes it is just one or two. “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose so much,” should become your new risk taking mantra. Those are the antifragile bets. Conversely, fragile bets have the potential for ruin … you should avoid them.

Over and above the risk taking framework, the most important lesson I have taken from this book is the Lindy effect.  Stated simply, the Lindy Effect is that perishable items lose lifespan for every day they are alive, while non-perishable items gain lifespan each day they exist. For example, every day you are alive brings you one day closer to death. but an idea or a technology gains traction each day longer it exists.

Hence the power of old books. The longer they have survived in human consciousness, the longer their ideas and words will last. In this case, older actually

is better, categorically so. This is not to say that non-perishable items cannot be destroyed or forgotten, but the longer they survive, the better their chances of continuing to do so. Sorry, atheists, but it looks like the Bible, a book that has been impactful for almost 2000 years, should last another 2000 years, the Quran another 1400 years and the Illiad longer still. It implies that natural foods will last longer in the human condition than processed foods, horses will outlast cars, and cars will outlast airplanes.

There are many books that can bring wisdom, and the oldest ones are best. I hope this book gets a chance to last a lifetime and become one of the great books.  Read this book to change the way you look at the world and you may be amazed at what you see. And remember, the truth is the most antifragile concept of all, so live your life with truth in your heart, and you can survive any lie.