Please Behead Me

Or How To Be Antifragile

Ominous, isn’t it? (Source: Unsplash)

Antifragility describes things that benefit from shock, things that thrive and grow when exposed to volatility like the mythical hydra that grows stronger whenever it is beheaded. The opposite of fragility is not resilience, but antifragility.

The title of this article is “please behead me”, a reference to the hydra. An alternative (and arguably more pretentious) title might have been “nihil perditi”, meaning “I have lost nothing” in Latin and taken from Seneca on stoicism. He describes a fictional character who, after having lost all his wealth and possessions, simply says: I have lost nothing.

Even ancient philosophers knew that the only constant in life is change. In his books Antifragile and The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb makes a convincing case for why it is in our best interest to strive for antifragility in our professional and private lives. Embrace and benefit from volatility instead of resisting and being harmed by it.

I believe this is a lesson anyone can incorporate into their daily lives (to varying degrees). Why isn’t he more widely read? It might be that the more technical portions of his work, geared towards economists and financial experts, are hard to understand for laypeople like me and you. Nevertheless, I will try to summarise what he has written on antifragility for the individual so we may apply it in our own work and life. I throw in some Naval Ravikant because he gives similar advice, he just calls it being successful and happy instead of antifragile¹.

Note that I am figuring this out as I go, I write this article as much for myself as for you.

How to Play the Odds

First of all, being antifragile is not about predicting the future. As any physicist will tell you, we can only predict the odds of something happening, never accurately predict the future². The world seems to be inherently unpredictable—we can never prepare for every possibility. Fortunately this is not as bad for individuals as it is for large companies or nations. We can be fallibly human in the right places without coming to much harm but we should avoid unnecessary dependence on large-scale harmful predictions. Don’t invest your savings into something experts claim will plausibly come to pass.

Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

The good news is that the inherent unpredictability of the world can be exploited in other ways. Here are some basic tricks.

1. Learn to distinguish between human undertakings with positive contingencies and those with negative ones. The latter are those where the unexpected can hit hard and hurt severely, banking or money lending for example. Businesses prone to positive contingencies (or Black Swans) would be publishing, scientific research and venture capital because they lose small to make big.

2. Do not look for the precise and the local, instead accept that you can only have one or the other and choose accordingly. As mentioned earlier, invest in preparedness, not in prediction.

3. Seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity to maximise your chances.

4. Beware of precise plans by governments as their main interest does not lie in objective truth but in surviving and self-perpetuating. Take every claim from politicians or officials with a grain of salt.

What To Do

The following strategies provide more specific ways of optimising your work and life to maximise antifragility.

The Barbell

The barbell demonstrates the idea of two extremes that are kept separate with avoidance of both in the middle—a spectrum. This means playing it safe in some areas where you are likely to encounter negative black swans while taking lots of small risks in other areas to keep yourself open to positive black swans. This enables you to take advantage of antifragility as much as possible because your downside risk (risk of ruin) is significantly reduced.

Some examples of this strategy might be

• having a very safe day job while working on your literary writing on the side

• periods of pure action, followed by periods of pure reflection (see Seneca and Michel de Montaigne)

• working intensely for very short hours, then doing nothing for the rest of time. This goes against everything hustle culture has ever taught us. In fact, concentrating intensely for short periods of time is known to boost productivity by up to 500%—why not enjoy your well-earned rest after that?³ I feel like it’s seeping back into the mainstream with movements such as deep work and slow productivity.

Those with more extreme streaks or greater disregard for societal norms might enjoy my favourite quote.

Do crazy things (break furniture once in a while), like the Greeks during the later stages of a drinking symposium, and stay “rational” in larger decisions. Trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never middlebrow stuff. Talk to either undergraduate students, cab drivers, and gardeners or the highest calibre scholars; never to middling-but-career-conscious academics. If you dislike someone, leave him alone or eliminate him; don’t attack him verbally.

Optionality

As you might expect, optionality is one of the key components you should look for when designing an antifragile lifestyle. More options equals less fragility to sudden events. For example, writers inherently have more options than many other professions because there is no opposite to someone buying their book. They are open to positive black swans (their book becoming a bestseller) and protected from negative ones at the same time (it’s physically impossible to reduce book sales).

The rules for optionality are as follows.

1. Look for optionality and rank things according to their optionality.

2. Look for things with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs. If you invent something, it would be wise to keep the secret or right of how to make it to yourself (if you can) so people keep coming back to you and paying you for the finished product.

3. Do not invest in business plans but in people. Unlike businesses, they could change careers six or seven times.

4. Make sure you are “barbelled”, whatever that means in your business. This ties into the concept of tinkering—Taleb’s term for figuring things out via trial and error. Through tinkering, you expose yourself to large potential upsides but also prevent significant losses because you are not investing much. Many great inventions, for example, were toys at first. Cal Newport writes about this in So Good They Can‘t Ignore You, calling it small bets. Don’t quit your job!

Viewed from the outside, keeping your options open can look an awful lot like luck. Naval Ravikant also mentions four ways of keeping your door open for luck.

• You can hope luck finds you. Naturally, this is the least efficient.

• You can hustle until you stumble into it. Still pretty inefficient because you could put in a lot of time and effort with little return.

• You can prepare the mind and be sensitive to the chances others miss. This requires specific knowledge or experience or both, enough to be a trailblazer in your industry, which is hard and time-intensive to acquire.

• You can “become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.” This appeals to me because it sounds glamorous. It’s probably the hardest but also the most robust out of all four. Once you’ve figured it out, you can do it again and again.

Wealth

Your barbell strategy should always include having an income to pay the bills. For most people, this will be a safe day job. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur or a wildly successful writer right out of school. Sure, not everyone wants to be wealthy but everyone wants financial freedom. Taleb’s advice on building wealth is nothing that you haven’t heard from other gurus before so I will keep it brief.

• Build and maintain assets that earn while you sleep.

• The first step is gaining specific knowledge in one area.

• Keep redefining what you do (which area you gain that knowledge in) until you find something that you can be best in. This can be tricky—it doesn’t mean you should hop from one area of expertise to another, becoming the proverbial jack of all trades.

• The most important foundation is perpetual learning. If you can consistently learn new skills fast, you’re already ahead of the crowd.⁴

Decision making

Why decision making? According to Naval Ravikant, wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Judgement is that wisdom applied to external problems. If you can make the right decisions, you capitalise on your knowledge of the long-term consequences. Good decision making can make you more antifragile.

When faced with any problem, you’re often better served to remove rather than to add. For example, when suffering from a (non-acute) physical ailment, first remove negative influences such as unhealthy food or alcohol—only then go to the doctor who will most likely add medication. Taleb calls this the “via negativa”.

Applied to decision making, this means: If you have more than one reason to do something, don’t do it. Having more than one reason equals trying to convince yourself you should do it even though you really shouldn’t. One valid reason is much more significant than a hundred small reasons.

The same applies if you can’t decide right away. More likely than not, your honest answer is no but you’re either trying to convince yourself to say yes or looking for justifications.

Lifestyle

Antifragility in your lifestyle is easy: Do whatever you have to do to be healthy in the long term. Taleb himself is a weightlifter, again preferring short bursts of intensity followed by long rest periods. He also mentions the “via negativa” of diet, inspired by how humans have historically fed themselves.

Drink no liquid that isn’t at least a thousand years old (wine, water, coffee). Eat nothing invented or re-engineered by humans.
When consuming plants they would have been regular, meat irregular, so it would make sense to eat mostly plant based most of the time then feast on meat intermittently.
In nature, we had to expend energy to eat. Lions do not eat then hunt for fun. Fasting is quite good for us, and natural. We do not need to load up on food before doing something, rather, re-feed after.

I have definitely had success with following his advice on drinking: water, coffee or tea, and alcohol only pure or mixed with water, no cocktails.

Please Behead Me

I try to become more antifragile every day. If there’s one takeaway from the pandemic, it is that unpredictable events can happen anytime, anywhere. Change really is the only constant, and it’s happening faster the more technology advances. We don’t have to like it but we better get comfortable with it. To me, being antifragile means being flexible in various areas of life, working with the changes instead of raging against them. Any encounter with something out of my control is an opportunity to practice. I want to be able to say “Please behead me” and become stronger, like the hydra.

I enjoy Taleb in particular because he knows what he’s talking about but he’s also not trying to sell you anything. He’s not here to make friends. His voice is very ironic, he writes to entertain himself—you might be entertained, even inspired, or not. (Give it a try, I say, and feel free to rage at me in the comments.)

1. Jorgenson, Erik (2020): The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

2. Feynman, Richard (1994): Six Easy Pieces

3. Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály (1990): Flow

4. Naval Ravikant even claims you’re guaranteed to be successful:

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it‘s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy.

I’ve been honing this skill for a couple years now but success hasn’t materialised yet so I’ll have to get back to you on that.