Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West
Tough times don't last. Tough people do.
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.
'The hottest thinker in the world' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
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About Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Reviews for Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Mohsin Hamid
Guardian
The hottest thinker in the world
Bryan Appleyard
The Sunday Times
A superhero of the mind
Boyd Tonkin Wall Street's principal dissident
Malcolm Gladwell A guru for every would-be Damien Hirst, George Soros and aspirant despot
John Cornwell
Sunday Times
Nassim Taleb, in his exasperating but compelling book Antifragile, praises "things that gain from disorder" - people, policies and institutions designed to thrive on volatility, instead of shattering in the encounter with it
Oliver Burkman
Guardian
More than just robust or flexible, it actively thrives on disruption
Julian Baggini
Guardian
Modern life is akin to a chronic stress injury. And the way to combat it is to embrace randomness in all its forms. . . Taleb is the great seer of the modern age
Guardian
Something antifragile actively thrives under the impact of the unexpected...to embrace randomness rather than trying to control it
The Sunday Times
Enduring volatility is one thing; what about benefiting from it? That is what Taleb calls 'antifragility' and he thinks that it is the ultimate model to aspire to - for individuals, financial institutions, even nations. . . May well capture a quality that you have long aspired to without having quite known quite what it is. . . I saw the world afresh
The Times