How Fragile Are You?

Kintsugi

Browse Etsy, the online handmade marketplace, and you'll find any number of artisan merchants selling Kintsugi kits:

Step one: break enclosed pot.
Step two: fix it back together again with thick gold joins that everyone will see.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken crockery using lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Joins between shattered pieces are emphasised rather than hidden. It's a celebration of damage; a normalisation of shock.

The repaired object is the same but also different. Its function is preserved but its form altered. The obvious mends now symbolise an important time in the object's history rather than the end of its useful life.

But is it improved by the shock that broke it?

Antifragile

Fragile breaks and robust is unchanged. Fragile fails catastrophically; robust is resilient and tough. We place objects, systems, nations, people and ourselves somewhere on a scale between the two. We might feel fragile one day, tough the next, but mostly sit in the middle.

Philosopher and ex-options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb extends the scale to the right, beyond robust. In 2011 he introduced the concept of 'antifragile' - the complete opposite of fragile. Fragile is destroyed by shock; antifragile improved by it. It's more than weathering a storm; it's about being sculpted by the wind.

Taleb predicted 2008's stock market crash citing fragile global finance as the cause. But he also argues that shocks are necessary (if painful) and improve the wider economic system. He provides rules of thumb to spot fragility and antifragility and explains how to make antifragile decisions. By extending the scale, Taleb gives us a new way of seeing, of thinking and of living. What if some shocks were absolutely necessary to make things better - eventually?

Hormesis

Evidence is mounting that aging well (as opposed to a slow decline into complex medical issues, system failures and a self-perpetuating cascade of pills) is promoted by regular weight bearing exercise. Within reasonable limits, the repeated shocks to bone and muscle of high quality work outs improve the body and prepare it for less troubled senior years.

Hormesis is the term for this; an effect found in many biological systems. Low doses of harm have beneficial effects. Life overcompensates in response to small stresses and gains greater capacity to respond to bigger ones.

Taleb argues that organisms (and systems with emergent, organic features) are antifragile while objects and machines are not. Depriving antifragile things of the shocks they need can end up harming them.

This is not a trick to 'make things better' or 'call pain by a different name'. The shocks still happen, they still hurt, but there's a necessary purpose to them.

Learning to be Antifragile

Educator, leader, learner: what if most of the shocks felt are not a personal attack, a dangerous development, or a risk of unacceptable failure? What if the shocks need not bounce off your toughness or be destroyed by your strength? What if, instead, those same unavoidable shocks were a wholly necessary and integral part of you becoming better at what you have chosen to do, and of being more of who you have chosen to be.