Antifragility – growing in times of hardship

Nassim Taleb writes of three categories of things – fragile, resilient, and antifragile.

Antifragile things are those like political systems, economies, ecosystems, and the human body, each of which needs stresses to build and maintain strength. We want to be able to acknowledge that life isn’t always easy. The world around us shows us this. And we want more for our students that resilience, the ability to bounce back to how things were. We want for them antifragility, the ability to grow, even in and sometimes through times of difficulty. Not that we should seek out difficulty any more than we should seek out the weights in the gym. Unlike the weights in the gym, difficulties will find us anyway, we don’t need to chase them. But we do need to face them with a mindset that helps us avoid bitterness, that tilts us towards success and a stronger, brighter future. Our attitude is not everything. But the way we view the world shapes the world that we inhabit.

“The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble.” Maria Popova

“We should not try to alter circumstances but to adapt ourselves to them as they really are, just as sailors do. They don’t try to change the winds or the sea but ensure that they are always ready to adapt themselves to conditions. In a flat calm they use the oars; with a following breeze they hoist full sail; in a head wind they shorten sail or heave to. Adapt yourself to circumstances in the same way.” Bion of Borysthenes

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.” Oscar Wilde, writing from prison.

“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Viktor Frankl

Days after being sentenced as a political prisoner, with an eye to the years ahead, Czech poet Vaclav Havel outlined his spiritual strategy for survival:

“I find myself in a radically new existential situation, and the first thing I have to do is learn to live with it, which means finding a completely new structure of values and a new perspective on everything — other hopes, other aims, other interests, other joys. I have to create a new concept of time for myself and ultimately a new concept of life. I’ve discovered that in lengthy prison terms, sensitive people are in danger of becoming embittered, developing grudges against the world, growing dull, indifferent, and selfish. One of my main aims is not to yield an inch to such threats, regardless of how long I’m here. I want to remain open to the world, not to shut myself up against it; I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them. I have different opinions of different people, but I cannot say that I hate anyone in the world. I have no intention of changing in that regard. If I did, it would mean I had lost.”

Within a decade of his release, Havel became the Czech President. What a powerful retort to those who imprisoned him unjustly. Like Nelson Mandela, he managed to be bigger than his difficulties and injustices. His circumstances did not diminish him; they enabled him to grow.

Tim Watson
Principal