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**Antifragile is a book written by Nassim Taleb. It’s an analysis of the three categories of resistance to stress known as fragile, robust, and antifragile. Antifragile things benefit from randomness and become stronger when attacked. The book observes this phenomenon of antifragility in life and society and explains how to become antifragile.**
Antifragile is the fourth book of *The Incerto, a series composed of:*
**Fooled by RandomnessThe Black SwanThe Bed of ProcrustesAntifragileSkin in the Game**
It’s not an easy book, but it is worth it.
You will learn that life is too random to be accurately predicted and that it’s better to focus on the robustness of things and system to weather bad events (Black Swans). stop predicting and focus on the robustness or antifragility of systems instead.
Taleb wrote a short summary of the book in the prologue but you can always read another one here.
Finally, you can buy the book here.
I give this book 9/10 because some parts were unusually long while others were unnecessarily complicated.
NB: Please skim through The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness before reading Antifragile, as Taleb directly builds on them.
You don’t want to suffer from uncertainty. You want to use it so that it propels you and makes you stronger.
Becoming stronger from shocks is called antifragility. Things that get stronger with time are all antifragile: culture, ideas, political systems….
The antifragile loves randomness, meaning it loves errors. Antifragility enables us to play with things we don’t understand – to build things (we are much better at building than we are at understanding.)
By understanding the properties of antifragility, we can build a guide to nonpredictive decision-making under uncertainty, which means we can understand what the system is allowing us to do, and what it doesn’t.
Indeed, it’s easier to estimate the (anti)fragilility of something than it is to predict what will kill it and when. Risk is neither measurable nor predictable. Antifragility or robustness are.