Antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an incredible intellectual.
A Lebanese born options trader, went on to become a professor and is also an amazing author of several entertaining and insightful 📚 centred around uncertainty.
Idiosyncratic, refreshing and honest.
One of my favourite 💡 of his is the idea of antifragile.
Simply put, it’s not something that just is resilient to or merely able to withstand disorder or chaos but on the contrary benefits from it and becomes better from it.
Imagine how being antifragile can help us in various walks of life, be it career, health, finance or just in terms of thinking and becoming a better human being.
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.
Lets hear about it from Nassim himself.
Book Bytes - Seneca on the shortness of life
Finished reading: On the Shortness of Life by Seneca 📚
One of the most profound books ever! Also, one of the shortest. At around 11000 words, takes about a couple of hours or so to read.
This is one the those Antifragile books. One that has truly stood the test of time. Written 2 millenia ago by a roman stoic philosopher who’s life was indeed a tale worth telling.
Here are a few snippets from the book to read and reflect.
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.
The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
So desirable a thing did leisure seem that he anticipated it in thought because he could not attain it in reality
There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn
The fairest day in hapless mortals’ life Is ever first to flee.
I hear that one of these pampered people—provided that you can call it pampering to unlearn the habits of human life—when he had been lifted by hands from the bath and placed in his sedan-chair, said questioningly: “Am I now seated?
They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Personally, I also feel it resonates closely with the perfect Yogic wisdom of revered scripture Srimad Bhagavad Gita.
If you read only one thing this weekend, let it be this great book!
Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
~Nadia Boulanger
#quotes
In a world of instant gratification, would we be willing to make art (or whatever is our path to greatness) in the dark for as long as one of the greatest ever did?
The Long Game Part 3: Painting in the Dark from Adam Westbrook on Vimeo.
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.
~Bill Keane
Raindrop - Probably the best bookmark Manager Around
Every once in a while you come across a product or service that makes you jump in excitement!
Raindrop is quite frankly, one such product.
A bookmark manager par excellence. Awesome is an understatement.
A product so good that you want to use it, just for the sheer pleasure of it.
I’ve recommended it to family and friends and they’ve become fans too! Some of them did confess to me that its been a big life-saver and were grateful for sharing this tool.
Its available across operating systems and even browser extensions. Which can be especially handy to access specific links across work or personal machines or a laptop and a phone.
Raindrop is a wonderful tool for storing and organizing anything with a link. Web pages, videos, Stored docs or images or anything else.
You can create collections based on specific topics or even asset types.
Tags help you to further segregate and find content you want to refer back later on.
Its possible to share collections with others as well.
Latest update allows you to highlight content in your bookmarks.
Icing on the 🎂 it also features full text search.
Paid tier offers additional functionality including ability to take notes on your bookmarks, nested collections and larger cloud storage.
You can check it out at Raindrop
Please give it a try and feel free to share your experience in the comments.
Click to Subscribe for more such posts.
7 Lessons from Rocky Bhai (KGF-2)
Rocky Bhai and KGF chapter 2 is all the rage at the moment.
After all, he is the biggest national issue right now!
While its surely a treat for the 📽️ goers, here are a few things we can hope to learn from it.
-
Greed is (not)good Though Rocky makes progress and also creates history, it doesn’t all end very well for him. Atleast not yet.
-
Speed Matters The pace at which Rocky went gold digging 🤣 was (while greedy) an epitome of efficiency.
-
Don’t talk, show the work Its not what he says(although he surely talks a good game too) but what he does that makes him a force of nature among friends and foes alike.
-
Your word is everything When asked about his obsession and the reason for doing everything, he goes on to explain how much the promise he made to his dying mother mattered to him.
-
Overcoming your fear is the ultimate test His courage gives people hope. Following his example they are not only willing to sacrifice their lives but are also prepared to kill for him.
-
Powerful people make places powerful Most people are a product of their environment however a few who transcend it can shape the destiny of the time and space they power over.
-
Nothing is greater than a mother’s ❤️
A mothers love and blessing is for sure the greatest thing in ones life.
All that he is, is because of her: - his courage - his respect for women - his extent of honoring his word
How remarkably well the movie captures this emotion, this experience is surely one of the 🗝️ reasons for its success.
This is also why KGF2 is not just a movie but a movement.
Rocky Bhai and KGF chapter 2 is all the rage at the moment. After all, he is the biggest national issue right now! While its surely a treat for the 📽️ goers, here are a few things we can hope to learn from it.
- Greed is (not)good Though Rocky makes progress and also creates history, it doesn’t all end very well for him. Atleast not yet.
- Speed Matters The pace at which Rocky went gold digging 🤣 was (while greedy) an epitome of efficiency.
- Don’t talk, show the work Its not what he says(although he surely talks a good game too) but what he does that makes him a force of nature among friends and foes alike.
- Your word is everything When asked about his obsession and the reason for doing everything, he goes on to explain how much the promise he made to his dying mother mattered to him.
- Overcoming your fear is the ultimate test His courage gives people hope. Following his example they are not only willing to sacrifice their lives but are also prepared to kill for him.
- Powerful people make places powerful Most people are a product of their environment however a few who transcend it can shape the destiny of the time and space they power over.
- Nothing is greater than a mother’s ❤️
A mothers love and blessing is for sure the greatest thing in ones life.
All that he is, is because of her:
- his courage
- his respect for women
- his extent of honoring his word How remarkably well the movie captures this emotion, this experience is surely one of the 🗝️ reasons for its success. This is also why KGF2 is not just a movie but a movement.
Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by common sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.”✨
– Dale Carnegie #quotes
If you stop learning, you stop living.
Currently reading: Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy by Neel Mehta 📚
How my dad made me love reading?
Through stories.
My grandfather and especially my dad would tell me stories all the time. Stories from Ramayana and Mahabharata. Stories from their life and experience. Stories they heard from people. Stories from all the novels, magazines and other books they would read.
Like most kids I started reading comics and loved all their super powers. When I read a comic version of Ramayana I thought it would be nice to be like Vali, getting half of your opponent’s power in a fight.
I had fun and it also seemed to make me smarter before my friends and elders. This got me interested and led me to read more. As expected, I got better at school too.
I started reading the books that I saw my dad read during the day and share stories with me and my sister at night. I started reading kannada magazines (Taranga, Sudha and Mangala) and then Reader’s Digest. Reader’s Digest surely elevated my reading with all the humor and word exercises and also stories from people across the world. Along the way, I came across a weekly sports magazine Sportstar. While I enjoyed the stories on/of my favorite cricketers. I also discovered names like Mohammad Ali and Lance Armstrong. An account of Lance Armstrong over-coming cancer and winning seven Tour de france, which is considering to be the most endurance testing sport known to mankind, made me purchase my first real book, when I came to Bangalore for CET counselling, his Autobiography - It’s not about the bike
Since then I have developed almost a fetish for autobiographies. Some of my all time favorites are:
- Andre Agassi’s - Open
- Mahatma Gandhi’s - The Story Of My Experiments With Truth
- Viktor Frankl’s - Man’s search for meaning
- Paramahamsa Yogananda’s - Autobiography of a Yogi - Probably the best book I have read thus far.
- Helen Keller’s - The Story of my Life
- Adolf Hitler’s - Mein Kampf couldn’t bring myself to complete as I found it bit too cruel.
- Anne Frank’s - The Diary of a young girl
Growing up, the now ubiquitous internet was nowhere. We didn’t have power at our home, let alone a TV. So books were my only access to the outer world.
Autobiographies are two things: A window to the person’s soul, they tell what they think about themselves, and also how they want the world to remember them.
I am also grateful to all all my English teacher’s who epitomized the pinnacle of reading pleasure through names such as Oscar Wilde, William Blake, Wordsworth and of course the Bard.
We are the stories we tell ourselves.
~ Joan Didion
My dad has taught and inculcated a few good things in me for sure. The best and most impactful of those certainly is the habit of reading.