Isaac Lewis
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THE ANTIFRAGILITY of SAYING "F*** YOU" TO FATE

Found this on Nicolas Taleb's Facebook page. It helps to understand his concept of "antifragility" - basically, fragile things are hurt by adverse conditions, robust things survive adverse conditions, and antifragile things get made stronger by adverse condiitons.


The classical, mostly Stoic, idea is that what matters isn't the random event itself, but how one responds to it, how one acts when hitting a snag. This was believed by scholars to make people "robust", that is immune from adversity --since we can control how we respond to events. But the point is, once again, misHarvardified: the classical man was vastly more antifragile than academic & library rats want him to be. He was not withdrawn from the world, but above it. His principal asset was in how much courage and fortitude he put in front of circumstances, how he could say "f*** you" to fate, how he defied reversals of fortune.


If that's the case, then he is not robust, as academics want him to be, but antifragile, as he wants as much disorder, adversity, and volatility to show off, to say "f*** you" to circumstances. If so, he is long volatility. 
The good news is that it takes a certain training. When a certain fellow failed his election bid for the Italian presidency (with an embarassingly low number of votes), as the results of the ballots were being announced, one of the senators was heard telling another: "now watch this man and learn from him how to lose".

It reminds me of this post: http://sebastianmarshall.com/give-me-strife-and-suffering-but-in-manageable-doses, which is why I'm putting it here.

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Sweden. Startups. Lifestyle design. Philosophy. Self-improvement.
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Immune to adversity - cool concept.

The Italian Arditi special forces during WW1 used to do all kinds of crazy shit - like standing 1cm away from a giant punching machine or crawling under live machine gun fire - to make them "immune to danger" as they called it. Injuries during training were common and seen as positive, almost expected.

Source: Italian Arditi - Osprey Publishing (great line of books btw)

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NO SHAME

A friend of mine set some goals for last week, and failed. His goals were realistic and possible, but he did not do them. He sent me an introspective email analyzing why. We had a good discussion on it, here's an excerpt of what I wrote him -

--

I understand. This really sucks. By the way, I still do this, myself. I still catch myself making the occasional fundamental mistake. The good thing is, no single mistake kills you (well, usually). Usually you can recover. Don't flip out when you a mistake, damage-control it and move on. How old are you - 28? You've got 10-15 years of mediocre societal programming, you don't get that out of yourself in seven days. 30 days, 60 days, you can take a huge chunk out of it. A year or two, absolutely you can almost completely re-wire yourself. But remember how you were saying, "Dude, I can do this so much faster than your timeline!" Well, I've been there. Shit like this happens. You're fighting some of your deepest, instinctual defense mechanisms to keep you alive. You've also got your toolbox of good instinctual mechanisms limited by society, so you're needing to create new tools. Basically, you've got all the disadvantages a caveman had (fear, nervousness, pressure), but you lose a lot of the advantages (unbridled, raw power, no rules, etc). You've got to make new tools - calmness, focus, intent. It takes a while. There's no shame in that - let me say this -

THERE'S NO SHAME IN THIS, IT'S NO REFLECTION OF YOU - WE'RE ALL BUILT WEAK, YOU'RE ONE OF THE FEW WHO ACKNOWLEDGES IT AND TRIES TO BECOME STRONG.

We're all built weak, man. Most people hide from it, deny it. That way they don't have to feel it. But you're diving right in, into your weakness, into your errors, into your unrefined patterns, into your fears... so you feel it. But don't mistake these things - these things are the weakness that everyone feels, there is NO SHAME in feeling it. It's part of being human. You need to feel it to conquer it. This is what I was writing in "Give me strife and suffering" -

Steel on the Inside, Silk on the Outside

Two days ago I took a very hot bath. The place I'm staying has a large bathtub, and I sunk slowly into the scalding hot water, and thought. My mind moved this way and that way, drifting around, and I had some good ideas. I opened my eyes and got down to the details of the bath itself.

I scrubbed the dead skin off hard with soap, got out, dried off, and put on lotion, as described in "adding good skin at age 100 to goals."

This is not uncommon for me. I wrote in "Daydreaming" that my mind was wrecked, so I went to get a massage at a spa with essential oils, and then drank green tea and ate ginger.

I'm wearing light colors - sky blue, white, purple are among my favorite. I'll wear silks and cotton. I believe in being polite, friendly, maybe even a little lighthearted when with people most of the time. I don't take myself too seriously.

I think most guys are afraid to do this - to wear light colors, to go to a spa, to being silly and lighthearted, these traditionally feminine things. I think most guys go out of their way to appear tough, rugged, macho. And you know why? I think it's because most of 'em are soft on the inside, scared, powerless, aimless.

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