Antifragile Quotes

“Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system for our lives and projects.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“The antifragile perfects being imperfect.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“Like any foundation, antifragility requires continued care to remain resilient to new hazards, which constantly emerge to erode it.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“The trade-off between efficiency and resiliency is a trade-off between fragile and antifragile.”
― Roger spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“None of these were “Black Swans,” which is the “go to” taxonomy for C-suites and policymakers justifying their surprise in the face of the assumptions they made about the world, signals they chose to ignore, and preparation they decided to skimp on.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Whether personal or organizational, building capacity to effectively deal with change creates resilience, and without exceptional resilience there is no antifragility.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World

“The objective is not to get the future right. Rather, our work spurs better preparation for any of the futures which may arise.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“The issue with uncompromising reliance on flawed assumptions is not being wrong, but being unprepared for alternative outcomes.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“If we are to remain relevant, we need to build antifragile foundations to prepare for disruption and benefit from any disorder.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“The imagined suppression of uncertainty is nothing more than a mirage… The future is unknown, and we all constantly make assumptions. But to rely on assumptions as if they were certainty is irresponsible.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“This need for humans to enhance their capabilities to become AAA is relevant in the context of machines learning faster, with increasingly higher-level human functions.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Stressors, incoherence, and even mistakes strengthen antifragile systems, rather than breaking them.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“To remain relevant in the age of AI, we must actively build antifragile foundations that are resilient under stress, and strengthen with shocks.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“This asymmetry means that the fragile suffers a disproportionate amount of downside from shocks.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Decentralized systems can offer more resilience and antifragility, as this single point of failure does not exist.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Developing antifragility means focusing on the amplitude of potential consequences, not the probability.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Many man-made systems, including ICT systems, have positive feedback loops that cause certain local events to propagate and create extreme global behaviors. The extreme behaviors, especially unplanned downtime, become more common than stakeholders can accept. These outliers are modeled by probability distributions with thick tails. Unfortunately, classical methods for risk analysis based on predictions of future events tend to underestimate or ignore extreme global behaviors in complex adaptive ICT systems, even though these events may very well dominate the overall risk to stakeholders.”
― Kjell Jorgen Hole, Anti-fragile ICT Systems

“... we should develop and operate so-called anti-fragile systems characterized by two important properties: First, an anti-fragile ICT system fails early with a small, local impact to break positive feedback loops before they can create extreme global behaviors. Second, the prevention of extreme global behaviors allows stakeholders to learn from small-impact incidents about new vulnerabilities caused by changes in the system and its environment. The vulnerabilities can then be mitigated to avoid future extreme behaviors.”
― Kjell Jorgen Hole, Anti-fragile ICT Systems

“Two examples illustrate the redundancy principle. First, when a virtual machine fails in a cloud-based system, an identical instance is started automatically. Second, a critically important system should have at least one secondary backup system that runs in parallel with the primary system to ensure a safe fallback. Leading up to the next principle, we note that the secondary system should differ from the primary system to avoid both failing for the same reasons.”
― Kjell Jorgen Hole, Anti-fragile ICT Systems

“Note that there is not a focus on eliminating failures. Systems without failures, although robust, become brittle and fragile. When failures occur, it is more likely that the teams responding will be unprepared, and this could dramatically increase the impact of the incident.”
― Laine Campbell, Database Reliability Engineering: Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems

“The aims of safety-ism were noble. They saw that young people were experiencing greater amounts of anxiety, stress, and depression than previous generations and sought to remedy their angst by protecting them from anything that could potentially harm or upset them.

But this is not how the human mind works. The human mind is not fragile—it does not need to be protected and cushioned from the hard surfaces of reality like a vase or piece of fine china. The human mind is antifragile—that is, it gains from discomfort and strain. That means to grow stronger, the human mind needs to regularly be confronted with difficult and upsetting experiences to develop stability and serenity for itself.”
― Mark Manson

“Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. if every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution - so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and anti fragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible - for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don't care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are anti fragile.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb