We want to use randomness, uncertainty, and chaos, not hide from them

Be the fire and wish for the wind

We are better at doing than we are at thinking

Anything that has more upside than downside from random events is antifragile; the reverse is fragile

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness

It is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility—hence fragile—than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans

The extended disorder family: uncertainty, variability, imperfect, incomplete knowledge, change, chaos, volatility, disorder, entropy, time, the unknown, randomness, turmoil, stressor, error, dispersion of outcomes, unknowledge

The more time, the more events, the more disorder

Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable—and those that come from reality

Doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which are committed enough to take personal risks

If you see fraud do not say fraud, you are a fraud

Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it

Many of the problems of society come from the argument "other people are doing it"

A man is morally free when he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity

When in action, new problems and scares emerge every day to displace and eliminate the previous day's headaches, resentments, and conflicts

How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius

The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates

Moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability

Necessity really is the mother of invention

Comfort is a road to waste

The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals

If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to they gym for some exertion instead of resting

If you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest person in the office

Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free times makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated

One should have enough self-control to make the audience work hard to listen, which causes them to switch into intellectual overdrive

Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery

The fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed

Revolutions feed on repression

The more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you

It is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one

Loss of bone density and degradation of the health of bones also causes aging and diabetes

A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on

Someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any

Our emotional energy is blind to probability

The media make things worse as they play on our infatuation with anecdotes, our thirst for the sensational, and they cause a great deal of unfairness that way

The world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future

What survives comes from the interplay of some fitness and environmental conditions

The more American policy makers intervene in other countries for the sake of stability, the more they bring instability

No stability without volatility

Medical error kills between three times and ten times as many people as car accidents in the United States

Noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless for any purpose, and that you need to clean up to make sense of what you are listening to

As with news received at too high a frequency, too much information becomes harmful—daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner

We overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never at small ones

The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied

Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not

Men of leisure become slaves to inner feelings of dissatisfaction and interests over which they have little control

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it— books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well

Excess wealth, if you don’t need it, is a heavy burden

Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors

The traditional understanding of Stoicism in the literature is of some indifference to fate

The attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness

When you become rich, the pain of losing your fortune exceeds the emotional gain of getting additional wealth, so you start living under continuous emotional threat

The modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking

Invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us—not good deeds and acts of virtue

Wealth is the slave of the wise man and master of the fool

The bookkeeping of benefits is simple: it is all expenditure; if any one returns it, that is clear gain (my emphasis); if he does not return it, it is not lost, I gave it for the sake of giving

If I have “nothing to lose” then it is all gain and I am antifragile

Antifragility implies more to gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable) asymmetry

The first step toward antifragility consists in first decreasing downside, rather than increasing upside; that is, by lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting natural antifragility work by itself

Nothing can be done both hastily and safely— almost nothing

Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow

People don’t know what they want until you provide them with it

An option is what makes you antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty, without a corresponding serious harm from the negative side

We are managed by small (or large) accidental changes, more accidental than we admit

We talk big but hardly have any imagination, except for a few visionaries who seem to recognize the optionality of things

The more studies, the less obvious elementary but fundamental things become; activity, on the other hand, strips things to their simplest possible model

Wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper)

When you think you know more than you do, you are fragile

Experimentation can make people much more careful than theories

The money should go to the tinkerers, the aggressive tinkerers who you trust will milk the option

Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living

Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing

What I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember

The most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent

Incompleteness —half-knowledge—is always dangerous

Doing is wiser than you are prone to believe—and more rational

Society doesn’t appear to advance with organized education

The job of a scholar is to ignore insignificant current affairs, to write books, not emails, and not to give lectures dancing on a stage; that he has other things to do, like read in bed in the morning, write at a desk in front of a window, take long walks (slowly), drink espressos (mornings), chamomile tea (afternoons), Lebanese wine (evenings), and Muscat wines (after dinner), take more long walks (slowly), argue with friends and family members (but never in the morning), and read (again) in bed before sleeping, not keep rewriting one’s book and ideas for the benefit of strangers and members of the local chapter of Networking International who haven’t read it

For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock

For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point)

The learning of life is about what to avoid

Keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs

Simpler methods for forecasting and inference can work much, much better than complicated ones

Adopting some intellectual humility and abandoning the aim at sophistication can yield powerful effects

By invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions require no more than a single reason

The antifragile benefits from volatility and disorder, the fragile is harmed

Technology is at its best when it is invisible

In a “mature” market there is no free lunch anymore, and what appears as a free lunch has a hidden risk

If the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor

Complex systems have feedback loops, so what you “burn” depends on what you consume, and how you consume it

What Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise

Spend less, live longer is a subtractive strategy

“The good is mostly in the absence of bad” - Ennius

If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive (elimination of iatrogenics)

In a large set of circumstances (marginal disease), anything that takes you away from the doctor and allows you to do nothing (hence gives nature a chance to do its work) will be beneficial

Among other things the role of religion is to tame the iatrogenics of abundance—fasting makes you lose your sense of entitlement

What we mostly need to remove is a few meals at random, or at least avoid steadiness in food consumption

For the ancients, the worst possible outcome was not death, but a dishonorable death, or even just a regular one.

The antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me

In traditional societies, a person is only as respectable and as worthy as the downside he (or, more, a lot more, than expected, she) is willing to face for the sake of others

A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand

When you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog

Predicting—any prediction—without skin in the game can be as dangerous for others

Every opinion maker needs to have “skin in the game” in the event of harm caused by reliance on his information or opinion

No opinion without risk; and, of course, no risk without hope for return

Never have people who talk and don’t do been more visible, and played a larger role, than in modern times. This is the product of modernism and division of tasks

Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win

Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one

Marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity

The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations

Results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks

Things in nature move ahead from resurrection to resurrection