Ikigai : the Japanese secret to a long and happy life pdfdrive com

Beyond resilience: Antifragility

As the legend goes, the first time Hercules faced the Hydra, he despaired when he discovered that cutting off one of its heads meant that two would grow back in its place. He would never be able to kill the beast if it got stronger with every wound.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in Antifragile: Things That Gain from
Disorder,⁴ we use the word fragile to describe people, things, and organizations that are weakened when harmed, and the words robust and resilient for things that are able to withstand harm without weakening, but we don’t have a word for things that get stronger when harmed (up to a point).
To refer to the kind of power possessed by the Hydra of L erna, to talk about things that get stronger when they are harmed, Taleb proposes the term antifragile: “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Catastrophes and exceptional circumstances offer good models for explaining antifragility. In 2011 a tsunami hit the Tōhoku region of Japan, doing tremendous damage to dozens of cities and towns along the coast, most famously Fukushima.
When we visited the affected coast two years after the catastrophe, having driven for hours along cracked highways and past one empty gas station after another, we passed through several ghost towns whose streets had been taken over by the remnants of houses, piles of cars, and empty train stations. These towns were fragile spaces that had been forgotten by the government and could not recover on their own.
Other places, such as Ishinomaki and K esennuma, suffered extensive damage but were rebuilt within a few years, thanks to the efforts of many. Ishinomaki and K esennuma showed how resilient they were in their ability to return to normal after the catastrophe.
The earthquake that caused the tsunami also affected the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The Tokyo Electric Power Company engineers working at the plant were not prepared to recover from that kind of damage. The Fukushima nuclear facility is still in a state of emergency and will be for decades to come. It demonstrated its fragility in the face of an unprecedented catastrophe.
The Japanese financial markets closed minutes after the earthquake. Which businesses did the best in the aftermath? Stock in big construction companies has been steadily on the rise since 2011; the need to rebuild the entire coast of Tōhoku is a boon for construction. In this case, Japanese construction companies are antifragile, since they benefited enormously from the catastrophe.
Now let’s take a look at how we can apply this concept to our daily lives. How can we be more antifragile?
Step 1: Create redundancies