Antifragile (Updated)

This is a second update of the Antifragility mental model that were published long time ago. I will continue to update more models during the next year, but the next update may take a while.

Antifragile: ”A thing that is improved by variations, turmoil, stressors, mistakes, etc.” In this model, I use the word shocks as a common word for the aforementioned.

Fragile, resilient and antifragile

Shocks harm fragile items and persons. Shocks do not affect the resilient. Yet, you cannot invert fragile and get resilient. You get antifragile. It gets better with shocks. Antifragile wants you to abuse it within limits. These limits are high. Antifragile things are common in nature, but rare in man-made inorganic constructs. Genetic code and human bodies are antifragile. Buildings, bridges, and companies are fragile.

Antifragile systems need shocks to function. They finally die without them. These systems work better when you do not change them. Fragile systems get worse without changes. Bottom-up approaches increase antifragility in these systems. Top-up approaches diminish it or destroy them. Even though antifragile systems get better with shocks, they have limitations. Your body can handle hundreds of little rocks separately, but it cannot handle one rock that has the size of hundreds of little ones.

Noticing fragility and antifragility

Limited gains and unlimited harms are characteristics of fragile. The opposite is true for antifragile. For example, flight time is fragile. Your flight´s estimated time of arrival is never hours earlier than it should, but can be days later. Hydra in Greek mythology was antifragile. If you cut one of its heads, it grew two more. Acceleration of harm tells whether something is fragile. For example, when a shock is twice as large than another and it causes more than twice the harm, the victim is fragile.

Large, stable, and purposeful constructions are fragile. The opposite is true for small, but not too small, volatile, and inorganic systems with little parts like the restaurant business. When one part of the fragile breaks, the entire construction breaks. When this happens to the antifragile, it gets stronger. You cannot have antifragility without this characteristic.

Only time will tell you whether something is fragile or antifragile. You might have to wait centuries or millennia to find out. The longer something survives, the higher the odds it is antifragile. Books, genetic code, and even the idea of tablets have survived for millennia. Ideas usually remain, even though their executions can change. Models in this book look antifragile now, but nobody can be sure about the future.

Inorganic structures are more usually fragile and some of them are man-made. Organic structures have more common antifragile characteristics. Humans have existed only a short time compared to life on earth. Genetic code will thrive on earth long after humans face extinction. Nature develops bottom-up and humans usually create top-down approaches. Nature lets complex systems thrive on their own, and humans like to control them. The problem with the latter approach is that humans cannot understand the effects of their actions on complex systems.

Nature adapts to environmental changes, humans try to change the environment. It improves systems through elimination and humans through addition. The former creates better adaptability, the latter higher odds of destruction. Nature adapts to changes without effort, humans do anything to resist them. Nature approves the fact that failures are natural ways to improve the common good. You cannot say the same about humans.

Nothing has 100% efficiency in nature. It has slack and redundancy. They are signs of antifragility. Humans have two kidneys, instead of the one they need. Animals have useless body parts. Efficiency creates fragility. Even though there are no systems with 100% efficiency, the ones that aim for it have almost 100% certainty of destruction. All parts of these systems have to stay intact. Therefore, they are fragile. Systems that allow the destruction of some parts are antifragile like the restaurant business. If one restaurant goes bankrupt, others will stay alive. The system becomes stronger.

Commonalities of being less fragile

You will never be antifragile. It is not possible. Your body and brain will eventually decay. Your genetic code can be antifragile, but it depends on your offspring´s ability to reproduce. You can become more antifragile, but with opportunity costs. Sacrifice efficiency to make it happen. Here is how:

• Little short-term shocks are good for you. Increase their amount in your life and minimize the amount of long-term shocks. Deal with the latter first.

• Increase slack and redundancy. Faster and more efficient is never better after certain points.

• Focus on ideas that have survived the test of time.

• Larger downside than upside is the warning signal.

• Focus on survival. Never put your survival at stake, unless you have to. This applies to everything.

• Never listen to anyone who transfers part of your upside to himself, but not the downside.

• Favor the natural over the man-made.

• Favor simplicity over complexity. On average, reducing is better than adding.

• Build systems that do not have a single-part dependency.

• Do not interfere complex systems.

• Do not use statistics to approach power-law events.

• Favor practical knowledge instead of theoretical. Listen to practitioners, not academics.

• Use the rational trial-and-error approach and never repeat the same mistake

• Establish ways to learn from other people´s mistakes.

• Think about suckers. If you cannot find them, it is you.

• Have many reliable sources of income and data.

The amazing part of all is that you have to be less smart in most of these cases. You can also be more often wrong and still get higher odds of positive outcomes in life. These commonalities apply also to organizations. Most of them have negative first order effects, but in this complex world they do not matter much. The real advantages of those approaches apply to second- and higher order effects. Some of the opposites of the list have precisely inverse effects when talking about become more fragile.

Deliberate practice

You live in a global, interconnected economy. Anyone can sell anything to anyone anywhere in the world. The average performance is not good enough. Unless you have world-class skills in highly competitive fields or some unique and needed expertise, you are in trouble. When you are truly masterclass, the rewards are magnificent. You need to acquire skills through practice and the general principles of the best way to do it are the same in almost every field. This is called the deliberate practice.

Definition of deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is a highly structured act of rehearsing a behavior or engaging in an activity over and over consciously and intentionally, for the specific goal of improving or mastering it. Deliberate practice has four components:

1. The person practicing has a strong motivation and is focused on getting better in every action.
2. The task is designed to take person´s existing skills into account and be understood by her.
3. There should be immediate informative feedback.
4. There should be a possibility to repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

Examples

Figure skater is learning a new jump with the help of her coach. The jump should be a little bit harder than skater has ever succeeded in. Coach should give feedback after every jump about how the skater did and what she can improve when she repeats the jumping action. A professional chess player is studying a certain position that he played wrong in the last game with his coach. The study could be consisted of the games played before by the best chess players in history.

Some of the fields of expertise are better for applying deliberate practice

Many fields of expertise have already developed broadly accepted training principles and these can be called deliberate practice. Most of the professional sports, classical music, and mathematics use the principles of deliberate practice. These fields have some common characteristics. First, there are at least semiobjective ways of measuring performance such as evaluation of expert judges. It is impossible to improve performance, unless you are not aware of what constitutes improvement. Second, fields typically have to be competitive enough to have enough motivation to practice for the goal of improvement. Third, the relevant skills of these fields have been developed for a long time, normally for decades. Fourth, these fields have professional coaches who are improving training methods used by the experts. Otherwise it is not possible to increase the skill level of the top performers in the fields.

The four components

It is hard to have an intense focus and a superb motivation, while you practice things you have not yet managed to do well enough. You need to push outside of our comfort zone and stay focused, when you experience the pain of failure or disappointing result. You can do two things to have a better focus. First, you need general maintenance like enough sleep and good nutrition. The second, is to limit the length of the practice sessions for not more than an hour. Humans have a basic rest-activity cycle which lasts about 80-120 minutes. When you are awake, your brainwaves are faster during the first half of the BRAC cycle and you feel alert and focused. Then your brainwaves slow and we start feeling dreamy and little tired and your focus gets lost. You must also have a motivation to get better. Practicing years and thousands of hours and constantly failing is nearly impossible without high intrinsic motivation.

The practice needs to push the person outside of his/her comfort zone. The path of least resistance is not enough. Specific practicing activities, and exercises should be designed to exceed the person´s current skills, adapt to the person´s ways of doing things and get him/her to the next level. A figure skater needs to learn a jump that is harder than the previously learned jump. She should also understand what is the purpose of everything. What are the reasons to do something in a particular way. And what will the results be by doing things that way. For example, in which part of the feet should touch a certain part of the football while practicing a certain kick. And what kind of spin will the ball have after the kicking action is done right. All the practice should have concrete clear goals. What to do, how to do it and why it should be done that way.

You need feedback to improve. In many cases, it is not possible to know what you have done wrong. It is hard to improve in many activities without somebody watching you while practicing. You should get this feedback immediately. It should be delivered in a way it is understood by the person. Most people need some advice after failure. For example, skater needs to know why her new jump failed. Was it because of not enough speed, or was the position of a skate´s blade wrong. Why did it happen? What should she do differently? Practicing without feedback may lead to the strengthening the wrong chains of nerve fibers. Too many repetitions in a wrong way will lead to wrong ways of doing things and practice won´t be useful. The better you are the more you can understand what you did well and what you did wrong. Watching the performance from the videos may be enough for many experts.

All the practice should be repeatable. It is not possible to strengthen the right nerve fiber chains without repetition. These nerve chains won´t get strong without it. If this is not possible, deliberate practice cannot be done. There are many situations where conditions are not always the same. In these cases, the practice can be done through simulations. For example, practicing about flying an airplane in a storm needs to be practiced in a simulator, or practicing the emergency landing is not possible in natural conditions. Repeating things over and over again will achieve unconscious competence. Things become automatic and repetitions need less thinking. When the critical mass of repetition has been done, the unconscious action becomes the new norm.

Deliberate practice creates better mental models

Every skill has its own mental models. To achieve an expertise through deliberate practice happens by developing latticework of mental models in the field. Experts have more developed and accurate latticework than ordinary people. This is true in physical skills too. Most of the practice is done to form a clear mental model of what the action should feel and look like at every moment in terms of moving your body and it´s position. These models are held in a long-term memory and can be used to have a fast and effective response to certain types of situations. Better models make it possible to process larger amounts of information despite the limitations of short-term memory. Complicated activities require more information than your short-term memory is capable of processing, therefore, you are always building mental models. Everyone has their own models. What really makes the difference between experts and novices is the quality and quantity of the models.

Sources:

Peak, Anders Ericsson
Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin
The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle
The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin

-TT