Anti- Fragility: The Benefits of Failure
I fail A LOT. And, it’s not just big failures, each of my days is full of small little fails. Let’s take this week’s fails for example, I should’ve woken up an hour earlier today. I wish that after my 5 hours of research for a project I would’ve gotten something done. I should’ve planned out my summer earlier so I wouldn’t be so worried right now. I should’ve studied more for the math test that I took yesterday. I wish that I was able to solve global poverty in that 2 hour zoom call I had on Sunday (ok I guess that one’s a bit much). But most of all, I wish I could go back and do it all over again. And here’s the thing… I can’t.
So now that we’ve discussed all of my fails for the week (well actually it’s only Tuesday so I guess just the past three days), let’s discuss fragility.
Fragility is our automatic response to failure. We as human being have a natural tendency to want to do our best. And, understandably, we don’t like to fail. And with that dislike, comes fragility. We get mad, disappointed, dwell on the past, etc.. Think about it, how many times have you reacted with a smile when you didn’t win something? My guess would be little to none. That’s because fragility is our instinct response.
However, just because fragility is instinct, doesn’t mean that it has to be that way.
Now that we understand fragility, let’s talk about anti-fragility.
And yes, the word means exactly what is sounds like: Not fragile.
What does it mean to be not fragile?
Take a look at this:
You may be wondering “why did I just look at a picture of an egg under a broken hammer”? Well, this egg is anti-fragile. As we can see above, the egg broke the hammer, or depending on how you look at it…the hammer broke itself by trying to break the egg. The point is, the egg didn’t break. And, we are all eggs. Constantly fighting our failures and trying to bounce back.
How do we bounce back? Well, I like to think of life in three ways.
- Everything happens for a reason (I know… it’s a classic and kind of annoying to hear) but I honestly think that if you go through life with this mentality then you eventually learn to not take things too hard.
note: confidence and humility are meant to balance eachother out. I’m confident in my abilities, but I’m able to admit that it’s ok to fail all the time. And, think about it this way: if you never fail then you’ll lose out on having a built in confidence check (after all, nobody likes a show off).
2. So what? So what if you didn’t wake up on time? So what if you didn’t do well on that test? So what if your team didn’t win the soccer game? Focus on the benefits. You got an extra hour of sleep, or maybe learned to set more than one alarm. You learned that you need to spend more time studying quadratic equations. You figured out what skills you still have to work on. And, those are some experiences/lessons that you never would’ve gotten otherwise.
3. A blank slate. I like to think of the future as a beautiful blank canvas. The only thing that comes after failure is the future. The past is like a dark, cloudy, gloomy place that you don’t get to go back to, and that you shouldn’t want to go back to. Stay focused on what’s ahead.
And, I guess that’s all for now. So, as a fellow egg, I’m encouraging us all to not life failures (the hammer) break us.
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