Antifragile

Things That Gain from Disorder

By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Narrated by: Joe Ochman

Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

From the best-selling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book on how some things actually benefit from disorder.

In The Black Swan Taleb outlined a problem, and in Antifragile he offers a definitive solution: how to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. For what Taleb calls the "antifragile" is actually beyond the robust, because it benefits from shocks, uncertainty, and stressors, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. The antifragile needs disorder in order to survive and flourish.

Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is immune to prediction errors. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is everything that is both modern and complicated bound to fail? The audiobook spans innovation by trial and error, health, biology, medicine, life decisions, politics, foreign policy, urban planning, war, personal finance, and economic systems. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are heard loud and clear.

Extremely ambitious and multidisciplinary, Antifragile provides a blueprint for how to behave - and thrive - in a world we don't understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to understand and predict. Erudite and witty, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: What is not antifragile will surely perish.

Please note: The bleeps in the audio are intentional and are as written by the author. No material is censored, and no audio content is missing.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2012 Nassim Nicholas Taleb (P)2012 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[This] is the lesson of Taleb...and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable." (Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point)

"[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne." (The Wall Street Journal)

"The most prophetic voice of all.... [Taleb is] a genuinely significant philosopher...someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone." (GQ)

Eye Opening

I would have to say that I never really thought of situations in terms of risk taking the way Nicholas describes it and I will most likely adjust the way I live based off of this. Im an industrial engineer where a part of the syllabus in college was forecasting, however there always seemed to be missing a real time aspect to these calculations. Forecasting promised to give the statistician foresight into behavior however it was based on the past and what could happen would always require that we adjusted our calculations based on a new factor. I do believe some statistical methods are not a total waste such as statistical sampling or quality control methods, however forecasting is definitely not a good methodology. This book also shed light about why taking risks and shots at things like starting a business or a relationship has a big upside in that you only need it to hit once in order to benefit big from that interaction.

muy complejo...

Es un libro muy complejo, cambia las ideas de un lado para otro.... con poca relación....

Understanding the tip of the iceberg

The difficulty in non fiction that suggests time is the best predictor of value, or at least that old things are more likely to stand the test of time than new things--the difficulty is that the work of non fiction must be born old. This book distills years of thought by Nassim into a collection of "books."

I love to read but there is much I do not know. I look forward to reading this book again because the items I did understand were so important. First, the continuum presented in the book has on one side Fragility, on the other Antifragility, and in the middle Robust. Antifragility deals with those items that benefit from disruption or difficulty.

Second, instead of working towards resilience, a good long term focus might be to focus on robust systems or even anti fragile systems.

Thank you for your work, Mr Taleb.

yep, skin and yes don't be fooled.

This book will take 2 readings a year for several years plenty of principals to apply.

A wake up call for those on the sidelines

Great Discovery of a Heuristic Principle we didn't know we knew. He even proved it by insulting everyone and fishing for bad press which caused him to sell more books. It was so blatant that you have to appreciate it. The historical examples were all very interesting though some of the examples were reaching.

Frank and

What did you love best about Antifragile?

This book has so many ideas and interesting concepts.

Have you listened to any of Joe Ochman’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Except he can't say 'modernity' it's great

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Nope, far too long and to many ideas.

Taleb is thought provoking.

Nassim Taleb, whether you agree with him or not always makes you think and draws are s wide range of sources for his philosophy. everyone in business should be required to read/listen to his books from the black swan to anti-fragile annually!

Listened to this book 10 times

Master piece, I really enjoy the content and the character even though I understand it may come as arrogant for some.

good book on topic rarely (if ever) discussed

If you could sum up Antifragile in three words, what would they be?

We predict trivia (implying we shouldn't be, but instead put some effort into coping with the antifragile events in life).

What did you like best about this story?

It provides answers to the issues brought up by The Black Swan, but you need not read TBS to gain from this book.

Have you listened to any of Joe Ochman’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

n/a

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

Haven't finished yet, but the basic premise of the book is what has "grabbed" me thus far (I plod slowly through books like this, but it makes it more helpful that way).

Any additional comments?

Thank you for bleeping the profanity. (I would've preferred silence to a beep, though.)

Absolutely Brilliant!

Antifragile wasn't what I was expecting. I think I was expecting some kind of self-help/psychology book, but what a pleasant surprise it turned out to be.

Nassim Taleb's Incerto series (of which, this is book 3?) is a breath of fresh air. Antifragile focuses on how everything either suffers from or benefits from disorder/randomness/instability/volatility. It's an incredible way to think of the world, business, life, the universe, and everything. I've been recommending it to almost everyone I know, and it definitely inspired me to pick up his next book, Skin in the Game.

The narration by Joe Ochman is great. I think he really captures the proper voice for the book and Taleb's idiosyncrasies.

#Business #Brilliant #tagsgiving #sweepstakes