Whether writing a blog post or thinking of an idea for an e-book or longer project, I find myself paralyzed by the notion that any idea I have isn’t fully developed. And why would I want to publish an idea that isn’t complete? (I think Steven Pressfield would call this an example of Resistance…)
In Fooled by Randomness (Amazon), the first book of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Incerto, he shows how the world is much more random than we tend to think it is. That is not to say that everything is random (as many people incorrectly interpret his work), but to say that there is more randomness in the world, in impactful and meaningful ways, than we realize.
But what is this randomness that we don’t realize? The Black Swan (Amazon). The second book of the Incerto further explores the idea of these random events which fool us so greatly. The highly improbable events which carry highly disproportionate impacts on our lives and the world. We are lulled into a false sense of security that highly improbable things won’t happen because of notions like variance and standard deviation, when in reality, so much of history has been determined by a relatively small number of consequential, unpredictable (ahead of time) events.
But why do those improbable events impact us so greatly? Because we are fragile, and not Antifragile (Amazon), the fourth book of the Incerto. Fragile things break under stress. Robust things stay the same. But, antifragile things gain from stress and disorder. They become stronger under stress. The antifragile benefits from randomness. When we are fragile to unexpected, large random events (i.e. Fooled by Black Swans), we have much more at risk than we realize. To counteract that fragility, we must strive to become antifragile – an idea that didn’t even have a name (as far as I know) until he developed it. Our aim should be that we actually benefit from the unexpected and random.
But why are we so fragile? Because in modern society, most people do not have enough Skin in the Game (Amazon), the fifth book.
My thoughts today are about how NNT’s ideas developed over time. In Antifragile, he even discusses how the books are not so much individual entries, but one long book that is connected. He sets the base in Fooled by Randomness, but then develops the idea further in The Black Swan, which raises further questions, addressed in Antifragile, with even more developed solutions in Skin in the Game.
If Taleb had waited until his ideas were fully developed, I’d imagine we wouldn’t have any of these books. Each of the books is developed in its own right, but reading them in relatively quick succession (I am on day 55 of the 75 Hard program and have been working through the Incerto again as most of my at-least-10-pages-a-day reading regimen), the development of the ideas over time is clear.
A lesson to take from the Incerto, beyond the specific lessons regarding randomness and fragility, is that the development of ideas takes time. Sometimes years. And the development of ideas isn’t always done when we think it is. In Antifragile, he writes about how it is the final step in the journey, not realizing at the time that the notion of Skin in the Game was percolating (references to having skin in the game appear in the prologue of Antifragile) – but would not be released as a book for another six years.
I think I started reading the series in 2017 with The Black Swan. In reading that one, I realized Fooled by Randomness came earlier, so I picked that one up and read it, then Antifragile, and after it came out, listened to the audiobook of Skin in the Game. It’s fine to start anywhere in the series. You don’t need to read the whole of the first to understand and appreciate the second (or fourth or fifth), but going through the development of the ideas from start to current (I don’t know if the Incerto is finished yet – and I would presume that Taleb doesn’t necessarily know either), has its own value.
The astute reader might notice that I have written about books 1, 2, 4, and 5. But what about book 3? Great question!
The Bed of Procrustes (Amazon) is a very short book of aphorisms and heuristics – brief comments and observations about life and various other topics. It is an amazing book, which I keep on my desk and pick up occasionally to just read a few points. It isn’t prose or any kind of narrative, just aphorisms. Think of it as sound-bites of the other books and ideas.