Rebellious Thoughts #57 - 🤘 The Surprising Reason Stress Is Good for You

Hey Rebels!

As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.

YEW!

Let’s get into today’s newsletter:

So… as I mentioned a few times in the last few newsletters, I’ve been reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.

Nassim is a controversial character and he does have opinions that are a bit out there…so he is not for everyone, but, Black Swan, Skin in the Game and this book are worthy pieces of reading.

Let me recap on Order and Disorder which is my model and then let me connect them.

Turns out his antifragile thinking fits elegantly with my model and in fact, it gives it another perspective to consider (or the other way around, my model fits in his thinking…. either way!)

I say in my presentations that as you solve a problem (the simplest way to view innovation) - you move from Disorder to Order.

At the start, when the problem is yet to be solved, disorder reigns. Everything is more random, uncertain, chaotic, unknown.

As you order the parts and put in place prototypes and then solutions, you find the order necessary to solve the problem (you effectively fought against the second law of thermodynamics - when you innovate you are fighting the universe - that’s why it’s hard! Haha!)

Order tends to be favoured in our societies, we value it higher than Disorder.

We also tend to avoid disorder or move out of it as fast as possible taking away the valuable and important exploration step.

Let me have a crack at trying to explain his concept in simple terms:

When something is fragile it means that any stress or impact or disruption breaks it.

When we think of the opposite we tend to imagine robust or resilient or flexible or strong.

But none of these capture the opposite. To be the opposite of fragile you should get better with impact or stress, not simply withstand it.

Something that is robust can put up with impact or stress.

Something that is antifragile gets better with impact or stress.

Think of humans - think of kids! If we wrap a child in cotton wool and remove all stress for 18 years and then we send them off to face life as an adult, they will likely fail due to their fragility. Exposing kids to doses of stress and challenges and impact and disruption is what makes a human antifragile.

A book or author can be antifragile - the more you criticise it the stronger its sales are!

So… what do we do with this?!

Embrace stress (obviously, there’s a limit) but perhaps don’t view the discomfort of disruption as a negative but more as steps towards antifragility.

In the other book I am reading, Lifespan, it clearly explains the genetic process cells go through when there is stress or disruption to stop reproducing and repair themselves - which is an area that has a lot of attention at the moment (intermittent fastening, ice-cold baths, heat treatment, etc) all microdoses of stress to make your body antifragile perhaps? Just thinking out loud :-)

Like I say all the time, if you are feeling too comfortable you are in danger!

Novelty in your life is a great way to provide micro doses of stress and discomfort!

The stressor of Disorder is Order.
Order makes a Disorder person like me stressed!

And Disorder is the stressor of Order.
Disorder makes an Order person like my wife stressed!

So - Disorder gets better with Order and Order gets better with Disorder. It’s the stressors that take you from “robust” to “antifragile”.

When a market is challenging and a business stops innovating and focuses on “doing what we know works” hoping for safety, we paradoxically end up in a situation where we increase the fragility of the business.

Innovation is stressful, it makes businesses antifragile!

Yew!!

Love

Gus

P.S. If all this talk about antifragility and embracing stress has struck a chord, then you might want to check this out.

Just like microdoses of stress can make your body stronger, sprinkling a bit of chaos and novelty into your career can transform you from merely resilient to truly antifragile.

Feeling too comfortable? That's danger disguised as safety!
The Shake Up! program is all about helping you step out of the comfort of Order and dive headfirst into the enriching waters of Disorder (in a safe and guided way!).

It's time to flip the script—make stress and disruption your allies, not your enemies.
So, are you ready to stop just surviving and start thriving?
Ready to inject some excitement back into your professional life and become antifragile?

Join the Shake Up! Experience, and let's turn those doses of stress into fuel for your greatest growth.

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