Antifragile

I read the book Antifragile a few years ago and highly recommend it. The gist is that we can design things so that they benefit from problems, challenges and uncertainties. There are a lot of unknowns with what we are doing at 7 cups. i.e., there isn't a map or path we can follow. What we are doing is new. We cannot see around the corners. A $13 dollar word - it is opaque - or we cannot clearly see the future or how it will unfold.

When this is the case, the best thing you can do is try to mimic evolution. You do a lot of small experiments and double down on what works and let go of what doesn't work. As you make progress you discover the path. The path is not something you can divine from the beginning. Instead, you have to have a lot of patience, be able to take a lot of punches, have a high tolerance for failure and keep marching ahead.

Not all efforts designed to figure out new paths succeed. Many don't. However, the ones that do figure it out are often considerably stronger on the other side. They are so much stronger because all the bumps and bruises, all the pain, all the figuring out has made them much stronger.

This process of benefiting from pain, problems, and disorder is what the author suggests is being antifragile - it is the opposite of fragile. If you were to ship wine glasses across the ocean you might label the box "fragile" . What would you write on the box if the wine glasses benefited from being thrown around? Maybe "please mishandle" "please step on" etc. Resilience or robustness don't really capture antifragile, b/c these types of people/systems know how to take a punch from life and stay the same, but a person/system that is antifragile take a punch from life and actually benefits from it - they grow stronger.

We have deliberately designed 7 cups to be antifragile. We listen to stress in the community, we listen to feedback, we work hard to correct mistakes etc. In this process we better figure out the path forward. This process of listening and addressing problems early - before they blow up - is what makes a system antifragile. Each problem we collectively solve allows us to course correct and stay close to the path. (note: some of you may be thinking we do not focus enough on solving all of the problems. if you have reported a problem, and we havne't solved it yet, it isn't because we don't think it is important - rather, it is because we are solving bigger problems :)).

In psychology, we call antifragility post-traumatic growth. Nietzsche famously said "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." In some instances this is correct. Here is a quick example from my own life. I didn't grow up with the best father figure role models. As a result, I thought I might not be the best dad. I really worried about this before I had kids. My wife - unexpectedly - became pregnant with twins. The womb is a single house - not a duplex - and, unfortunately, my twins came 10 weeks early. It was very challenging for us. They were in the hospital for weeks, my daughter needed a blood transfusion, we were really, really worried about them. This was a traumatic experience for us. However, we got though it, the kids recovered and are now considered normal in all the milestones people worry about. And, for me, through this process, I became a much better dad. I had to really invest, really focus, work tremendously hard to make sure my kids were going to be okay. Without going through this process I can imagine that I would have allowed myself to get more lost in my work, spend less time with them, and, overall, just be less present as a father. Their premature births made us all more antifragile - we ended up all benefiting from the unexpected problems that arose.

So, for us, in our own personal lives and in our collective life as a community - let's think of ways that we can learn, grow, and benefit from challenges. We can all move from being fragile to robust to antifragile.