Episode Details

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It's easy to just want praise, but that's not how nature works. Nature roots out the fragile and keep only that which is anti-fragile. So is anti-fragility just a factor of "resilience"? No it isn't. There's a big difference between being resilient and anti-fragile. And the key to anti-fragility is to be like a "hydra". Find out more about how you can root out the namby-pamby factor and become anti-fragile.

Useful Resources

Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com

Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

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Time Stamps

00:00:20 Introduction: Anti-Fragile /

00:00:33 The Trip To New Zealand /

00:02:26 The Stockdale Paradox: Good To Great /

00:05:43 Table of Contents /

00:06:15 Part 1: Chaos / 00:09:33 Part 2: Twice as Strong /

00:13:37 Part 3: Brutal Feedback / 00:20:06 Summary /

00:21:03 The One Thing You Can Do /

00:21:41 What's Happening Next? / 00:23:10

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Sean: This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. In the year 2000 we had moved to New Zealand from India. When we moved to New Zealand we didn't really know anyone here. We'd never been to New Zealand. We just chose to come here, and then in 2001 we decided we were going to stay here, so we had to get on a flight and go back and sell our apartment and sell all the stuff that we had there and just close up everything in India.

While I was on the flight I had a book with me. It was called Good to Great. It's a book by Jim Collins. I'm not sure why I picked it up. Maybe it was the title. As I was reading that book on the flight, something happened to me that changed my mindset. What was my mindset at that point in time? It was a complete jumble of facts. We'd got to New Zealand. We'd bought a house within three months of getting here. I'd got a job; I last at the job for six months and then I was made redundant.

The question is were we feeling fragile. That's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about this concept of anti-fragility. Anti-fragility is just not being fragile, it is the opposite of fragile. I used to drink rum and Coke back then, and while I'm at 35,000 feet I'm drinking my rum and Coke and chomping my peanuts, and reading about the Stockdale paradox.

This is about a guy called James Stockdale. He was in prison in the Vietnam War and he was the highest ranking officer at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, which was a prisoner of war camp. From 1965 to 1973 he was tortured over 20 times. On page 85 of the book there is this conversation between the author, Jim Collins, and Stockdale. Jim Collins is asking Stockdale who didn't make it out of the prison camp. Stockdale says, "Oh, that's easy. The optimists didn't make it."

That causes Jim Collins to be completely confused. He says, "I don't understand. Why the optimists?" Stockdale says, "The optimists always thought that things would get better, so they would say we'd be out by Christmas, and then Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they'd say we'd be out by Easter, and then Easter would come and Easter would go. Then they would say we'll be out by Thanksgiving, and Th