Last week I attended a sponsored business dinner with a group of folks from the Operator’s Guild, a community I joined at the end of last year. The Operator’s Guild is for senior operations and finance folks, so the dinner was full of ops nerds. I loved it.
We talked about business for three hours, which saved my family from having to hear those things from me for the night 😁
I was able to test ideas with other folks, and learn from their experience and stories. I came home feeling energized, ambitious, and connected, despite being a self-professed introvert.
If you’re like me and spent the majority of your professional career focusing 100% on your company and the people in it, I encourage you to broaden your horizons and find a professional community. You’ll learn a lot, and have fun doing it.
If you’re interested in the Operator’s Guild, just let me know. Have a community your already a fan of? Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
Kevin
A Quote
“
You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside.
— Ryan Holiday in "Stillness is the Key"
Three Things
1 - 🗓️ Youcanbookme Calendar Booking Tool - I really like this calendar booking tool, as an alternative to Calendly and others. I find the interface more attractive than Calendly. You can remove their branding and add your own. Customizing your page is also really easy. Pricing-wise, they also have a tier lower than Calendly’s first paid tier. Check if out if you’re in the market for this.
2 - 🧹 Clean your Inbox - Do you struggle with inbox overload? This tool integrates with your Gmail or Outlook and helps organize, filter, route, tag, archive, etc. so you can focus on dealing with “real” emails. This tool has been recommended to my by a few folks, so wanted to pass it along to you.
3 - 🏈 Small Business Prepping Footballs - I always though NFL teams played with new footballs. Turns out that after a semi-recent rule change that allows for modified footballs, people are paying this guy to condition footballs before use. He muddies them up, conditions the surface, and otherwise wears them in. Neat little in-home business he started.
(Please enjoy this 7️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive on the Implications of Antifragility
Grab a cracker on each end, and bend. What happens? It snaps.
Poke a spoon into the top of your crème brûlée? Same. It cracks.
Lift a heavy thing? Your body gets stronger.
That’s antifragility.
Things that are antifragile are those that are strengthened or otherwise improved with use.
The Implication?
What are the implications of antifragility?
#1 Do hard things.
Since things that are antifragile improve with external shocks, the more shocks you give it, the stronger it becomes.
If something is antifragile, the more you use it, the more you stress it, the stronger it gets. So give it more stressors! Do hard things.
#2 Embrace randomness and uncertainty.
A fragile object would look at high uncertainty with trepidation. In the wide range of possible outcomes, many of them might break it - like the cracker.
A fragile object would think: “I better to play it safe. Think a little more. Reduce the available options until there’s certainty that nothing will snap me.”
The antifragile YOLOs into uncertainty. Why not? No matter what happens, it’ll come out stronger on the other end. Why waste time debating what could happen - just jump and react to things along the way.
"I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be good!"
You Are Antifragile
In more ways than not, you are antifragile.
Your body. Your mind. Your business. They get stronger with use. They improve the more active they are.
There are some limits, of course, which I’ll explain later, but in general you’re more capable than you realize. You have less to fear than you think from uncertainty.
I’ll share some tangible examples below to make the case that this is true!
Body and Natural Systems
Exercise Your muscles, your heart, your lungs, etc. all LOVE being used. They get stronger having done so. The best way to stay young is to stay active. Your muscles actually atrophy when they’re not used.
If you’re like me and work on a computer all day, all that sitting weakens your muscles. This is why I’m so intentional about getting out and doing something active!
In fact, I’m writing this just before heading out for the monthly business ruck that I’ve been doing for the past nine months or so. It’s a great way to get out and give those muscles something to do.
Exercise may wear you out in the short term, but because you’re antifragile, it strengthens you in the long term.
Bro is gonna be ripped eventually.
Extreme Temperature Exposure We all love sitting in air conditioning in the summer, and heat in the winter. Why expose yourself to extreme temperatures when you don’t have to?
I get it - especially in these Austin Texas summers! - but cocooning yourself at 70F/21C makes you fragile.
After years of sitting in air conditioning a lot of people are now relatively incapable of being in the extremes. That limits the things you can do; you have fewer options in life. Minor example, but related to the ruck, I have people tell me they don’t go outside when it’s above 85F/30C.
I won’t get into the science of it, but exposing yourself to extreme temperatures makes you more capable of being in those temperatures, and temperature exposure has all sorts of health benefits to boot.
So get outside in the winter. Get outside in the summer. Sit in cold water. Sweat in the sauna. It makes you more capable, gets you stronger, and increases your optionality.
“Effortless comfort has made us fat, lazy, and increasingly in ill health.”
She looks much happier than it typically feels in a cold plunge.
Exposure to Small Stressors One of the ways the body get stronger from use is through the concept of “hormesis,” or exposure to small stressors, where it can adjust.
For example, if you skip a meal, or a day of meals (fasting), that’s a stressor to your body.
Thankfully, during fasting the body doesn’t shut down, it adjusts. It might do a little autophagy, or clearing out of unfit cells, so that it reserves resources for “fitter” cells.
The frequent exposure to small stressors makes the whole system more antifragile.
It’s like that for lots of systems. Think of forest fires. Before modern times, natural events, and intentional small fires initiated by ancient peoples, would cause little fires in the forest. This would clear out the brush and kindling. This prevented bigger issues in the future.
We don’t allow these small fires any more. Material builds up and the system becomes more fragile. Eventually, the right spark at the right place, and of the sudden you get a conflagration that you can’t contain.
Mind
Learning Teaching your brain new things is hard. Who hasn’t been exhausted in school after a long study session?
But obviously your brain didn’t melt. You don’t have a limited number of thoughts available to you, and when they’re used up your brain shuts down forever.
Instead, the opposite is true. The more you work it, the more it works for you.
You invest in doing the work to learn new things, and you gain a more potent tool.
“Neuroplasticity is a real thing. Your neurons, just like your muscles, can rewire and grow through discomfort. As Norman Doidge, a leading expert in neuroplasticity, explains, the brain can “change its own structure and function in response to activity and mental experience.”
Ideas Exposing your ideas to stressors makes them stronger!
They’re not like the crème brûlée sugar. They’re like your quad muscles. The more stress you expose your ideas to - in the form of debate, discussion, and experimentation - the better idea you get out out of it.
Thoughts (Doing Judo on Antifragility) Thoughts can exhibit antifragile properties - and that can be a bad thing!
As anyone who experiences rumination knows, some thoughts get stronger as you resist them. If you’re stuck in a circle of thinking, constantly revisiting the same concepts, the temptation is to resist. You push against the idea. You get mad at yourself and your brain. 😡
But being aware of antifragility gives you another technique - to stop resisting.
The more you feed an antifragile thought, the bigger it grows. So here your strategy is to do the opposite. Stop doing the reps. Stop resisting.
Before you know it, the thought dies, starved of the attention that fed it.
Business
Power Power is antifragile because the more you use it, the more power accrues to you. Once you gain power, the worst thing you can do is to do nothing.
You need to get out there and put it to work. It’ll get stronger when you do.
“Third, and the principal theme of this chapter, is the idea that power is not some scarce, limited resource that becomes depleted by being used. Instead, the more someone uses their power to get things done—including structuring the world around them and changing who works with and for them in ways that support themselves and their objectives—the more power they will have.”
Experiment. Act. If antifragile things are improved by randomness and uncertainty, then start experimenting.
Get your ideas out into the real world and see what works.
You won’t win by sitting back and waiting to figure out what’s going to happen. More planning is going to do it either.
You’ll win by honoring antifragility and letting your work get stronger by exposing it to stress.
Doing your best work when you have nothing to lose.
There’s an interesting anecdote about antifragility regarding a Russian author. I’ve never caught the name of the author, but the story is that when the author published a book and suddenly received acclaim and money, he became fragile.
Now that he had money, he was scared of losing it all! He was fearful of writing his next book. What happens if it sucks?
Eventually the author lost the money. But wait, now he had nothing to lose! He could write without worry. Who cares if his next book sucks? It can’t get any worse.
It turns out not worrying allowed him to write more freely, and he created a better book because of it.
Eventually this author turned this into an explicit pattern. Every time he wrote a good book and earned money, he would give it all away so he could continue to write at his best.
You can create the conditions for antifragility by putting yourself in a position where you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
“Simple test: if I have 'nothing to lose' then it is all gain and I am antifragile.”
When you play out a lot of these ideas to their logical conclusion, some interesting ideas emerge.
If we’re not as fragile as we think. If ideas get stronger through stress. If the mind improves by learning. If you do your best work when you have nothing to lose. Then what better place to be than entrepreneurship?
Going out on your own is the ultimate stressor. It’s the best place to put antifragility to work and see what positive outcomes can be generated.
While quitting isn’t for the faint of heart, it’s the kind of thing that does at least warrant consideration. What could go right? How much stronger could you get?
“Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact, only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.”
Antifragility has limits. Antifragile doesn’t mean immortal, and it doesn’t mean impervious to harm.
Your muscles might get stronger from stress, but if you hop off the couch to back squat 1000 lbs / 450 kg, it’ll crush you.
Running might make your heart stronger, but you can also get injured.
So antifragile is true, but you get there in increments. The dose makes the poison. Expose yourself to stress, but don’t overdo it. 😊
Call to Action
Use antifragility to your advantage.
Do something hard this week for your body, your mind, or your business.
Get out there and do something physical. Go a little heavier. Go a little longer. You’ll be getting stronger.
Learn something new. Make your brain sweat a little.
Experiment at work. Debate ideas. Act.
You’re stronger than you think. You’re more capable than you know. And you’ll get even better by doing hard things.
“I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible. That’s what makes the world a better place to live.”
