When we’re young and naive, every minor unfavorable event that happens to us makes us far too sad, angry, or otherwise disappointed than we should objectively have been. I remember my first break-up and how seriously it had impacted me then. If I had been wiser, and someone with the knowledge and experience found in this essay would have told me then the secret to dealing with minor shocks, I’d have probably wasted less time and energy moping and pitying myself, and would have certainly dedicated myself to more uplifting, worthier projects.

Alas, but that’s how the lie of the land usually is. School is the one place we think we’re getting an education from, but in reality, it’s just churning future workers, obedient, non-thinking ones. The side-effect of this semi-uselessness is the ingrainable idea that ‘reading is for bookworms’ and the mental model acquired then, is something along the lines of ‘why should I bother read, I’ve already graduated’.Thus, the idea that some people just ’like reading’ while others don’t, comes to the cultural fore.

How wrong such suppositions are! For it is in the very depths of reading that one can find true wisdom, and useful knowledge, if one is careful enough to look in the right places. If the book is worth reading, it accelerates our life, so that I’d have been acting and thinking like a 30-year-old when I was a mere 18. Is that desirable? Would someone who’s 50 should act and think like someone who’s 100? But I am not talking about the biological aspect. You’ve probably heard of the idea that the young don’t know but can, while the old know but can’t. This is exactly what I mean. Reading accelerates aging in reverse, so that you keep developing increasing amounts of ‘know’ at a time when you are at the peaks of your ‘can’.

One such idea, which forever changed my outlook on life is antifragility, which I first read in Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile. Sure, I read it much later than I’d have liked, but it’s always better later than never. Briefly, the idea is that natural systems benefit from minor shocks, thus preventing major shocks–the Black Swans. I’ll have to rephrase natural, though. Probably, a better would be dynamic systems.

All dynamic systems are designed to ’learn’ from volatility. Your body for instance: as soon as you stop exercising, it learns from this change, and adjusts itself accordingly. Also, dynamic systems don’t have to be biological. The main premise is that the system in question is either robust, or fragile, or in between: dynamic. The secondary premise is that as long as there are minor shocks for the dynamic system, it will continue to strengthem itself. Are you yawning yet?

It amazes me just how often we read something without realizing its true import. Sure, we understand it, or think we do, but the actual understanding only happens in those rare introspective moments when our subconscious pieces together all the relevant data. One such occurred to me this morning–and hence this essay, before I forget it. The idea is based on antifragility but it dawned on me roughly a decade after I read the book!

The idea was that whatever difficulties that we face, especially earlier in life, somehow, actually prepare us for the much tougher, bigger bosses of troubles that we must inevitable come across and hopefully conquer.

I reflected on my first break-up and how it had actually given me a lot of data to learn from. But my mistake was that I didn’t see them as data, but as ‘why did this happen to me’ and began complaining inwardly of the toughness of my lot. This is exactly why I had several similar break-ups, because I wasn’t learning from the underlying lessons! It’s hard to do so when you’re not aware what you should be learning. But once the floodgates of information open, all the missing pieces fall in place.

This is what happened to me this morning. I have been struggling with a series of very big-boss troubles recently, but at each juncture, on looking back, feel that I overcame each with success. The other point was that each successive time, success was easier to attain, and more success, too. Which got me to think, perhaps all the painful events I had suffered earlier in my life, though I consciously didn’t want to learn from them, my subconscious had already reacted to the experience by preparing me for the next one.

The point of this essay being: if you’re going through a rough patch that you think is not a Black Swan, think about how you landed there, learn all you can from it, and consider it a sort of preparation to avoid a similar problem but of Black-Swan scale. In other words, these minor shocks, if you see them for what they truly are, are there to help you learn how to avoid similar, major versions.

And that, in a word, is the antifragile mindset.