Designing Our Lives To Be Antifragile

Lately, there has been this one idea that's been growing on me, and I've been thinking about how we can apply the underlying concept to our lives:

Being antifragile.

In this post, I'll discuss what I've learned from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, how I've connected those ideas with real-life examples and situations to understand their benefits, and the measures I'm taking to design my life and business to be antifragile.

Let's start by understanding:

What being antifragile means

At face value, being antifragile means, well, not being fragile. Being robust and resilient.

While that's true to an extent, that line of thinking is limited and doesn't capture the entire essence of the concept.

Yes, in part, being antifragile means we are resilient to the changes around us, in life and business. But it also means that when others barely survive chaos, an antifragile person or business thrives from it. They grow stronger.

I know this sounds a bit confusing, so let me explain this with an example:

TOTO is a Japanese company based in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, that has been making toilets since 1917, especially the washlet that Japan is known for.

Their products are exceptionally popular in Japan and worldwide, and you might've seen a TOTO-made toilet in Japan, an international airport or someplace else.

What's relatively unknown about TOTO is that since 1988, TOTO has also been making a component called electrostatic chucks or ESCs that are widely used to manufacture silicon chips that power our devices, including the one you're reading this piece on.

Electrostatic chucks are excellent at holding silicon wafers for etching and other processes, because they use electrostatic force to hold these wafers in place. Thus, preventing damage to these highly valuable components:

Now, while TOTO's primary business and a reliable source of revenue has always been the toiletware business, the ESC wing has also been a solid contributor.

But with the cloud boom and now AI, demand for semiconductors skyrocketed, and with it, TOTO's business.

Looking at TOTO's stock price over the last 10 years, we can see it has been on an upward trajectory ever since the boom of smartphones, cloud computing and now AI:

This is what being antifragile looks like.

While TOTO had a reliable bathware business that had stood the test of time, they used their knowledge and expertise in ceramics and other advanced compounds in an experimental bet that's now paying TOTO an asymmetric dividend when the general economic situation around the world seems to be gloomy.

As AI tools are adopted at a larger scale and the demand for memory chips and other semiconductor products keeps increasing to run advanced large language models (LLMs), TOTO, being one of the largest manufacturers of ESCs in the world, is in a position of immense benefit.

They had a century-old business that's largely protected from downside due to their range of toilet products, but they also invested time and money into options that have been paying them dividends when half of the tech hardware industry seems to be in disarray.

TOTO demonstrated what it means to be antifragile. It's thriving in a chaotic and economically volatile world.

So, how can we shape our lives and businesses to be more antifragile like TOTO's?