Two Ways of Overcoming Challenges in Life: Resilience and Antifragility
You are bound to experience setbacks and difficulties in life.
It might be distressing and sometimes feel incapacitating — but you can only overcome these challenges by choosing to move forward. Otherwise, you will become a victim to your circumstances, and you will fail to find light at the end of the tunnel. Indeed, the difference between, on the one hand, those who are resilient or antifragile, and on the other hand, those who are not, is day and night.
Both are effective approaches that you can use to overcome challenges.
But they differ in one key aspect — and it might change the way you live life.
The content of this article ties back to information presented in the book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Fransesc Miralles, as well as personal knowledge gained from years of attending therapy and studying psychology. All the quotes below have been retrieved from Ikigai. The term and topic of antifragility are from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, presented to me in a chapter of Ikigai.
Resilience
Resilience is the ability to persevere through a challenge.
Things that challenge you are fueled by stress. It is stress that makes you anxious and overworked, and it is stress that makes it feel impossible not to cave into your worries about the past or the future. But stress in itself (or a lack thereof) is not what determines a person’s resilience.
See, stress is not something you can avoid, and in many cases, a highly anxious person might be more resilient than a “less emotional” person. What determines your resilience is not the number or magnitude of the challenges you face — rather, it is determined by what you choose to do in response to these stressful situations. You cannot control what happens to you, and you cannot control what emotions arise as a result, but you can choose to either (A) keep going or (B) give up.
You become resilient when you choose to persevere.
Fall seven times, rise eight. ( — Japanese proverb)
How to Become More Resilient
Resilience is built over time.
Each time you face a challenge, you can choose to keep going. Each time you choose to keep going, you grow more resilient. This means that, over time, small and large challenges become more manageable, because you have faced various difficulties before and come out alive.
There are two central things you can do to strengthen your resilience:
- 1: Live your life with an inner purpose in mind
When you know where you are headed, you can adjust and adapt to your terrain, even when it changes. Your path is clear, and none of the hurdles or obstacles along the way can remove you from the purpose you have in life (whether that mission is to have a family, work with animals, or learn several languages). By pursuing this larger purpose, you give yourself a reason to push through until the end — and with each roadblock that you face on your way forward, you become sturdier and sturdier.
- 2: Focus on the things that are within your control
There are things you cannot control (your mood, a personal loss, disease), and there are things you can control: specifically, your actions. There are a thousand things that can go wrong, but there are also a thousand solutions to these setbacks. None of them come from giving in to your circumstances (or your worries about the past or the future) — all of them come from your decision to work within the parameters of your situation in the present moment in order to rise from the current challenge.
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters. ( — Epictetus)
Antifragility
Antifragility is the ability to improve as a result of a challenge.
This approach moves beyond resilience. Whereas the resilient person remains strong despite a challenge, the antifragile person gets stronger because of a challenge. Resilience is about meeting a roadblock on your path and moving around it to resume your course; antifragility is about standing on this roadblock and finding a better alternative toward your destination than the one you were following.
Of course, the underlying principles remain the same: (1) keep moving toward your purpose and (2) focus on what it is that you can control. The unique thing about antifragility, is that it involves not just adapting to the situation. It means changing your very lifestyle to better suit your current circumstances (like quitting your harmful job instead of pushing through each exhausting workday, or improving your diet rather than coping with surgeries and headaches) — it means thriving rather than just managing.
Thus, each setback becomes an opportunity to greatly improve your life.
The resilient resists shock and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. ( — Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
How to Become More Antifragile
Antifragility is an improved version of resilience.
Facing that boulder in the road, you have three options: (1) you can turn around and leave your path, walking further away from your destination, (2) you can find a way around the boulder and continue on your course as before, or (3) you can use the boulder as a stepping stool and find a better, less boulder-filled road. This new road might offer other obstacles (fallen trees or bridgeless lakes), but it is an improvement from the one before. You have faced a block in the road and sensed that it might not offer the best way forward, so you have adapted and found that another path within your reach might bring you to your destination much more effectively.
There are two central things you can do to strengthen your antifragility:
- 1: Expand your comfort zone to keep more options available
The most antifragile people are the ones who continuously challenge themselves in their work, relationships, and lifestyles. You need to expose yourself to sources of discomfort, not just to train your ability to overcome them, but to always grow and improve the way you do things. By expanding your comfort zone, you expand your options too — so that if one thing (job, relationship, health aspect) fails, you will not come falling and shattering along with the single-pathed, comfort-driven life you have been leading.
- 2: Eliminate the things that make you fragile
Bad habits compound and create a bad life. What feels pleasant in the moment is often unpleasant in the long term, and what is challenging in the short term often feels rewarding and fulfilling by the end. Skipping a workout session or eating half a cake is harmless when done rarely or in moderation rather than habitually — and so it is important to create good patterns of action that pave the way to a better and healthier future.
[We] shouldn’t fear adversity, because each setback is an opportunity for growth. If we adopt an antifragile attitude, we’ll find a way to get stronger with every blow […]. ( — Héctor García and Fransesc Miralles)
Be resilient. Be antifragile.
Be strong and even stronger.
