It Ain’t That Bad

Nassim Taleb wrote a book called Antifragile, and then consultants everywhere went crazy talking about it in every room they walked into for the next three years.

The premise is simple.

Things experience volatility and become stronger post-volatility.

It's everywhere in biology.

Go to the gym, tear muscles, and gain more muscle.

Exposure to pathogens causes the body to respond and become more resistant to pathogens.

Darwinism is supposedly the result of nature being antifragile.

Consultants got excited because it was a new way to pitch their services, "we won't just help you fix the problem, we'll help you gain from the problem".

Whether they knew how to do that or not was a different story.

Regardless, I think Antifragile is an incredibly useful frame of mind to work from when you're running a business.

If anything, it stops the doom loop that "bad luck" can suck you into when you're running a business, and immediately gets you solution-seeking.

Here's what this looks like in real life.

I was forced to shut my gym for the women's football World Cup.

It sucked.

But I took that opportunity to negotiate access to my gym before the World Cup ended and to refloor our gym before reopening.

We significantly improved the look and feel of our gym and came back stronger. 

Our gym's marketer resigned this week.

So we're taking this opportunity to simplify our marketing, cull a whole bunch of costs and do what's left with AI. This will add ~$7k in monthly profit.

Our competitor used their government position to change policies in an attempt to squash Gravy.

We used this as a sign to work even closer with the entities our competitor was trying to box us out of.

And it's led to new business opportunities that will become a start-up in their own right.

I can give many examples like this. I guess it’s another take on turning mud into custard. Bad events only stay bad events if you let them.

The Vault

I’ve got two sites I peruse at least once a week to make me better at being me.

Here they are:

1. God Of Prompt - This site has a huge list of prompts for each model, whether you are after videos, text, or images.
   
   How I use it: When I’m stuck and not getting the output needed (typically when creating images using Nano Banana), I’ll jump to this site and peruse what's available.
    

2. Oboe - This is an online study platform that generates entire courses for you based on any concept you are trying to learn.
   
   How I use it: If I’m trying to brush up on a skill, I’ll simply head over to the site & type in the topic and the level I’m at.

   

   Example of me trying to learn the difference between SFT & RL

Short & sweet.

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