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111 - How Stress Makes you Stronger

Hello there, Kevin here. With another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. The only podcast that’s here to help you become a badass English speaker, naturally, by also making you a badass person.

Teaching you life-changing English lessons.

I’m going to talk about a concept today, a pretty complicated one. A concept that’ll stretch your mind, make you think, possibly make your mind stronger.

And speaking of stronger, let’s first talk about muscles. How do we build muscle at the gym? I mean, how do we really build muscle? By going to the gym and lifting a light amount of weight, many many times? Or by pushing your muscles beyond their limit? Beyond what they’re used to, what they’re accustomed to?

Well, if you’re not too knowledgeable about building muscles it works like this…

When you go to the gym and lift really heavy weights, when you feel the burn and get close to your limit, but push on and do just one more rep, one more repetition, that’s when muscle growth happens.

This happens because the fragile parts, the fragile tissue in your muscles, are broken down, are ripped you could say. You give a “shock” to your muscles by surprising them with heavier weight than they’re used to.

Speaking of ripped, ripped means to tear, or to damage something, like a piece of paper or fabric. You could rip your shirt on a nail, for example. And muscles rip, the fibers rip, which are repaired and strengthened by your body, made bigger, in order to avoid ripping the muscle again.

We also call a strong person with big muscles ripped. Like when you see some big dude (or dudette) at the gym, you’d say, “damn, you’re ripped, man!” Hmm, coincidence? Or totally unrelated? Well I’m not going to research if ripping your muscles and calling a strong person ripped are related, just thought that was interesting.

So your muscles grow when they are damaged because of stress. Your muscles need to be prepared for the next time you try to lift that heavy weight, and so your body now overcompensates for this damage by building extra capacity, bigger muscle fibers, in order to handle future shocks. Over night, as you sleep and recover, your muscles are rebuilt and they’re now a little stronger than before.

That’s how stress and shock can prepare your body for even bigger stress. And it’s the building of this “extra capacity” to avoid future shock that I’m going to talk about today.

What we are going to think about is how shock, stress, and volatility make things stronger. More resilient.

This concept is based on a book called “Antifragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This book reveals how some systems thrive from shock, volatility and uncertainty, and when things allow for breakage, like muscles, it’s actually a good thing.

Strong systems need to be able to break, as oppose to the idea that we should be able to always avoid shock, stress, breakage.

feelgoodenglish.com. Once you’re on the website, look for the bear. The bear is there to show you the way to English freedom! Sorry, that was obnoxious.

Now let’s get into today’s episode. It’s a deep one, are you ready?

So to start out we have to talk about the word fragile. Fragile. What does fragile mean?

Well, fragile is a word that describes something that is easily broken.

Like glass. Glass is fragile. Maybe your cell phone is fragile. If you drop it, it’ll break.

We all know the label on boxes with glass inside them that reads “Fragile – handle with care”.

You know that fragile things break when you shock them and toss them around, volatility does them no good. If they experience a shock, they might break and be useless.

Volatility is another important word today. This word describes when something, or a situation can change easily or without warning. Like the stock market can be volatile, experience volatility, which means it changes a lot, goes up and down. A volatile market would be a very risky one, that could change quickly and lose a lot of people money.

So when something fragile is in a volatile environment it could very well break or fail. You wouldn’t put glass in a volatile situation, and if you didn’t have a lot of money you wouldn’t invest your money in a volatile market.

You need to treat fragile things carefully. But when you think about it, there isn’t really a word that describes things that are the opposite of fragile, is there?

We might talk about something being robust or durable, but that really just means it can resist shock and stress better than fragile items, but it doesn’t benefit from them. You’d still label the boxes you ship robust things in with “Handle with care”, not with “Please handle roughly”. You wouldn’t want durable things to break, would you?

The author of the book I’m talking about, Nassim Taleb, took care of this dilemma by giving a word for what we’re looking for: antifragile.

Antifragile describes things that benefit from shock, and thrive in volatile environments because as they’re stressed and put under pressure, they get better, not worse. Repeating that main point, antifragility means things get better when they are put under stress and shock, not worse. Like your muscles. Shocking them, ripping them, makes them stronger.

Can you think of another example of something that actually benefits from shock and uncertainty? It’s tough, right?

Well how about this…

Airlines and companies that make airplanes. Airplane manufacturers are antifragile because whenever there is a plane crash, the other planes have to get better. And they have to get better right now. In other words, the company learns why the plane crashed and has no other choice but to improve and adapt the others planes to avoid another catastrophe.

Without unpredictable airplane crashes, the planes themselves wouldn’t get safer.

So the main point is that antifragile systems work because they build extra capacity when put under stress.

But how exactly does that happen? Why does this happen?

According to the book, the antifragility of a system depends on the fragility of its parts.

A good example of antifragility is the evolutionary process which thrives in a volatile environment. With each shock, evolution forces life forms to transform, mutate and improve to become better suited for their environment.

Yet when you look closely at the evolutionary process, something very interesting becomes clear. While the process itself is undoubtedly antifragile, as you can see by how much better adapted animals become to their environment, each individual organism itself is fragile.

For evolution to occur, all that matters is that the successful genetic code is passed on. The individuals themselves are unimportant and die in the process. That’s pretty sad, but it’s just mother nature at work.

And we can’t mess with mother nature. In fact, the system needs this to happen to free up living space for more successful individuals to thrive.

Too complicated? Am I losing you? To clarify, the evolutionary process demonstrates a key trait of antifragility. In order for the system as a whole to be antifragile, most of its constituent parts must be fragile.

This is because the success or failure of these parts act as pieces of information, informing the system of what works and what doesn’t.

Think of it as trial and error. The mistakes and successes of each individual part provide the information as to what succeeds and what doesn’t. The price of failure in evolution is extinction; therefore, every failure actually improves the overall quality of all life that has evolved.

So why do we need to know about this? How does this apply to our lives? Let’s talk more about that.

To see how this applies to your life, how it can be beneficial, let’s talk about the three different types again here; fragile, robust, and antifragile.

You are fragile if you avoid disorder and disruption for fear of the mess they might make of your life: you think you are staying safe, but really you are making yourself vulnerable to the shock that will tear everything apart.

Are you being fragile in an area of your life? Keeping things really safe, avoiding disorder but also not realizing that maybe you are becoming more and more vulnerable to a catastrophe? That’s the risk in being fragile, too safe you could say.

And what about robust? You are robust if you can stand up to shocks without flinching and without changing who you are. You’re tough.

Unshaken. Nothing phases you. But, are you improving? Are you learning from mistakes, or are you missing the lessons that could be learned from those mistakes? Arrogance might apply here. The danger of a big ego.

Lastly, you are being antifragile if shocks and disruptions make you stronger and more creative, better able to adapt to each new challenge you face. You welcome unexpected events, and volatility in general is something you use to grow.

The author thinks that society today is facing a critical problem that needs to be explored. It’s a problem with modern thinking in which society tries to make everything as smooth and tranquil as possible. As human knowledge grows, we become more arrogant about what we can and should control. We view volatility as something we can’t predict, so we try to control it. We try to control everything that might happen to us. We want to be comfortable 100% of the time.

Unfortunately, we don’t know as much as we think we do, so instead of making systems better, we make them worse. Without knowing it, we rob systems of the volatility vital for antifragility.

Removing volatility, and therefore antifragility from a system has one particularly explosive effect; without volatility, problems are not as apparent, so they lie dormant, growing more severe until they reach massive proportions.

To highlight this phenomenon, consider the example of a forest: A forest will always be at risk of fire. Yet, the danger of a large, devastating fire is often decreased by a series of smaller fires, which

purge the forest of its most flammable materials while leaving most of the trees intact. Volatility, like the small fires, helps prevent the larger event. But if we naively tried to eliminate all forest fires, eventually there would be a devastating fire, destroying everything.

In order to make yourself antifragile, you have to accept uncertainty, rather than avoid or eliminate it.

And here’s how to be more antifragile.

In the book, the author talks about something called the “barbell strategy”. A barbell is what you see at the gym. It’s a long metal bar where disks of varying weights are attached at each end, used for weightlifting. Like when you’re lifting a bar with weights on both sides of it for arm or chest exercises , that’s a barbell.

And much like a barbell having weights on both ends but nothing in the middle, you must prepare for extremes, both negative and positive, and ignore the middle path.

The first thing you must do is concentrate on the negative element on your barbell, one side of your barbell. Minimize your exposure to potentially disastrous risks.

For example, and I’m using the author’s example here, let’s talk about finance a bit. More specifically, how to treat your assets.

Assets, first off, are properties owned by a person or company, that have value after debts. So it’s the valuable things you own, like your house, money, business, etc…

Now treating your assets with antifragility would like this: if you ensure that 90% of your assets are secure against unexpected market collapse, you know that you are safe against such shocks. This money might not be making a huge profit, but at least it’s safe. You have 90% of your assets in a very secure place. Secure from total disaster. Savings accounts, cash; a couple examples of low risk assets.

And once most of your assets are secure, you can concentrate on the other end of your barbell. With the other 10% of your assets you can take small risks in highly volatile and unpredictable areas that you can

profit from. This way you could possibly make huge gains if things go well, while having limited exposure to negative consequences.

Compare this to someone who puts 100% of their assets in an area of medium risk. In the middle of the barbell. No matter how much money they potentially could make, in the case of a financial crises they might lose everything. They have all their value in the middle, thinking they are playing it safe, but actually risk losing it all because they haven’t kept that 90% of their value on the safe side and taken big risks with the 10% to make even more. It’s all in the middle, and could then be all gone.

So to become antifragile, manage your risks so you can benefit from unpredictable events.

What other system should be treated like this? A system where you should make sure to have sufficient assets on one side, and the option to take big risks on the other side without losing everything? I’ll let you think about that for a minute….

So what we are talking about seems pretty big, right? Evolution, forest fires, finance, airplane crashes; but what I am trying to do with this book here is relate this idea of antifragility to our everyday situations.

Where do we need to apply this concept in our lives?

Where do we need to build up a strong system, a secure system, but also have the option to take risks?

Here are a few areas in life I came up with:

Talking about professions, career: A friend of mine built himself a very secure profession as a software developer, in which he was known to be very good. He was successful with it. Then, after a decade or so, he left that completely for something highly risky but exciting. This is a true barbell in every sense of the word: he can fall back on, return to, his previous profession should the risk he is taking fail, or fail to bring the expected satisfaction he’s looking for.

Another area, how about this: You have a reasonable savings account, having enough money to cover all your expenses for let’s say, 3-6 months, that would be safe, but you’d also leave some money to invest

when the opportunity comes, money to take big risks with. And you could even jump at a new job opportunity because you’d have savings to fall back on if the new job didn’t work out.

Last example; how about time management? You could spend 90% of your time on things that you know are good, good for you, your career, good for your health, relationships. The obvious things.

Then you could spend that other 10% on things that could pay off in the future if things go right. Things that could pay off big, but could also do nothing for you. That’d be an antifragile way of managing your time.

Make sense?

So here’s a challenge. Let’s apply antifragility to language learning.

Hmm. I have fun doing this. Applying the lessons I teach to language learning.

So what are we trying to avoid? Let’s say we are trying to avoid a totally embarrassing, devastating English experience. Or more so, learn from

these awkward experiences. Times when you feel like a total failure, and want to run out of the room.

Well, if your English is an antifragile system, we’d need to build a strong foundation, the 90%, the side that can get through extreme stress, grow from stressful situations. You’d need to be able to handle yourself well even if you don’t understand what people are talking about, or maybe you can’t understand who’s speaking. When you’re talking to someone with a strong accent maybe? But you’d need to develop the tools to get through these situations even when you’re uncomfortable.

And what are the tools? Well I consider these “navigation” tools: the ability to navigate conversations. Being able to ask for clarification when you need to without sounding lost, listening to the keywords people are using so you can understand the overall context, repeating back what people are saying in order to make sure you’re following them, being comfortable with saying, “sorry, I’ve never talked about this in English before. It’ll take me a bit to catch up with you guys”. Things like that could help you avoid disaster. Also, having a strong training routine, where you’re always listening to and reading English content

based on things relevant to you. Continuing to develop that English database everyday! That’s safe. That helps.

And the other 10% part, where you take risks and face volatility? Well that would be throwing yourself into difficult conversations. Talking about totally new concepts in English. Throwing out new slang you’ve learned, seeing if it works and what kind of reaction it gets. Playing with risky words, learning from failures, but not doing it in situations where catastrophe isn’t an option. You’d save the risky stuff for the 10%, when you could play with English, because you’d have a very strong foundation, made up of your ability to navigate through conversations, confidently.

Does all that make sense? Maybe. I don’t know. It sounds cool anyway.

Well it sounds cool to me.

So, I’ll sum it up like this… The oversimplified explanation. Be brave, take risks, that’s what brings growth and progress, but do these things “Antifragile” - Episode #112 19

only after you have created a strong safety net, a strong foundation to fall back on if disaster happens. That’s antifragility.

Got it? Good!

Thanks for listening to today’s confusing lesson. Well I hope it wasn’t too confusing. I tried to make it clear. I really like finding books on totally foreign concepts, concepts I haven’t heard of before. And “Antifragility” is definitely one of those books.

Another question for you. Do you want to become a confident, powerful English speaker? Do you need to attack English and make it something you don’t have to worry about anymore? Do you want to become antifragile? Well you could simplify your life by making Feel Good English your main English learning resource. With my Feel Good Premium Membership, you get two complete lessons per month to help you reach that next level of English fluency. In each lesson, I take the podcast episode you’re hearing right now and transform it into a powerful English learning tool. Become a more effective, smart speaker by becoming a Feel Good Premium Member. Go check out how the premium program works at www.feelgoodenglish.com/go

And that will do it for today. I’ll be back soon enough with another Feel Good English lesson. Make sure you listen to this episode many times.

Learn from it deeply. And to see the links to the book I talked about today plus the show notes go to FeelGoodEnglish.com/antifragile Until next time, be a badass, with assets.

Bye bye.