ANTIFRAGILITY
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger
The date was Friday July 20, 2007.
My family and I were camped out in front of a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Naperville, IL.
I’ve queued up several times before — the first and second round of the 1989 Wimbledon Championships, every Walt Disney ride that I have taken that did not accept a Fast Pass and the early Saturday morning retro Jordan sneaker drops — but never before had I experienced the anticipation for this type of event. A moment for kids, their imagination and the power of reading.
Broomsticks, owls, chocolate frogs, wands and wizards were everywhere excited for the big reveal. Precisely at midnight, the bookstore was about to open its doors for the release of JK Rowling’s seventh and last novel in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. By the time our two sons (who were 8 and 9 years old at the time) walked through the doors, picked up their book around 12:15am, they looked around the store and they were mesmerized…and probably half asleep as well.
DID YOU KNOW
Harry Potter is the most successful series ever, selling 500 million copies worldwide (which is 150 million more copies than the next-highest selling series).
Looking back on JK Rowling’s career, I am so fascinated by the entire arch of the Harry Potter story and also by her resiliency, love of writing and whimsical style.
DETERMINATION
Many people don’t realize that Rowling wrote Harry Potter through extremely challenging times. While Rowling conceived the idea of the boy wizard as she waited on a delayed train and planned out the seven books in the series before finishing her first book, she faced serious life vicissitudes.
She was unemployed, “as poor as possible without being homeless” and extremely depressed. Her mother had died from multiple sclerosis when Rowling was 25. After her divorce from an abusive husband in Portugal, Rowling moved back to the UK to raise her daughter on her own. At one low point, she actually considered ending her life.
Thankfully therapy improved her outlook and she started spending her days writing in the now famous Elephant House Cafe in Edinburgh to finish the first Harry Potter book in 1995.
DID YOU KNOW
JK Rowling put the Platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross station because this is where her parents first met
After completing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (later changed in the US to Sorcerer’s Stone), twelve different publishers turned her down.
Two years later Bloomsbury offered her a modest $2,000 advance to print the first 500 copies in the UK with 300 of the books going to schools. And the rest is history...but how did she do it? Why did she keep going?
How do others, like Rowling, overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to succeed?
GRIT
IMHO (In my humble opinion) the word Grit gets misused and is misunderstood.
Most people think grit equates to strength, toughness or power. Instead I love Angela Duckworth’s definition of grit as a “combination of passion and perseverance.”
“…interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t…Without experimenting, you can’t figure out which interests will stick, and which won’t.” — Angela Duckworth
Duckworth is currently a psychology professor at the University of Pennsyvlania and the author of one my all time favorite books — Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Through years of research, meeting cadets at West Point, professional athletes and other high achievers, Angela Duckworth discovered grit to be a stronger predictor of high-achievement than intelligence, talent and other personality traits. Her widely viewed TED Talk is also quite powerful and persuasive illuminating her findings.
ANTIFRAGILITY
Some people believe that Kelly Clarkson coined the following phrase instead of properly attributing it to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — Friedrich Nietzsche
In his 2012 book called Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, (and what I am currently reading) Nassim Nicholas Taleb divides the world and everything into three categories: the fragile, the robust and the antifragile.
In the book Talib states that people are fragile when they avoid disorder and disruption for fear of the mess they might make of your life. When we “play it safe,” Talib shows that we might actually may be setting ourselves up for a potential shock that could tear our lives apart.
People are considered robust or resilient if they can stand up to changes in their life without changing who they are.
Those that are considered to be antifragile allow shocks, obstacles and disorder to “make them stronger and more creative, better able to adapt to each new challenge they face.”
Taleb thinks we should all try to be antifragile.
“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
RISING FROM THE ASHES
With the Great Fire of London in 1666, to the Chicago Fire of 1871, to the Golden Dome burning down in 1879 at my alma mater, we have all witnessed the amazing rebirth and recreation from such devastation and destruction.
From ancient Greek mythology we find this renewal story also in the prized Phoenix — a bird with beautiful colors and magical healing powers — who is reborn from its own ashes whenever it is destroyed.
As we start this New Year of hope, in the midst of the events from last week in Washington, DC, I believe that we can all rise to greater heights from these ashes. I am determined to become more antifragile, more accepting to uncertainty and more open to growth and change.
“The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means — crucially — a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them — and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Jerry Quinn is the author of QNotes, lives in Portland, OR and looks forward to another Harry Potter walking tour on the streets of London.
