Antifragile

With my commitment to personal development and achieving what I want out of life, I have been relentlessly pursuing knowledge. I am consuming hours upon hours of media each day. In the car. At the gym. I even caved and am paying for a family membership to YouTube Premium so I can watch long form content without ads and with my screen off. 

I have consumed more books this year than I have consumed in years - around twenty so far. Not because I don’t enjoy reading - I actually love reading but I haven’t made the time for it. I have reacquainted myself with the gym and while going there between an hour to two hours five days a week, I have begun to consume books via Audible. 

While listening to someone talk doesn’t necessarily fuel my pump - it helps me make use of otherwise dead time to grow. 

Today, I finished the book Grit and used an Audible credit to explore a book with similar concepts called Antifragile. 

While the book Grit has validated the journey that I am on and the steps that I need to take to make progress, the book Antifragile - while conceptually similar - has proposed the idea of taking in failure to make you stronger. 

If we were to analyze the concept of grit, it is intentionally doing hard things to force yourself to grow. This could be learning a language, learning a sport, or learning a new skill. Anything that is going to take you intentional effort and feedback to continue to refine your skills. 

For me right now, this is the practice of bodybuilding, writing, and content creation. 

The concept of being antifragile slightly differs. While grit is an underlying behavior - both being a constant pursuit of growth through challenge - being antifragile is the ability to grow from volatility. Volatility takes the form of time and antifragility embraces education through the formation of character, personality, and acquisition of true knowledge from the disorder that comes with time. 

Antifragile is the concept of being strengthened by every seemingly random hardship that you go through and embracing the natural disorder of the world to do so. 

Each and every one of us has faced adversity through the random disorder that comes with life.

These experiences are real regardless of your personal situation. Don’t allow others to minimize them due to your background versus theirs. 

My brief analogy that helps add perspective to the very real nature of anybody’s hardships is: a person who has never felt pain will find the pain of a tac excruciating. 

While most of us have experienced much worse than the pain of a tac, this helps you realize how much your personal experience determines what you view as difficult or, in this analogy, painful. 

For many of us, these trials have strengthened us into becoming the person that we are today. For all of us, these trials have the potential to. 

To some, one of my largest trials will sound basic but it was eye-opening for me. 

My dog, Norman, was yelping occasionally when we touched him. Initially, we didn’t think much of it as he was a rescue and if he thought he was in trouble, he would make a heart wrenching yelp. 

This continued for a week and we took him to get his teeth checked. We thought he might have cracked a tooth. 

Upon getting his teeth cleaned, he was still yelping. 

He now seemed to be favoring his right shoulder so I figured he might have strained or tore something. 

We got an MRI with the worst conclusion. 

He had a mass on his vertebrae that was pinching his spinal cord. 

There was a chance that it was an infection and not cancer so we spent $9,000 to do a surgery to find out. 

It was cancer. 

In a matter of a few weeks, we went from having a surface level, healthy dog to a dog with a death sentence. 

Due to the location and size of the mass, we couldn’t operate without significant risk to him becoming a quadro-ped and Normy was terrified of people so we didn’t want to have to bring him to the vet numerous times each for radiation that would only potentially help with the pain. 

We got him home the day after his surgery, our anniversary, thinking we would get at least a couple of weeks with him. 

He hadn’t shown the vets the insane amount of pain he was in. 

As I backed into the garage to carry him, screaming, into the doorway, he laid down just enough that I could close the door. Panting heavily and clearly terrified. He was on a massive amount of painkillers and they seemed to be doing nothing for him. 

That, the 6 inch long incision where he was sewn and stapled shut, paired with the harness that I had to use to help stabilize and carry him was gut-wrenching. 

He would have laid in that spot all night if I let him. He was contorted horribly and not nearly as comfortable as he could be. 

So we coaxed him to a massive, Big Barker, dog bed in our living room that he couldn’t lift his paw high enough to get on, forcing my assistance and again, him screaming and drooling in pain. 

This was one of my best friends in the whole world and I was helpless to the suffering he was going through. 

The sheer amount of pain he was in was painfully obvious and all I could think about is how in the fuck he was going to make it for two more weeks. I didn’t even know how I was going to help this man go to the bathroom. 

I had to take him out to the bathroom twice that night and it was humbling. 

Norman was only 140 pounds but due to the rapidly progressing cancer was losing motor function of both of his front legs - and I don’t think the painkillers helped with his ability to walk. I practically had to carry him 20 yards - him screaming the whole way. 

The second time, at 2:00 AM, he bit me and I knew he was done. 

I harbored no resentment towards him. Just pity. My sweet boy had no idea what was going on. That I was doing everything in my power to help him live. The worst part was not being able to communicate this to him. To help him understand that his options were perpetual pain or death. 

Upon getting him inside and seeing his inability to sleep through the pain - my wife and I knew that we would be putting him down in the morning. 

I sobbed then and this makes my cry now. This experience was eye-opening to me. 

I had never experienced an unexpected death, let alone the death of someone that I loved so much. 

The grief process was long and I pondered the meaning of life for months. 

It was rare for me to fall asleep quickly - which is especially shocking if you have ever seen my knack for falling asleep just about anywhere at any time. 

After living this experience in March - we got to experience it again in October with our sweet boy Hank. 

We are all guaranteed to experience death in our lives, but I hope the deaths that you experience are expected because being stripped of things you love unexpectedly is a horrible feeling. 

I spent a long time beating myself over how I could have been better to our dogs - how I could have done more. I was spiraling and not in a good direction. 

Their deaths weren’t my fault - one had cancer and the other heart disease - but I couldn’t help but feel at fault. It is in my nature to take responsibility - that being ingrained in me from my childhood, and I couldn’t let these things go. 

But I was on a path to self-destruction. If I didn’t learn and grow from these experiences, the lives of my two boys would be squandered. Their memories tarnished. 

I couldn’t allow myself to spiral. We spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to help them and were ultimately powerless.

How could I use this as a lesson to and do even better by our surviving dog, Truman. By our cat, Moose? How could I be better in my relationship with my wife?

My takeaway? I have to be better. 

I could get cancer, like Norman. Get in a car accident. A plane crash. 

While the likelihood of all of these events is low, it’s not zero. I have no idea when I will die or how. 

So I must make as many of my moments on this earth matter. 

Compared to what many of you have endured, this will seem trivial. In the grand scheme of things, it is.

But the random nature of these events demolished me. 

My experience with Norman and Hank forced me to confront the reality that life can end at any second.This has allowed me the opportunity to become antifragile. To practice the skill of pursuing my goals regardless of the roadblocks placed in my way. To recognize the volatility of life and utilize it to my advantage. 

It has shown me that the only tomorrow that matters is today and what you do with it. When you choose to be fragile, to lack grit, you are choosing to leave the future to chance. The chance that the future will never come, leaving you with a trail of disappointment formed by broken goals and aspirations. 

We all have events like these. If you somehow haven’t, time will reveal them. Events that you could respond to in a helpless manner, curling up in a ball under the warm covers on your bed - allowing life to pass by and you not to bat an eyelash. 

While that is an option - you would be remiss to do so. However hard it is in the moment, you must find a way to utilize these events to make you stronger. If you allow yourself to maintain the label of fragile and lay, emotionally or even physically shattered - lacking the conviction to move forward, you will ultimately begin to atrophy and die. That death could take days, months, years, or even decades but in responding this way - you are committing yourself to this outcome and welcoming it to you.