I finally finished Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Taleb, and I devoured every page of it, word for word. It’s been some time I enjoyed diving deep into a book. Hence, would like to really share what I took away from it, and later try to apply the key lessons into my work.

I really enjoyed this chapter on education. Nassim applied antifragility techniques on mainstream schooling and it blew my mind. Things like being an antistudent by being an autodidact, how to game the schooling system by barbelling yourself (yet still passing), and most importantly, the real knowledge gems are outside of what most other people already know (that’s how you can stand out). I wished I knew all these back when I was in school. But then again, no one in school would say things like that - too much conflict of interest. Even if I knew, could I have been able to do as he did? It’s probably very challenging, made even harder as a young person with little emotional and moral anchors. But I’m so glad to have read this book now. At 40, better late than never! I’m still continually learning for my work and career, and these tips still pretty much apply. 

Sharing them here as reference for myself, and for anyone who might find it useful. This is not a book review, just raw notes lifted directly from the book, with some minor edits, interpretations and categorisations of my own. This is part of my reading list for a new season.

Read past notes:

• (1) Prologue
• (2) Book 1: Intro to antifragility
• (3) Book 2: Antifragility on a systems level and interventionism
• (4) Book 3: Be 90% accountant, 10% rock star - the bimodal strategy of antifragility
• (5) Book 4: Tinker, have options, don’t be axiomatic in business
• (6) Book 4: How to be an antistudent ?

-–

**Education and fragility

**

Nobody talks about the harm school can bring

We accept the domain-specificity of games, the fact that they do not really train you for life, that there are several losses in translation. But we find it hard to apply this lesson to technical skills acquired in schools, that is, to accept the crucial fact that what is picked up in the classroom stays largely in the classroom. Worse even, the classroom can bring some detectable harm hardly ever discussed.

Be an antistudent, an autodidact

Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters—those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives. What an intelligent antistudent needed to be: an autodidact—or a person of knowledge compared to the students called “swallowers”, those who swallow school material and whose knowledge is derived from the curriculum. The edge was exactly what lay outside it.

Just don’t flunk, and then educate yourself outside of curriculum

I was a barbell autodidact as I studied the exact minimum necessary to pass any exam… But I read voraciously, wholesale, outside of the curriculum. The enterprise needed to be totally effortless in order to be worthwhile. The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved on to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether—when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have the tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement. The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading.

Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.

“Just don’t flunk” was my father’s condition. It was a barbell—play it safe at school and read on your own, have zero expectations from school.

Nonnerdy mathematics is possible!

There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.

“Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”

The treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible. But there is something central in following one’s own direction in the selection of readings: what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.

###