Antifragility: The Most Important Concept for Parenting and Building a Strong Mindset
The anxiety disorder that changed my life, the one year anniversary of publishing Setting the Bar, and the power of asking yourself, "what actually matters?"
Hello, good people!
As of today, an entire year has gone by since the release of my first book, Setting the Bar: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Era of Distraction, Dependency, and Entitlement.
It has been such a pleasure to hear from readers across the country and even many outside the U.S. There were many great surprises (like this review) along the way, and many great connections and opportunities that came as a result of the book. But, best of all, it freed me to discover what the next big projects would be.
I’ve often said that Setting the Bar was the book I could not not write. It was the mission that was going to weigh on my soul until completion and I put all of myself into it. After the publishing and promotion sprint, I took a necessary drawdown period. I allowed myself to sleep a little later, to read more, to begin learning the guitar, and to get some necessary space so that I could clarify what was important—to think about what matters most.
What actually matters? That question has been foremost in my mind over the past year. A lot has changed as a consequence of asking that question more often. In fact, it is the working title of an intentional parenting workbook that I’m currently working on and hope to have available to you newsletter subscribers in time for the New Year. As usual, I’m just creating what I needed to get my own life in order.
What actually matters is a prescient question for anyone living in our busy, information-saturated modern world, but especially for parents. There is a lot of pressure to fill days with select sports, to quiz three-year-olds on the alphabet, to make sure your kindergartner has a chocolate fountain at their class Christmas party, and so much more. But what actually matters? Where do we devote our time, money, and energy? When we are always reacting, it is easy to find ourselves living life like a game of whack-a-mole. It’s easy to wake up and feel like it all got away from us and we didn’t make time for the experiences, the lessons, the people, and the intentional and attention-filled time that really matters.
Anyway, more news on the What Actually Matters Parenting Workbook to come…
Now, as the title of this newsletter implies, I want to highlight Antifragility—the most important human development concept, which all parents and educators need to understand. Even if you haven’t heard of it, I bet you do a lot of things based on an intuitive sense of its importance. Still, a more thorough understanding of antifragility will help bring a clarity to what matters in parenting and life.
To give antifragility the detail it deserves and to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Setting the Bar, I’m releasing an excerpt from Chapter 3: Antifragility, which I believe is the most important chapter of my book. It begins with an account of the anxiety disorder that ran me for years. This period was quite painful, but perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me. Paid members, you also have access to the full audio version of Chapter 3.
As usual, I hope you’ll read and share!
Life is too short to be normal!
Shane
Chapter 3: Antifragility
“The things that hurt, instruct.” –Benjamin Franklin
The water was getting cold. I’d been in the shower for 30 minutes and if I didn’t get out soon, I’d be late for work. My boss would be calling my phone, anxious to get supplies for the day’s landscaping job. I didn’t take this lightly. After all, it was my perfectionist streak that brought me to this point. But I couldn’t leave. Not until I remembered the name of the second baseman that the St. Louis Cardinals had just traded for.
It was the summer of 2009. I could have googled the answer and there was a sports page on the dining room table, but I had to remember his name for myself. I had to remember it before getting out of the shower, or I might go to hell.
It would appear I’d lost my mind. Believing you’ll go to hell because you can’t recall a baseball player’s name isn’t a far cry from “My dog told me to kill my wife.” Yet, I was as rational as ever. I knew how insane this was. Yet, I couldn’t, or, rather, wouldn’t get out. The fear was too real.
Mark DeRosa! That was it. I dressed in record time and flew out the door.
For years, I dealt with a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) known as Pure Obsession, or Pure O. It began when I was 19. At first, there was just a general sense of anxiety that I couldn’t shake. I spent enormous time and energy trying to come up with mental defenses that could make it go away. Rather than the ticks and cleaning rituals that most associate with OCD, I mostly just obsessed and occasionally wrote notecard reminders with lists like: Ignore, Trust, Balance, Confidence.
At times the anxiety was manageable and I’d even forget about it, however briefly. But over time it manifested in increasingly irrational and constant obsessive fears that were magnified with each step I took to push them away.
We all have random uncomfortable thoughts, but typically see them for the arbitrary mental conjurings that they are and move on. For example, you have almost certainly been driving down the interstate at 70 miles per hour, when it occurred to you: At this speed, if I pull the wheel hard in either direction, I’ll be sent flipping to my death. It is a sobering realization that serves as a momentary reminder about the focus that driving demands. You think the thought and then turn your attention back to the countless other more interesting and useful thoughts. You’d have no idea how many of these musings you had unless you began believing that they were going to happen just because they popped into your head. Such unwelcome impulses, to jump from high balconies or shout obscenities in polite company, are so common that they’ve earned a term—the Imp of the Perverse—named after the Edgar Allan Poe short story of a man who couldn’t help confessing to a murder.
For me, the realization that high speeds require sensitive steering adjustments brought a terror that, at any moment, I might be possessed by a perverse impulse that sent me flipping. I was in no way suicidal, but knowing my history with Pure O led me to not trust myself. I did not so much fear anything as I feared my response to the fear. I knew that I would never flip my car on purpose, but feared that because of my experiences with anxiety, just having the thought made it a threat. I assumed that since I couldn’t get rid of the thought, I had to stand guard against it. I’d fight like mad to convince myself that, with 100% certainty, there was no way I’d ever be so reckless. But the harder I fought, the more my anxiety levels increased.
On one 10-hour road trip from Ft. Worth to my parents’ house in St. Louis, the anxiety got so bad that I had to pull over at a rest stop. After a ten-minute break, I got back on the road and coached myself home like Maverick helping Cougar get back to the aircraft carrier at the beginning of Top Gun.
There were more insane internal battles than I care to remember. The specifics are irrelevant because they were only symptoms of a thought pattern. I’d obsess on a bizarre fear convinced that the presence of my unique disorder turned the impossible, or highly unlikely, into a possibility—one that required mental combat to keep me from unravelling. Like the mythological hydra, every time I fought back at the irrational thoughts, they’d grow more, increasingly bizarre heads.
You may be picturing a feeble, panicked college student who spent his free time rocking in the fetal position. But, to the contrary, I appeared to be flourishing. I had a large, strong social circle, I volunteered as a Lacrosse Coach at my old high-school, and I loved my studies, sporting a 4.0 G.P.A. throughout college. My issues were mostly self-contained, leaving few clues other than the growing pains typical of a young-adult struggling to figure out who he would become. The experience is hard to understand unless you’ve been through it. I had confidence and conviction. I knew what I believed. I knew what was rational. And yet, I spent the majority of every day consumed by irrational fears.
If this sounds like an awful affliction, I’m here to tell you, it was the most important period of my life. I would have never willingly chosen to spend three years in constant anxiety, trying to convince myself that I could hold it together. But, having worked past it, I’m now more terrified to think of who I might be if life had followed my own narrow plans. Or if I’d jumped to numb the painful feedback with pharmaceuticals rather than learn to correct the patterns that were wreaking havoc.
This challenge prompted me to funnel my obsessive mind towards human psychology, philosophy, and a broader view of health. It led me to explore meditation, gratitude, and many other self-development practices and it spurred a passion for exploring the principles of human thriving, which continues to stoke my curiosity and sense of purpose. Without those years of anxiousness, I’d be less as a father, husband, friend, leader, writer, and human. And you would likely not be reading this book.
Groomed for Success
“Life instantly improves when you don’t blame other people and focus on what you can control.”
- James Clear
…a 2003 survey of Great Britain’s 69,000 self-made millionaires found that half came from unprivileged backgrounds and about 40% were dyslexic, four times the national average. A naive reading might prompt parents to hope for dyslexia in much the same way that baseball-crazed fathers hope for left-handedness. But clearly dyslexia doesn’t provide any direct advantages. The struggles of dyslexia are just prompts to ingenuity and tenacity. Because human attitude and persistence matter most, we find that in people with the right mindset, disadvantages almost always create greater strength.
Decorated former Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, articulates the success mindset beautifully in his book, Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual:
“The people who are successful decide that they are going to be successful. They make that choice and they make other choices. They decide to study hard. They decide to work hard… They decide they are going to take on the hard jobs. Take on challenges. They decide they are going to lead when no one else will. They choose who they are going to hang around and they choose who they will emulate. They choose to become who they want to become—they aren’t inhibited by nature or nurture. They overcome both.”
Whether Jocko’s statement is true or not, our children and society will be far better off when they hear and believe it. Some people do have great disadvantages that are harder to overcome and others have advantages that make their route to success much more likely. I don’t mean to discredit that reality in any way. In fact, just the opposite. I want you to see how big of an advantage a person’s upbringing can give her, especially in regards to mindset. The greatest advantages and disadvantages come from mindset.
The question we should be asking, then, is what makes a person inclined to decide that they are going to be successful and to believe they can make it so? Cultivating that mindset, more than anything else, will determine our childrens’ success.
The Adaptation Principle
“It is likely that most of what you currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time you are 40... my best advice is to focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence." - Yuval Noah Harari
Traditionally, we think of resiliency along a spectrum that ranges from very fragile, like glass china, to very durable, like a bullet proof vest. But author and statistician, Nassim Taleb, coined the term antifragile to describe a third category that is not only resistant to stress, but is actually improved by it.
Bullet proof vests may be able to withstand bullets but they are still better off not being shot. Gore-tex resists water, but it is not improved by rain. Humans, on the other hand, are antifragile. After years of attracting what seems like every possible sickness, adolescents begin to fight off infections with increasing success. Our immune systems require stress to prompt the adaptations that strengthen and protect us. Likewise, our bodies become stronger when we engage in physical stress and our minds grow more capable and confident when we face a steady dose of appropriate mental challenges.
There is, of course, a sweet spot. Jumping in front of moving cars or beating children will do more harm than good. Too much stress can be devastating. But too little and we wither into a feeble, limited version of ourselves.
The more fragile someone is, the more their available experiences must shrink in order to keep them from shattering. A baby has access to only a very limited experience set. If they try to cook, drive, or bathe themselves, they’ll die. Similarly, fragile adults won’t allow themselves to date, speak in public, start their own business, learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, or do much of anything. In this way growing antifragility is growing the freedom to live more fully. Antifragility we have more opportunity to grow by trying new experiences and more courage to go where those experiences lead.
We are fragilizing the modern world. The rise of safety culture, the self-esteem movement, and the subsequent demands for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” have deluded many into believing that any painful experience leaves us irreversibly traumatized—that major hardships (however loosely defined) imbue us with an intractable pathology, which infects every future thought and action. This sentiment took purchase long ago. As psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, explains in Stumbling on Happiness:
“For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them…. But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.”
We’re adaptive beasts, whose biology anticipates inevitable hardships. And we aren’t just capable of overcoming stress, we need it. People who don’t allow themselves to face hardships don’t feel better, but are, in fact, more sensitive and more afflicted by each minor inconvenience. The absence of stress pits our antifragile systems against us.
Immigrants who grow up in the developing world experience a far lower rate of auto-immune disorders than the general population. Their children, by contrast, born into hygiene-crazed Western lifestyles, develop these disorders at the same high rates as other citizens. Without any exposure to hostile bacteria, the immune system begins attacking healthy cells. Similarly, we’ve discovered that the best way to ensure children don’t develop peanut allergies is through frequent exposure to peanuts.
The same rules apply for our emotional development. In an oversanitized, comfort-obsessed environment, the body, mind, and emotions whose natural instincts are to find problems and solve them, will create problems that don’t exist. When adversity is reduced and pleasure is increased, minor pains are magnified to make up the difference. We maintain a baseline level of discomfort regardless of how comfortable life gets.
The problem isn’t hardship, it is convincing people that hardships are traumatizing—that our disadvantages define us and that we should be shielded from whatever makes us uncomfortable. There is a self-fulfilling nature to believing that we are more fragile than we are. We begin to fear what we have no reason to fear and to avoid what we have no reason to avoid.
My Pure O didn’t get better until I started to consciously train better patterns of thought by committing to meditation and a form of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) known as exposure therapy. What I eventually found was that I had to change how I responded to anxiety. I had to learn not to fight or flee when I felt the symptoms of anxiety. These were only thoughts, after all. They had no power to do actual harm. If they were so eager to keep dropping by, why not just invite them in to stay a while. It turns out the best way to treat anxiety is to stop fleeing or fighting fears and, instead, to seek them out.
CBT is the most effective, enduring treatment there is for a vast array of mental disorders: depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, and more. It works by identifying and deconstructing unhealthy beliefs in order to reprogram what it calls mental distortions—patterns of perception that wreak havoc on those who hold them. In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that the exact same mental distortions that CBT works to untrain are being indoctrinated in our universities and flowing out into mainstream culture. They identify Three Great Untruths that are being reinforced in our younger generations:
The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
The Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good and evil people.
These untruths contradict psychological research on well-being, they contradict ancient wisdom, and they harm the individuals and communities who embrace them. At their core, these untruths are the product of an immature, delusional view of reality. People are not simple. Feelings often betray us. And living a good life should not and could not be painless.
Supreme Court justice John Roberts explains this well in a commencement speech to his son’s graduating class:
If we don’t give our children the gifts of struggle, they’ll be disproportionately bereaved by the smallest hardships. Life won’t be better because they somehow avoided normal human trials, they’ll just be more sensitive to every slight. Most devastating, they’ll be far less likely to persist in the pursuits that would build confidence and expose them to transformative ideas and people. Thus, they’ll be less likely to seize future opportunities for growth. They aren’t only shells of their potential, but they lack the initiative to change.
Still, there is always a balance. Focusing on antifragility is only effective when there is genuine care and stress only makes us stronger when it oscillates with periods of rest and recovery. Again, we can look at Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s example, as described by Theodore Roosevelt in a letter from 1900:
I was fortunate enough in having a father whom I have always been able to regard as an ideal man. It sounds a little like cant to say what I am going to say, but he did combine the strength and courage and will and energy of the strongest man with the tenderness, cleanness, and purity of a woman. I was a sickly and timid boy. He not only took great and untiring care of me—some of my earliest remembrances are of nights when he would walk up and down with me for an hour at a time in his arms when I was a wretched mite suffering acutely with asthma—but he also most wisely refused to coddle me, and made me feel that I must force myself to hold my own with other boys and prepare to do the rough work of the world. I cannot say that he ever put it into words, but he certainly gave me the feeling that I was always to be both decent and manly, and that if I were manly nobody would laugh at my being decent... I would have hated and dreaded beyond measure to have him know that I had been guilty of a lie, or of cruelty, or of bullying, or of uncleanness or cowardice. Gradually I grew to have the feeling on my account, and not merely on his."
As Roosevelt’s reflections about his father indicate, cultivating antifragility doesn’t call for callousness or faux bravado. It is not an absence of compassion, but in fact wisdom—an understanding of the tools required to make a good life.
We must remember that the goal of youth development is to create strong adults—people of purpose, capable of standing for what is right and solving hard problems—not perpetual dependents who think more comfort is the way to a better world. The primary objective of youth development is to create great people.
This has been an excerpt from Setting the Bar: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Era of Distraction, Dependency, and Entitlement.