We Must Be Antifragile

"As Hemingway writes in one of the most beautiful passages in A Farewell to Arms, the world eventually breaks all of us. 'Afterward,' he says, 'many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.'"Find out about the power of antifragility in today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. We must be anti-fragile. The world is a cruel and random place. Our plans are dashed, our systems are broken. People we love die. We lose what we have built and what we have so carefully saved and invested. We try to be stoic, we try to be strong, but sometimes

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  we falter. Is this weakness? No, this is a good thing. As Hemingway writes in one of the most beautiful passages in A Farewell to Arms, "The world eventually breaks all of us." Afterwards, he says, "Many are strong at the broken places, but those that will not break, it kills." Let us be clear about what Stoicism is. In simple terms, it is a philosophy designed to make you stronger so that you don't break easily. It is not, however, a philosophy to make you unbreakable, at least not in the most easily understandable sense of that word, because only the proud and the stupid think that that is even possible.

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  Instead, Stoicism is there to help you recover when the world breaks you, and in the recovering, to make you stronger at a much, much deeper level. So much of what happens is out of our control. Pandemics, the markets, supply chains, world leaders, what our neighbors do. We are drafted to fight in wars, to bear huge tax or familial burdens. We are forced to admit defeat about the thing we wanted to win so badly. This hurts. There's no denying that. A stoic heals by focusing on what they can control: their response, the repairing, the learning of the lessons, preparing for the future. It is in this that we become, as Nassim Taleb has said in his wonderful book by

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  the same name, Anti-Fragile. We become better for what we went through, better than if we had resisted and never been broken in the first place. In this, we have true strength because those that cannot break cannot learn and cannot be improved for what has happened.

• 2:33Speaker 01

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