Would World War I have started if Gavrilo Princip hadn’t shot the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo?

But failure carries with it one huge antifragile gift: learning.

This gives you some real decision-making power: It tells you about the limits of what you know and the limits of what you should attempt. It tells you, in an imprecise but useful way, a lot about how smart or stupid your decisions were regardless of the actual outcome. It makes you aware of your process, so that even if the results are good, you

Keeping a journal of your own performance is the easiest and most private way to give self-feedback. Journals allow you to step out of your automatic thinking and ask yourself: What went wrong? How could I do better? Monitoring your own performance allows you to see patterns that you simply couldn’t see before. This type of analysis is painful for

two areas where second-order thinking can be used to great benefit: Prioritizing long-term interests over immediate gains Constructing effective arguments

As popular—and generally useful—as counter- and semi-factuals are, they are also the areas of thought experiment with which we need to use the most caution. Why? Because history is what we call a chaotic system. A small change in the beginning conditions can cause a very different outcome down the line. This is where the rigor of the scientific

The truth is, the events that have happened in history are but one realization of the historical process—one possible outcome among a large variety of possible outcomes.

asking what would need to change in order for her to feel safer.

ideas and overvalue the complicated ones.