Nassim Nicholas Taleb the bestselling author of The Black Swan" & one of the foremost thinkers of our time reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress & tension many things in life benefit from stress disorder volatility & turmoil. What Taleb has identified & calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive & flourish. In " The Black Swan" Taleb showed us that highly improbable & unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer-tainty on its head making it desirable even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil-ient resists shocks & stays the same; the antifragile gets better & better. What's more the antifragile is immune to prediction errors & protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state why is debt bad for you & why is what we call "efficient" not efficient at all? Why do government responses & social policies protect the strong & hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial & error life decisions politics urban planning war personal finance economic systems & medicine drawing on modern street wisdom & ancient sources. " Antifragile" is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite witty & iconoclastic Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile & only the antifragile will make it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty probability & knowledge & has led three careers around this focus as a businessman-trader a philosophical essayist & an academic researcher. Although he now spends most of his time working in intense seclusion in his study in the manner of independent scholars he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is "decision making under opacity " that is a map & a protocol on how we should live in a world we don't underst&. His books " Fooled by Randomness" & " The Black Swan" have been published in thirty-three languages. Taleb believes that prizes honorary degrees awards & ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport."