what is anti-fragility? Anti-fragility is actually the antonym of fragility, but what is the antonym of fragility? Not tough, tough can only be called intermediate state. It is the spirit that China people often say is more frustrated and more brave. When encountering external blows, it will not be fragile, but it will benefit from the blow.

a little simpler: we may understand more clearly by using numbers to express the relationship between vulnerability and toughness and anti-vulnerability. In our 7 community, 7 is a good number. Then -7 stands for vulnerability, stands for toughness, and 7 stands for anti-vulnerability.

Then you must ask, what kind of strategies can you adopt to make yourself anti-vulnerable?

The author introduces a method called "barbell strategy".

the barbell strategy is a method to realize anti-vulnerability and transfer to the third kind of ternary structure (fragility, toughness and anti-fragility).

The characteristic of barbell strategy is that the two ends of barbell are not necessarily symmetrical, but it consists of two extreme conditions, with nothing in the middle. You can also call it a bimodal strategy in more technical language, because it has two completely different models, rather than a single golden mean model.

At both ends of the barbell, on the one hand, there is extreme risk aversion, and on the other hand, there is extreme risk preference, instead of adopting a "moderate" or "moderate" risk attitude, because this moderate attitude is actually a deceptive trick (people generally understand the concepts of "high risk" and "zero risk", but moderate risk is very confusing because it is affected by huge measurement errors). However, thanks to its structure, barbell strategy is conducive to reducing adverse risks, that is, eliminating destructive risks.

This passage is too difficult to understand, so the author gives two examples. The first example is that if you fall in love with a rock star, don't marry him, but marry an accountant and then have an affair with the rock star. So you can have both love and bread. When I saw this, the movie The Shawshank Redemption suddenly popped up in my mind. Didn't the hero's wife just marry a banker and have an affair with a rock star? Although she had both love and bread, she lost her life, killing both the rock star and the banker.

But I like the second example very much and benefited a lot.

The author said, "A writer who takes a leisure job that has nothing to do with writing activities during the day will write better."

My understanding is that there is almost no income at the beginning of writing, which can not only increase income but also have life experience, so the author will not get into trouble to support himself, but will write better. There are many such examples in reality. For example, Mingyue, the author of the best-selling book Those Things in the Ming Dynasty, was a grass-roots civil servant that year. She didn't have much to do during the day and had the energy to write at night.

Liu Cixin, a famous writer, was not a professional writer before he became famous. After graduating from a university in Henan Province, he has been working in Niangziguan Power Plant in Shanxi Province, during which he wrote the world-famous science fiction novel Three-body.

The enlightenment that this brings to us as individual investors is that no matter how much capital you invest, you must never be a full-time stock trader, and you must have a job to make endless off-site money, so that the time for us to make a fixed investment can be long enough, because if we have a job, we will not concentrate all our energy on marking the market, we will not trade repeatedly, and we will not spend a lot of time watching all kinds of media hype, which will keep our psychology and emotions stable.

where else in life can we use barbell strategy?

exercise is also possible. If you just walk every day, your exercise effect will not be very good. You should also add a little strength training, strength-based weightlifting training and relaxed walking to form the two ends of the barbell. In this way, the author cultivated himself into a bodyguard-like figure. Needless to say, the advantage is that readers will hesitate when they see him: why does a weak scholar have a body like a bodyguard?

Then my understanding in reading is: read more classic long-selling books at one end of the barbell, and try to finish them no matter how difficult they are. Read them a few times and you will understand naturally. On the other hand, I choose to read some relaxing leisure books, and try not to choose those books in the middle zone.

what kind of people do you choose to chat and make friends with?

At one end of the barbell, choose those friends who are accomplished and thoughtful to communicate with each other. On the other hand, chatting with young college students or going to the countryside to talk with the uncle at the entrance of the village may get a lot of inspiration.

writing here, I can't help thinking of my dead mother-in-law. She has lived in the countryside all her life and has no education, but I have heard many "wise sayings" from her:

1. "Money is hard to earn, but shit tastes bad" (warning children not to be afraid of difficulties in work)

2. "Tears are flowing downwards" (parents always think about their children)

3. "Mother's heart is on her son, and her heart is on a stone. The sentence is: "reducing vulnerability is not an optional choice, but a mandatory requirement, which may sound obvious, but it always seems to be ignored."