I have been having so much fun watching Nicholas Nassim Taleb talk about Antifragility.

Source: Wikipedia, Hitrecord.org

Did I mention that I am big fan of his work? It is just brilliant the way he has simplified complex systems. I really like his perspective on Entrepreneurs and those who risk it all and have their skin in the game. His argument which makes a lot of sense to me is that having a lot of entrepreneurs tinkering with things is what creates science and not the other way around. The problem is that those who are practitioners don’t always write their habits and rituals and why they are able to improve on their experiments so that knowledge gets lost. This is changing in the Entrepreneurial community world wide because of the explosion of the work of Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Mark Andersen, Ben Horowitz, Eric Ries, Steve Blank and many others fallen heros who have taken the audacity to show everyone how to fail, learn from the failure and increase our odds of success as a global entrepreneurial community. The reason we listen to the above list and to Taleb is because they have fallen, lifted themselves up and succeeded, would our learning be improved if all those who fail also shared their experiences and learnings? I think it would hence the title of the blog post… I would encourage everyone to create a blog and start writing about your fears, successes and failure, you never know what titbit of information you provide can help someone else in the global community. We are able to link information together and access it from different devices and from almost anywhere in the world, if we are able to create a collective conscious of entrepreneurs and tinkerers, it would be awesome to listen to this heartbeat… just stop and think about it. This is profound stuff if only you notice it.

Taleb talks about Convexity and how that skews every assumption we have about economic models and econometrics… I am sorry Dr.Carter Hill (my econometrics professor in Louisiana State University), I think the Central Limit Theorem does not work neither does the Bell Curve. Taleb has proved many times over and the stock market is proving everyday that none of these theories and empirical work is relevant in the real world.

Coming back to the notion of why we need entrepreneurs and small is beautiful, a couple of the themes in Talebs work. Both of these things are attributes of Iceland. Watch the video above, it is 1 hour long but it sooo worth it.

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