Sam Matla

I’d finished work for the day, it was early afternoon.

The sun was shining.

I’d recently finished reading Peak, by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. Fantastic book. Highly recommend it.

Anyway, having learned more about deliberate practice, I wanted to develop a skill. I wanted to apply the concepts I’d learned in Peak to something.

Music production is out of the question. It’s not because I’m a master at it (I’m certainly not), but I spend most of my day learning about or writing about music, and I need something different.

Programming? Design? These things all require sitting down. I need something active.

Why I chose skateboarding

From the ages of 13 to 19, I loved skateboarding. For many years, I skated every day. If it was raining, I’d skate in the garage, or on the deck underneath the shelter we had.

I was good at it too. I wasn’t professional, but I learned quickly.

But I never applied deliberate practice to it. I had no idea what deliberate practice was when I was 13. I just spent a lot of time skating.

As I was sitting in my chair on that sunny day, figuring out what skill to develop, I turned my head over to the corner of my room and saw my skateboard sitting against the wall. It hadn’t been used in well over a year.

So that’s what I chose.

It’s a great field for deliberate practice because it offers immediate feedback. You know exactly why something went wrong, and you know what you need to work on to fix it.

It also involves a lot of repetition.

My intention is not to become a professional skateboarder. I’m sticking mostly to flatground tricks so I don’t injure myself. I may only do this for 6 months.

The main reason I’m doing it, other than the fact that I miss skateboarding, is that I want to log my findings. As far as I know, there’s nothing on the web about deliberate practice and skateboarding, so perhaps my insights will be helpful.

I’m not starting from square one really. I’ve got 6 years behind me. But a lot of it has completely disappeared. I can barely land anything.

Next Steps:

Come up with a deliberate practice plan for the coming two weeks
Follow it
Log my progress

Antifragile is by far one of the most interesting books I’ve read. It’s certainly challenged long-held beliefs of mine, and even changed a few. Taleb rants a lot, but his rants actually make sense.

It’s not a light read, so if you want the basics, here are my notes (most are direct quotes from the book)

Buy Antifragile on Amazon

My notes

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is anti fragile; the reverse is fragile.

If antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them.

The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.

Simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.

Innovation

How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble.

The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates.

Stress & difficulty

The frequency of stressors matters. Acute > chronic. An acute stressor such as a shock is better than mild but continuous stress (e.g., a bad boss, mortgage, tax problems).

The former is necessary, the second harmful.

Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it.

You learn best thanks to situational difficulty, from error to error, when you need to communicate under more or less straining circumstances, particularly to express urgent needs.

If you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

Environments with variability don’t expose us to chronic stress injury unlike human-designed systems.

Randomness

Injecting confusion stabilises a system.

Firms become very weak during long periods of steady prosperity devoid of setbacks, and hidden vulnerabilities accumulate silently under the surface—so delaying crises is not a very good idea.

We seek vaccination at every new school year (injecting ourselves with a bit of harm to build immunity) but fail to transfer the mechanism to political and economic domains.

Naive intervention

Naive interventionism: the urge to help when it’s unnecessary or even harmful.

Iatrogenics: causing harm while trying to help

One should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.

We are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never at small ones.

Upside and downside

Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

Seneca fathomed that possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend on them.

Q = quality of life
H = harm

If +$1000 != +Q and -$1000 = +H then you have a unfavourable asymmetry.

Modern stoic: someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into imitation, and desire into undertaking.

Action

Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department.

There is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. It makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunitistic course of action.