Risk Imperative: Watch the troughs, not the peaks

August 25, 2021

The main tenet from Antifragile is that we the people are miscalibrated about risks and rewards. If we calibrate, we can use the barbell method to protect ourselves from the terrible. Here is an application seen in action.

The questions I want to ask myself:

What is my baseline?

What is terrible? What is ruin?

What are the things I can do to avoid the terrible and ruin? (insurance)

What the things I can do that are asymmetrical and antifragile? (lottery tickets)

Terrible is what can chronically take you out - a dangerous loop that can lead to ruin in the short to medium term. It is a fire that needs putting out. What is ruin? Ruin is being irreversibly damaged - usually physically or mentally.

After identifying your baseline, what you want to do is you want to mitigate terrible and annihilate ruin. The terrible disrupts the baseline, ruin irreversibly damages it.

We identify the terrible and the ruin, and then find insurance to avoid and annihilate parts of it. These acts taper the troughs, and most importantly keep you in the game.

When you have your insurance, you now have the stability and safety to take repeated massive risk. That leads to thinking about what things are asymmetrical and antifragile that you would like to do.