We think of things as either fragile or robust. Uncooked eggs, for example, are fragile. Add a little disorder such as a torn grocery bag and it’s scrambled eggs. Two-by-eight lego bricks, by way of comparison, are surprisingly robust. Introduce disorder—say, a bare-foot walk through the house at night—and they keep their integrity! Nassim Nicholas Taleb adds a third category to this seemingly binary distinction: antifragile.

Antifragile things, as the subtitle of the book says, gain from disorder. Consider the Jack Pine. This remarkable tree has dense armored cones that can protect their seeds for years. They often remain closed until a forest fire roars through. When exposed to the heat of a fire, the cones open, releasing their seed into the recently cleared landscape producing arboreal offspring. Jack Pines are antifragile—when the disorder of a forest fire is introduced, they thrive.

Taleb, author of The Black Swan, is a polymath who explores this idea of ‘antifragile’ through a variety of fields—global finance, medicine, and religion, to name just a few. He even explores the ethical ramifications of his theory. At times there’s an off-putting condescension in his writing, but it’s worth pushing through. There are fascinating insights on almost every page.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. Random House, 2012.