Vanessa Glau

Imagine you’ve decided you’re going to be a blacksmith. Where would you start? Would you go on the internet and watch every tutorial video, read every book and consume every course on beginner blacksmithing you could find? Of course not. Instead, you would find a master blacksmith and apply for an apprenticeship. You would see that master blacksmith as your mentor and expect them to teach you about the craft, the business, and the industry of blacksmithing.

Antifragility describes things that benefit from shock, things that thrive and grow when exposed to volatility like the mythical hydra that grows stronger whenever it is beheaded. The opposite of fragility is not resilience, but antifragility. The title of this article is "please behead me", a reference to the hydra. An alternative (and arguably more pretentious) title might have been "nihil perditi", meaning "I have lost nothing" in Latin and taken from Seneca on stoicism.

I’ve never understood it when authors say they don’t know where their books come from, as though they are just some channel for art to flow through—I don’t feel that way at all. There is nothing more “me” than my writing—especially my books. If a dream is everything in my subconscious rearranged in a different order then writing a novel is my subconscious rearranging my entire life into a book. In this way, I often think of myself as a museum.