I just started (admittedly late) reading Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Seeing as I am no further than chapter one, I don’t have much to say at this point, except for it is rare to read a book where on the first page, a word is, literally, invented by the author, and by the third page, the reader wants to know everything about this concept.

It is even more rare that the invented word–antifragile–should be something that describes a concept so innate, so common, so fundamentally part of human experience, down to our very evolution, that it is remarkable no one has coined a term for it, let alone talked about it.

The idea that something so exciting and revolutionary as the concept of antifragility can exist in plain sight makes me think about everything else out there that hasn’t been discovered yet; or, at least, no one has written about. Literature and knowledge themselves, as Taleb notes, are antifragile disciplines which benefit and grow from stressors. It’s only a matter of time before more exciting concepts that have never been discussed break loose.

It’s a promising start to a great book. But even if I stopped reading after the first chapter, it has given me a lot to think about.