Athletic Antifragility
On stress as the necessary catalyst for greatness in sport
Hey Everyone! 👋🏻
Happy Sunday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.
It was a frigid and white one on our end, as we found ourselves in the midst of our biannual winter storm that turns the DFW metroplex into “Dallaska”. It was a great opportunity to spend some time in the snow together as a family (Luna is unsurprisingly a big fan), on top of getting to tune into some playoff football at both the NCAA and NFL levels.
After two great college football playoff semifinals, I found myself thinking about the journey that the two teams set to face off for the title - Notre Dame & Ohio State - took in order to get there. And in doing so, I couldn’t help but notice that there is a underlying similarity between their paths to Atlanta: brutal losses to inferior teams (Notre Dame at home to NIU, Ohio State at home to Michigan) that served as a catalyst for something more.
Zooming out, I think their stories are representative of a broader trend in sports: stressful moments experienced by teams and players that create a crossroads at which they are forced to adapt or crumble. And so for this week’s edition, I wanted to dive into the underlying mechanism behind why I think this happens in sport - through the lens of one of life’s fundamental principles:
Antifragility.
So let’s get to it. Hope you enjoy, and look forward to hearing any thoughts or comments.
- CG
“Wind extinguishes the candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, and chaos; you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.” - Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
Sport moments, like life, tend to adhere to the guiding principle of power laws: there are but a select few capable of standing out against the backdrop of the many. For while the history of competitive athletics is littered with countless games and performances, the lore of sport is such that only a small handful of them come to dominate our attention and endure in our minds throughout time.
As individuals, each of us erects our own pantheon of memories; monuments that house our favorite sports recollections, ones that speak to our inclinations towards teams, athletes, and the like. I’m sure that as you read this a number jump to the forefront of your mind, in the same way that they do for me (Tennessee’s 2004 victory over Florida on a last-second field goal is first up on my end, in case you were wondering).
And the same is true when it comes to our collective attention. Just as there are feats in sport history that strike a chord with specific people, there are also ones that manage to capture the attention of groups of them. Moments that form the foundation for how we attach to and talk about sport as a society, threads that weave together to form the canvas of sport as we know it.
But what leads to this phenomenon? What qualities distinguish the ones that rise above the rest?
A basket of them, to be sure.
High stakes and the thrill of drama certainly play their part. An air of improbability, an essence of unexpectedness too. Iconic matchups and rivalries, innovative plays, never before seen performances. The list is long and the more qualities a specific moment or game combines, the likelier it is to etch itself into fame.
And yet there is a fundamental characteristic of sport that stands out above the rest: adversity. Moments that test athletes and teams in ways that extend beyond raw skill or preparation; times where challenges reveal the underlying character and resilience of a competitor. And in doing so provide a lens into a powerful - yet often missed - lesson about the nature of sport.
Consider the following examples from sports history:
June 11th, 1997 - Michael Jordan scores 38 points while sick with the flu to take down the Utah Jazz in a pivotal Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
October 20th, 2004 - The Boston Red Sox defeat the New York Yankees 10-3 in Game 7 of the ALCS, becoming the first (and only) team in MLB history to rally from a 3-0 deficit to win a best of 7 series.
February 4th, 2018 - The Philadelphia Eagles defeat Tom Brady and the New England Patriots 41-33 in Super Bowl LII to cap an improbable championship run behind backup QB Nick Foles.
Three pivotal moments etched into the pantheon of sports lore, each sharing a core underlying theme that transcends the decisive moment of victory and speaks instead to the process of achieving it. Three case studies in odds faced and ultimately surmounted. Three lessons on the value of adversity. On the value of stress. And ultimately about what can emerge on the other side of it.
Each of these moments are bound together by a common thread. Whether Jordan fighting his biology to give us greatness, the Red Sox spitting in the face of probability, or the Eagles banding together to overcome the loss of a star quarterback - the moral of the story is one and the same:
Stress is a necessary catalyst for greatness.
And as such, it is not something to be mitigated so much as it is a mechanism to be harnessed.
Because what great moments teach us about athletes and teams is that they are not candles extinguished by the slightest breeze; they are instead fires that sit and wish for the wind. People that lean into adversity, embracing chaos and uncertainty to catapult themselves to new heights they would be incapable of reaching without them.
Sporting greatness, thus, is a lesson in antifragility: a characteristic trait of the world’s systems that grow stronger when exposed to stress.
This is that story.
Taleb
Coined by the philosopher-economist Nassim Taleb, antifragile is a term that refers to how certain systems - and thus the individuals within them - exhibit a unique response to stress: rather than shrinking in the face of it, antifragile systems use adversity to grow stronger and thrive in the process.
Antifragile systems stand in contrast to two other types of systems, which Taleb details in his book of the same name: fragile systems, in which stress or disorder impair the system and cause it to break down; and robust systems, in which stress does not harm the system but nor does it drive it forward.
To contextualize the distinction between the three system responses to volatility and chaos, he provides the following analogies from the ancient mythology:
Damocles (Fragile) - Borrowed from the Roman myth in which Damocles, a courtier to the Sicilian ruler Dionysius II, is allowed to enjoy a luxurious banquet, albeit with a catch: a sword hangs above his head while he dines, tied to the ceiling with but a single thread of horse hair. With enough pressure from gravity over time, the thread of hair is certain to break - meaning that Damocles finds himself in the midst of a short-term enjoyable yet long-term fragile conundrum.
Phoenix (Robust) - The ‘bird of splendid colors’ that is reborn from its ashes whenever it is destroyed. A representation of a system that neither fails nor improves, but rather always returns to its initial state.
Hydra (Antifragile) - The fabled multi-headed monster dwelling in Greece’s lake of Lerna, with a peculiar trait: cut off one head, and two grow back in its place. The Hydra, as Hercules found out, loves to be harmed. And as such, like all antifragile systems, it is inevitably hard to kill.
What this triad teaches us is that when it comes to our daily lives, we’d rather be more akin to Hydra than Damocles.
When the only certainty of life is in fact uncertainty, is it is imperative that we learn to adapt to chaos and the resulting stress rather than hiding from it. In striving to become antifragile, we can live a life in which exposure strengthens rather than weakens, one where challenge leads to adaptation and opportunistic responses to disorder turn chaos into growth.
Everywhere we look, antifragility is at play. It serves as an underpinning for many of the world’s most powerful phenomena, extending equally across domains such as biology (eg: growing stronger muscles by first breaking them down) and business (eg: the restaurant industry succeeds as result of individual restaurants failing).
And sports are no exception.
Sports: A Microcosm of Antifragility
The landscape of sport creates an environment that is ripe for antifragility. So much so that I believe it is the fundamental trait that competitive athletics reward above all else.
Why? Think about it: sports, like history, may rhyme - but they never repeat.
Competitive athletics are an inherently complex environments, one where the context of each moment changes from one to the next. The ball never bounces the same way, the players are never in the same place. From season to season, game to game, and play to play, no two points in time are ever the same.
The result is a landscape in which volatility, chaos, and uncertainty are ever-present. And so too is the resulting stress that each of these characteristics leads to. Coaches, players, and teams do not have the luxury of a complete blueprint for each situation that they may face. Rather than planning perfectly for every eventuality, they must instead be adept at responding on the fly. In any given moment, they must try to find the best possible combination of strategies for what the moment requires - with the recognition that perfect conditions, and thus perfect responses, are a mirage.
Jordan didn’t know at the start of the ‘96-’97 season that he would be playing Game 5 of the finals with the flu. Likewise, the ‘04 Red Sox didn’t know they would be down 3-0 in the ALCS until they were. And I can promise you that when the ‘17 Eagles were bulldozing through the NFC on the back of MVP candidate Carson Wentz, they had no expectations that their playoff Super Bowl run would in fact be led by their backup quarterback.
And yet, each found their way to greatness. As in countless other moments throughout the history of sport, adversity and uncertainty led to something special on the other-side. Chaotic moments forced players and teams to rally around stress and become something more. Antifragility, in action.
So much so that it is worth asking if that stress was the necessary ingredient that made those moments possible in the first place. Does Jordan score 38 in Game 5 if he is fully rested? Do the Red Sox win the ‘04 title if they had swept the ALCS instead?
It is tough to say - revisionist history is a tricky thing, after all. But it is not a stretch to imagine a different outcomes in each of these cases should the initial conditions have been a bit less challenging. Because sometimes in order to find your best, you need something that draws it out of you.
Since a positive response to stress serves as a hallmark of antifragility, it follows that an absence of it prevents systems - and thus players and teams - from becoming the best versions of themselves. Take it from Taleb, who said the following in describing how a lack of stressors affects antifragile systems:
“Crucially, 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. They will weaken, die, or blow up.”
In this we see an explanation for how superior talent can play down to the level of inferior competition - not enough stress. And similarly, why certain teams and players need a catalyst to ‘wake up’ or ‘rally around’ - whether that be an illness, a bad break, the loss of a star player, or insurmountable odds.
A certain level of stress in sport is thus not only a certainty but also a necessity. In order to achieve greatness in athletics, it is not enough to merely recognize the presence of challenges - you must welcome them at the same time, leaning into them for all the growth they are capable of inducing. Whether as an athlete or as a team - you must be Hydra and not Damocles.
Good teams and players may win in spite of stress. But the great ones win because of it.
Creating Anti-Fragile Athletes and Teams
Taleb wrote that antifragility has a singular property: “it allows us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them.”
In this quote lies the perfect link between the concept of antifragility and sports, because at the end of the day sports are about instinctive reactions to the unknown. And when no-one knows for certain what will come their way, the ones capable of harnessing uncertainty the best will inevitably stand the tallest.
So it goes without saying that teams and athletes benefit the more antifragile they become. But how do they get there? A few principles can help:
First, embrace exposure to stress. At the heart of anti-fragility is the idea that exposure to manageable challenges leads to adaptation and growth. Make your training as tough as possible. Simulate pressure situations. Play in hostile environments. Seek out opportunities against the toughest opponents. The more you expose yourself to stress, the friendlier you become with it.
Second, iterate and adapt. Antifragility isn’t built over night but rather via small, incremental failures over time. Through constant bouts of appropriate stress that allow us the opportunity to calibrate and adapt. Note that the word appropriate is key here: while critical to embrace the upside that challenge can provide, we must be wary of taking it too far. Or as Taleb says, “we must avoid the risk of ruin at all cost.” So find a balance. In the same way you start lifting light weights in the gym and increase over time, making your training progressive as well. Allow your athletes to fail in controlled, low-pressure environments so they can experiment without fear of major consequences. Micro-dose adaptability in practice and it can’t help but show up come game time.
Third, develop optionality and flexibility. In both life and sports, the more avenues you have through which to succeed, the better equipped you will be to handle uncertainty and adversity. Teams with versatile rosters can more easily plug holes that emerge from injuries. Players with diverse skillsets can adapt when their primary strengths are neutralized. So work to build mastery of a skill, certainly - but make sure that you adding more than just one to your tool belt. More optionality, more antifragility.
And lastly, make sure everyone is putting real skin in the game. From coaches, to players, to support staff and beyond. It’s not enough to sit on the sidelines. To become truly antifragile - both as individuals and as a unit - you have to get into the arena. What that looks will differ for everyone depending on roles and responsibilities, but everyone should have a level of accountability for how their preparation and performance drives outcomes. Growth is downstream of ownership - of our successes, but especially our failures. And the more accountable we hold ourselves to realizing outcomes agnostic of circumstances, the stronger we become.
Go Forth & Be Antifragile
And so to close, we see that sports exemplify antifragility in its purest form.
In the end, the greatest athletes and teams understand that adversity isn’t just an obstacle to be overcome - it’s the very catalyst that enables them to achieve the extraordinary. They recognize that like the Hyrda of ancient mythology, stress exists in order for us to grow stronger from it.
For in sports, as in life, the path to becoming truly exceptional isn’t about being unbreakable - it’s about growing stronger with every challenge faced. The most memorable moments in sports history serve as a testament to this truth: it’s not just about surviving the storm, but learning to thrive within it.
About being the fire, and wishing for the wind.
