Anti-Fragile: The Doctrine of Prevented Trials

Floating House Concept modspace.com.au

Do you imagine Japan without earthquake-resistant houses? One strong quake and the whole city could collapse like dominoes. Now imagine the opposite: buildings designed to bend, sway, and stand firm. The earthquakes still come, but the damage is far less. (Like socks after laundry: still messy sometimes, but less catastrophic.) 

We can’t stop the quakes, but we can decide whether to face them unprepared or with structures built to last. Life works the same way. Many people treat trials as inevitable, yet some challenges can be prevented, if we seek knowledge and apply it deliberately.

Engineered Safety: Life as Strategy

People often see my life as “easy” or “with minimum trials.” What they don’t see are the hours I’ve spent preventing trials: reading thick psychology and self-help books (after all, the first instruction God gives us is IQRO! To read!), learning financial literacy, exploring multiple fields and weaving them together, exercising self-restraint, and practicing delayed gratification for years. Yes, literally for years. Once again, for years.

The amount of delayed gratification I’ve endured has made me insane in short term but steadily sane in the long term. Choose the hard way tortures you in the beginning but free you in the end. 

Choosing to work part-time instead of going out with friends when you were still in college is hard. Choosing to invest instead of spending is hard. Of course, you can flex a bag, not a balance sheet (Try showing that to your friends, see their faces.). Choosing to build courses/ tuitions from scratch is hard. Choosing to keep learning & reflect is hard.

However, those small, consistent choices became safety nets (financial, mental, and physical) that turn what could have been crises into manageable situations. 

And that years of discipline gave me a fragment of freedom I can rely on. An internal freedom that even though can’t be flexed, but can be felt quietly.

FYI, I also carry a small pouch of medicines everywhere I go to prevent small illnesses from turning into big problems. Others might see it as over-cautious, but for me, it’s part of engineered safety. (Basically, I’m like a tiny walking pharmacy. Ask me for aspirin, your move!)

Self-Love Requires a Safety Net

All the preparation, foresight, and deliberate effort (financial planning, health vigilance, knowledge accumulation) serves a deeper purpose. It creates the space to care for yourself.

Self-love and self-respect are luxuries built upon a safety net.

Without a solid foundation, self-love can feel like an abstract concept. With stability in place, it becomes actionable: you can make choices aligned with your values, set healthy boundaries, and navigate life without constantly bending to pressure or expectation.

Still, because the effect can be contagious, this must be grounded properly, otherwise it leads you to total rejection of the outside system haha. (Warning: may cause sudden eye-rolling at nonsense.)

Knowledge as an Addiction and Weapon

“The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.” – Munger

Knowledge is addictive, not as an escape, but as empowerment. Every psychology book I’ve read, every knowledge from books I’ve practiced, every skill I picked up years ago became tools for survival and growth. (Side effects include excessive note-taking and random references to Munger in casual conversations.)

Charlie Munger once said: “You can say, ‘Who wants to go through life anticipating trouble?’ Well, I did! All my life, I’ve gone through life anticipating trouble. It didn’t make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came. It didn’t hurt me at all. In fact, it helped me.”

That philosophy shaped me. I live by anticipation: preparing for risks before they turn into disasters. Even the skills that once seemed “useless” (like learning French or experimenting with content creation) later became critical assets in my career and business decisions.

Rewriting Karma: Strategy Against Consequences

Most people hide behind fate or destiny when things go wrong (Of course, I refer to controllable things). I believe that while we cannot erase karma, we can rewrite the script. After all, there must be reason why Quran says that God will not change the condition of people until they change what is in themselves (13:11). There is power in deliberate action and self-transformation.

Sometimes, I feel like a chess player, seeing five moves ahead, navigating the board to avoid the pawns that trap most people. What’s usually perceived as unavoidable karma, I see as patterns I can recognize and maneuver around. This is not arrogance, it’s the result of years of deliberate learning, reflection, and choice. (Warning: may cause friends to accuse you of thinking five moves ahead while ordering coffee.)

Sometimes this hyper-vigilance leads me to act preemptively. But that’s the trade-off: awareness prevents disaster, even if it occasionally creates blind spots.

The Philosophy of Anti-Fragility

The Crown

This is the essence of anti-fragility: not merely surviving, but using challenges to emerge stronger. 

By preparing in advance, building resilience, and exercising foresight, we prevent trials from becoming disasters. 

Life remains unpredictable, but strategy, knowledge, and intentional effort turn potential calamities into opportunities for growth.

Every small, deliberate action builds a buffer, a margin for life’s chaos. It’s a form of margin of safety, extra space that protects against mistakes, unexpected events, or miscalculations. 

Added with redundancy, multiple layers of preparation (financial, mental, physical), ensure that if one fails, others hold. Together, these buffers and redundancies don’t just prevent disaster, they make life anti-fragile, allowing people to absorb shocks, adapt, and grow stronger from them.