Comfort…security…certainty. As humans we gravitate towards these states. It is a comfortable place to be. There are no surprises and we remain enveloped in the warm embrace of knowing what our day, month and year is going to look like. We go about our days thinking about where we are going to brunch on the weekend and our next fabulous getaway. We dangerously make the assumption that we have it all figured out. As Naseem Taleb would put it we are extremely fragile at this moment. No matter how high we stack the walls that protect us, deep down we know they can come crumbling down. We refuse to think about that possibility. It scares us. We keep telling ourselves that it won’t…can’t happen to me.

Then one day the walls come crumbling down. The ironic part is sometimes we bring them down ourselves. Everything we had worked so hard to protect gone in an instant. All these years we focused on the external and forgot about building up ourselves. It was all about what the world wanted and cared about. We didn’t ask the difficult question as to who we are? What do we want? Most importantly how do we want to contribute meaningfully to the world around us?

Focusing on these questions is what makes us antifragile.

This path offers far less security…comfort and certainty. The chances of finding ourselves lost at multiple junctures of our life is to be expected. These moments will signify that we have the courage to lose ourselves to find out who we really are. What remains to be seen is whether we have it within ourselves to start asking ourselves these difficult questions. Being able to put ourselves in positions where we don’t have the answers.

The decision is the same one Neo had to make in the Matrix. To decide between the blue or the red pill. The only difference is that each of us have the ability to make that decision every morning when we get out of bed. So which pill is it going to be?