Tag: books

Antifragile and COVID-19

Book recommendation, insights and inspiration to get stronger during the crisis

I spent most of the past two weeks devouring the book, “Antifragile: things that gain from disorder” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I highly recommend you pick up a copy for yourself and dive in too, sooner rather than later.

I cracked this book open after my Winter Expedition in Iceland and spent most of the past two weeks poring over its pages as I adjusted to COVID-19 changes and hunkered down to figure out my next steps in the new world we’re living in.

Antifragile is a dense and inspiring read that’s particularly powerful and relevant in this time of great disorder and uncertainty.

In this article, on top of passing along a book recommendation, I’m going to list out some of my takeaways and excerpts from the book that I think are particularly useful as we all work through this COVID-19 crisis.

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2020 Goals

The 10 big things I want to get done this year.

I’ve been posting my annual list of goals since 2013, and it’s featured Ironman triathlons, epic hikes, Rubik’s Cubes, reading, writing and arithmetic, to name a few.

This year’s list is a slight shift from many of my previous lists: I’m making habitual, sustainable behavioral changes more of a focus, rather than one-time, bucket-list style accomplishments.

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“Order without Design” by Alain Bertaud

Highly recommend the book, “Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities” by Alain Bertaud.

Especially recommended for professional urban planners, armchair urban planners, people looking to better understand how their cities work, and nerds looking for healthy doses of graphs, statistics, and analysis to inform their municipal commentary and priorities.

For me, this book fed my confirmation bias that it’s all about mobility, and also challenged and changed my views on sprawl and density constraints. It also introduced me to some next-level ways of thinking about housing affordability and cities as labor markets.

Here are some of my notes, comments and favorite excerpts. I put direct excerpts in quotations, and delineate my personal commentary using AF Comment. Everything else is pretty much me picking out takeaways, summarizing and paraphrasing to varying degrees.

For more on these topics, be sure to listen to interviews with author Alain Bertaud on Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen) and EconTalk (Russ Roberts).

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