Surf and Serendipity: Embracing Antifragility for Real Innovation

I was recently on a vacation in Sri Lanka, sprawled on a sandy beach with Antifragile, a book by Nicholas Taleb in hand, when I hit a line that lit a spark in the last rays of the setting sun: “We (humans) talk big but hardly have any imagination. We need some randomness to help us out (for innovation) with a double dose of antifragility.”

My eyes immediately darted from the page to the surf: kids building wobbly sandcastles, surfers wiping out time and again. No grand theories there—just trial, error, a dash of luck, and a willingness to fail gloriously before eventually nailing that perfect wave.

So, first thing first, what is antifragility? 

Picture something that doesn’t just survive chaos but actually thrives on it—like muscle fibers that rebuild stronger after a workout. It’s the opposite of fragility, where a system breaks under stress. Instead, an antifragile system gets better with every bump or jolt along the way.

That’s when it clicked: real, innovative solutions don’t come from spouting big words in fancy boardrooms; they come from rolling up our sleeves and tinkering aka trial & error with a resilient attitude (rather antifragile attitude) towards failures. 

Think of Penicillin accidentally discovered when Alexander Fleming noticed a mold decimating bacteria in a neglected Petri dish; or Teflon, stumbled upon by Roy Plunkett while he was trying to invent a better refrigerant. But my all-time favorite is the first flight by the Wright brothers, two bicycle mechanics (not even engineers) who took flight by tinkering with gliders on the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, a small town in South Carolina —failing and adjusting until they changed the world. None of these breakthroughs arose from pristine theories. They were children of chance, accident, and open minds.

Yet we insist on complicated diagrams and bullet-point-laden presentations—but why? Because, as I realized through Taleb while sifting sand through my toes, “Simplicity doesn’t lead to laurels.” 

We are suckers for the sophisticated. We crave applause for elaborate master plans—never mind whether they actually work under real-world pressure.

Complicated is only sexy until it snaps. Then we are left with confusion and excuses. Meanwhile, those surfers keep at it, adjusting stance, angle, timing—embracing disorder until they find that fleeting sweet spot on the crest. That’s antifragility in action: learning and improving through every wipeout. It’s the kid on the beach who wonders if adding coconut shells to the sandcastle might hold off the tide. It’s the team at the office running small experiments, bombing nine times, then striking gold on the tenth. 

We don’t get “real laurels” by playing it safe; we get them by betting small, learning fast, and leaning into the unpredictability of life.

That’s the spirit I took home from that evening: let’s tinker, fail fast, and come back stronger every time. Let’s welcome experiments (and thus failures) with open arms and a healthy sense of humour. Because in the end, it’s not complicated theories that save us—it’s the scrappy willingness to get sand in our shoes, tweak, rebuild, and watch our makeshift fortresses stand tall long after the tide recedes. 

That is how CARS24 will become antifragile.