Subtracting to create more

My first ever disclaimer: I am not a medical practitioner. The opinions expressed below are entirely my own.

Another thought that circulates in Taleb's Antifragile is that if smoking were removed from our society, ever other current medical intervention and action would be a footnote in describing improvement in the health of humans across our planet. His point is that the human body is very good at sorting itself out - it has been refining its defences and health over a very long time, and anything that we choose to add to it (like smoking, like unnecessary surgery) is probably going to be worse overall than better. Removing unnecessary interventions into our system can only be good for our health.

Intervention needs to be saved for the situation when there is a massive upside, and a small downside (for example if somebody has cancer and only surgery/chemo will prolong their life). When there is a small upside, it is highly likely that there is the potential for a massive downside (for example elective plastic surgery that provides a small improvement to the nose, but could introduce and fatal infection into the body).

This has got me thinking about my own life and also that of my kids, and the number of interventions I think are necessary, and whether they actually are. Here are a couple I am thinking about:

- when my kids have a mild temperate: I often think they need Panadol or Nurofen to help them feel better. Is this the case? Could the temperature actually be good for them, helping their body recover, and allowing them to flow with their lethargy and rest?

- prescribing antibiotics to speed up the rectification of infections: Could this mask the cause of infections, rob my body's ability to learn how to fight infections, and also kill the necessary good bacteria of my gut?

I leave these as questions because I am not qualified to know the answers. And that is Taleb's point. Actually none of us really know the answer to these questions; we can't predict all the short and long term consequences of medical intervention. He advocates not trying to work them out but to use a heuristic to help guide us (not just for medical instances but for many of life's decisions): Big upside and small downside? Intervene. Small upside and unknown downside? Leave it be.

Mindful problem creation

I am reading Antifragile at the moment by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The book is about systems that actually become stronger through adversity and stress. They thrive and grow from it - the opposite of being fragile (and not to be mistaken with being robust or resilient).

In taking a year off during a difficult period of my life, this is one of the things I have learnt. That through difficultly I actually become better and stronger. There is a lot of common wisdom around this, and we hear it in phrases such as 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and 'when life gives you a lemon make lemonade'.

I am so grateful for having been placed in a situation of stress and difficulty, because it woke me up. I was comfortable and safe in my life, my job, my salary. I knew that something was not quite right, but I was not going to do anything about it until I was forced to confront it.

In taking a year off and being forced to be with myself, I managed to find my purpose and the corrections I needed to make.

Which makes me think about how I can practise putting myself into difficultly so that I force myself to grow. As an old manager of mine use to say, create a problem for yourself so that you extend yourself to find a solution.

I recently did this by publishing my podcast before I had all of my ducks in a row for launching. In launching before I was ready, I stopped myself from procrastinating any longer, and had to quickly find ways of learning all the things I needed to do.

I call it mindful problem creation.