Highly planned systems — economies, companies, personal lives — that don’t allow for organic movement become fragile. They might grow for a while, but they break. Allowing creates resilience that lasts not 30 years but hundreds. Joe points to open-source platforms versus proprietary ones, decentralized ride-sharing versus controlled taxi services, and non-planned economies versus command economies.
The same principle applies internally. Allowing our emotional experiences rather than managing and constricting them helps us heal quicker, transform faster, and make decisions with more clarity. When we stop trying to control our inner experience, we become antifragile — capable of responding to change rather than rigidly defending against it.
“That same resiliency is created by allowing the emotional experiences that we have — by not managing and constricting on those.”
This connects to identity flexibility: allowing ourselves to update who we are, rather than insisting on a lagged-behind version of ourselves, creates the capacity to pivot in response to changing circumstances — internally and externally.