3/21/2024
Speeches are a beautiful thing, condensing a talk down to their most valuable.
My final speech, “Antifragility through Rational Optimism”, was more than just a presentation. It was a personal manifesto. A reflection on how we grow through adversity, and how pessimism holds the majority of us back from fulfilling our dreams. This blog post is a reflection on that journey, the emotions, the breakthroughs, the insights, and how public speaking taught me important lessons about myself.
Last year I "raced" to get into the Honours Programme, and a few months ago, I found out I needed to sign up for an interfaculty course. A friend of mine told me that we should both sign up for the public speaking course. I agreed, and in hindsight, it might have been one of the best decisions I made while in uni.
I go to my first meeting and meet the teacher who was a really great guy. He eases us into the idea of the course: During the 8 week course we would develop a ted-style speech that we would hold publicly for our final assesment.
I unfortunately missed the second session, when we were supposed to brainstorm ideas. So the third session comes around and we had to present our introduction. I volunteered to go first and I completely freestyled an introduction about the experience of jumping out of a plane. I was really proud of myself after I had finished presenting. I felt like I grasped something. I was aware of my eyes, my movement, my voice, and I felt how I wanted to control them for the sake of the talk. At some point, I was so invested in what I was saying that after I talked about leaning out of the plane and jumping, I unconsciously physically leaned and almost let myself fall.
I went home and knew I had to develop it further, but I had no idea what to write. So, I asked ChatGPT to draft a whole talk starting from my introduction and a few ideas. I went back to class the next week, and it felt off. I couldn't present that... I couldn't act that—it wasn't mine. So, I wiped it clean and, starting from the intro again, I began writing. I came across a video from Nassim Taleb talking about antifragility, and it really caught my attention. I decided that my speech would be about antifragility, and since at the start of 2024 I told myself I would be more optimistic, I titled it "Antifragility through Radical Optimism."
The following week I gave a rough version of the talk to multiple friends over the phone. I kept finding ways to slip parts of it into conversations. Slowly the talk was coming together. One day, I was listening to a podcast from Naval and I heard a really interesting idea about optimism and how we evolved to be pessimistic. He mentioned rational optimism specifically. I realized this was really insightful and interesting, so I found a way to add it to my talk and renamed my speech to “Antifragility through Rational Optimism”.
Slowly but surely the idea took shape. Some time passed and I received an urgent call to fly to the US. On a day's notice I packed my bag, bought a ticket, and flew from Amsterdam to Denmark and then straight to LAX. On this journey I had time to think. To further distill the talk.
The content itself might have almost been done, but I wanted to present it in a certain manner. I wanted to improve my control over the speed of my voice, over the pitch, and over my movement. I came back from the US and the next day, I had the final practice session before the actual talk. I held my speech, but I didn't feel quite right. I received some great feedback from my peers and especially my professor on how I could increase the tension in my introduction by varying my speed.
I knew my introduction by heart. However, for the rest of the talk, I only knew the outlines. This was intentional, as I wanted to maintain the natural, free-flowing feel of my talk. Not knowing meant there was no way I could forget, so I would just have to freestyle it, like I did in my first introduction. Every time I delivered that speech, it was different. This time, the final time, however, might have been my best iteration yet.
Giving this speech was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had during university. Not because it was perfect, but because it felt real. I stood on the stage with words I had reshaped over weeks, not memorized, but lived. By the time I held my speech, I must have given parts of that talk at least 20 times during different interactions, and that was really fun! I felt really good talking with friends about this and asking them to help me shape my ideas.
This experience made me realize a couple of things:
by Andrei Ilinescu
Delivered as the final assignment for my public speaking course. Lightly edited for clarity.
I would like to request that all of you close your eyes for a moment. Imagine yourself boarding a small tight plane. You smell gas, And as you climb up in your seat, your heart is pounding. The plane starts ascending. And as you feel the engines turning on, you grip your seat tightly, your nails digging into the plastic.
You hear 500 meters, 1000 meters, 2,000 meters, and finally 4,000 meters. As you stand up, you feel the hearts of the people surrounding you pounding. There's a tension in you. The door of the plane opens and you go towards it, a deafening sound fills your ears. You look down and see thousands of meters below.
As you breathe in, you look down one spinal time and you jump. You start spinning in all directions, terrifying out of your mind. You can't hear anything. You gasp for air and you think that this terrifying feeling will hold on to you, but no. Fight or flight kicks in.
And in a few moments, the soothing feeling of adrenaline watches over it. You appreciate this feeling for a bit, and then your parachute opens. And with that, I hope your eyes open as well. Now those fifty five seconds, free fall break you, and then build you back up. This kind of reminds me of something.
Maybe the most important myth of all, the myth of the phoenix. The phoenix might be the most important symbol of anti fragility. It represents the idea of thriving in the face of adversity. It burns up, falls into its ashes, and then rises back up. Signifies transformation.
Now I mentioned anti fragility, and this is what today's talk is going to be about. So let's for starters try to define antifragility. A quick starting point is to think about what fragility is. Think about something fragile. Most probably, glass comes to mind. When you hit glass, it breaks. Now, what do you think the opposite of glass is? If I were to ask you, you would probably say, I don't know, something resistant like steel. Okay. It kind of makes sense to think that's the opposite of something, fragile, something resistant, but let's twist this a bit. Let's think about positive numbers. If you were to go anywhere in the world and ask someone what is the opposite of a positive number, they would say a negative number. They wouldn't say zero. So in the case of fragility, why is it that if we ask what the opposite of fragility is? We say, basically, zero, something resistant. We should search for something positive. And I think that the positive is antifragility. Something that when you push it, you try to hit, doesn't just resist, it grows stronger.
Now, this idea might be kind of abstract and to help the concept stick a bit, I will go through a concrete exam, one that could actually be found in our own bodies:
One would be the immune system. Your immune system fights a disease and it gets stronger and smarter. Next time you are met with that same virus, bacteria or whatever else, it usually doesn’t have a sliver of the impact it once had.
Another would be the way muscles grow. You break down your muscles by doing exercise. Then your body repairs them, making the muscle stronger than before.
However antifragility doesn’t just apply to your body. Most importantly it applies to the way you bounce back from mental hardship. To this avail I am going to propose a mindset that puts you in the right direction.
Let’s go back a couple millions of years and let’s imagine two humans walking in the jungle, they hear a tiger. The optimist says it’s probably not headed our way and continues. The pessimist runs and survives. And most of the time the optimist gets eaten, so are mostly descended from pessimists. We are genetically hardwired to be pessimists. However, contemporary society is much safer. There is no looming threat wandering around our cities. It is very unlikely that you will end up in total ruin. It is much more likely that in most opportunities the upside is unlimited and the downside is quite limited. Currently there is much more reward in being an optimist, specifically a rational optimist. You have to take rationally optimistic bets with big upside. Being a rational optimist means that you are willing to take opportunities in a rational manner, while keeping an optimistic outlook. It is a balanced mindset.
Now, besides mindset you also need to create opportunities for yourself. If growth happens when challenged, that means you have to find ways to challenge yourself. People say that opportunities come from luck, “blind luck”, however this isn’t the only type of luck.
At this point in our lives, when we have energy and time, the greatest strategy is to ‘stir up the pot’. It is like when a wave washes on the beach over sand. Lots of things get stirred up and after a while it settles. Try to do as many interesting things as possible and see what sticks. But you have to remember, you can’t win everytime, so you might fail at many of the things you try to do and that is fine, it is part of the process.
However when you do win, as a good friend of mine said, “Make sure everybody knows it!”. Why? Well, this plays into another type of luck. Reputational Luck, opportunities disproportionately flow to people that are known to be exceptional. There isn’t much benefit to hiding your wins from society. Over time, those wins add up, and they start to speak for you.
As I said Luck is something that you create. Opportunity is something that you create. However adversity is the material from which opportunity is carved. And antifragility is the perfect tool for handling said adversity.
And through all this adversity, you build anti fragility. You become stronger, this doesn't move your job. So if there is one thing that you take with you from today's talk, Let it be that anti fragility is not a passive endeavor. It is a doers mentality. It demands action. So next time you step into the fire, do it willingly and like the phoenix, knowing that it is the very thing that will forge you.
Thank you!