Bent But Not Broken

Resilience is necessary

Rahul Abhishek

Published in

Answers to Life

5 min readMay 22, 2017

I recently read an article by Adam Grant on resilience.

Adam neatly writes about how ‘Never Give Up’ is not the best of the advises. He claims so with some past experiences and logic.

Resilience has a lot to do with it.

Just like opportunity cost exists in this world, it thus is simple to understand that you’ll always end up losing something in order to achieve something.

Doesn’t mean you lose.

Giving up isn’t always losing. Quitting isn’t always a failure. Failure isn’t always the end.

Awful things happen in everyone’s lives. I’m talking miserable and suicidal phases of everyone’s lives.

Doesn’t matter who you are. The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried. All winners were losers once.

Money & Career

Millionaires, specially self-made millionaires lose more than millions over the period from when they started their journey till they achieved that milestone.

See? They might have lost more money than they earned when they became a millionaire.

Money isn’t everything, people have to let go of friends, family and much more.

Being rich isn’t everything either.

Athletes who have been entitled champions. Actors who dazzle us on the screen or from the stage. Musicians who touch our hearts through the melodies. World leaders who lead and defend nations. Social activists who influence the whole world to change for the good. Writers who change our inner world with their words. Journalists who put everything on the line to show the world the truth. Military personnel who risk their lives to serve their nations. Teachers who give away the most precious treasure one could have, knowledge. And so many more.

All these and many more people who achieve success have to do the trade in their lives all the time in their careers.

Money isn’t everything. Money should have never been a thing.

Doing something that you love and is meaningful is what matters. Everything else is secondary.

Career isn’t everything either.

People don’t just feel broken on facing a setback in career.

Relationships

A Ted speaker who was speaking on ‘Happiness’ said in his talk that social connections aka relationships or just relations are one of the most influencing factors in someone’s lives.

He studied thousands of different people of all the ages before coming to such a conclusion.

Love kills more than terror attacks. This was one of the headlines on the front page of my newspaper a few weeks ago.

People come and people go. Friends leave. Partners leave. Family leaves. But life goes on.

Your life doesn’t end in practicality.

Maybe, you’ll feel lost without your brother. Maybe, you’ll feel hopeless without your friend. Maybe you’ll feel alone without your partner. Maybe you’ll feel all of this and more all at once at times.

People leave, sometimes by choice and sometimes by faith.

Being Yourself

Relations and careers are important factors of anyone’s life, but there is something of much more importance that most of the people just blindly ignore.

It’s nothing to do with adapting to change or being traditional.

Let’s call the world around you, a culturescape, a term used a lot by Vishen Lakhiani in his book, “The Code of The Extra Ordinary Mind” which simply means the way the world works today.

Today’s culturescape makes people resist change.

Filled up with lots of “should”s.

You should be like this.

You should do this.

You should wear that.

You should pursue this.

Being yourself, doesn’t always mean going against the wind.

Doesn’t always means quitting that job.

Doesn’t always mean you should be a rebel.

Walk which ever path you want to walk on, whether the rest of the world gives a thumbs up or not.

This is important. Lot’s of people think, being yourself is always going against the world.

Sometimes, it may not.

The point here is to be yourself.

You will always feel a pushback, a resist.

You may feel you are stepping out of your comfort zone, since you might be possibly bashing up the walls of the culturescape.

People may not support you.

Actually, people won’t support you. They will bring you down. You’ll be down on your knees, and they’ll still make it worse.

If you find some people who do support you, be grateful and never let them go.

Not many people understand that embracing yourself, whatever and however you, just being more yourself, making choices more and more of your own and not by anyone else is indeed what will make you, you.

Just accepting that the most of the people will let you down or won’t support you in your life and that has nothing how your life turns out is a power in itself.

Be you, all of you, the highest magnitude of yourself.

Be inspired, but don’t be a follower.

Be unapologetically you, unless you harm someone else or yourself.

Then rethink.

Being yourself is the right way to go about life but make sure no one else is getting hurt because of it.

Most people look at other’s lives and wish to be them forgetting that they themselves have been gifted a life of their own.

Trust me, don’t worry about being let down, be yourself, 100% yourself and you’ll discover gold beneath the dust, called life.

Subsequently, you will start living, not just existing anymore.

Conclusion

You may not always be able to control what happens to you or your surroundings, but reacting to it is totally your choice.

Being stuck in a situation and let that affect you is a choice, or doing something about it to get out of the situation for the good is also a choice.

Failure is inevitable in all aspects of life. You will face adversity no matter what, just don’t be affected by it forever.

Learning how to face adversity more and more through failures is the key.

The good always exist in the universe in abundance.

Don’t ever feel you’re broken. Do you know how powerful the human spirit is?

Just remember, you might bent but not broken.