Do Hard Things
Resilience in a Culture of Convenience
The shift of our culture in the last decade has been to make things easier. From ordering food to buying a car, the more comfortable and convenient we can make things the better. It wasn’t long ago that a good meal meant getting your hands dirty and now it’s just tapping a finger on the DoorDash app.
I’m certainly grateful for the convenience. I’ll probably “Dash” me some Wingstop while I watch NFL Redzone this weekend, but in our quest for quick and easy, I think we’ve lost some of the benefits of time-consuming and hard.
One of the most valuable attributes that any individual can have is resilience. Success often involves facing setbacks and challenges. Resilient individuals can bounce back from failures, learn from their mistakes, and persevere in the face of adversity. They view setbacks as opportunities for growth.
So how can you build resilience in a culture that is trying to make everything easy for you?
Simple.
Do hard things.
Walk into any daycare in America and observe for 5 minutes. It won’t take long to see that resilience isn’t built into the human DNA. It is something that can only be learned and it can only be learned through experience.
No book’s going to teach you how to overcome adversity.
No lecture’s going to show you how to get back up after falling short.
Now books and teachers can certainly give strategies and advice, but until you do it, you’ll never internalize it because there is no risk in reading and listening.
This is why I think athletics is one of the most important cornerstones of our society. It’s one of the only things in America that we can’t make easier (Well that’s kind of a lie given tennis courts are slowly being overrun by pickleball, but you get the point).
It’s one of the last places where we are forced to learn through failure, where mistakes mark growth, and where consistency and perseverance are the only things that are rewarded. That’s why it should be no coincidence that “Fortune estimates that 95 percent of its Fortune 500 CEOs played sports” growing up.
I will take it one step further and say the weight room is probably the purest place to build resilience because the playing field is about as equal as you can get. Talent and ability aren’t going to give you an advantage and adversity, in the form of a barbell, is going to weigh the same regardless of day, time, location, or how you feel.
It’s a pretty simple line of thinking:
Want to be successful?
Be resilient.
Want to be resilient?
Build resilience.
How do you build resilience?
Do hard things.
