How Do You Learn to Be Resilient?
Resilience determines success more than education, training, or experience. This isn’t a new insight—60 years of research beginning with Duke / Minnesota professor Norman Garmezy tells us it’s important. But in our newly disfigured workplace, resilience is essential. Fortunately, anyone can learn it. Maybe. And how?
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What is resilience? Paul Jarvis summarizes it nicely in Company of One.
First, resilient people have a staunch acceptance of reality, which is different than optimism. Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was held prisoner and tortured for eight years, was asked who didn’t make it out. He said, “The optimists. The ones who said we were going to be out by Christmas.” (endnote 1)
Second, resilient people have a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful--they’re motivated by meaning, not just money.
Third, resilient people have an uncanny ability to improvise. Angela Duckworth calls it Grit. Jia Jiang calls the guts to ask for a “burger refill” at a restaurant.
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How many people are already resilient? As Diane Coutu explained in How Resilience Works, resilience is one of the great puzzles of human nature, like creativity. But here’s a good guess: Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan determined that for every 5,000 employees, only 25 have the mindset of an entrepreneur, a good sign of resilience. That’s 0.5%.
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So, resiliency is either hard to learn or 99.5% of us just don’t care. If you’re still reading, you probably want to learn! But how? Unfortunately, brilliant articles like How People Learn to Become Resilient are descriptive; they don’t prescribe how.
If resilience is like creativity, I think the answer is obvious: practice. COVID is like a batting cage for resilience—it’s firing a steady stream of challenges at us; a few at our head. You just have to keep swinging.
We also need to be told how to hit the ball, and Guy Raz is the best swing coach I know. His podcast, How I Built This, has been popular for years, but 2020 put the show into overdrive. Host Guy Roz has been called one of the most popular podcasters in history. Each episode shows how a different entrepreneur or CEO hits the pandemic resilience ball, including plenty of missed swings and hit batsman.
Here are my favorite 10 episodes from the “resilience series” that you may want to start with:
Airbnb (lost 80% and $1 billion in revenue when the pandemic hit)
Luke’s Lobsters (try their delivery!)
Rad Power Bikes (a rad-good pandemic business to be in)
Powell’s Books (books; tough!)
Kodiak Cakes (amazing long-term resilience)
Homeboy Industries (Father Gregory Boy, my favorite CEO of the year)
Wayfair (think the retail segment imploded during COVID? Think again.)
The Laundress (eco-friendly detergent; try it, you’ll like it)
Peloton (now there’s a business I wish I owned when COVID hit)
Tatcha (my wife’s new favorite face cream).
We’re all in the resiliency batting cage today. These stories show how others swing, miss, connect and come back to the cage the next day.
This article was inspired by the team at Gapingvoid
ENDNOTES
(1) Good to Great, Jim Collins.
