Resilience By Eric Greitens: 3 Takeaways
"You're not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you deal with what happens to you."
-Eric Greitens
In 2012, Navy SEAL Eric Greitens got a message from a fellow soldier he moved up the ranks with, Zach Walker. Walker was known as a tough SEAL who could grind through any obstacle. He reached out to Greitens after a decade of not talking to one another because he was struggling to get through life outside of the military.
Born and raised in a small logging town, in Northern California he returned there where he resided with his family and start a business. His business failed, his brother died, and he got out of the car in his driveway one day and dropped to the ground thinking that snipers were watching him, laying there for hours. He had PTSD, started drinking too much, and got arrested. In an effort to get out of the mud he was sinking in, he reached out to Greitens.
Not only is Greitens a former Navy SEAL but he's a Rhodes Scholar, and Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient, and founder of The Mission Continues, which gives returning veterans an immediate purpose of serving their communities. Greitens and Walker started writing letters to one another which turned into this book, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life. Each of the letters Greitens wrote is a chapter of the book with a specific theme (happiness, philosophy, models, pain, etc.) which combines stories of philosophers, saints, soldiers, and his personal experience with purposeful points
The letters are written with the grit and toughness of a Navy SEAL but with the wisdom of someone much older. His writing style is powerful and colloquial bringing home points in such a way that every few paragraphs could be a quote you'd hang in a gym.
My list of notes from this book stretched way longer than most others which made it tough to narrow it down to 3 takeaways but here they are.
1. Making You Or Breaking You
Greitens defines resilience like this:
"Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain fear and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength if we have the virtue of resilience."
Yet these benefits of pain are not givens. Pain, fear, and suffering can also make us weaker and more cowardly. When two people go through similar situations, you get two results. The difference is in the perception. I love when I feel sore from a workout because I perceive it as my body getting stronger while some people perceive it as negative pain with annoying discomfort and hate it. This same experience occurs with mentality as it does with the physicality. Pain, fear, and suffering can break us down or build us up into someone who is strong, courageous, and wise. A positive perception leads to positive action which amounts to resilience.
This resilience is important on many levels, most notably it's essential for a well-lived life, according to Greitens (a point that's reiterated through The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck which I wrote about here).
"If you want to be happy you need resilience. If you want to be successful you need to resilience. You need resilience because you can't have happiness, success or anything else worth having without meeting hardship along the way. To master a skill, to build an enterprise, to pursue any worthy endeavor, simply to live a good life requires that we confront pain, hardship, and fear."
2. Stress And Purpose
Arguably the most consistent point that Greitens expresses to Walker is the importance of purpose. They went from Navy SEALs who were routinely told what to do and how to do it during life-or-death situations on a routine basis to everyday citizens who were totally on their own. They went from difficult situations with high purpose to the other end of the spectrum as soon as they left the military.
I agree with Greitens that purpose is one of the most important aspects of a good life. These stark transitions in purpose and mindset have the ability to cause trauma. Some common examples I think of often include professional athletes to retirees, able-bodied to disabled, free citizens to prisoners (and vice versa), career persons to stay-at-home parents, rich social lifers (you know what I mean) to parents, and empty nesters. Some do great with the transitions but many do not and the reason boils down to the difficulty in finding a new purpose. Many of these situations had built-in purposes that developed over a lifetime and stopped in a heartbeat. Starting a new life purpose then is difficult and doesn't come without effort, however, it's necessary for a good life.
A life without purpose is just that, purposeless. Finding purpose is important on many levels. Do a Google search into this and you'll be swallowed whole. Purpose has been shown to improve wealth, sleep, longevity, mental health, heart health, happiness, and even decrease Alzheimer's risk. Simply picking up a hobby, though is not finding purpose. A requirement of purpose is struggle, but not just any struggle, a "worth struggle" as Greitens says.
"Without oxygen, water, sleep, and food, our minds and bodies begin to break down. If we go without any of these for too long we die. I believe it's also true that without some sense of meaningful struggle in our lives something inside of us begins to break down. A part of us begins to die. And it's amazing how adaptable human beings can be..... In the long run though, deprivation of purpose is as destructive as deprivation of sleep. Without purpose we can survive but we cannot flourish."
Find a clearly defined purpose for a better life. Having trouble? Take one of these online tests.
3. Kids Need More Hardships
"A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. I focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness."
-Eric Greitens
For a kid to learn to walk he needs to fail hundreds of times. It's more of the same for feeding himself, tying a shoe, making good friends, developing sport-specific abilities, and building most skills. As Greintens writes, "If you're growing you're likely failing." This failure often includes pain and frustration but, accompanied with achievement, it builds resilience. The issue, he argues, is that parents are not allowing their kids to be resilient.
"When we swaddle our kids in bubble wrap, keep red ink off their school papers to spare their feelings, rush to pick them up every time they fall, don't let them climb trees, and give them trophies for everything they do, we've stopped letting them fail."
Children need hardship. Letting children fail is tough in the short term but it's a necessary ingredient for resilience. You can't praise your kid to resilience. Kids need to be challenged in all walks of life—physically, socially, emotionally—as I wrote about here. Doing hard things means potential failure, a.k.a. learning, but also a sense of achievement, mastery, and self-respect. This breeds a sense of satisfaction and resilience in knowing that you're good.
That being said, a critical ingredient to building a kid’s resilience is love. "The child who is always protected from harm will never be resilient," he writes. "At the same time, the child who is never loved will rarely be resilient.
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