Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

by Eric Greitens

His docs at the VA diagnose him with post-traumatic stress disorder. But they don’t prescribe exercise or community service. They do prescribe a raft of pills.

People have known this for thousands of years. But today a lot of this ancient wisdom goes unheeded.

Pain can break us or make us wiser. Suffering can destroy us or make us stronger. Fear can cripple us, or it can make us more courageous.

It is resilience that makes the difference.

in an age of distraction, we’ve lost touch with practical wisdom.

Our wealth of common sense fails to become common practice.

I could tell you stories of winter so cold it killed the birds in the air.

When we’re struggling, we don’t need a book in our hands. We need the right words in our minds. When things are tough, a mantra does more good than a manifesto.

The point, after all, is not just to read. The point is to read in a way that leads to better thinking, and to think in a way that leads to better living.

on some level I still thought of most people’s struggles as man against the world, rather than man against the self.

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.

To move through pain to wisdom, through fear to courage, through suffering to strength, requires resilience.

“Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”

We all need courage and wisdom. Compassion and strength.

But to realize the potential of the present, we need to heed the wisdom of the past.

Homer’s Odyssey. Along with the Iliad, it’s the first piece of literature in the Western world.

During the Golden Age of Greece, philosophers were less interested in sitting and thinking. They were more interested in thinking and living.

Reading philosophy meant reading aloud to others; practicing philosophy meant living in a community.

The emphasis was not on the words alone, but on the effect of the words. Did a philosopher

help people to examine th...

You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you deal with what happens to you.

Arrogance is the armor worn by hollow men,

Have the humility to admit to yourself that, of all the things you need to know and don’t, one of the things that you don’t know well enough is yourself.

What a selfish desire cannot do is produce meaning.

When we rob people of their pain—when we don’t allow them the possibility of failure—we also rob them of their happiness.

We are meant to have worthy work to do. If we aren’t allowed to struggle for something worthwhile, we’ll never grow in resilience, and we’ll never experience complete happiness.

If you want to feel differently, act differently. This ain’t complicated, my friend. But it’s amazing how many people get it wrong for so long.

You have power over your habits. That also means you’re responsible for your habits.

I do believe that there is one question that can tell you more than any other about people’s capacity for resilience. Ask them: “What are you responsible for?”

The more responsibility people take, the more resilient they are likely to be.

The less responsibility people take—for their actions, for their lives, for their happiness—the more likely i...

At the root of resilience is the willingness to take responsi...

Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa. They aren’t often thought of as warriors, but they endured more hardship and inspired more courageous commitment than most generals.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In the ancient world, it was rare to find anyone who read silently. When words were read, they were usually read aloud, and often they were read to and with other people.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes that suffering is something we create through our attachments: what makes people suffer is not so much the physical sensation they experience, but the meaning they attach to their losses.

When you acknowledge pain and allow yourself to feel it, you see it for what it is—and then you are wrestling with something solid.

People introduce complication as a way to avoid beginning.

A closed mind protects the ego, but at the cost of weakening and degrading our thinking.

of all the vices, self-righteousness is often the most self-blinding.

You can pursue any practice you like without a mentor, and you can build knowledge, but it’s unlikely that you’ll ever build mastery. A mentor teaches you everything you can’t learn from a book.

I’m suggesting that it’s much easier to make information complex than it is to make it simple.

A good mentor will focus on a simple thing that you can learn in order to get better.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. —BORIS CYRULNIK

If it’s important that we don’t forget the fact of our death, it’s also important that we don’t fixate on it.