Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

by Eric Greitens

The frontline was where battles were fought and fates decided. The frontline was a place of fear, struggle, and suffering. It was also a place where victories were won, where friendships of a lifetime were forged in hardship. It was a place where we lived with a sense of purpose. But “frontline” isn’t just a military term. You have a frontline in your life now. In fact, everyone has a place where they encounter fear, where they struggle, suffer, and face hardship. We all have battles to fight. And it’s often in those battles that we are most alive: it’s on the frontlines of our lives that we earn wisdom, create joy, forge friendships, discover happiness, find love, and do purposeful work. If you want to win any meaningful kind of victory, you’ll have to fight for it.

Of course fear does not automatically lead to courage. Injury does not necessarily lead to insight. Hardship will not automatically make us better. 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.

You bear your struggles. And because they are borne by you, they can feel pressing and heavy to you in a way that they are for no one else. But you have to remember that while they are yours, they are not unique. Your struggles are very much like the struggles of those who went before you, and they are very much like the struggles of those who will come after you. Every human being from the beginning of time has suffered pain and hardship, difficulty and doubt. And in the record of mankind’s struggles our forebears have left clues in stories and philosophies and poems and plays and paintings and songs.

“Culture” was originally a word for the tilling and tending of the land. Later, people made an analogy and suggested that you could cultivate yourself. So culture also came to mean the things that you could see, listen to, read, learn, try, and practice in order to make yourself better and to live a fuller life. A great scholar wrote that “the desire for culture is innate.” We all want to touch and taste and hear and see the things that can make our lives richer.

Life—and the subject of resilience—rarely allows for perfect precision. Real life is messy. Attacking your fear can lead to courage, but there is no equation for courage, no recipe for courage. It gets mixed up with anger and anxiety, with love and panic. This isn’t an excuse for sloppy thinking: the virtues have been the subject of rigorous, disciplined thought from before Aristotle to today. But when the question is “How do we live a resilient life?” we also have to be ready to accept ambiguity and uncertainty.

During the Golden Age of Greece, philosophers were less interested in sitting and thinking. They were more interested in thinking and living. As a practical matter, the Greeks usually did not “read” philosophy in the way that you are reading this letter—silently and to yourself. 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 their lives? Did that examination lead to happiness, to flourishing, to meaning? If it did, it worked. If it didn’t, then it didn’t matter how clever the words were.

The test of a philosophy is simple: does it lead people to live better lives? If not, the philosophy fails. If so, it succeeds. Philosophy used to mean developing ideas about a life worth living, and then living that life. It still can.

Without purpose, we can survive—but we cannot flourish.

We all need something to struggle against and to struggle for. The aim in life is not to avoid struggles, but to have the right ones; not to avoid worry, but to care about the right things; not to live without fear, but to confront worthy fears with force and passion. One of the reasons you are suffering right now is precisely because the purpose of your struggle is unclear. What are you working toward? What are you fighting for? Who are you going to be?

First, as a community, we cannot abandon our wounded. They still have something to offer—perhaps the very thing we need. Second, our wounds and mistreatment—whether the ten-year abandonment of Philoctetes or the much smaller wounds of our lives—do not wipe out our obligation to serve. Being hurt by life does not diminish our duty to others. Even wounded and mistreated, we owe to others the labor that can make our lives glorious.

Suicide isn’t what warriors do, because the first purpose of the warrior is to protect others; suicide makes that impossible. In suicide, we take our pain, multiply it by ten, and hand it to everyone who loves us. What was hurting us becomes hell for them. There is something selfish about this. This is hard to write, Walker. I’ve known some veterans who have committed suicide, and you’ve known a few too. I say this not because I want to criticize the dead, but because I want to help you. Suicide is not what warriors do.

You can still see the influence of this hunger for the precision of physics if you look up “resilience” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. One of the first definitions you’ll find is this: “capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation, especially if the strain is caused by compressive stresses—called also elastic resilience.”

Life’s reality is that we cannot bounce back. We cannot bounce back because we cannot go back in time to the people we used to be.

And when we’re not at rest—when we’re struggling, agitated, anxious—we think that something must be wrong. But in human life there is no state of rest. Children grow as they sleep. Our bodies—themselves host to tens of thousands of microscopic cells and other living organisms that live and die every day—are in a constant state of activity. At “rest,” we are still aging; at “rest,” our minds are organizing our memories. When we exercise, it’s the period of recovery—time that looks like rest—in which our muscles grow stronger. And what is true for us as individuals is true for our community, our country, our world. The forest does not rest, the sea does not rest. The ground beneath us is always moving, shifting, even if we are not aware of it. Your life moves forever in time.

Don’t expect a time in your life when you’ll be free from change, free from struggle, free from worry. To be resilient, you must understand that your objective is not to come to rest, because there is no rest. Your objective is to use what hits you to change your trajectory in a positive direction.

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” That line of Hemingway’s is famous for good reason. What sticks in most people’s minds is the phrase “strong at the broken places.” It’s also important to remember his qualifier: many. Not all. Not all of us are strong at the broken places. To be strong at the broken places is to be resilient. Being broken, by itself, does not make us better.

Too often, when we talk about the challenges we face, that our children face, that our coworkers and colleagues and friends and fellow citizens face, we begin with a description of the world. We name and describe all the things that have contributed to our difficulties. What we usually overlook (or ignore) is what we have done to contribute to our situation. To put it another way, at the center of everything that happens to you is you. So let’s make an obvious point: you are the place you need to start if you want to become stronger in the face of adversity.

The first step to building resilience is to take responsibility for who you are and for your life. If you’re not willing to do that, stop wasting your time reading this letter. The essence of responsibility is the acceptance of the consequences—good and bad—of your actions. You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you deal with what happens to you. Even when we recognize the limits of our own power to shape the world, we can still strive to be masters of ourselves. And that is more than enough work to fill a whole life.

But responsibility also offers power. If we take responsibility for ourselves, we become not victims, but pioneers. The victim falls prey to fear and delights in blaming others. The pioneer forges his own path: more difficult, but much more rewarding.

Even our word “virtue,” which comes from Latin, originally meant “the excellences of a man.” Vir meant “man,” and a virtue was a character trait that a man needed to live his life well. Today we recognize that men and women all need certain kinds of excellences to live well. The key point is this: a virtue is an excellence that we can develop like any other excellence.

We begin to see that virtue is not necessarily something that we have, but something that we practice. With practice, we may become better at running, better at pottery, and better at writing plays. Without practice our skills deteriorate.

Today, in a culture that should know enough to be forgiving of human weakness, we often fail to remember that people are not great all the time. People practice greatness. They perform with greatness. People practice courage. They perform with courage. And then, one day, they don’t. This does not make them cowards. It makes them human.

Many virtues—like courage or compassion—can be displayed in a moment. If we see a fearful child stand up to a bully, we recognize it immediately as a clear example of courage. Resilience takes longer. To endure pain and then turn that pain into wisdom, or to endure hardship and grow through that hardship, takes time. The fruits of resilience grow slowly. Because of this, we learn best about resilience not when we focus on dramatic moments, but when we take in the arc of whole lives. Resilience is cultivated not so that we can perform well in a single instance, but so that we can live a full and flourishing life.

How do you know the difference between acknowledging pain and wallowing in it? There’s no precise test. But if talking about or “examining” or “understanding” your pain has become an excuse you use to avoid doing what you need to do, then you are probably wallowing. Don’t wallow in pain. Confront it. Do it for yourself. Do it for your family. Do it so that you can grow and create happiness. Now let’s begin.

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. You perceive that something is missing in your life. It worries you that you cannot name it or define it precisely. Welcome to the club, mate. That’s not an excuse for not starting, that’s the point of starting. If you were whole, perfect, without need, desire, or fault, you wouldn’t have to begin anything. Of course you begin with doubts. We can be in awe of how much we don’t know. “This feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher,” said Plato, “since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.” Wonder at what you don’t know is the source of the wisdom you might one day achieve.

When we build resilience in our lives, we come to see that pain is not something to be eliminated so that we can have joy, any more than fear is something to be eliminated so that we can have courage. Courage overcomes, but does not replace, fear. Joy overcomes, but does not replace, pain. When we realize this, we feel the moments when we meet our limitations not as times to retreat, but as opportunities for happiness, meaning, engagement, exploration, creativity, achievement, beauty, and love.

When we accept what we cannot change—that some pain cannot be avoided, that some adversities cannot be overcome, that tragedy comes to every one of us—we are liberated to direct our energy toward work that we can actually do.

We learned that we could point a compass in a given direction, pick a landmark along that bearing, walk to it, pick another landmark, walk to it, and by doing so we could follow a bearing through a forest, through a desert, over mountains, and—at the end of the day—we’d end up in one very particular place. But if, at the beginning of our journey, we decided to change course by just a few degrees, and again we walked that new path through a forest, through a desert, over mountains, then—at the end of the day—we’d end up in a completely different place. Great changes come when we make small adjustments with great conviction.

Every time we make a choice to confront our fear, our character evolves and we become more courageous. Every time we make a choice to move through pain to pursue a purpose larger than ourselves, our character evolves and we become wiser. Every time we make a choice to move through suffering, our character evolves and we become stronger. Over time, through a process of daily choices, we find that we’ve built courage, strength, and wisdom. We’ve changed who we are and how we can be of service to the people around us.

If you wait to begin until you’ve mastered your intentions, you’ll never begin. Selfish, silly, vain desires can create real growth when you subject them to discipline. Accept that you are imperfect and always will be. Your quest is not to perfect yourself, but to better your imperfect self.

Everyone likes to say that they are offering constructive criticism. But you know what’s really constructive? Work. There are simple standards for measuring the worth of people’s critiques. Do they actually care about you? Do they just talk at you, or are they willing to sweat with you? Have they put any effort into what they are saying to you?

Remember that deciding is not doing, and wanting is not choosing. Transformation will take place not because of what you decide you want, but because of what you choose to do.

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 it is that life will crush them. At the root of resilience is the willingness to take responsibility for results.

If you take responsibility for anything in your life, know that you’ll feel fear. That fear will manifest itself in many ways: fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of hurt.

Fear can make human beings do amazing things. Fear can help you to see your world clearly in a way that you never have before. Fear becomes destructive when it drives us to do things that are unwise or unhelpful. Fear becomes destructive when it begins to cloud our vision.

The deepest questions can also provoke the deepest discomfort, the deepest fear, the deepest rage. That often means they’re working. If philosophy doesn’t make you uncomfortable sometimes, it’s not doing its job. When we take a hard, honest look in the mirror, it’s natural to be disturbed. When we discover things we don’t like about ourselves—small ways we’ve been lying to ourselves, bad habits we’ve fallen into—it’s natural to be angry. Today, we don’t burn people at the stake for asking uncomfortable questions. Usually we ignore them. Sometimes we ridicule them. But the impulse to run away from the hard questions hasn’t really changed. We have to learn to replace that impulse with a new one. Just as we can train ourselves to endure and even to seek the pain that sometimes comes from physical exercise, we can train ourselves to endure and to welcome the discomfort and fear that come when we do philosophy. Those feelings of discomfort are often proof that we’re making progress.

There is value in rigorously testing the logic underlying our thinking. But the difference between a philosophy fixated on the consistent use of words and a philosophy that speaks to life is akin to the difference between dissecting a horse and riding one. We’ll measure the worth of our words by how they move us to live well.

Extraordinary cases and extreme examples naturally pique our interest and invite our attention. And sometimes there’s something to be learned about life in general when we look at a famous case in particular. But it’s a mistake to root our thinking about rules for living in extreme examples. The tallest person in the world is over eight feet tall. That’s fine to know, but we shouldn’t expect it to guide the way houses and beds are built for the rest of us.

Epictetus, a slave and a philosopher, lived in this ancient world of insecurity and uncertainty. Every time you kiss your child goodnight, he said, you should tell yourself, “Perhaps it will be dead in the morning.” The suggestion that you think of your child’s imminent death every night seems alien and cruel to us. But in the ancient Roman world, more than a quarter of newborns died before their first birthday, and half of all children died before their tenth. Epictetus was not being needlessly harsh. Instead, he was reminding parents to be grateful for what they had in that moment, and to mentally prepare themselves for a hardship they might face any day.

People who grow up like you did have a real connection to the earth. They grow up understanding that life has a reality—sun, moon, heat, frost, flood, drought—that is beyond human control, a reality we must accept, adjust to, and work with. When you were logging, each day was shaped by the burn of the sun, the speed of the wind, the snap of the cold. When the outdoors is a part of your life, it’s hard not to be a realist. But when people spend all of their time in a world shaped by human hands, they bring a different perspective to their lives. Those who grow up in or near cities often see the world as built by and for other people, and they tend to believe that if we continue to build it better, we can achieve perfection. Without openly acknowledging it, they often believe that the relentless pursuit of progress will eventually lead us to paradise.

The American Revolution produced men like James Madison, who said things like this: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition . . . This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.”

Readiness means confronting the reality that life’s course is not completely under your control. Readiness is a form of humility, spurred by a recognition of how little we can know or control. Hardship is unavoidable. Resilient people recognize this reality. Then they prepare themselves for it, seeking to meet it as best they can, on their own terms.

Imagine that human nature can be perfected, and the human failings all around you—others’ and your own—will infuriate you. You might even find yourself tempted to think, like Robespierre, that people must be bullied or terrorized into goodness. Recognize, as realists do, that life has a tragic character—that human beings are flawed, and that both the natural and the human world are beyond your power to control, and you’ll have a better chance of serving effectively.

A morality of intentions also fails to help us get better. If all that matters are our intentions, we don’t have much of a reason to make ourselves better at doing good. A morality of results is difficult precisely because it requires us to mold ourselves into wiser, tougher, more capable people who do good in a difficult world.

On one hand a horribly simplistic notion of “intentionality” where it exists in a singular pre-behavioral space, rather than an ongoing judgment intimately connected within behavior. With this in mind it’s easy to see how then the simplistic notion of “action morality” is promoted, as if action divorced from intention is one possible and two, what any of us would want. If intention is meaningless and disconnected from morality then individual conscience is dead.

But there is also the pain that seeks us. In its milder forms, this pain is just the unfortunate and bad stuff that happens in a normal day. But in its most virulent form, this pain is the stuff of tragedy. This is losing your brother, your wife, your husband, your child. This is the pain that comes from fire, flood, famine. This is the pain that follows when the doctor calls you and asks you to come in, sits down next to you, and says there’s bad news—and you know then what is going to kill you. This is a different kind of pain, and philosophers and theologians and counselors and pastors and priests and poets have all tried to explain where it comes from and what it means. Philosophers have tied this kind of pain to the idea of fortuna, from which we derive the concept of “fortune,” or the pain of chance. Unlike a pain we might seek when we set out to accomplish a goal, the pain of fortuna hits us without regard to our desires and often without warning. Fortuna suggests that certain things are written into our lives, certain events are beyond our control. There is no easy answer for this pain. There is no pill to take, no prayer to make that lets us wake the next day without pain. At some point, we all have to wrestle with the pain of fortune. All that can really be said about this kind of pain was summed up by Seneca: “Fate guides the willing but drags the unwilling.” Led or dragged, there are some places we have no choice but to go.

Everyone has theories about how the world works. If we’re open to the possibility that we might be wrong, and we adjust our thinking based on what we learn, then over time our theories become stronger and we can have more justified confidence in our ideas. The right way to reflect on our lives isn’t too different from the scientific method. Start with a hypothesis, and then—no matter how good it makes you feel, no matter how commonsensical it sounds, no matter whose authority you have to back it up—test it. Test it honestly. Test it ruthlessly. See how it stands up to the facts of the world. Then let the results of that test—whether they affirm or contradict your hunch—shape your understanding.

Reflection is the kind of thinking that demands far more than intelligence. It demands, for instance, a certain kind of humility and courage. It requires the humility to recognize that you might have been wrong in the past, that you might be wrong today, and that you are certainly going to be wrong in the future. It takes the courage to be attentive to and honest about your own faults. And it takes a mind orderly enough and undistracted enough to enjoy its own company. To reflect well requires some virtue.

One of the people who has helped me think more clearly about the value of mentors is the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. He taught that every activity relies on two kinds of knowledge: technical and practical. Technical knowledge can be captured in writing, rules, and mechanical practice. You grow in technical knowledge by absorbing information, not by doing. Practical knowledge, on the other hand, “exists only in use . . . and (unlike technique) cannot be formulated in rules.” It’s passed on by experience, through communities. It’s the kind of knowledge that we learn directly from others—as coaches teach players and masters teach their apprentices. I like to think of this as the difference between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” You can learn facts on your own. But if you want to know how to do something—from baking a cake to writing a story to disciplining a child—you usually have to be shown. The best mentors show us how.

Ideas are cheap. Advice is easy. And too often, “giving advice” is something that people do to reinforce their own deflated sense of self. It’s worth pausing, then, to consider a few of the people who will not be able to help you. Some people love to make their lessons overly complicated. If a mentor becomes lost in his lesson, you can usually assume one of several things. One, the mentor hasn’t mastered the material. Two, the mentor is trying to make himself seem important. Or three, the mentor can’t remember what it was like to learn the material himself.

Good teachers care less about proving they have a great system than about finding the best way to make each student grow. “This one needs a spur,” said Plato, one of history’s great teachers, about a student who seemed a little too lazy and self-satisfied. “That other one needs a brake,” he said about a know-it-all too eager to rush ahead in his lessons (who happened to be Aristotle). Extraordinary coaches also know that sometimes the same person who needed a spur last week needs a brake this week.