When Harry Potter series creator J.K. Rowling was writing the first Harry Potter book, she was a single mother on welfare writing her book from cafes in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her manuscript was also rejected by multiple publishers before one finally took a chance on her.
The stories of successful people seem filled with plenty of failures and rejections like these along the way … but there is another side of these stories that you rarely hear about.
what they don’t tell you about failing
These big celebrated failures unfold over months and sometimes even years. They are memorable because of their duration and severity.
In real life, most of the failures you will have are not the sort of thing you will want to celebrate … or even admit.
What about the small daily failures that we have far more often? Failures like inadvertently posting that photo to Instagram without making sure there wasn’t something embarrassing in the background. Or accidentally missing a deadline for work. Or not having the answer to a question you should have known.
These are the tiny embarrassing failures that weigh on our minds in the short term. When it comes to building your resilience overall, the real question is how can you train yourself to consistently overcome these types of setbacks, forget about them and move forward?
To answer that question, consider the extreme example of people who manage to survive in disastrous situations.
how to survive disaster
When faced with a life-threatening moment, adventure writer Laurence Gonzales estimates that about 90% of people freeze or panic. What makes the other 10% maintain their calm and ultimately survive?
Gonzales explores this fascinating question in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why. The thing that sets survivors apart, according to Gonzales, is that “they immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation. They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly.”
There is plenty of science to support this idea that the ability to be resilient and overcome adversity has a lot to do with how quickly you can accept the reality of a situation instead of dwelling on what could or should have happened instead.
the art of calm
Beyond acceptance, the next step toward real resilience is finding a way to remain calm. Gonzales also tells the story of interviewing former NASA psychologist Ephimia Morphew-Lu about the curious case of several scuba divers who had drowned despite having air in their tanks and working regulators.
Morphew, the founder of the Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments, shared that after extensive study, researchers had finally concluded that the deaths were a result of an uncontrollable feeling of suffocation that some people feel when their mouths are covered.
This led victims to make the unintentionally suicidal choice to uncover their mouth and nose far under water and drown.
Panic literally killed the scuba divers.3
Being calmer in the face of adversity may not have such life and death implications—but when you add this skill to the ability to accept a situation and move on, you can become more resilient yourself in the face of almost any failure … no matter how extreme.
how to be more resilient
TIP #1 - Shift Your Explanatory Style
Martin Seligman is a psychologist who is sometimes described as the “father of positive thinking” thanks to his lifelong mission to study, teach, and write about the relationship between optimism and pessimism and why people choose one or the other.
In his national bestseller Learned Optimism, he describes one of the key differences between people who bounce back from adversity and those who don’t in terms of their “explanatory style”—a term he uses to describe the way in which a person tends to explain situations in their mind.
If you challenged a group of people to draw a cat, for example, a person with a negative, pessimistic explanatory style might say or think “I can’t draw anything,” while a positive, resilient person might say “I’m not great at drawing a cat, but I can draw an amazing house.”
Shifting your explanatory style to be positive and optimistic is within your control to do—and can have a big impact on your future success.
TIP #2 - Be Low Maintenance
When someone has a lot of unreasonable demands or requires constant attention, they are labeled as “high maintenance.” In the real world, unless you happen to be a highly-paid pop music star, it usually pays to be the opposite. Sometimes when someone treats you dismissively or without the respect you think you deserve, it is not about you.
Feeling overwhelmed can make us all behave badly or slight someone without intending to. If someone doesn’t return your message, choose to follow up with kindness instead of accusations. Most of us are just doing the best we can and many times the thing you need just won’t be at the top of someone else’s to do list. Get over it and try instead to have more empathy for someone else’s situation.
TIP #3 - Don’t Mention It (for Real)
When you hold a grudge or dwell on a string of failures, the usual way that it comes up over time is through minor comments or remarks mentioning it in passing that demonstrate how much you have not forgotten about it and have not moved on. To fight against that, make a mental commitment that once you have publicly shared that you are “over it”—you will not mention “it” anymore—even in small side comments.
This commitment is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, once you make the mental commitment to not mention it, you will end up really getting over it much more quickly. Of course, this doesn’t mean avoiding a problem—so if something is unresolved, you need to face it head on first … then you can actually move on and not mention it.
chapter 3
Start Smoking
the secret: control your destiny
When I first moved to Australia, the best way I found to get to know my fellow workers was to join them on the several smoking breaks many of them took throughout the day.
I had never been a smoker, but I decided to give it a try despite all the health concerns. As I did, I made a promise to myself that after a month, no matter what, I would stop.
So I started smoking—and enjoyed it. For that month, every day I would go out with my new colleagues and we had a low pressure moment during the day to just hang out—the more modern equivalent of the old water cooler conversations.
After a month I stopped smoking, but kept going out for those smoking breaks. Looking back I know that smoking helped me build some professional relationships because it gave me a time to socialize outside of the usual work day. You might be wondering why I couldn’t have done that without ever smoking.
It is easy to cave to peer pressure and do something like smoking because you are pressured to do it or would feel excluded if you didn’t. Making your own choice (whether to start smoking, or to stop) is much harder.
Is smoking dangerous and can it kill you? Of course. So is having a poisonous snake for a pet—but some