Reject a victim mentality. When faced with adversity, you will find a way or you will find an excuse. Refuse to quit in your efforts to better yourself and your life. When you fail (and you will), fail fast and fail cheap.
The third principle of the Pilanesberg Project — resilience — is personified by the rhinoceros. This beast’s determination and grit engenders grudging respect from others. With his formidable bulk and protective armor, the rhino allows nothing to stand in the way of what he wants.
When the door you want to open is closed, you knock. When the door still won’t open, you take the door off the hinges. If you can’t take the hinges off the door, you dig a tunnel under it.
Life can land a hard left hook to your jaw out of nowhere and leave you reeling. Perhaps it’s a major unanticipated expense, a major illness or injury, a sudden job loss, the untimely death of someone close to us, or a betrayal by someone who you trusted. It’s not a question of “if,” but rather “when” this will happen to ourselves or to a loved one.
The more your life is in order prior to receiving such a blow, the easier it will be to deal with.
Resilience is not innate, rather, it is a learned and conditioned behavior that we have to develop over time. Very young children are not resilient because they haven’t had enough life experiences to learn from. There are grown adults who continuously bounce from crisis to crisis in a state of chronic stress because they haven’t learned how to adequately insulate themselves from the inevitable realities of life.
A high level of resilience can insulate at-risk teenagers from a number of potential risk factors in their family lives and environment. Self-control
Always ask yourself, “what is the worst thing that could happen if I choose this course of action?” What is the best thing that can happen? What is the most likely thing that will happen?
A common thread among every successful entrepreneur, business owner, and world class athlete is their willingness to embrace and learn from failure. I challenge you to find someone who “made it” who doesn’t openly discuss their failures.
In one of the more underrated movie scenes, after a dramatic chase through a circus train in the Utah desert, a bandit took the newly-discovered Cross of Coronado from young Indiana Jones and gave him his now iconic hat in exchange. The treasure hunter told him, “You lost today, kid. But it doesn’t mean you have to like it.” Young Indy didn’t protest the fairness or the legality of the situation — in fact, he didn’t say a word. You can tell from the look on his face that he knew what had just happened, though disappointing in the moment, was going to forge him into a better man.
A key part of being a resilient person is only worrying about things that you have immediate control of.
While all five foundational principles of the Pilanesberg Project are more or less equally important if one is to be a well-rounded person, possessing the quality of resilience is the easiest way for a young man to stand out from his peers these days because it has been the trait that has been most lacking in recent generations. Unfortunately, it is also the most difficult of the five to cultivate because quite simply…failure freaking hurts sometimes.
If you see someone who is better than you at something, it’s almost certain that they have failed at it more than you. The key is to fail as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Barring extreme circumstances, people remember you in the end for what you accomplished, not for what you didn’t.
When you think of Michael Jordan, you probably think of #23 palming the basketball in one hand with his tongue stuck out as he confidently propels himself toward the hoop from behind the foul-shot line, not the guy who played one season of AA baseball and batted well below average. Likewise, everyone remembers Hulk Hogan as the wrestling entertainment legend who ripped his shirt off as he strutted out toward the ring to his theme song, but relatively few remember his failed “Pastamania” restaurant that bled cash and lasted less than a year in Minneapolis’s Mall of America.
One must have healthy outlets to reduce stress and deal with setbacks. This can be exercise, meditation, your inner circle of friends, faith, the ear of a mentor, a patient spouse or intimate partner, a hobby, or ideally, a combination thereof.
Resilience also involves the pain of making the appropriate short-term sacrifices so that you’ll be a better man in the long run. The ability to delay gratification is a major marker of maturity and a sign that you are on your way to becoming a more resilient person. This could look like taking the time to learn a second language to advance your marketability in your sector or better connect with your neighbors instead of mindlessly scrolling through your phone in those idle moments on the train or in between sets at the gym. It could mean declining an offer from friends to go out because you’re finally getting your financial house in order.
In the end, you’re going to have something better than you could have had at the beginning.