Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life is a book written by Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL and Naval Officer, that consists of a series of letters written to a friend struggling with life after military service.

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LETTER 1 Your Frontline

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.

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.
What worked for us in the SEAL teams, what works for Olympic athletes, what worked for the Greeks two thousand five hundred years ago—much of it is the same stuff, directed at the same human questions. How do you focus your mind, control your stress, and excel under pressure? How do you work through fear and build courage? How do you overcome defeat and rise above obstacles? How do you adapt to adversity?
To be resilient—to build a full and meaningful life of strength, wisdom, and joy—is not easy. But it’s not complicated. We can all do it. To get there, it’s not enough to want to be resilient or to think about being resilient. We have to choose to live a resilient life.

Think about your own life as you 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.

LETTER 2 Why Resilience?

Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. —MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

Resilience is the key to a well-lived life. If you want to be happy, you need resilience. If you want to be successful, you need resilience. You need resilience because you can’t have happiness, success, or anything else worth having without meeting hardship along the way.

To move through pain to wisdom, through fear to courage, through suffering to strength, requires resilience. 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. This is wisdom about how to live. And it’s your property as much as anyone’s. It is yours. Take it. Use it.
“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.
Everyone can learn. We can all cultivate our character. People of action require a sound mind and a strong will as much as a healthy body. “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.”
I’ve learned from working with hundreds of veterans that no one can build your resilience for you. I can point you in a certain direction, maybe draw you a map and give you some ideas. I can’t carry you where you need to go. For this to work, you’re going to have to take what you learn and build your own program for your own life. No one can do that for you.

There is no simple equation for the good life

When Aristotle gave his great talks on the nature of the good life, which were collected as the Nicomachean Ethics, he began by making one thing clear: there is no simple equation for the good life.
Aristotle’s students were asking for rules, formulas, guarantees. He told them there was no such thing: 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.
“How do we live a resilient life?” we also have to be ready to accept ambiguity and uncertainty.
A masterful warrior carries everything she needs and no more, just as a masterful painter uses all of the paint that she needs and no more, and a master chef uses all of the ingredients that she needs and no more. In the same way, a masterful philosopher will use all of the words that she needs and no more. In the same way, words have value. The right words can right your balance. The right words can light your way. But words also have weight. In our life and work, we have to carry what is essential, and leave much of the rest behind.

A truly new and original book would be one which made people love old truths. —MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES (1715–1747)

Thinking AND Living

During the Golden Age of Greece, philosophers were less interested in sitting and thinking. They were more interested in thinking and living.
Epictetus, who started life as a slave and ended it as the wisest philosopher of his day. Here’s what he told his students about what they were trying to do together: “A carpenter does not come up to you and say, ‘Listen to me discourse about the art of carpentry,’ but he makes a contract for a house and builds it . . . Do the same thing yourself. Eat like a man, drink like a man . . . get married, have children, take part in civic life, learn how to put up with insults, and tolerate other people.”

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. The question is, are you aware of the philosophy you have—the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas that drive your actions? Are you aware of the way those assumptions, beliefs, and ideas add up to shape your life? Can they stand exposure to the light of day?

What are you willing to struggle for?

There are a few things that human beings must do to live well: breathe, sleep, drink, eat, and love. To this list I’d add: struggle. We need challenges to master and problems to solve. If we are trapped in a life where everything is provided for us, our minds fail to grow, our relationships atrophy, and our spirits deteriorate.
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.

LETTER 3 What Is Resilience?

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is only one road to true human greatness: the road through suffering. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

If we limit our understanding of resilience to this idea of bouncing back, we miss much of what hardship, pain, and suffering offer us. We also misunderstand our basic human capacity to change and improve. 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. The parent who loses a child never bounces back. The nineteen-year-old marine who sails for war is gone forever, even if he returns. “What’s done cannot be undone,” and some of what life does to us is harsh.What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences; they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives.

When pain hits you, it hits a moving target. And since you’re already moving, what will change is not so much your state as your trajectory.

Change is constant

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.
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.

Start by asking yourself: Where am I headed? It’s not enough to want to be resilient.

The first step to building resilience is to take responsibility for who you are and for your life.
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.

Excuses are incompatible with excellence

Arête really meant something closer to “excellence.” For the Greeks, no part of life was considered “moral” life or “ethical” life. It was all simply life. Just as a person could be excellent at running or pottery or writing plays, he could also be excellent at making the kinds of decisions that today we call “moral”: decisions about how a person, a family, or a community can create and live a good life.

Virtue is an excellence we practice

Virtue is an excellence that we can develop like any other excellence. When we think of a virtue as an excellence, it changes the way we look at the world and at ourselves. We begin to see that virtue is not necessarily something that we have, but something that we practice.
You weren’t born with resilience, any more than you were born with the ability to use a compass or aim a rifle. Resilience is an excellence we build. We can practice it in the choices we make and the actions we take. After enough practice, resilience becomes part of who we are.
When we understand a virtue as an excellence that we practice, three other things will happen.
- First, you will gain a great sense of power. You will recognize that you have more ability than you thought to shape your character and, with it, your fate.
- Second, you will become more forgiving of others. Imagine a great runner. She is fast and agile. When she runs, her heart pumps, her legs turn, her arms glide, and her feet strike the ground so smoothly and cleanly that she seems to fly through the air. Now imagine that on the day of an important race—after years of diligent practice and successful competition—she blasts out of the blocks, sprints to the front of the pack, establishes a commanding lead, and then crashes like a sack of limbs on the track. The other runners pass her. She stumbles to regain her footing. Maybe she’s bleeding, broken. She finishes last, or maybe not at all. Is she a bad runner? Of course not. She had a bad race. The Greeks recognized that great people could fail terribly and still be great. Wise people could sometimes be dumb. Courageous people could be cowardly. Honest people could lie, and compassionate people could be cruel. 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.
- Third, we begin to see the power, fun, majesty, and beauty in virtue. Virtue is not about what you deny yourself, but what you make of yourself.

We become what we do if we do it often enough. If we make resilient choices, we become resilient.

Cultivate Resilience

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.
In the face of hardship, you have to maintain a clear focus on your harsh reality. It does you no good to sugarcoat the facts. It does you no good to fantasize about what might be. You have to maintain clarity about your reality. The paradox, however, is that at the very same time you have to find a way to maintain hope.

Embrace the Brutal Facts

Pain is real. And we do better dealing with it when we acknowledge it. When we acknowledge pain, we shine a light on it. Pain doesn’t like this. Pain prefers to slip quietly into your psyche and breed with fear. Pain would rather lurk in the shadows and ambush you. Pain doesn’t like to be seen or understood.
Stockdale said that you must confront the brutal facts of your reality. When we stop running from pain and acknowledge it, we see it for what it is.

LETTER 4 Beginning

The choice is about whether or not you’re going to live in fear for the rest of your life.

Humility Mantra

I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility. Humility leads to clarity. Humility leads to an open mind and a forgiving heart. With an open mind and a forgiving heart, I see every person as superior to me in some way; with every person as my teacher, I grow in wisdom. As I grow in wisdom, humility becomes ever more my guide. I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility.

And it struck me that one of the habits of the truly powerful is that they have the humility to recognize the power in everyone.

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.
Life places limits on all of us. Yet even under the severest limits, we can still struggle valiantly, and in that struggle reach new heights of nobility and wisdom.

In a world without imperfections, the virtues would not be required. Joy is a practice we build in a world where we feel pain. Resilience is a practice we build in a tragic world, where every one of us is limited in time, knowledge, and ability.

There’s a line between tragedy and comedy, and it’s thin. There’s also a thin line between tragedy and determination, between tragedy and optimism, between tragedy and laughter. If you think about it, I bet some of the funniest people you know have also been hurt badly.

Edith Hamilton observed that the two greatest eras of tragic drama, the Golden Age of Athens and Shakespearean England, were times of great optimism, energy, trade, and exploration. Far from being periods of darkness and defeat, each was a time when life was seen exalted, a time of thrilling and unfathomable possibilities. They held their heads high, those men who conquered at Marathon and Salamis, and those who fought Spain and saw the great Armada sink. The world was a place of wonder; mankind was beauteous; life was lived on the crest of the wave. More than all, the poignant joy of heroism had stirred men’s hearts. Not stuff for tragedy, would you say? But on the crest of the wave one must feel either tragically or joyously; one cannot feel tamely.

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.

Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, put it this way: “Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness . . . Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”

Acceptance of the unavoidable

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.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The right acceptance of what must be accepted will allow you to begin what must be begun.
Yes, you have to accept some unpleasant, upsetting, tragic facts about life. But you also have to accept your responsibility to act in the world.

“Great changes come when we make small adjustments with great conviction.”

To get there, all you have to do right now is make a slight change of course. Point yourself in a new direction and start walking.
I’ve seen how only a few degrees of change—a slight reorientation of the spirit followed by consistent practice on a new path—has helped people rebuild their lives. We pray in the evening right before bed. We exercise. We sleep just half an hour longer. We eat dinner twice a week with our friends and family. We forgive. We take two minutes every morning to give thanks for those we love and the happiness we enjoy. These are quiet changes in the context of all the things we do in a day, and yet, applied consistently over time, they transform our lives.
Take a simple idea and take it seriously. I’ve noticed that these tiny microscopic actions throughout the day add up tremendously.

Transformation happens through evolution

When people begin, they are often too hungry for immediate results. When real transformation does occur in someone’s life, it usually happens through evolution, not revolution. 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. What choices will you make today?

Action without direction rarely leads to progress

At the start of many important endeavors, you’ll often think: How can I do this? I don’t even know enough to begin. It’s a common excuse, and it’s often a mask for cowardice. When we say that we don’t know what to do, it’s often not information we’re lacking, but courage. When we begin, we sometimes lack the skills, knowledge, and experience to carry out even the most basic tasks. Of course we do. If we had the experience we needed, we’d already be done. Not knowing everything cannot be an excuse for not doing anything.
You’ve heard it said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. That’s true. It’s also how the journey to nowhere begins. Action without direction rarely leads to progress.
You don’t need to know what perfect looks like, just what better looks like. Better is your bearing. Better is enough to point you in the right direction. It’s like getting in a rowboat and setting out for a far shore. In the beginning, you see it dimly, but that’s all you need. With effort and a steady bearing, the far shore comes into focus. It grows clearer with every pull on the oars.
To begin where you are, you have to be where you are. This sounds a little abstract. Maybe it is. I’m only trying to point out that to begin at the beginning you have to be at the beginning. Too often we enter a new endeavor and imagine that we have more skills, more knowledge, more ability than we actually do. Focus on the fundamentals. We will fail if we expect to be good before we’ve even begun. So start at the beginning. Approach each day as if you have something new to learn. Your task is not to begin in a noble place, but to end up in one.

Writers on spiritual life, from Saint Ignatius of Loyola to T. S. Eliot, have spoken of “the purification of the motive” on the journey to wisdom. We don’t start with the motives of a wise person. (If we had them, there’d be no need for the journey.) Instead, we begin with the selfish motives of a fallible person.

It doesn’t matter. As long as we have enough wonder and humility to start the journey and to correct ourselves when we go wrong, our motives don’t have to be pure. Finding better, more selfless, more meaningful reasons for what we do is exactly why we set out. And one day we can look back and laugh at the foolishness we once carried. That’s the surest sign we’re growing in wisdom.
It hurts to realize how much time we have wasted. It hurts to realize how foolish we were when we began. And yet, the only thing that hurts more is not beginning at all.
Know this: anyone who does anything worthy, anything noble, anything meaningful, will have critics. You are a man who does things that are worthy, noble, and meaningful. You will have critics.
You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.—VICTOR HUGO

As with all fears, we have a tendency to imagine the worst. I like how Thomas Jefferson put it: “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!” Are you going to let what someone might say prevent you from doing what you must do?

Great endeavors are usually fueled, at least in part, by an irrational passion. Let’s not glorify irrationality, but let’s recognize that if you look rationally at the odds of succeeding at anything worthwhile, you’ll often end up with a rational decision to surrender. To go on anyway, you have to be a little crazy. Harness that crazy. That’s what some of the giants of history were so great at—not at being more rational than the rest of us, but at putting their crazy to work.
The ones who transcend history really do embrace their funk and put their crazy to work. Its tapping into that “crazy” that allows their true essence to come through. Just tapping into that trueness is a super power

You will fail

Especially in the beginning. You will fail. And that’s not just OK, it’s essential. Without resilience, the first failure is also the last—because it’s final. Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably coexist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes.

Move and the way will open.—ZEN PROVERB

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.

Goethe’s: Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

Letter 5: Happiness

“Do you want to be happy?” They say, “Yes.” Then you ask, “What does it mean to be happy?” And you get blank stares. You get some umming and aahing. Now, not everything that is good, useful, or beautiful can be defined. Can you define jazz, or ballet, or painting? I certainly can’t. So we shouldn’t be surprised that we can’t come up with a set of words to describe the art of living. But “happy” is a word we throw around a lot. “The pursuit of happiness” is etched into the American mind right there next to “life” and “liberty.” And if we’re going to aim for something, work for something, then it might do us good to spend some time thinking about what we’re aiming. We need to start defining and getting clear on what we’re going after in life. Yen says “can you picture a perfect day? Now go live it.” We need to start picturing what we want to happen as that is the starting point.
In the Greek world, to live well meant to live a flourishing life. You know trees. And it’s obvious to you when a tree is flourishing. Provided the right soil, water, and sun, a flourishing tree grows tall and strong. Its branches spread, its trunk grows thicker, its leaves come in green in the spring, and it produces seeds and sap and deep roots. Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming. Flourishing isn’t abstract. It’s a product of what we do. You exercise vital powers. Vital to you. Vital to the world. You draw from your strengths to do worthy work in the world. You work along lines of excellence. You don’t just do things. You do them well.
Flourishing, then, isn’t a passing feeling or an emotional state. Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in.
“a flourishing life.” Aristotle and the Greeks expressed this idea in a single word: eudaimonia. Flourishing is not a virtue, but a condition; not a character trait, but a result. We need virtue to flourish, but virtue isn’t enough. To create a flourishing life, we need both virtue and the conditions in which virtue can flourish.
Fortune will play her hand. And when she stands between us and flourishing, all we can do is live our best life.
One of the reasons why so much of the wisdom about resilience is in fact ancient wisdom is that it comes from a time when human beings put less stock in their power to control the world….Surrender
Think of the sense of joy and peace that comes over us when we pause, even for a moment, and genuinely say “thank you.” We may experience this kind of happiness in prayer, reflection, or meditation. Some people experience it on long walks. Others experience it when they see their children smile or when they see their spouse soundly asleep.
In order to say “thank you,” we have to thank someone or something. This means that we have, at least at that moment, some kind of relationship that is larger than ourselves. When we say “thank you” we acknowledge a rightness in the world. The whole world might not be right, but we are thankful for at least one thing that seems fitting.
This is the happiness that goes hand in hand with excellence, with pursuing worthy goals, with growing in mastery. What counts more, though, is not the happiness of being there, but the happiness of getting there. A mountain climber heads for the summit, and joy meets her along the way. You create joy along the way. Some psychologists, like Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, talk about the concept of flow, the kind of happiness that comes when we lose ourselves through complete absorption in a rewarding task: “These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives. A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.” Flow, from the psychologist who first popularized the term: “Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Joy, like sweat, is usually a byproduct of your activity, not your aim. Remember what comes first. A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness. The pursuit of excellence leads to growth, mastery, and achievement. None of these are sufficient for happiness, yet all of them are necessary.

Worthy Struggles

The happiness of excellence comes from deep engagement with the world. And when we’re engaged in service to others, we find that this happiness takes on a whole new dimension: meaning.
And that combination—outer service and inner growth—is one of the most beautiful things we can create in a good life.
Those who do not have worthy struggles in their lives never enjoy the pleasure of celebrating a hard-won victory.
One of those people was Hannah Senesh. When she left her native Hungary to emigrate to Palestine, she wrote in her diary, “I’ve become a different person, and it’s a very good feeling. One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one’s life has meaning, that one is needed in this world.” She lived by those words. A few years later, at the age of twenty-three, she volunteered to parachute into a war zone, sneak behind Nazi lines, and rescue Hungarian Jews on the verge of being sent to Auschwitz.
Lots and lots of red will never make blue. In the same way, because physical pleasure is fundamentally different from the pursuit of excellence, the happiness of pleasure can never replace the happiness that comes from the pursuit of excellence. But people still try. When people lose the pursuit of something worthy, they often try to replace that pursuit with some kind of pleasure. We can pursue pleasures all we like. But having a lot of the wrong thing doesn’t make it the right thing. Pleasures can never make up for an absence of purposeful work and meaningful relationships. Pleasures will never make you whole.
This is a great point that its a combo of these that makes happiness. If you don’t have a purpose or love of the family then nothing can bring you true joy. When you can get these aligned its when you’re truly flourishing in life.
There is happiness in struggle.
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.
Probably one of the hardest things to do to people you love. You don’t want to see those people struggle and fail but without that they’ll never grow and become what they can.

Letter 6: Models

You know by instinct that it is impossible to “teach” democracy, or citizenship or a happy married life . . . They come, not from a course, but from a teacher; not from a curriculum, but from a human soul.—JACQUES BARZUN

If you want to know how to live well, don’t make things more complicated than they need to be. Just look at a model of someone who’s already living well. Start there.

Human beings learn by imitating other human beings. Probably the most complex intellectual feat any of us will ever achieve is learning to talk. And we do it simply by listening to others, trying to do what they do. We survive because we imitate. We pass on cultures and languages and common sense because we imitate. And what we imitate are not only skills—how you ride a bike or climb a rope—but ways of being.
Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam veteran, wrote an excellent book called What It Is Like to Go to War. It starts with this: Any fool can learn from his mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.—OTTO VON BISMARCK
Here’s the thing: life only hands you pieces. You have to figure out how to put them together. Your life doesn’t come with a picture of what it’s supposed to look like on the box. You have to—you get to—choose that picture for yourself. And you choose it by looking for a model of a life well lived.
What’s powerful about this simple idea is that, over time, you’ll begin to find models for almost any part of your life that you want to make excellent. And because of this, in any well-lived life, you’ll likely not have one model, but many.
You should keep in mind that not everyone is, can be, or should be a model for you—even if they are great.

There’s no excellence in a vacuum. Look at the most original people you can think of—the pathbreaking scientist, the profound artist, the record-setting athlete—and you’ll find people who started by copying. “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” Yohji Yamamoto

What’s true is that the way to excellence starts by copying the excellence around you. “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Salvador Dalí

Finding a Model

What all good models share is an excellence that draws us to emulate them.
How do you know if you’ve found a model? It’s pretty straightforward: when you find yourself reflecting on someone’s positive example to guide your thinking and your actions and you begin to imitate him, then you have a model.
We don’t grow in courage or wisdom or resilience by thinking alone. We grow in these virtues by observing how they are embodied in courageous, wise, resilient people of flesh and blood, and by emulating them.
The goal is to learn from our models, not to make ourselves into identical copies of them.
It’s because you’re asking the wrong question. The question isn’t, “What do I do?” The question is, “Who do I learn from, and how do I learn from them?” Learn from a model, and you’ll know what to do.
You won’t achieve exactly what your model has achieved. But by learning the habits, disciplines, and practices that made their accomplishments possible, you’ll find your way to accomplishments of your own. Rather than ask, “How can I achieve what they achieved?” try asking, “How can I create myself as they created themselves?”
Literature and history are among our greatest resources in this regard. By immersing ourselves in stories, we learn to exercise the moral imagination. By putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes—by trying to see what she saw and hear what she heard and feel what she might have felt—we expand our sense of what is possible in our own lives. When we learn how to enter into the stories and experiences of others, we’re learning some of what they learned. It takes humility to realize that your story is not unique. It takes empathy to realize that the stories of others matter as much as your own.

Models Aren’t Perfect & They Change

People can have one virtue without having them all. We don’t choose our models in a spirit of passive, all-consuming admiration, as a child does. We must choose actively, as an adult does. We’re seasoned enough to know that no one exercises a perfect and complete set of the virtues. We can select the qualities we want to emulate, leaving aside the rest without regrets.
The models you choose for your life should match the challenges you’re facing. Over time, you’ll grow. Your sense of self will change. You’ll have new challenges, and you will choose new models of excellence to help you meet them. The model who was perfect at one time in our lives can turn imperfect as our lives and our needs change. The model who taught us courage may be ill suited when the times demand patience. At each stage, we pursue different dreams, learn different ways of living a good life, and pass through different trials. So we cannot hold inflexibly to our models. We cannot make them into idols. And when times change, we have to let go of our models with gratitude.
The most important thing to let go of—the thing so many of us struggle to let go of—is the idea that our heroes are flawless. We have to put that idea away, if only because such a view of heroes begins to limit our view of our own lives.
If we believe that our heroes are flawless, we begin to believe that we, being flawed, are incapable of heroism. In this way, a belief in the perfection of others can inhibit our own growth.
Flawed heroes are still heroic. Every Achilles has an Achilles’ heel. Your hero is flawed. So are you. Congratulations, you have that in common. Now, make yourself similar in another way: go be heroic.

Letter 7: Identity

Be less concerned with what you have than with what you are, so that you may make yourselves as excellent and as rational as possible.—SOCRATES

IDENTITY ACTION FEELINGS

You begin by asking, “Who am I going to be?” You decided to be courageous again. So what’s next? Act that way. Act with courage. And here comes the part that’s so simple it’s easy to miss: the way you act will shape the way you feel. You act with courage and immediately your fears start to shrink and you begin to grow. If you want to feel differently, act differently.
Cato was “accustoming himself.” The translator might have said that Cato was “training himself.” He chose a noble identity and then used his actions to make himself into the person he had resolved to be.
When you put identity first—when you start from your conscious choice to be a certain kind of person—the way you think about achievement changes too. You see that character precedes achievement. Character precedes achievement. Being the type of person you’re setting out to be is so much more important than the “rewards” you will reap.
I only mean that while what we accomplish is sometimes beyond our control, we can always shape who we are. We can’t promise achievement. But we can become the kind of people who are worthy of achievement.
Our feelings for others—beginning with empathy—are at the heart of living well. A disciple once asked Confucius, “Is there a single word that can be a guide to conduct throughout one’s life?” Confucius answered, “It is perhaps the word ‘empathy.’” We can’t treat others as they deserve unless we can feel what it’s like to be in their shoes.

Emotions Can Be Harnessed

Our emotions can be harnessed and your feelings can be trained. Plato had a nice way of thinking about this. When we think of the soul, he writes in his dialogue Phaedrus, let’s imagine it as “a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.” The charioteer, who controls the horses and steers the chariot, is your reason. The two horses are our emotions: one, Plato says, stands for our nobler emotions, such as our desire for honor, and the other stands for our baser passions and appetites. But notice: both horses are required to pull the chariot forward. Emotions can drive us in a way that reason alone cannot. And we need the drive of the emotions to live a flourishing life. One of the beauties of Plato’s analogy is that he makes it clear that you are not your emotions. There is a difference between feeling jealous, angry, gluttonous, greedy, or slothful and actually being jealous, angry, gluttonous, greedy, or slothful. If you feel jealous, you’re human. If you are jealous, then you’re losing control of your life; your horses are running wild. The analogy works in another way as well: you can train your horses.
Gandhi said about his anger: “I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”
Plato is telling us that it’s not that simple. We control our emotions as much as our emotions control us. The way we feel is often a product of the way we act. Our actions often create our feelings.
Sleeping, eating, exercising—these actions shape how you feel. Acting with compassion, courage, grace—these actions also shape how you feel.

Depression

The question we almost never ask, however, is the only one that really matters: How: “How do you do that? How do you make yourself depressed every morning?” That sounds like a harsh thing to say to someone who is down. It certainly is a hard question to ask. The only thing harsher is to not ask the question. We fail to give the struggling person the thing he or she needs most: control.
He finds that many of the painful things we believe about ourselves are wrong, or at least exaggerated. Over time, through deliberate action and thought, we can change how we feel.

Jump in calm & you’ll make it. Jump in fearful and you’ll fail

In BUD/ S, Master Chief Will Guild taught us that if you’re having trouble finding “it” inside, then “put on your game face.” He reminded us that when Achilles puts on his helmet, he becomes a warrior. Contemporary actors know that when they want to create a feeling, they act out the body’s emotional language. If they want to act angry, they purposefully furrow their brow and take shallow breaths. If they need to act impatient, they might start tapping their foot. The furrow of a brow when angry, the tapping of a foot when impatient, the deep sigh when worried—these actions don’t just express emotional states, they create emotional states. That’s not unique to actors: your actions shape your state.
Take fear. If, when you’re afraid, you slow and deepen your breathing, you’ll gain control over your mind. That was the lesson of the test: Jump in calm and you’ll make it. Jump in fearful and you’ll fail.
Smiling and breathing. These are simple things. Exercising and serving. These are simple things. Being grateful and gracious. These are simple things. Acting with humility. Acting with courage. These are simple things. Some people try to make this business of living too complicated. It’s hard, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Decide who you want to be. Act that way. In time, you’ll become the person you resolve to be.
“Be what you would like to seem.” Wear the mask of the virtue you want until it’s no longer a mask.

Shaping Our Sense of self

Our sense of ourselves shapes what we do. When you claim that identity—whether it’s a logger, a scholar, a SEAL, or a father—you’re also claiming the commitments and expectations and values that go with it, and you’re making a promise to live up to them. And yes, when you claim that identity, you’re faking a bit. You definitely weren’t going to go into the forest and cut down a redwood when you were seven. You weren’t a logger. But you became one.
Becoming someone new will sometimes feel like play. In play we’re engaged. In play we create joy. The opposite of play isn’t work. The opposite of play is disengagement. Creating who you are is a serious and important endeavor. But engage with it and it’ll feel fun, playful.
Make it fun, make it delightful, make it a game. Don’t make it harder than it has to be to have fun in this entire process. If you want to be a great lover then act like a great lover. You want to be a great speaker than act like a great speaker.
You don’t have a choice about being an alcoholic. But you do get to choose what kind of alcoholic you’re going to be: the kind who lets his addiction define his life, or the kind whose life is too rich and purposeful to be defined by addiction. Resilient people are able to quickly and powerfully remind themselves—or be reminded by others—of who they are.
Think about what made the SEAL teams work. Even with access to the most sophisticated technology in the world, we had a simple mantra: “Humans before hardware.” Millions of people, in all walks of life and in every endeavor, create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They’d rather, as Socrates warned, focus on what they have than on what they are. But you know better than that. No tool can take the place of character.

Letter 8: Habits

We sow a thought and reap an act; We sow an act and reap a habit; We sow a habit and reap a character; We sow a character and reap a destiny.—ANONYMOUS

Never cease chiseling your own statue.—PLOTINUS

You have enormous potential to create yourself

Small modifications can alter the trajectory of your bullet—up to a point. But if you really want to change your results, you have to reset your natural point of aim. Your life has a natural point of aim. It flies in the direction of your habits. To change the direction of your life, you have to reset your habits.
Every time you act, your actions create feelings—pleasure or pain, pride or shame—that reinforce habits. With each repetition, what was once novel becomes familiar. If you are cruel every day, you become a cruel person. If you are kind every day, you become a kind person. It is easier to be compassionate the tenth time than the first time. Unfortunately, it is also easier to be cruel the tenth time than the first time.
When a habit has become so ingrained that actions begin to flow from you without conscious thought or effort, then you have changed your character. If we are intentional about what we repeatedly do, we can practice who we want to become. And through practice, we can become who we want to be.

It can be tempting, in retrospect, to single out one moment and declare, “That was when everything changed.” But it’s not true. Most lives aren’t that neat. When you read a good biography, or you come to know a good friend, what you begin to see is that the direction of that person’s life is shaped not by a single turning point, but by thousands of days, each filled with small, unspectacular decisions and small, unremarkable acts that make us who we are. You’ll understand your own life better, and the lives of others better, if you stop looking for critical decisions and turning points. Your life builds not by dramatic acts, but by accumulation.

People like to imagine that they will “rise to the occasion.” They taught us in the Teams that people rarely do. What happens, in fact, is that when things get really hard and people are really afraid, they sink to the level of their training. You train your habits. And if a critical moment does come, all you can be is ready for it.
People do change their lives. Sometimes radically. It happens through hard work.
You’ve never been afraid of hard work. And that’s the only kind of magic you need to believe in. You don’t need a turning point, an epiphany, a miracle moment to change your life. How many people have put off the necessary, unglamorous work of building habits because they spend their lives waiting for an epiphany that never comes? Don’t wait. Don’t wait a single day. Live.
By relying on habits, we free our minds to focus on what matters most.
Da Vinchi had been studying and practicing and building habits his entire life. When he sat down and took up his brush, all of that, all of it, was a part of him. He had attained a level of unconscious competence.
We can choose, at any age, to have adventures and growth and happiness. We can begin again. We can have all of this, as long as we are still willing to fail.

And happiness . . . what is it? I say it is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.—JOHN BUTLER YEATS

Cultivating Virtues

Virtues that are not practiced die. Resilience that is not practiced weakens. The only way to keep resilience alive—through success, through temporary comfort, and through the challenges of age—is to engage ourselves in purposeful learning at every step of life. Every master must still have a master. Every good teacher must still be a student.
There’s one sure way to build self-respect: through achievement. A child who learns to tie her own shoes grows in confidence. So does a child who learns to spell his name. So does a student who learns to stand in front of class and read his poem. Self-respect isn’t something a teacher or a coach or a government can hand you. Self-respect grows through self-created success: not because we’ve been told we’re good, but when we know we’re good.
If we want our children to have a shot at resilience, they must learn what failure means. If they don’t learn that lesson from loving parents and coaches and teachers, life will teach it to them in a far harsher way.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the children who are most likely and most willing to take risks are those who know that they can return to loving parents and a secure home. We often venture most boldly when we understand that our ventures are not all or nothing—when we are confident that we have a safe and welcoming home to return to. Resilience—the willingness and ability to endure hardship and become better by it—is a habit that sinks its roots in the soil of security. The child who is always protected from harm will never be resilient. At the same time, the child who is never loved will rarely be resilient.
The reality is that great risk takers often have a safe place to retreat to, a place of confidence and security that enables them to dare greatly. Children who fall from the tree retreat to the arms of their loving parents. Adults retreat to their homes, to their spouses, to their friends, or to their hobbies.
If there’s one thing I hope you’ll take from this, it’s the promise that you don’t have to serve your habits. Your habits can serve you. They can strengthen and reinforce the kind of person you want to become. You have power over your habits. That also means you’re responsible for your habits.

Letter 9: Responsibility

The single most important habit to build if you want to be resilient: the habit of taking responsibility for your life.

But 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 it is that life will crush them. At the root of resilience is the willingness to take responsibility for results.
You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you react to everything that happens to you.
Even at their most powerless, some found that they had a power that events could not steal from them.
On the other hand, as soon as we say “I am responsible for . . . ,” we take control of something.
Symbolic of his philosophy: even in the face of a master who delighted in cruelty, Epictetus maintained mastery of himself. Whatever the world sends us, we have power over our intentions and our attitudes. It just means that a lot of our suffering—or, as Epictetus believed, all of it—comes from our minds, from the way we turn things over and over, the way we worry, the way we fear things that haven’t happened yet. Try to look at things as they actually are in this moment, stripped of fear and worry, and you’re likely to find that you can better bear your pain. Don’t suffer imagined troubles.
Stockdale maintained that he held more power over his suffering than his captors did: his ordeal would only become an evil if he let it. “I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, “that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” Stockdale refused to relinquish responsibility for his own thoughts and intentions. That acceptance of responsibility is a powerful cure for pain. Even when seemingly powerless, the resilient person finds a way to grab hold of something—no matter how small at first—to be responsible for.

Fear

Such fears are entirely natural and healthy, and you should recognize them as proof that you’ve chosen work worth doing. Every worthy challenge will inspire some fear.
Yet if you come across a person or a team without fear, without anxiety, there is a good chance that you’ve run into ignorance or apathy. You’ve run into someone who doesn’t know enough or care enough to be afraid. Neither is good.
Fear is a core emotion. A life without fear is an unhealthy life.
If you take your kids to the creek to swim, you’ll have a lot of fun, but you’ll also be on alert. That’s good. That’s proper. Fear is fine. You need it. If someone came to you at the creek and offered you a pill so that you won’t worry as much about your kids, you’d tell ’em to shove the pill. Focus not on wiping out your anxiety, but on directing your anxiety to worthy ends. Focus not on reducing your fear, but on building your courage—because, as you take more and more responsibility for your life, you’ll need more and more courage.
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. But like most emotions, fear is destructive only when it runs wild. Embrace the fear that comes from accepting responsibility, and use it to propel yourself to become the person you choose to be.
While fear can often be your friend, excuses are almost always your enemy. Faced with a choice between hard action and easy excuses, people often choose the excuse.

Eric Hoffer said this: “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.”

Excellence is beautiful and, like all beautiful things, temporary.

An excuse promises permanence. Excellence is difficult. An excuse is seductive. It promises to end hardship, failure, and embarrassment. Excellence requires pain. An excuse promises that you’ll be pain-free.
Excuses protect you, but they exact a heavy cost. You can’t live a full life while you wear them.

And here’s what’s really difficult about excuses. You’re the only one who can let them go, but other people offer them to you all the time. Excuses don’t just tempt those who make them, they tempt those who hear them. Sometimes the world can’t wait to give you an excuse. Why? Because an excuse often frees everyone from responsibility. If you grab an excuse, it can almost look generous. It can look as if you’re giving not just yourself but everyone around you a break, and that makes it even more tempting.

People who think you are weak will offer you an excuse. People who respect you will offer you a challenge.

It is not things which trouble us, but the judgments we bring to bear upon things.
Diabolos is the ancient Greek word for devil. The literal translation is “one who throws an obstacle in the path.” We throw obstacles in our own path. If we had an external enemy who consistently forced us to make bad choices, to engage in self-destructive behavior, to be less than we are capable of, we’d declare war. Why should we act any differently when the enemy is inside? You have to master the one who throws obstacles in your way. Master yourself.

Letter 10: Vocation

You will never find your purpose. You will never find your purpose for the simple reason that your purpose is not lost. If you want to live a purposeful life, you will have to create your purpose.

How do you create your purpose? You take action. You try things. You fail. You pursue excellence in your endeavors and you endure pain. The pursuit of excellence forces you beyond what you already know, and in this way you come to better understand the world. You do this not once, not twice, not three times, but three thousand times. You make it a habit. Through action, you learn what you are capable of doing and you sense what you are capable of becoming.
This is how vocations are created. You act and achieve a small victory. This feels good. It reinforces your commitment. You act again, and maybe you fail this time. A defeat leads to learning, which leads to better action, which is followed by another small victory, which again reinforces your commitment. This cycle, repeated again and again, inches you closer and closer, minute by minute, day by day, to developing your vocation. Slowly you create your passionate purpose through consistent, excellent work.

You’re shaped by what you work on

What you work on, works on you. People are shaped by what they do. But the work we do has an effect on our minds and our souls as well. The point is that what you do will shape you as much as it shapes the world you live in. What shape do you want that to be? How is the work you are doing today shaping who you will be tomorrow?
The word “vocation” comes from the Latin vocare, “to call.” To have a vocation, then, is to have work that you feel you have been called to.
What I can tell you is that whenever I’ve met people who feel as if they’ve found their calling, they’ve told me stories of failure, confusion, purposelessness, even despair—stories of the hard work they did before and after they heard a call.
Newton was able to see what he saw only because years and years of study and experimentation and wonder had made him ready. I think that being called to a vocation is a little like that. Maybe you’ll have a revelation, an aha moment. But you have to make yourself ready to listen. The calling you hear is often the echo of your own efforts. When the student is ready the teacher will appear.
But it all added up to this: when I saw veterans lying in hospital beds, I saw them differently. I didn’t see people who wanted charity, but people who needed a challenge.
This is how people everywhere have found their vocations. A real accounting for vocation starts not just with the aha moment, but with all of the work that makes such moments possible.
You want to know what your purpose is. I can’t tell you. I can tell you that, whatever it is, you’ll have to work for it. Your purpose will not be found; it will be forged. What people experience as revelation is often a result of their resolve.

The greatest definition of a vocation I’ve ever heard was offered by Reverend Peter Gomes. He said that your vocation is “the place where your great joy meets the world’s great need.” Let’s stop for a minute and think about that definition. In a true vocation, you find happiness in your work—not just in the rewards of your work, but in the work itself. And because your work serves a need, others take happiness from your work too.

There is nothing selfish in devoting great energy to creating and then practicing your vocation. Without a vocation, we can serve others in short bursts of enthusiasm, but before long we may wear out. It’s usually only from within a vocation that we can serve with lasting energy and consistency.
Almost any activity, if you pursue it with purpose and attention for its own sake, can become a vocation.
MacIntyre writes that you can train a child to play chess by offering her a piece of candy—an external good—every time she wins. But not until she discovers for herself the pleasures of developing strategies, reading her opponent’s mind, and thinking three moves ahead will she become a real chess player. There’s a Jewish tradition that embodies this very wisdom. In the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe, mothers would prepare a treat for their children on the first day of school: cookies in the shape of letters of the alphabet. In some families, the new student would get a drop of honey for each letter he sounded out. The lesson was easy enough for a six-or seven-year-old to grasp: learning is sweet. In time, children would learn that the real sweetness was in the knowledge they could unlock as they mastered their letters. They’d move from seeking external rewards to pursuing internal happiness. Some jobs are just jobs—we work ’em for money in the way that a kid works for honey. But other jobs, over time, become part of us in a deeper way. We begin to study the job—we want to learn how to get better at it. We begin to enjoy the job and time seems to fly by at work. We begin to build friendships at the job—we find people we like and sometimes admire. And we begin to take pride in the job. We come to associate the work we do with who we are, and when we’ve found our vocation we’re proud of both.
Everyone who has ever felt that they’ve been called to a vocation has endured similar suffering: leaving the comfortably familiar behind for something you know you have to do.
Working at your vocation doesn’t mean that your life is going to be easy. In fact, in many ways it may be harder. And working at your vocation does not mean that you will always be happy. But such work is an absolute necessity for living the flourishing life I’ve been writing to you about—the kind of life in which you can exercise your vital powers to the fullest.

With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting.—DANIEL KLEIN

In response, distracted people often try to eliminate distractions. They create processes, rules, or tricks to help them do their work. This is helpful sometimes. But much of the time, the drive to kill distractions can be a huge distraction itself. There will always be distractions in life. We can be unnerved even by the sound of silence. Focus comes not from working without distractions, but with a devotion so intense that distractions fall from our awareness.

I am a creature of God and you are a creature of God. My work may be in the city, yours is perhaps in the field. As you rise early to your work, so I rise early to my work. As you do not claim that your work is superior to mine, so I do not claim that mine is superior to yours. And should one say, I do more important work and the other less important work, we have already learned: more or less, it does not matter, so long as the heart is turned toward heaven.—TALMUD

Nobility in work lies not so much in the work that we do, but in the excellence we bring to it. We hurt ourselves as a society when we imagine that service is something that select people choose to do, rather than the expectation of every citizen.
Resilience is often strengthened by a sense of service. If you’re going to be resilient, what are you going to be resilient for? This is why having a vocation often strengthens resilience. Your devotion gives you something worth sacrificing for. Your desire to become excellent gives you a reason to develop your habits of mind, body, and spirit.

Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Here’s how Campbell summarized this recurring myth: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Given what we’re talking about, having a vocation, one aspect of the hero’s journey is especially important for you to grasp. “The ultimate aim of the quest,” wrote Campbell, “must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” The hero engages in self-discovery and self-creation so that he can ultimately be more useful to others. The hero’s journey gives him the power to serve, and he returns to use that power. Of course, we live in the real world, not the world of myth. But diverse communities wouldn’t tell and retell variations of this story if it didn’t express something true about human possibilities. And at the crux of the hero’s journey is this: the decision to return and serve. That’s the real test of heroism. And that’s where your story is now, Walker. You left your world, you saw and experienced things that would have changed anyone, and you’ve come back. What have you brought with you? How will you use it to make your journey, and your return, heroic?

Energy, curiosity, and wonder are not products of age. They’re byproducts of what we do. Just as those qualities are not universally alive in children, they’re not universally dead in adults.

The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows . . . Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.—MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

Letter 11: Philosophy

Most people imagine that philosophy consists in delivering discourses from the heights of a chair, and in giving classes based on texts. But what these people utterly miss is the uninterrupted philosophy which we see being practiced every day . . . Socrates did not set up grandstands for his audience and did not sit upon a professorial chair; he had no fixed timetable for talking or walking with his friends. Rather, he did philosophy sometimes by joking with them, or by drinking or going to war or to the market with them, and finally by going to prison and drinking poison. He was the first to show that at all times and in every place, in everything that happens to us, daily life gives us the opportunity to do philosophy.—PLUTARCH (C. 46–120)

Examine your lives. Take a disciplined look at your actions. Test your beliefs. Ask the hard questions. Discover how much you don’t know.

Some words, to some people, are so uncomfortable that they have to be silenced by any means necessary. What if I’m living my life wrong? What if my faith isn’t true? What if we aren’t the center of the universe? 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.
Philosophy demands clear thinking, and a quest for clarity often leads to consistency.
Some of the thinkers we most remember weren’t afraid of inconsistency, because they were daring enough to face up to the mess of real life. (And many of the thinkers we forget made careers out of pointing out these inconsistencies.) Poets like Walt Whitman got this. He wrote: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) When we were in BUD/ S, I gave you a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Emerson had the same idea: “Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” Life isn’t neat. Life isn’t tidy. And philosophy needs to speak to life.

Philosophy is not, for me, a discipline about writing clever papers. It’s a discipline about living well. The philosopher shouldn’t offer a way of thinking, but a way of living.

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.

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

If you think deeply and you find that two important ideas seem to be in contradiction, what you should do first is celebrate: your discovery is evidence that you’ve had the courage to think deeply. You’ve become self-aware. You’ve discovered something about yourself that most people never have the courage to consider: that your own ideas, and your own life, might not fit into a tidy little package.
In a similar way, if we’re going to think well about our lives, we have to remember that some things can be true most of the time without being true all of the time. What is real, though, is the tendency to give up on the search for principles that can guide our lives most of the time just because they fail to apply all of the time.
- What principles have I thrown away because they didn’t fit a particular model but could be useful in a multitude of other contexts?

And to be guided by a serious philosophy means only that there is a relationship between thinking and action, in that order. Too often, we dive into action and, in retrospect, discover that we should have thought first. Afterward, we try to explain ourselves to ourselves, but our thinking is more an exercise in justification than a search for insight.
The danger, though, is that the explanation that justifies our past will become the philosophy that guides our future. You do something stupid. Then you justify it. Then you start to believe your own justification. Then you start doing things to justify your justification.
If you want to live like a philosopher, do what Franklin did—seek out good conversation. Philosophy is, and has always been, a kind of conversation. It’s only by engaging with others that we break out of the prison of our own prejudices, our own bad habits, our own fears. That’s what we’re trying to do together here.
If we recognize that our experience is limited, we should also recognize that our wisdom is limited.
In our security and comfort, we slip quietly into the false expectation that life will afford us complete happiness. We believe that we will move only from pleasure to pleasure, from joy to joy. When tragedy strikes or hardship hits, too many of us feel ambushed by pain, betrayed by the present, despairing of the future.
For most of history, our feet were hardened by walking on the rough ground. In our world, most people wear shoes. Shoes are good. They protect our feet. But we realize that it is possible to gain something very good and still lose something very real. What most of us have lost is the ability to walk barefoot over difficult ground. Today, sheltered from the hardships of hunger, disease, heat, and cold that stalked human life for centuries, some people have lost their capacity to deal with real difficulty. Growing up in a protected palace of comfort, they have lost their ability to walk through pain.

Resilient realists know that life—despite our highest ideals—is imperfect. You learned as a logger that you can’t control the weather, and that the weather has real consequences for your work. You’ve learned, too, that you can’t control the greed of others, and that greed has real consequences for your community. Human failings, like a gathering thunderstorm in the woods, are more dangerous if we close our eyes to them until it’s too late. Resilience is not a path to perfection. Instead, we seek to be resilient in the face of life’s imperfect reality.

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.
The monk Thomas à Kempis understood this human limitation: “If you cannot make yourself what you would wish to be, how can you bend others to your will?”
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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew about evil: he was a writer who chronicled the Soviet gulag and served eight years in its forced-labor camps. He wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them . . . But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” The more we think, the more we study, the more we learn, the more likely it is that we will confront some of life’s complications. As we begin to know more, we grasp details. We see nuances.

Simplicity is easy. Clarity is earned. We earn clarity by confronting complexity.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that, in almost any endeavor, people who really know their stuff can explain it clearly. The master instructor knows the details but coaches with simple instructions: stand tall, breathe, and so on. The master teacher understands every word of her text but concentrates on the central idea. The ability to explain complicated things with clarity is a mark of mastery.
The great dividing line between words and results was courageous action. One of the greatest gulfs in life is between sounding good and doing good.
We are ultimately measured by our results, by the way our actions shape the world around us. Without results, all the kind intentions in the world are just a way of entertaining ourselves.

Intentions vs. Results

It may be helpful to think about the difference between intentions and results by looking at how the Greeks thought about right action. The word that shows up again and again in their discussions of ethics is arête. As we’ve already discussed, arête doesn’t really mean “virtue,” though that’s how it’s often translated. When the Greeks used the word arête, it referred to excellence. They used the same word to describe the excellence of a vase, the excellence of a great runner, and the excellence of a person. To be excellent is to be someone who produces excellence. There is no such thing as an excellent shoemaker who regularly turns out flimsy shoes. So think a bit about what the Greeks must have believed about having an excellent character. Your character was judged excellent not before you acted, but after. The judgment was based not on your intentions, but on your results. When we think of virtue as an excellence, we don’t ask, “What did I intend?” We ask, “What did I do?”
The people who accomplish such things regularly and with excellence are the ones who hold themselves accountable for results. It’s nice that you want to make a difference. But here’s the hard truth: your wanting is irrelevant to the people who need your help. They don’t need your wanting. They need your strength in action, and they need you to be open to discovering what actually works.

“There is no try. We do not try. Your teammates do not need you to try to cover their backs. Your swim buddy does not need you to try to rescue him on a dive. Your platoon does not need you to try to shoot straight. There is no try. There is only do. Do, or do not. There is no try.”

The lesson was this: If your best is not good enough, make your best better. If you tried hard and failed, then try harder, or find a new way to try until you succeed. Trying hard is trying hard. Success is success. There is a difference.

Trying hard builds character, but it is only the achievement that follows the effort that builds true confidence. We teach children that it doesn’t matter whether they win or lose, it’s how they play the game. But this lesson can be taught poorly or well. Taught poorly, this lesson results in children who are careless of the outcome of their actions,
Intentions do matter. But they matter because they find expression in our actions and in our character. What ultimately matters is not what we intend, but who we become and what we leave behind us.
Those who live by a morality of results and responsibility are much more likely to be resilient, because what matters most to them is useful work. Because their effectiveness matters to them, they take seriously the lessons the world teaches them, including the lessons of disappointment. Because they don’t allow themselves to retreat into the purity of their intentions, they learn to confront the facts of failure. This allows them to grow in humility and in the honesty with which they see themselves.

LETTER 12 Practice

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses . . . in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights. —MUHAMMAD ALI

But if we’re entertained too much and forget to practice ourselves, we’ll lose sight of the work behind the beauty in front of us. We come to believe that dancers, players, and actors simply have talent, and we can forget that they have to struggle every day to develop it. We see the product, but forget the sweat that put it there. We forget that what looks effortless is usually the product of years of effort.
One benefit of pursuing excellence in your own life again is that it will shape the way you see the world around you. Whether it’s a great game you watch, meal you eat, or story you read, you’re more likely to see the sweat and care that went into it. Working hard yourself makes you more appreciative and respectful of the hard work of others.
When most people practice, they think of themselves as practicing how to do something. What if, instead, you think of yourself as learning how to practice something? If you learn how to do something—change a tire, prepare a canvas, develop a photograph, pour concrete, make macaroni and cheese—then you’ve learned how to do one thing. If you learn how to practice, then you have learned how to learn anything. It is only through practice that we attain excellence in any endeavor. And perhaps the greatest skill we can learn is the skill of practice itself. We’ve already talked about some of the things that go into good practice: finding a model, thinking about identity, forming the right habits. The point I want to impress upon you now is: You can practice more than you imagine. You know that we can practice games and sports and instruments. But we can also practice, for example, gratitude. A daily practice of writing down things we are grateful for will, in time, make us grateful people. (In my experience, it will also make us happier.)
We can practice self-examination. Seneca recommended looking back over each day’s actions before going to bed. He said that you should ask yourself: “What evils have you cured yourself of today? What vices have you fought? In what sense are you better? . . . When the torch has been taken away and my wife, already used to my habits, has fallen silent, I examine my entire day and measure what I have done and said. I hide nothing from myself.”
People who don’t understand the possibilities inherent in practice often conclude that they “are” a certain way. When they fail or succeed they think, “I am stupid” or “I am smart” or “I am lazy” or “I am evil” or “I am fat” or “I am funny.” By concluding that they “are” a certain way, they fix their identity to the present and the past, and they often look to the future with fear and trepidation. Those who practice practice use their experience to inform who they can be. “That happened, so next time I should . . .” or, “If that happens again, I’ll . . .” or, “That was great, and to get even better, then next time I should practice . . .”
Learning how to practice is essential to moving through, because it is the discipline of practice itself that allows you to take what happens to you, integrate it into your experience, and then act again. The more you see that life can be practiced, the more resilient you will become.
“We do two things here. We work hard. And we win. The reason we win is that we work hard. So really, we only do one thing here. If you don’t want to work hard, don’t waste my time.”
The magnitude of the challenge × the intensity of your attack = your rate of growth It’s an idea, of course, not a real formula. But you do need big challenges in your life, and you need to bring intensity to those challenges if you aim to grow.
Five variables go into training or practice of any kind: frequency, intensity, duration, recovery, and reflection.
- Frequency is important because we learn through repetition. Our bodies and minds and spirits need to adapt between each practice.
- Intensity is important because we grow only when we push ourselves beyond the boundaries of our past experiences.
- Duration is important because we need to train as long as necessary for our bodies, minds, and spirits to adapt to our work.
- Recovery is important because our bodies, minds, and spirits need time to adapt to what we have learned. When we sleep after exercise, we can grow stronger. When we sleep after studying, we can grow smarter. Even monks take breaks from prayer so that their spirits can grow.
- Reflection is important because we have to consider our performance against the standards we have set, adjust ourselves, and integrate what we’ve learned into our lives. Our times of practice will become isolated islands unless we reflect. Reflection is the bridge between what we practice and the way we live our lives.

In repetition, three things happen.
- First, we are reminded. Most of the important things in life need to be taught only once, but we need to be reminded of them often. Marcus Aurelius’s practice of philosophy was really nothing more than an elaborate system of self-reminding. He recognized that “we need more often to be reminded than informed.”
- Second, as we change over time, the same message works on us in different ways. A message about mental toughness in the face of exhaustion will be heard differently by the young athlete than by the new parent.
- Third, an idea is similar to a tool: for it to become part of who we are and how we think, we have to become familiar with it. We become familiar with ideas not only by reading about them or hearing about them, but by thinking about them, talking about them, writing about them, and using them in our lives. Practice and purposeful repetition are what separate an idea that interests us for a moment from an idea that becomes a part of our character.

A young mother is holding a baby in her arms. At the same time, she is trying to cook dinner. Dinner is about to burn. Just as she needs to grab the pot from the stove, the phone begins to ring. Meanwhile, her husband is upstairs writing. She calls to him for help, and he murmurs something about his writing. She walks upstairs and stands in the doorway of the room where he is typing. He does not look up. She gets his attention by saying, “I need you to listen to me,” and asks, “If there were a fire right now, would you run through the house to save me and the baby?” He says, “Yes, of course.” She replies, “There’s never going to be a fire.” We talked about this before, Walker. People want to imagine that somehow, when “the moment” comes, they will be heroes. But there are rarely such moments in anyone’s life, and when they do come, they last for mere minutes. What usually matters in your life is not the magical moment, but the quality of your daily practice. As the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
Is the problem really that people don’t know enough? Or is it that they don’t do enough of the right stuff? It’s an important question to ask, because it helps us to get clear on the relationship between education and training.

Knowing is usually the easy part. Doing is much harder.

It’s helpful to know something about resilience, but to be resilient you have to practice, to train in resilience. Education is different from training. Education aims to change what you know. Training aims to change who you are. Practicing practice will enable you to—in the words of the old Army commercial—be all that you can be.

LETTER 13 Pain

There is the pain we seek. And then there is the pain that seeks us. The pain that comes from study, from training, from pushing ourselves—all of that, as unpleasant as it might be to bear—is pain we seek. Because we have brought it into our lives, it is easier to understand, plan for, and work through. 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.
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.
The Stoics taught that our response to the world, our choice to accept or reject what we cannot control, is the only thing completely within our power. We can make ourselves miserable by railing against what has already happened, or we can accept our place in a universe greater and more complex than we can possibly imagine.
“Do not try to make things happen the way you want, but want what happens to happen the way it happens, and you will be happy.”
One practice they recommended was called the “premeditation of evils.” We imagine the worst that can happen, not in a fit of worry, but in a controlled examination. When we do this, we find that many evils are hugely inflated by our fear. When we really think about them, we realize that we can face and defeat them. And more important, we grow prepared. When evils do meet us, we meet them not in a state of shock, but with practiced readiness.
The Buddha taught that the first step to wisdom comes when we realize that living means suffering.
For all of us, the path to wisdom runs through the dark wood of pain. And we can never begin to master pain unless we look it in the face—unless we begin to understand it.
Walker, but if you are not depressed by some of what life throws at you, then you are not seeing or hearing or feeling all of the world around you. Many of the most resilient leaders—Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Gandhi—saw the tragic nature of life. All suffered through episodes of depression. They were also people who endured with courage when entire nations were counting on their strength. And in their pain, they built a depth of wisdom that few of their contemporaries could match. It would be wrong to say that Lincoln ever overcame his depression: “Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is a story not of transformation but of integration. Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.”
An unwillingness to endure the hardship of a depressed time keeps us from the possibility of capturing the wisdom and strength and joy that can exist on the other side. There is a season to be sad. Painful things hurt. Allow yourself to be hurt.
It seems counterintuitive to apply pain to someone already in pain. But to change people, you usually have to challenge them.
In our work, we don’t give things to veterans to ease their pain; we put a challenge in front of them to rebuild their purpose. The challenge is to begin to serve again in their community.
Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—you fight fire with fire. You meet pain with pain. You give a challenge to someone who’s challenged, and he grows stronger.
Life rarely presents us with painless choices. But if the choice is understood as one between two types of pain, then the questions to ask are: Which kind will make you better? Which kind of pain can you confront productively?
My brother said, “Look, you have two choices. If you’re working hard on the right things and there’s still too much to do, that’s pressure you can’t do much about. On the other hand, if you hire someone, you’re looking at being dead broke sooner, which will put pressure on you to make money. But that’s something you can do something about. So,” he said, “pick the pain you can confront most productively.”
C. S. Lewis called pain God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” He’s right that pain grabs hold of our attention like nothing else, but through the megaphone of pain we rarely hear instructions.
Pain gets our attention, but it does not instruct. It can tell us to look up, but rarely tells us where to go. While it’s important to recognize what pain has to offer, it’s not enough to simply experience it. It has no value on its own. For pain to be valuable, it has to lead to the right kind of understanding.
People frequently hold on to an unhealthy pain precisely because that relationship is comfortable. Of course pain hurts, but the pain you know can seem easier, more manageable, than the unknown pain you might encounter if you took a different path.
Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor, often wrote in his diary about his relationship with pain: “It is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquillity, and not to think that pain is an evil. For every judgment and movement and desire and aversion is within, and no evil ascends so high.” He did, however, recognize that we can choose how we respond to pain. We choose our relationship to pain. Pain is rarely constant. Pain waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows. And so, too, does our relationship with it. To work through pain is not to put an end to pain, but to change how we relate to it. Some pain never goes away. To work through pain is not to make it disappear, but to make it mean something different for us—to turn it into wisdom.
If you can avoid unnecessary pain, avoid it. If you can’t avoid it, then you have to choose your attitude toward it.
Frankl came to see that his unfinished work kept him sane: “Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable . . . What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.” If there is tension in your life, if there is some deep worry about living a worthy life, then . . . good. That tension and worry is part of a well-lived life.

LETTER 14 Mastering Pain

But one mark of resilience is learning to tell which pain deserves our attention. Paying attention to every pain, all the time, doesn’t lead to resilience. It usually just leads to whining. So which pain matters? Start with this: not all pain matters.
There are people whose attention is consistently drawn away from their purpose and toward their pain, like a moth to a light. Such people, who pay attention to every annoyance and obstacle in their way, are usually unsuccessful in their endeavors. In extreme cases they are mentally ill. A healthy person, a flourishing person, learns to move past a lot of annoyance and a good deal of pain.
But to achieve mastery at the outer edges of excellence, and to achieve precision in our thinking, we have to unpack the word “ignore.” If I am ignoring something, I am aware of it. I am aware of it as an annoyance or perhaps as an irrelevance. Yet in order for me to ignore something, I am both aware and choosing not to focus my mind and my time on what I am ignoring.
Truly great performers will often tell you that they “don’t even notice” the pain. In true mastery there is a transcendence at work: you actually are your pain. Your pain is not something separate from yourself, something you overcome or ignore or fail to notice. It is a part of who you are. And even this is not quite right—it is who you are, as much as your own thoughts and your breathing. Your pain is no longer outside of you. It is you, and you are it.
You don’t have to push yourself to a new max every day. That’s a recipe for injury. But you do have to push yourself. You do have to step beyond the boundary of your past experience. You do have to regularly and consistently pursue excellence at the edge. You fuel your excellence with challenges made to match you in the moment.
We do not grow because of the pain. We grow when we recover from the right pain in the right way.
Think about the phrase “roll with the punches.” People who don’t know boxing think that the phrase means something like: you get punched and you keep going. In fact, to roll with the punches means to twist your body—maybe even to slide slightly—so that the blow doesn’t catch you full force. That’s the idea of rolling with the punches: there is no virtue in taking punishment for the sake of punishment.
Consider this: one of the quickest ways for a medic to snap somebody out of her suffering is to ask her to describe her pain. What happens is simple. And it works in most situations. To describe your pain, you have to (metaphorically) step outside of it. You have to look at it, analyze it. Instead of being in pain, you are now thinking about what the pain is doing to you. What’s happened, at the most basic level, is that you’ve changed your relationship to pain. The pain might still be piercing. But by describing it, we see our pain. What happens—and this is true whether the pain we feel is from a knife wound, hunger, or a dearly loved relative’s death—is that deliberate attention to pain helps us separate the physical sensation from the suffering we mentally attach to that sensation.
What’s true about pain in this sense is similar to what’s true about fear. It does its worst work when it’s hidden. The minute we write down what we are afraid of, or take objective stock of what’s hurting us, we begin to gain control.
Edith Hamilton: that they were “lovers of beauty without having lost the taste for simplicity, and lovers of wisdom without loss of manly vigor.
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.

Self Talk

We all talk to ourselves. You may not speak your thoughts out loud or share them with others, but there is always a conversation in your head about your environment, the people around you, and, most important, about yourself. You can’t shut this conversation off. The best you can do is turn it in your favor. There are times when our self-talk becomes destructive. I screwed up. I’m stupid. I don’t deserve to be here. Everyone thinks like this occasionally, but repetitive negative inner monologues can be destructive.
There are lots of ways to do this, but all of the strategies have two features in common. One, they make you aware of your self-talk. Two, you start to change the voice in your head. (This, again, is hard. It takes a lot of mental effort and attention, and many people simply aren’t willing to do the work.)
Once you’re aware of the habit of destructive self-talk, you can—as with any habit—replace it with a new one. Talking positively to yourself will feel different at first: maybe it will come as a relief, or maybe it will just feel fake. But remember that changing the tone of your self-talk won’t work if you try it only once.
There is a difference between self-talk that is aspirational and self-talk that is delusional. The difference is not in the words. The difference lies in practice. You can try to talk yourself up before a big contest, but if you haven’t done the training, you won’t believe your own talk. Self-talk tied to disciplined practice enhances your power. Self-talk divorced from practice is just self-delusion.
Navy SEAL instructors found that most of the guys who quit BUD/ S didn’t quit during training. They quit when they started to think about all of the training ahead. The lesson of “getting to your dot” is that you don’t need to do all of your training at once. All you need to do at breakfast is eat breakfast. Once people made it to the dot, they usually found the strength to make it through that PT session.

Segmenting Your Goals

The process of taking a large goal and breaking it down into smaller parts is called segmenting. It’s a simple technique, but it can make seemingly impossible hardship more manageable. We break hard things down into smaller and smaller steps until each step is easy. We make the large thing small, and the small thing smaller, and the smaller thing smaller still, until the next thing is the only thing, and that next thing happens now.
It was the darkest moment for so many because they weren’t thinking about what was right in front of us. They were thinking about everything that was to come. And in their minds, what they hadn’t yet seen or touched or tasted turned monstrous.
People quit when they started to think about how hard something was going to be. When things feel too big to handle, break ’em down. It worked for you then. It’ll work for you now.
You got through Hell Week by staying focused on the reality in front of you, not the phantoms your imagination conjured up or the fear the instructors tried to put into your head.
Ernest Hemingway argued that “cowardice . . . is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”

We don’t learn from failure by mentally turning it into a catastrophe. We learn from failure by facing it and seeing it for what it is—no more, no less. Face reality. Isolate what happened. Separate what just happened from what might happen in the future. If it helps you, write it down. And once you’ve looked at reality, focus your energy on the task you can control that’s right in front of you.

When I was a kid, my dad showed me how to hold a magnifying glass, focus the rays of the sun on a fallen leaf, and draw out a curling wisp of smoke as the leaf caught fire. There is a power in focus. A laser is just focused light, but it can cut through steel. In the midst of hardship and fear, suffering and difficulty, the person who’s built the habit of focus harnesses tremendous power.
Resilient people learn how to mentally prepare themselves for difficult endeavors.

Mental Visualization/ Rehearsal

Mental visualization, or mental rehearsal, is one of the most powerful ways that we have to master pain, fear, and difficulty. Resilient people know that life is going to be hard, so they prepare themselves for hardship. You remember how the Stoics practiced the premeditation of evils? In some ways, it’s the same thing. For Seneca, it was the difference between carrying on and breaking down: “Everyone approaches a danger with more courage if he has prepared in advance how to confront it. Anyone can endure difficulties better if he has previously practiced how to deal with them. People who are unprepared can be unhinged by even the smallest of things.”
Mental rehearsal allows your mind to be in a place where your body cannot be. Mental rehearsal, practiced properly, is simply productive preparation.
It’s better to tell people, “Worry productively.” If you’re going to spend time thinking about bad things that might happen, then use that energy for a purpose. Go ahead and visualize the worst that can happen. But instead of wallowing in your worries, imagine how you’ll respond to them. Practice. Mentally rehearse what you’ll do. Imagine and envision yourself making it through hardship.
When you mentally rehearse, don’t imagine success falling into your lap. Imagine everything: the tingling at the back of your neck, the fear in the pit of your stomach. Your mind is built to prepare for problems. That’s more than OK—it’s good. The goal of mental rehearsal isn’t to fill your head with happy thoughts about the future, but to prepare yourself to succeed in the real world. And one of the ways you succeed in the real world is by anticipating obstacles, including your own fear. When you do that, you tap into a survival mechanism hard-wired into the human brain.
Both a panicked mind and a resilient mind will engage with fearful, anxious thoughts. What makes the resilient mind different is its ability to direct those thoughts productively.
The naïve mind imagines effortless success. The cowardly mind imagines hardship and freezes. The resilient mind imagines hardship and prepares.
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.—MONTAIGNE
It’s hard to wrestle with a ghost. You either own your fears or they own you. Fears do their worst work when they knock around in your mind. You can’t fight your fears until you put them in front of you. Write your fears down. Make them face you. The minute you do this, your fears will shrink, and you will grow. 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.
Everyone, Walker, has uneven courage. We build courage through the practice of facing fear, and while we may learn to face fear comfortably in one context, we may still act cowardly in another.

Breathing to control fight- or -flight

But here’s the problem with fight-or-flight: we’ve invented all kinds of new, modern ways to be scared. And in many of these situations, our body’s natural response to fear is useless at best and often harmful. How about the fear of public speaking? Your heart starts pounding, but it’s not going to work well if you run out of the room or try to fight the audience. It turns out, though, that your body also produces antidotes to this condition, and their release is triggered by deep, controlled breathing. This means that the relaxing effect of deep breathing isn’t in your imagination; it has a physical reality. And it means that you have access to a powerful calming path whenever you hit your body’s “manual override” switch. That switch is controlled breathing.
Try this: inhale through your nose while slow-counting to four, hold your breath, then exhale through your mouth while slow-counting to four. Try this for just four minutes. You can use your breath to gain hold of your anger. You can use your breath to quiet an attack of panic. You can use your breath to bear pain.
Resilience isn’t just in your mind. It’s in your body too. We’re all physical beings. Sleep matters. Exercise matters. What you eat matters. You’ll be happier if you are healthier. You’ll be more resilient if you’re better rested. Your physical strength is part of your mental strength. You know all of this, Walker. Most people do. It’s not a problem of knowledge, but one of action. So do this: Just breathe. If for no other reason than to remember that you have control over how you feel. You have control over yourself.
Suffering isn’t only in what we experience. It’s in how we process what we experience—the perspective we bring to pain.
Sometimes our perspective is simply a question of who we are and where we are. Other times, we can change our perspective. In those moments, we realize that what looks like a crisis or a tragedy doesn’t have to be. And at this point, Walker, you’re probably beginning to grasp that while I called this letter “Mastering Pain,” it’s really about different ways to master yourself. Very often the world is what it is and will be what it will be. Despite all of our desire and effort, we’ll never eliminate unfairness or do away with tragedy. And we’ll never really “master” pain. But we can gain some mastery over ourselves.

Gratitude

We could spend a lot of time thinking about why gratitude works, but I think it’s pretty simple. When we express thanks for something, we call our attention to the good things in our lives. We remember those things that we might otherwise overlook, take for granted, or forget. And when we offer thanks—when we express our thanks to someone or something—we’re reminded that we’re not alone.
Talmud of the self-inflicted stupidity of this mindset: “He who bears a grudge acts like one who, having cut one hand while handling a knife, avenges himself by stabbing the other hand.”
When you’re hurt, you really are cut and there’s no wishing the pain away. But when you hold on to the pain longer than you need to, it’s like cutting yourself over and over again. So you can look at forgiveness in the same way you can look at gratitude: it’s an attitude directed outward. But the person to whom you owe the practice is really yourself. It’s been said that to forgive “is to give up all hope for a better past.” In other words, to forgive means to give up your desire for power over what you can’t control. Resilient people know how to focus their power. And although the past is outside your power, how you live today and how you live tomorrow are still yours to control.

Letter 15: Reflection

Deep and productive reflection, he writes, often starts when we get our hands dirty. In science, many pivotal theories about the world began not with theorists at blackboards, but with skilled craftsmen in workshops. Crawford’s point is this: when you get your hands dirty, you often develop valuable ideas about how the wider world works.
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.
Without [action], thought can never ripen into truth.—RALPH WALDO EMERSON You’re still figuring things out, Walker. So am I. We all are. And like a scientist, if you have theories but never test them, two things will happen. One, you’ll have bad ideas. That’s not so bad. But two—this is the bad part—you’ll act on those ideas. It’s the personal equivalent of bleeding yourself to cure disease or blowing your leg off firing a poorly made cannon. Just as scientists build sound theories through experimentation, you can use your experience to build principles and ideas to shape your life. But to do this, you need to do more than just hypothesize and more than just act. You have to reflect on your experience. And it’s here, in reflection, where our culture is perhaps at its weakest relative to the ancients. Compared to the ancients, we live lives that are glutted with opportunities for distraction.
Action in the world, and reflection on it, go hand in hand. You can’t just sit down in a room and puzzle out your life. To reflect well, you need something to reflect on.
The Buddha’s insights didn’t come from his time of comfort and isolation. They came from his engagement with the hard facts of the world.
When we reflect, we are processing the meaning of something that we have learned or experienced. Often our reflections then guide our future actions. 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.
A lot of people need more work and less talk. More action, less complaining. We need to hear less about their feelings and see more of their effort.

How to Start

Where do you start when reflecting on your experience? Let’s make it simple. You can start with this question: Who do I want to be? If you have an answer to that question, everything flows from it. If you have a sense of the person you are trying to create, then you will know better, in any given situation, what to do.
So make it simpler still. Ask yourself: What am I aiming to do? What do I want to make happen? If you want to use military language, ask yourself: What is my mission in this moment?
You don’t have to know what perfect looks like, but you do have to know what better looks like. If you know better from worse, then you’ve laid the groundwork for quality reflection. We can keep this straightforward. You ask: What was I aiming at? How did I do? What do I need to do differently next time?
Phronesis, practical wisdom: the ability to figure out what to do while at the same time knowing what is worth doing. From Homer to Socrates, when the Greeks wanted to talk about wisdom, they often started by talking about it practically: a carpenter who knows how wood warps over time, a horse trainer who knows when to chasten and when to reward, a ship’s captain who knows how to ride the winds. That’s where good reflection takes you—it takes you to practical wisdom. And whether that’s wisdom about running a chainsaw, paving a street, sustaining a marriage, flanking an enemy, or coaching your kid’s team, it all makes you better.
The gold standard for good reflection is simply that it allows you to plan well. And planning leads to thoughtful action. It works like this: You act. You reflect on your action. You plan based on your reflection. Then you do it again. Act. Reflect. Plan. This process of acting, reflecting, and planning sometimes takes place in the course of seconds and sometimes takes place over the course of years. But if we want to build resilience, it’s critical that we engage in this process on a regular basis. If we build a habit of quality reflection into our lives, we will be able to consistently respond to hardship, error, pain, difficulty, and disorder in a way that makes us stronger.
Reflecting well also means recognizing the mindsets that stand in the way of insight. A closed mind is sealed against new information, new training, and new growth. More often, a closed mind is a product of fear. A closed mind protects the ego, but at the cost of weakening and degrading our thinking. When we close our minds in fear or arrogance we lock ourselves away,
The same is true of a core belief that is never exposed to debate and conversation, never nourished with fresh insight. Just as a person locked in isolation loses touch with reality, ideas that never have meaningful interaction with other ideas become erratic and fragile.
When we reflect well on an event, we reflect not only on what happened, but on why it happened. When we begin to understand why something happened, we are not just revisiting a memory. We are creating understanding. Done well, reflection is more than replaying memories; it is the process of making sense of those memories in the larger story of our lives. Everyone can call back a memory. Not everyone can reflect on it. If our reflection is thorough, we move from having had an experience to having an understanding of what we’ve experienced. And if that understanding is then applied to how we live, we move from having an understanding to living with understanding. In other words, with the right reflection we learn to turn our experience into wisdom that shapes how we live. The difference between a life that is happening to you and a life that you shape is often reflection.
You reflect on your purpose. You reflect on what you’ve done and you think about what you might do next. When you do this often enough, reflection becomes a part of who you are. That’s it. That’s the examined life.

Will Guild’s 4 ?’s for Situational Awareness

Guild was about six foot four, 250 pounds. Guys who operated with him called him Big Will. Will had joined the Teams when he was nineteen, and after doing everything he could in the Navy—he’d been an assault team crew leader, a pilot, a free-fall jump master, a combat diver, Special Forces–qualified—he went to college at William and Mary. He studied English. Acted in plays. Came to love Shakespeare. Read the classics. Later he went to a program at Harvard Divinity School to study Greek, and he became the first enlisted person ever to teach ethics and a class in philosophy at the Naval Academy. Will taught us that resilient people adapt well to what is happening around them. To do that, though, they have to understand clearly what is happening, without self-deception, too much optimism, or too much pessimism. They have to see the world around them as it actually is.
He says that there are four questions you have to answer to be situationally aware.
- First, why am I here? The answer might be: to conduct a reconnaissance mission of a suspected terrorist target.
- Second, what’s going on around me? Headlights whipped around the corner and are barreling down the street toward the target house.
- Third, what am I going to do about it? Watch the car until it pulls up in front of the house, take photographs of the people who step out of the car, and send those photographs back to the boss.
- Fourth, how will my actions affect others?

These four questions apply to almost any situation. For example: First, why am I here? To have a productive conversation with my wife, and to show her that I love her. Second, what’s going on around me? She’s mad at me because I’ve screwed up again: I was tired after training, was short with her, and I’m also home late again. Third, what am I going to do about it? Apologize. Tell her that I was wrong. Give her a hug and let her know that I love her, respect her time, and want to be a good husband. Four, how will my actions affect others? If I apologize sincerely, she may forgive me, and we can have a good night together. Next time, I can pause before I snap.
The model begins with you. To understand your surroundings, you need to start by understanding why you are there and how you fit in the picture. Next, you need to understand what is happening around you. But that’s not enough, because you aren’t a passive observer—you are part of what is happening around you. So you need to reflect on what you should do and on how what you do will shape your environment. If you can effectively answer all four questions, you have real situational awareness.
It’s important to remember that the model works best if you ask and answer the questions in the right order. You don’t start recording everything that’s happening around you without first thinking about your purpose in the moment—because your purpose makes some facts crucial and others trivial. You don’t plunge into action without observing the world around you. You don’t make a decision to act until you’ve taken stock of your effect on others. Each answer becomes stronger and makes more sense when you have a good answer to the previous question.
Try it. Think about a situation. Answer the four questions. Why am I here? What’s going on around me? What am I going to do about it? How will my actions affect others? It’s amazing to see the kind of clarity that this exercise can bring you. Sometimes your own course of action becomes clear immediately. Other times you realize that you don’t fully understand what’s happening around you, or you don’t fully understand how your actions will affect others. That knowledge in and of itself can help you to learn more and to act better. When you do this enough times, this way of thinking can itself become a habit. And that habit of thinking, over time, leads to greater situational awareness, which allows you to better adapt to and shape circumstances successfully—a skill at the heart of resilience.

The basic idea of enlightenment is pretty simple: you see clearly what you couldn’t see before. The Buddha taught his students that they must know for themselves. The work of reflection is something you have to do for yourself. No one else can make you wise.
Montaigne put this well: “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.” Some things you have to learn for yourself.
Much of the compelling evidence that we have about elite performance suggests that practice helps people, sometimes literally, to see the world differently. Great hitters in baseball aren’t always blessed with incredibly fast reaction times. Instead—through practice—they’ve come to read a pitcher’s delivery so well that they can reliably predict the pitch that’s coming in a fraction of a second. Great boxers aren’t so fast that they avoid flying punches. Instead—through practice—they are able to anticipate when and where a dangerous fist might fly. In each case, practice makes the world look different.
First, insights come through practice. When we work at something, we come to see it differently. This is true of seeing a baseball differently. It’s also true of seeing hardship differently. Second, we all have limited insights. Because some insights are built only through practice, and because the amount of time we have to practice anything is limited, we can master only a limited amount in our lives. Part of wise reflection is reminding ourselves of the bounds of our mastery and the limits of our vision. And part of a wise life is having friends who can help us to see beyond our limited experience.

LETTER 16 Friends

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.—ARISTOTLE

When a young person asks me for advice about what he should do, I often ask him: Who do you want to be with? Few things in life shape you more than the people around you, and few choices are more important than deciding who you’ll be with.
Be with people who are the way you want to be. If you want to be excellent, be around people who pursue excellence. If you want to be happy, be around people who are happy. If you are around resilient people, you’re far more likely to be resilient yourself.
You could make the case that Aristotle treated friendship as the single most important ingredient for a good life. His book on character and the pursuit of happiness, the Nicomachean Ethics, has ten chapters, each on a separate subject. Only one topic gets two chapters: friendship. No other subject in the book is discussed at greater length. He believed that friendship could be based on one of three things: utility, pleasure, or virtue.
- Friendships of utility bring together people who are useful to each other. Think of business partners, coworkers, teammates.
- Then there are friendships of pleasure. There are some people we just like being around. They make us happy. Every person should have friends like these;
- A friendship based in virtue and excellence is different. Remember when we talked about the word arête—how it is usually translated as “virtue” but means something a bit closer to “excellence” in English. This is important, because when people read Aristotle today and see that he thinks that the ultimate friendship is one based in “virtue,” it can read as if Aristotle is giving a long, boring Sunday school lecture.

But if you see that Aristotle is talking about friends who enrich one another’s lives, who help one another live their best possible lives, then what he’s saying starts to make sense.
Aristotle argues that such friendships are an end in themselves. It’s not that we pursue them because they will help us to live an excellent life; we make time to create such friendships because they are part of an excellent life. In fact, Aristotle suggests—and I also believe—that we can’t live our best lives or become our best selves without these kinds of friendships. The best friends support us, challenge us, inspire us. And we do the same for them.
It’s been said that the deepest relationships are formed not when two people are looking at each other, but when two people are looking in the same direction. Friends challenge the flaws in our thinking and the flaws in our character. When they do that, they make us better. Good friends hold us to a higher standard when we are ready to make an excuse for ourselves. Friends sympathize with our pain, but they stop us from wallowing in it. Friends point out our blind spots, and they do so not with vindictiveness or cruelty, but out of honesty, love, and a desire that we live the fullest and best life possible.
What makes life tragic is not only that we have limited time to live and limited strength to live with; it’s also that we all have limited vision. None of us can see or understand everything about anything, and that includes ourselves.
Think of a community of friendship as a pool of experience that multiplies each member’s wisdom. No one person, no matter how wise or experienced, can match the combined experience of a community. As long as we are imperfect, we will always find that the voice of a friend offers perspective and insight.
He said there are four kinds of knowledge:
- THINGS THAT we know and that others know as well; these things are known.
- THINGS THAT no one knows; these are unknown.
- THINGS THAT we know and others do not; these things are hidden.
- THINGS THAT others know that we don’t know; these things we are blind to.

If you pick up one of Homer’s epics, you’ll probably notice a special habit of his. He almost always attaches a unique word or descriptive phrase to each character, a tag line that comes up every time that hero or god is mentioned. That’s why you’ll read about “fleet-footed Achilles,” “bright-eyed Athena,” “earthshaking Poseidon,” and Hector, “breaker of horses.” This practice probably started as a handy memory tool. Achilles is blinded by rage. Agamemnon is blinded by arrogance. Paris is blinded by lust. But Odysseus is wily, and he becomes aware and able because, of all of Homer’s characters, he works the hardest to reduce his own blindness.
We would never willingly drag a friend into our hardship. But having friends by our side during a difficult test can give us incredible strength. We wouldn’t say, “I’m glad you’re suffering too.” But we do say, “I’m glad that you’re here with me.”
I remember that I had this huge smile on my face, because I realized that I’d just passed through my hardest moment. When all I thought about was my own pain and how the world had dealt me an unfair hand, I became weaker. When I thought of the needs of my team, my friends, I became stronger.
We often think that our friends help us when we are weak. And they do. But it’s also true that we become strong when we have friends to be strong for.

LETTER 17 Mentors

Mentors to guide us. They put before us the hard, unglamorous, and sometimes tedious reality of the work that leads to mastery, all while stoking the passion and wonder that set us on the path to mastery in the first place.
As long as you keep growing and keep pushing into new endeavors, you’ll need a mentor: someone who’s been where you’re going. Unfortunately, just like the models we talked about a few letters ago, people often stop seeking out mentors when they become adults.
I don’t think you can explain such actions without taking seriously mentors’ love of what they do. And that’s what you’re looking for in a mentor, Walker: someone who respects whatever it is—gardening, parenting, or the concrete business—
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.
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.

Knowing How vs Knowing What

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.
What humans know about physics, you’ll find that nearly all of it exists as technical knowledge scattered among books, journals, and articles. If you consider the sum total of what humans know about tae kwon do, however, you’ll find that only a small fraction of this knowledge has been captured and written down. So where is the rest of it? It’s in the practice of the greatest masters, and it continues to exist because it’s passed down to their students. If the masters disappeared tomorrow, the art of tae kwon do would likely disappear too.
The practice of every discipline requires both kinds of knowledge. Just as you can learn something about tae kwon do from books, there’s a part of being a good physicist that you can’t learn from books. My point is that you’ll waste your time and energy unless you think clearly about the kind of knowledge you’re after. Sometimes you’ll need to be sure you find the right books. But if you’re involved in a discipline like tae kwon do or parenting or leadership, you’ll need to find the right mentors. People will often scour the earth searching for the right book, but take whatever coach, teacher, trainer, or mentor who comes along. It’s not that one kind of knowledge is more important than the other. We only run into a problem if we convince ourselves that the only knowledge that matters is the kind that can be easily packaged. Our mastery of the practices that matter—including the practice of living a good life—comes from people and through relationships. It comes from coaches, teachers, trainers, and mentors.
It’s easy to find people willing to give you advice. It’s hard to find people with advice worth giving.
A good mentor will aim first not to give advice or instruct—activities that stress the mentor’s superiority to the student—but to achieve understanding and then to share it. We can’t always achieve simplicity. Sometimes complex things must be appreciated in their complexity. But we can always seek clarity. Clear advice. Clear direction. The master has mastery over her whole craft. She instructs with simple instructions: Relax. Breathe deeply. Stand tall. And in this way she gradually pushes her student, one step at a time, past the edge of her previous understanding.
Good mentors respect complexity. But because they’ve learned to separate essentials from distractions, they can offer clarity.
The best mentors must know two things: the challenge that’s being faced and the person facing it. Imagine someone who has to make a choice between staying in school and leaving school to pursue a career as a professional dancer. There is a question here about dancing, but it’s likely that the central question is about taking risks. So whose advice is worth seeking? Maybe not just a mentor with experience as a dancer, but a mentor with experience as a risk taker.
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
Extraordinary coaches also know that sometimes the same person who needed a spur last week needs a brake this week. Mentors who understand both the challenge and the person in front of them are extraordinarily valuable. They’re also quite rare. (They’re rare for the same reason that true friends are rare: the best relationships are only built over time.)
Two groups of fire fighters, novices and experts, were shown scenes of fires and asked what they saw. The novices saw what was obvious—the intensity and color of the flames. But the experts saw a story; they used their mental models to infer what must have led to the current state of the fire and to predict what was likeliest to happen next. Note that these inferences and predictions are more than just interesting. They are evidence that the experts are far better prepared than the novices to fight the fire. We’d expect experts to fight fires with more skill than beginners. This study helps us to see why experts are better. Where novices see surface details (the color of the flames), experts perceive patterns (where the fire is likely to go next). They see patterns not because they have a better understanding of the chemistry of fires, but because they have seen more fires. Their experience shapes what they see.
In a mentor, you’re looking for someone who can look at you and your challenges and see more than surface details. You’re looking for someone whose experience can help you to see where to go and what to do next. The best mentors have a sense for what matters. And if they don’t see or can’t hear an important detail, they’ll ask you about it. Good mentors (and coaches and teachers) have learned to look at and hear the right things. Good coaches cut through clutter and chaos. They direct your attention to the details that make a difference.

Superforecasters

Not all experts are created equal. Philip Tetlock, a political psychologist, proved it by putting together a massive study of expert judgment. Over twenty years, he asked 284 experts—academics, reporters, political officials, and others—to make predictions about world events. The experts made 28,000 predictions in all. Then Tetlock went back to check the results. It wasn’t professors who made the best predictions, or politicians. It wasn’t liberals or conservatives. The biggest difference was between “foxes” and “hedgehogs.” Those terms come from the Greek poet Archilochus, whom we talked about a few letters back. He said, “The fox knows many things . . . the hedgehog knows one big thing.” When it came to the accuracy of his subjects’ predictions, Tetlock found that foxes routinely outdid hedgehogs. “The fox—the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events—is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems.”
The best experts and the best mentors have flexible minds. The best experts and the best mentors won’t claim to have one big idea about how the world works. Instead, they will constantly evaluate and reevaluate. They learn. They update their view of the world. In the face of changing facts, they stay humble.
In Greek mythology, Chiron was a centaur—half horse and half man—and a great teacher. Many of the greatest Greek heroes were sent to study with him: he taught medicine to Asclepius, the first doctor, and navigation to Jason, who led a great sea voyage. Chiron was also a great warrior, and he taught Achilles to wield a sword and spear. Machiavelli wrote about the myth of Chiron and what it tells us about teaching: “Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. To have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures.” It wasn’t just what Chiron taught that mattered. It was who he was. The very fact that he was half beast and half man showed his students that to learn a discipline they also had to master themselves. Sometimes the life of the teacher is more than half the lesson.
The authority of trainers, teachers, and coaches comes from only one place: their willingness to take responsibility for results. The root of the word “authority” is the Latin word augere, which means “grow,” “increase,” or “enrich.” (This is also the root of the words “augment” and “author.”) In its root, we see that the idea of authority was once tied to someone’s ability to “author” a result.
Just as there are master painters of canvases, there are master painters of souls. Like paint, pain has to be applied with care to do its work well. Pain can lead to beauty, and pain can lead to strength, but applying pain recklessly or stupidly creates nothing but mess and ugliness. It’s easy to make people hurt. It’s easy to make a kid do one hundred pushups with a hose in his face.
Good teachers are comfortable with their students being uncomfortable, yet they understand that a confrontation with weakness, with ignorance, with pain, is not an end but a beginning. Awareness of our weakness opens a gateway to insight.
They have brought the trainee to the palace of insight, but they can’t unlock the gate. Embarrassed and confused by their own inability, they usually just keep shouting.
Steam, water, and ice are made up of the same building blocks, combined in almost the same way, but the environment around them profoundly shapes the form they take. In the same way, the elements of learning are often made up of the same building blocks and are combined in almost the same way. Pain is a part of learning. So is reflection.
In some conditions: pain + reflection = progress. We struggle. We reflect. We try again and grow stronger. But at other times: pain + reflection = whining. We think of how frustrated we are, and we complain rather than grow. In still other conditions: pain + reflection = drinking. We’re overwhelmed by the difficulty in front of us, and we turn to self-destructive activities.
The practice of resilience is about finding strategies for living, not formulaic, one-size-fits-all answers. You have to live your answers, and you have to do so in your world. You have to live your answers in your time, in your environment, facing all of the obstacles and using all of the assets you have at hand.
Good teachers or coaches know that what worked for the last student may not work for you. And they know that what worked for you yesterday may not work for you today.
Why is SEAL team training, the most difficult military training in the world, a source of fascination for so many people? In large part it’s because SEAL training embodies the possibility of transformation: it’s about turning a young man focused on himself into a warrior built to protect society.
“The Complete Warrior.” In it, I wrote about a few of the distinctions between the child and the warrior. When the child is skillful, he boasts. When the warrior has a skill, he teaches. When the child is strong, he attacks the weak. When the warrior is strong, he protects the weak. The child criticizes others to make himself feel better. The warrior is his own most demanding critic. The child brandishes symbols as a substitute for substance. The warrior knows that it is not his position, his rank, his education, or his warfare pin that makes him a man, but his honor. The child serves himself. The warrior serves others. The child relishes gossip. The warrior speaks through action. The child never makes mistakes. The warrior admits his mistakes and corrects them. The child’s character is cloudy. The warrior’s character is clear. If the child can recognize that he needs teaching, he may one day become a warrior. When the warrior meets the child, he seeks to teach him.
No matter how wise the master, he can teach nothing until the student is ready to learn. If you think you know everything, you can’t learn anything. The first thing we have to learn is that our cup is empty. Learning does not happen to you because you want it to. Learning is something you must prepare for. If you want to learn, make yourself ready to learn. This is the first task in any training, and it’s the most important, because it is the prerequisite for all other learning.

Eric Hoffer once wrote, “That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and exhilaration.”

LETTER 18 Teams

The strength of others can make us stronger. So let’s think a bit about how teams are formed, and what makes people come together. At the most basic level, people form bonds when they share things. Breaking bread brings people together. People also become connected through common study and shared discovery. We become close to the people with whom we discover the world.
I’d say that the extent to which personal differences disrupt a team is inversely proportional to the importance people place on the mission. In other words, the more vital people consider a mission, the more they’ll learn to deal with people who rub them the wrong way. The less the mission matters, the more people care about being around those they like. That’s helpful to remember if you’re ever on a team that’s starting to tear itself apart in the face of hardship. Often people react to these breakdowns by trying to ensure that there’s more “understanding,” or that people’s “feelings are respected.” Sometimes that’s essential. But much of the time, when animosities and jealousies rule the day, it’s because the work simply isn’t important enough for people to put their differences aside. We’re often told that work that’s too intense can break a team. Maybe—but intense work that matters can just as often save a team. Clarity of purpose creates perspective. When people have a shared commitment, differences and disagreements don’t disappear, but they can be seen in a new light.
Shared success can also help form teams. “Magnanimity” means “greatness of soul,” and Aristotle thought it was a suitable virtue for a successful and honorable person. The magnanimous person is not grasping, insecure, or jealous, not small or mean. The magnanimous person does not bear grudges or seek revenge. Rather, the magnanimous person is generous, eager to do a favor, quick to forget an insult, independent-minded, brave in the face of danger. The magnanimous move and speak with well-earned confidence. They are—the word sounds old-fashioned now—noble. People on successful teams can often find ways to be generous and kind with each other. Of course, shared success can lead to rivalry and jealousy, to backstabbing and broken promises. But it doesn’t have to. On a team with magnanimous people, shared success brings everyone together more tightly.
Real success is usually a product of struggle.
We need teams to face pain. It’s also often true that we need pain to build teams. Fractures and fissures can lead teams to crack and crumble under pressure. But teams that are moved by great purpose become tighter still when things are tough. Great teams are formed only when they experience this pain—when they sweat together, bleed together, cry together, struggle together.
But all resilient teams share one thing: an ability to manage many interests while serving a purpose that is larger than the interests of any one person.

LETTER 19 Leadership

I’ve found that life operates not by a series of rules, but by a set of consequences. What is true about how we live and lead is usually true only most of the time. Part of wisdom is knowing the exceptions to the rules. What is always true is that what you do will have consequences. With that in mind, there are still a few things worth special attention as we think about your resilient leadership.
I remember reading Henry V in school. The phrase “band of brothers” comes from Henry V. King Henry calls his army together, gets up on a tree stump, and tries to say something that will inspire his men. Remember, we’re in the Middle Ages here. Everyone in that army believes that the king gets his power directly from God. When the king speaks, they are listening to God’s representative on earth. So what does Henry say? “Fight for your king, so I can conquer France”? “You should all be honored to die for your king”? “Your king commands you to run across that field”? No. Here, according to Shakespeare, is what he says: He today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition. In other words, even if you are a fifteen-year-old peasant kid who’d never left the farm until the army came through, stuck a bow in your hands, and marched you to France, you can become royalty today. You can be the king’s brother, a gentleman, a prince. If you think of the most inspiring, effective leaders you’ve worked with, I bet you’ll find they have a lot in common with Henry V. Their devotion to their cause and to their team was greater than their devotion to perks and privilege. They worked and fought and struggled beside you. They endured what you endured. Think of officers sleeping on the same cold ground as their men, or employers working longer hours, traveling away from home more, shouldering responsibility, and taking blame. The idea is the same. Don’t do this for me—do this with me. A leader earns devotion by showing devotion.
Garry Wills called “a consummate actor.” Just to appear to walk in public, Roosevelt, with his polio-stricken legs, would have to shift his weight from a cane on one side to the son who held him up on the other side. “The strain always left his suit soaked with sweat, the hand on the cane shaking violently from the effort, the son’s arm bruised where his fingers had dug in. And all this while he would be smiling, keeping up pleasant banter, pretending to enjoy himself. It was an excruciating ordeal turned into a pleasant stroll.”
So there is no one list of a leader’s qualities. There is no one formula for leadership. But most of the time you’ll find that what we learned about leading in the SEAL teams still holds. Officers eat last. Leaders lead from the front. Never ask someone to endure more than you are willing to endure yourself.
But nothing truly valuable—from painting a portrait to raising a child to preparing for a game—is accomplished without persistent work. And people who can perform only when they have someone chanting slogans beside them are rarely capable of such work.
A lot of leaders begin with a mechanical mindset: find what’s missing or broken and replace or repair it. But in many social systems, the trick isn’t to repair what’s broken, but to multiply what’s working. Who has well-fed children? Who’s been injured and is still working? Who lost friends and is still serving? Be a model yourself. Then promote other people who can serve as models. Through emulation and multiplication, communities can begin to heal themselves. If you can fix something that needs to be fixed, go ahead and fix it. But real leadership is most often needed where simple solutions have already been tried and have failed. When things are hard, sometimes the best thing you can do is to drown what’s wrong in a sea of what’s right.
To inspire is to put the spirit, the breath of life, into something. To inspire is to help someone answer a simple question: why? Too often, however, we are quick to jump to the how—instruction in the tools of management—without asking if the leader in training has the right why. If you’re going to lead, it’s essential that you ask it of yourself again: why? What are you leading for? What are you willing to sacrifice for? Do you want to lead and expect some other sucker to do the hard work? Or do you want to lead because you believe enough in something to put your comfort, your ease, even your life on the line for it?
Dreams become reality through work and sacrifice. People who stoke fantasies about the way of the world often stumble and fall on first contact with reality. Other times, they confuse thinking or talking about what they want to accomplish with actually doing the work. And just as this is true of individuals, it’s also true of teams, groups, communities, and countries. That’s why one of the recurring themes in Marcus Aurelius’s writings is, “Leadership’s responsibility is to work intelligently with what is given and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.” Walker, you’ll be able to lead others not because you promote a fantasy about the way the world will be, but because of what you are willing to do.
We are almost always better led by men and women who have been hardworking, resilient failures early in life than by those who, by dint of privilege, luck, or circumstance, rise through life without ever having put their souls into a task that tries them. We are almost always better led by those who have pushed themselves up to and past their limits than by those who don’t know where their limits are.
Wise people look for a history of success and failure in a leader. Find in your failures resources for your own leadership. Let them be proof that you’ve pushed yourself. Let them be a constant reminder of how hard it is to fight well, and of how hard you must fight when you are down. Let them be a reminder of how and where you’ve earned your wisdom.
Beware the person who seeks to lead and has not suffered, who claims responsibility on the grounds of a spotless record. We can only be well led by those who have learned well the habits of resilience. Those habits take work, pain, and time. Resilience is a leader’s defining trait—not only because the leader of any worthwhile effort will have to confront hardship and suffering, but because the character of a true leader can only be forged in the fire where resilience does its work.
You speak through your actions. The vast majority of training is modeling. The vast majority of inspiration comes by example. Henry V didn’t merely speak some nice words and then hide. He spoke some true words and then fought. Leadership isn’t a set of techniques or tricks. Like resilience, it’s a way of being. If you want to inspire devotion, be devoted. If you want to inspire belief, believe. If you want to motivate, be motivated. You can’t fake any of it. If you want to lead, get yourself right first.

LETTER 20 Freedom

Creativity—ours and others’—makes life beautiful. We have to learn to think for ourselves, to question authority, and to disregard the rules at the right time. It’s often a fun experiment or a helpful technique to paint without a canvas,
Let’s think about freedom for a second. In the United States we spend most of our time thinking about freedom from. Some philosophers call this idea negative liberty, because it’s rooted in a belief about what other people cannot do to you. It’s fundamental to the American conception of the proper and limited role of government. Because most Americans think about freedom from in the context of rights and government, we often forget—in the context of our own lives—to think about freedom to: the freedom to accomplish what we want.
When it comes to creativity, people often focus on freedom from. They think they’d be more creative if they were only free from constraints, from interference, from obligations. We’d do better to spend as much time thinking about freedom to. You can be free from rules and obligations, but that doesn’t make you free to create. Some of our freedom can only be won through self-mastery. The inventive man on the trumpet is someone who earned the freedom to play his horn with genius. It’s likely he spent years shut in small rooms, practicing and playing and practicing some more. There’s a word for that among jazz musicians: woodshedding. Originally, it meant that you went out back, locked yourself in a shed, and spent hours at a time honing your technique in private.
Paul Klemperer explained it this way: “You have to dig deep into yourself, discipline yourself, become focused on the music and your instrument, before you can unlock the treasure chest. At the same time, woodshedding is a process of demystifying the music. The amazing solo, the intricate bebop melody, the complex rhythmic pattern, can be learned, if one is patient. It is a humbling but necessary chore, like chopping wood before you can start the fire.”
Excellence is renewed through deliberate practice, day in and day out.
Imagine that you have something important to do one morning, but before you can get out of bed, someone comes into your house and holds you down—not all day, but for a crucial hour or two. You’d probably kick that person’s ass. But that person, Walker, is you. And for me, it’s me. It’s all of us who rail against the way the world is designed, but who don’t muster the effort to master ourselves. Most of us can make ourselves more free through self-mastery.
The object in life is not to have as few commitments as possible, but to have the right kinds of commitments. When you make a commitment that’s in keeping with what you value most, you’ve made a decision to be your best self. And when you keep that commitment—when you get up at three in the morning to answer Keith’s cries, when you stand in the rain to help those kids learn football, when you show up at church and volunteer—you’re making yourself into the man you want to be.
Many people try to find balance in their lives first, and then run. Sometimes that works. But a lot of times it’s in the running itself that you find your balance. You plan and calculate and obsess over finding your balance before you begin to run, you’ll often wind up flat on your face. The balance comes in the running.
When people use the phrase “work-life balance,” most of them imagine a seesaw or a scale. On one end is “work,” and on the other end is “life.” The two are linked in such a way that everything is a tradeoff. If work is up, life is down. If life is up, work is down. Life and work are not two enemies battling for our limited attention. In fact, the opposite tends to be the case. When we have meaningful, fulfilling, purposeful work, it radiates through our lives. And when we have happy, secure, loving relationships, they, too, radiate through our lives.
At certain times, particular aspects of our lives come to the fore, while others fall into the background. As new harmonies emerge, we can create something beautiful. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
If you feel that every moment of life is a moment of slacking from work, or that every moment at work is a moment that you’re, say, stealing time from your daughter, I don’t know how you’d stay sane. Some people aim to solve this problem by half committing to everything they do. And, of course, everything ends up mediocre.
You need intensity tempered by intensity. Work hard. Pray powerfully. Exercise intensely. Laugh raucously. Love completely. And then . . . sleep deeply.
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

LETTER 21 Story

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

Alasdair MacIntyre, He wrote, “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.” We learn who we are and where we come from, what is right and what is wrong, from hearing and telling stories—something that begins in infancy and lasts as long as we’re alive: Your life, Walker, isn’t just one kind of story. It’s not simply a romance or a tragedy or a comedy. Your story will have elements of death and rebirth, rivalry and revenge, temptation and sacrifice, discovery and deliverance, envy and love; and it will have all of these things not just one time, but many times over.
Think of your life in terms of a quest. What’s a quest? It’s a journey with meaning. It’s not a treasure hunt, where X marks the spot and reaching that spot is what matters. On a quest we discover the true nature of what we’re after only by going on the journey.
“It is in the course of the quest and only through encountering and coping with the various particular harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which provide any quest with its episodes and incidents that the goal of the quest is finally to be understood.”
You figure out the purpose of your life by living your life. You give meaning to your quest by what you do and say and suffer. The challenges you face and the choices you make create the meaning of your story. The harms, dangers, temptations, and distractions that confront you are obstacles, yes, but it’s only by wrestling with those obstacles that your purpose can be understood.
Rilke put this well: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Without knowledge of the past, we become lost in the present and fearful of the future. Knowing our history can make us more resilient, especially when we understand our connection to the people who went before us. I recently read about a study on kids’ mental toughness. The more kids knew about their family history, the more resilient they turned out to be.
Often, it seems to me, they think the hardship they face is their own fault. Children, especially, tend to be self-centered, and it’s natural for them to ask the question, “Why me?” If kids don’t know that everyone has struggled, that everyone has suffered, they are more likely to conclude that they are what’s wrong.
Yes, your life is hard. Yes, you have suffered. And if you are hurting and I can help, then I am here for you. But your hardship makes you human; it does not make you unique. An absence of historical awareness often leads to an abundance of self-fascination.
If you want to understand why storytelling is so essential to resilience, you have to understand this: Stories are not an endless stream of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” Out of the raw material of events, some details are cut. Your life is no different. The events of your life are raw material, and they take on the meaning you give them. Your mind isn’t a camera. You don’t just record; you select, you recall, you reinterpret the events of your life. All of this is part of storytelling.
Storytelling is not just a way to remember what happened; it’s a way to understand what happened. When you tell a story, you give an event meaning. In storytelling we bring past, present, and future together in a way that helps us to make sense of events and make sense of our lives.
Different people put the same raw material to vastly different uses. “I messed up again.” Or, “I was brave and I tried. But I failed to prepare and I failed. Now I’m going to practice.” A different story doesn’t change the fact of what happened, but it does change the meaning of what happened. That is how resilient people tell stories. Failure and pain and hardship have the meaning we choose to give them.
But the professor I worked with and others had found that two interventions were especially good at helping those children deal with trauma. Sometimes he’d ask them to draw about what they’d lived through. Later, some of the kids might put on a play about what they had endured. The simple point is that the act of drawing a picture and then explaining it, or designing a play and then acting it, helped kids begin to make sense of what had happened to them.
Centuries ago, in fact, writers recognized that the best stories often start in medias res, in the middle of things. They realized that time in stories doesn’t run like time on clocks. In a story, the real beginning comes when things start to matter in a different way.
You’re going to live a real life. It’s not going to be perfect; it won’t always be pretty. But you can decide what the themes of your story are going to be.
These are the themes you’ve chosen for yourself. You are the author of your own story. What are you going to write today?
There will come a day when the lights go out one last time, a day when the work and the living and the loving is all done. No one knows for certain what lies beyond that day. But if you’ve lived well, you can hope to become part of a story that others are proud to tell.

LETTER 22 Death

There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by and is lost.—ANTIPHON (FIFTH CENTURY BC)

Your time is limited. It’s precious because it’s finite. You don’t know how much you’ll get, so you know to appreciate what you’ve got. And it’s in this way that death—the source of our greatest fears, the fear behind all fears—provides the urgency behind our greatest efforts.
We know we’re going to die. But we’re pretty darned good at forgetting it. Forget too long and you can spend a lifetime postponing and procrastinating. You can put off the life you want to live until you wake up to find that it’s too late. You study but never act. You plan but never travel. You think it, but never tell anyone you love them.
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. The best analogy I’ve ever heard about this says that death is like the sun. It infuses every part of our lives, but it doesn’t make sense to stare at it.
A lot of ancient philosophers recognized that through disciplined reflection on death, we bring urgency and vividness and meaning to the days that we live. They didn’t “practice for death” because they were gloomy, or morbid, or because they wanted everyone to appreciate how “deep” they were. They did it because they wanted to live more fully.
Seneca captured the idea clearly: “At the moment we go to sleep, let us say, in joy and gaiety: ‘I have lived. I have traveled the path which Fortune assigned to me.’ If a god gives us the next day as a bonus, let us receive it with joy . . . Whoever has said to himself ‘I have lived’ can arise each day to an unexpected. Think about it. When do you see things most vividly and love things most intensely? Often it’s when you first discover them—or when they’re about to be taken away.
We talked before about mental rehearsal and visualization. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius believed in the importance of mentally rehearsing their own deaths. They recognized the role of fortune enough to know that it was impossible to predict the exact time or place they would die. At the same time, they knew that we can prepare for death, as we can prepare for any fearful thing.
What lives on is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what we have woven into the lives of others. Those who have lived with us become a part of us.
Your life carries forward the story of all those who shaped it for the good and who are now gone. And you can live in such a way that those after you will be proud to weave your life into their own.

LETTER 23 Sabbath

Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.—ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

We’re even more skilled than the Romans at dominating nature and controlling space. We spend the bulk of our lives doing things. And yet some of the most meaningful parts of our lives come when we simply choose to be, when we let time carry us, when we “face sacred moments.” Space is something we strive to control and conquer; you can grab things with your hands. You can’t grab time. You can’t slow it down or speed it up. Time is beyond your control. Yet you have to live meaningfully in time as well as in space.
We should move through fear to courage. We should move through suffering to strength. We should move through pain to wisdom. But sometimes we don’t have to move at all. We simply have to be, and to practice the virtue of restful joy in a world that is not at rest.
What matters most is that you find time to stop. Stop striving, stop struggling, stop thinking about how to be resilient. Find joy and rest in a world that never stops moving.
Don’t think of this quiet as a way to “recharge” for the work in front of you. That may well be what happens, but to treat your Sabbath as a way to prepare for work is just another way of making the Sabbath work by another name.
If we’re resilient, we fill them with purpose, with meaning, with wisdom, and with work. And then on the Sabbath—whether it comes once a week at sunset or when you catch your breath looking in your new child’s eyes—we turn the crowded page, just as you can turn to the last page I’ll send you for now, and we rest.