Change your mind-set on hardships

Challenge yourself: How hardships help you be a wiser version of yourself

Life is very hard.

You might be experiencing money problems, career setbacks, personal traumas, business mistakes, entrepreneurial failures, family drama, domestic violence, or performance issues.

However, hardships make you stronger and help you grow into a mindful and wise person. You will be bolder and more resilient.

Suffering brings the best of us and cultivates our best selves. It is an exercise in character building. As a result of hardships, we grow to be more elegant and accountable in our lives, careers, and business.

Without suffering we cannot develop the necessary wisdom for long term contribution.

Viktor Frankl was imprisoned at concentration camps by Nazis, including Auschwitz. His wife and family were killed by the Nazis. He was still able to write one of the most influential books in history: “Man’s Search For Meaning”.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison before he became the president of South Africa.

Albert Einstein could not get a job in physics for two years after graduation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt overcame polio and paralysis before he was elected.

Jack Ma talks in length about his failures in his life in this Davos talk:

In my own life, I dealt with a lot of failures and hardships.

Years ago, I almost quit my Ph.D. at McGill University because I was stuck. I could not write or make progress on my thesis for a long time. I was on the brink of losing all my hope to become an academic. I could not see any lights at the end of the tunnel. Nevertheless, I continued my journey and finished my Ph.D.

I had to apply to more than 120 academic jobs in my career and I have got more than 110 rejections from these applications.

Similarly, I received more than 100 rejections from my article submissions to academic journals.

Getting hundreds of rejections is very hard and painful — you sometimes feel all the joy is sucked out of you. You feel that you are not good enough however hard you try. It is too easy to give up and lose your hope during these challenging times.

Success requires a mind-set of growth.

We can always choose how we react to events surrounding us.

We can resist the temptation to blame others and rise to the occasion.

We can recognize our mistakes, gaps, and shortcomings.

We can develop more skills, knowledge, and resilience to do better next time.

We can build stronger mental models, patience, and discipline.

We can build smart work systems to be more creative and productive.

We can keep learning, experimenting, and producing our best work possible.

When we do these things, we will survive and thrive. And that is what matters.

To continue our journey, we need a lot of mental resilience.

We need to re-think our perspective on hardships and difficulties.

Please look at the poster below (I created this poster as a reminder to myself).

Now, please create action points for yourself:

How will you put this mental toughness into action?

How can you apply these principles in your life?

Can you create your own poster to deal with challenges and difficulties?

Or, can you write yourself a letter to build your own morale and resilience when things get harder and harder?

Please identify 5 action points and implement them.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

I hope you find the power, courage, and resilience to overcome the challenges you are currently facing in your life.

Let us finish with the words of Roger Crawford:

“Being challenged in life is inevitable, being defeated is optional.”

Sincerely;

Fahri

Fahri Karakas is the author of Self-making Studio.

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