Resilience and Suffering
Sweet Bites for January 10, 2025
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
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📚 Wisdom
“We each have to take responsibility for our lives. The decisions, the willpower, the stamina, and resilience are up to us. But for most of us, it is other people who make the necessary difference to our lives, guiding us, inspiring us, lifting us, and giving us hope. It is the quality of our relationships that more than anything gives us a sense of meaning and fulfillment.”
Jonathan Sacks
Source: Morality
💭 Reflection for Weekend
How important is pain and suffering for character building? How does it teach one to build resilience?
According to NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, it’s built through suffering. He believes in order to find true success in life, one needs to suffer so as to learn setbacks and how to overcome them.
Huang credits his parents with teaching him the lessons of life. He states he was fortunate enough to grow up in a household with conditions to succeed as well as suffer.
“To this day I use the word, the phrase, “pain and suffering” inside our company with great glee. ‘This is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering,’ and I mean that in a happy way because you want to train. You want to refine the character of your company.”
Aristotle said character and virtue were not inherited but built through practice—training, on a daily basis.
“We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp,” he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics. “Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”
But does one need to suffer in order to build resilience? Or is encountering a setback and finding a way forward enough to start building the muscles? Does true suffering have to be involved? If so, is it because of the emotional attachment to the setback and therefore you’re emotionally driven by a need to overcome the setback?
🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation
🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📖 Book Recommendation
Mindset by Carol Dweck
One of my favorite books, Dweck dives into her research in resilience and success. Her research on Fixed versus Growth mindsets helped change the way people thought about success and the traits required to flourish.
A few favorite passages:
“My research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.“
—
“The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”
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“In short, when people believe in fixed traits, they are always in danger of being measured by a failure. It can define them in a permanent way.
Smart or talented as they may be, this mindset seems to rob them of their coping resources.
When people believe their basic qualities can be developed, failures may still hurt, but failures don't define them. And if abilities can be expanded-if change and growth are possible then there are still many paths to success.”
📚 Wisdom 📗
The below quote comes from N interview Godin recently gave for the release of his new book, This is Strategy.
“Strategy isn't just for Microsoft and Apple. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming… one day soon the person you are hoping to become is going to meet the person you are. How's that meeting going to go? Because that meeting could go really well. You could say, yeah, I invested in Microsoft. Four years ago to be where I am now and I'm glad we met, thank you. But it also could be a cause for heartbreak and a lot of the challenges of modern mental health is about that heartbreak of dreams not met, of finding ourselves in a bind, feeling trapped. Well, that's all strategy… Good strategies always outperform. In the long run, strategies that are just intuitive. We're just winging it.”
If you enjoyed the quote, you can checkout the full interview below.
🎥 Video I Enjoyed
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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