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Do you think you're tough?
How tough?
How much adversity can you overcome?
I want to give you a couple of scenarios and
I want you to take a second, put yourself in each one.
What would you do if your boss gave you a negative review?
What would you if you pitched your startup, and the investor passed?
What would you do if the company you spent 20 years building went bankrupt?
What would you do if you were diagnosed with cancer?
Now this guy in front is thinking, whoa whoa, that first set of questions
is completely different from that second set of questions.
A bad review is nothing like cancer.
And I would say, exactly, that's the point of my talk.
>> [LAUGH] >> I want to show that not only are there
different kinds of adversity, there are also different kinds of resilience.
There are lots of words for this characteristic.
Resilience, emotional fortitude, toughness, grit.
They have slightly different meanings.
They overlap some, but by and
large, they refer to the ability of individuals to overcome adversity.
The problem is that no matter what words we use,
we tend to think of it as a single spectrum.
Really weak people get overwhelmed by one bad review.
Really tough people can watch their whole career go up in smoke, and
not miss a step.
But that doesn't capture all of it.
As the guy in front pointed out, these are different kinds of stressors.
It would make sense that they would illicit different reactions, and
require different coping mechanisms, even from a tough person.
This has been bothering me and I had a sudden burst of clarity when I realized
that these same words that we used to describe people, also have meanings when
they describe the ways that physical materials deform under stress.
In mechanical engineering, deformation and
reaction to stress follows an established pattern.
Materials first deform elastically,
which is to say that they bend in response to stress.
But when the stress is removed, they bend back.
This period of elastic deformation continues to a point called
the yield strength.
Here's some calculus, you ready?
>> [LAUGH] >> The area under the curve between
the origin and yield strength is actually called toughness.
Toughness is effectively a measure of how much stress the material can take
and still recover.
It dovetails remarkably well with definitions that we see in psychology.
In mechanical engineering, there's a little bit more.
What happens when stress exceeds yield strength?
Mechanically, it's called plastic deformation.
The material bends permanently or
even breaks at what's known as a fracture point, which leads to what happened to me.
I fractured my tibial plateau, where the shin bone meets the knee joint,
I was tobogganing and I lost control, hit a pole.
To mitigate the risks of internal bleeding, I needed surgery that night.
Surgeons drilled two metal rods into my tibia, and
two metal rods into my femur, connected all four with an external fixation device.
A week later, I had another surgery in which they implanted a metal rod and
a dozen screws.
All told, the sentence was 16 days in the hospital, 12 weeks on crutches,
a year of physical therapy, and unknown permanent damage.
I hit my fracture point, literally.
How does that happen?
It's different for everyone, but
I'd say we go there when something really important to us changes permanently.
A job, a reputation, a relationship, or in my case, a leg.
That idea of permanent damage to the leg that I had intended to use for
marathon running and mountain climbing, the leg that I was maybe a little vainly
proud of, hit me hard, harder than other challenges I'd overcome.
Somehow, I couldn't help but think, what if this weren't my leg?
How would I react if this were my company?
That was a scary thought.
I'd long nurtured entrepreneurial inclinations and
the market can dish out plenty of challenges of its own.
If I was flat on my back with a broken leg,
how could I reasonably expect to lead in the face of corporate-sized adversity?
This is where mechanical engineering, of all things, made so much sense to me.
Mechanically, there are two types of deformation reactions in
response to stress.
In elastic deformation, materials bend but they end up back where they were,
in plastic deformation they bend or break and need to be rebuilt.
I think that people bend two different ways as well and that means there should
be two different such a skills for coping with stress, but we mostly talk about one.
We call people resilient when they can take a punch and get right back up.
Being tough is certainly a good goal, it's been one of mine for a long time.
But what about being good at rebuilding?
What do you do after, not just a punch but a knockout?
That was something I hadn't been taught, and so
I went about trying to find best practices.
My favorites came from the field of survivorship,
research on people who have made it out of life and death situations.
The first thing successful survivors do right
is move quickly from denial to acceptance.
They don't dwell on what's been lost or
think about the unfairness of their predicament.
Even in non-life threatening situations, that's so much easier said than done.
But it can be done.
When Jimmy Carter lost the election in 1980, he said that he went home, slept for
an entire day and awoke to what he called a new, unwanted, potentially empty life.
Unwanted, that's the tricky part.
But only potentially empty.
Carter never became president again, but
he did move on to international conflict mediation and the Nobel Peace Prize.
A second trait of successful survivors is the ability to set small goals and
the willingness to celebrate small wins.
Recognizing even small victories can help prevent a descent into hopelessness.
In 2013, ski racer Lindsey Vonn suffered a catastrophic crash.
She tore her ACL, MCL, meniscus and fractured her tibial plateau.
I can't know whether she did any wallowing but
I do know that two days after surgery, she was doing core strength exercises.
Three weeks after surgery, she was on a bike.
As soon as she could bear weight, she did squats.
She didn't actually ski for 203 days but by the time she did, she was strong.
Finally, survivors get help but they also give it.
Giving help takes you out of yourself.
It lets you be a rescuer, not a victim.
When Mickey Drexler was fired from his role as CEO of the GAP,
he found another company to help, in the form of a struggling J.Crew brand.
He invested $10 million of his own money,
took one-tenth of his former salary, and managed to catapult the company from a $30
million operating loss to a $37 million profit in just a year.
Move on from what's lost, set small goals, get and give help.
Whether these things really make the difference, I'm not sure.
I'm trying.
What I do know is that all of us, at some point, either already have or
will need to rebuild and I'm convinced that this
rebuilding requires different skills than traditional resilience.
In the wake of trauma, almost everyone experiences some depression anxiety.
Most go on to move past those early feelings and
some become psychologically stronger than they were before.
Psychologists call it Post Traumatic Growth.
It's what I'm hoping for when I talk about rebuilding.
You guessed it, I have to pull up my favorite graph one more time.
In elastic deformation, you bend but you end up exactly where you were.
In plastic deformation, you bend or break and you're going to end up different.
What kind of different depends upon how you rebuild.
Bouncing back and rebuilding are different skill sets.
Let's develop both.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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