Short excerpt from a talk by Adam Markel emphasizing resilience as essential for sustained impact. Markel cites an HBR study comparing elite athletes and other high achievers, arguing that rapid recovery (bounce-back) differentiates top performers. He presents three practical keys to resilience: reframe setbacks, extract the lesson from failures, and create rituals for recovery.
Chapters
But we've got to be resilient because the work we're doing is too important. The work you're doing is too important in the world for you to falter. So you've got to be resilient. What's the word? Thank you. Resilience is the key so that you can bounce back. Resilience leads to success. This is what I want you to know. This is really the core of my teaching that we've got to be. To be successful, to be an influence, to be an impact, to be a difference in the world. We have to be. It won't work if we're not here or if we're not at our best. So I love this Harvard Business Review study that compared high performing athletes, the ones that are in the Olympics, that are standing on the podium with the gold medal. And they compared those athletes to people that were high performers and high achievers in other areas, including in business and in careers. And what they found was that the highest performing athletes as well as other achievers had something that they did that others couldn't do as well. And that is to recover. What's the word? Recover. Thank you. To recover. They recover quickly, they bounce back quickly. That's what helps them to succeed mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. They have rituals for recovery. So we have three keys to resilience that we teach and I want to share them with you very quickly. Now, the three keys are that you reframe. Look, we all know the pressure. We all know the situations, the stories of things that go wrong, that are difficult. The question is, can we reframe, frame those situations in a positive light? This is not positive thinking. This is power thinking to see what's right with the world. DeWitt Jones gave a beautiful TEDx talk about that. What's right with the world. There's a lot of what's right with the world is in this room right now. Yes, yes. So you reframe. It does deserve applause, right? I mean, it's not easy to celebrate ourselves. I won't get into that now, but I think one of the biggest challenges that many people have is just to be able to receive great at giving. Lots of people are great at giving, not always so great at receiving. I want you to receive the love that is here for you this week, the appreciation and the gratitude for what you do. Will you do that? Will you guys be great receivers this week? Do you promise? We'll see. Right. So you reframe and then you find the lesson. What's the nugget? This is what teaching the essence of teaching is not just teaching a lesson, but finding a lesson. We can learn from our students as well. We learn from our mistakes. The things we call failures are feedback. The things we call failures is finding out what doesn't work sometimes. And when you know what doesn't work, you know what does work. It's very interesting, curious relationship between those things. And then lastly, you create rituals for recovery, because this is the key that we recover. And we recover quickly. We bounce back even farther and higher and stronger than we were before.
