Dr. Thomas Powell describes resilience as a learnable skill built through deliberate practice. He survived a childhood house fire, poverty, a $400 million business loss, and family cancer, then channeled those setbacks into extreme physical challenges like ultramarathons and Everest-scale climbs. Start small with incremental difficulty, he says, and let hard things reshape your character.
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Imagine you're snow skiing the world's steepest terrain, keeping pace with Olympians. You don't get there without falling. Viktor Frankl, in his book Man's Search for Meaning, taught you cannot control what happens, but you can choose your response. Dr. Tom Powell learned resiliency early, losing his childhood home to fire, living in poverty, growing up without parents, and carrying responsibility too soon. He proved that when you refuse to quit, a path appears. An entrepreneur since 12, Tom lost and rebuilt fortunes, became a deep learner, and just recently brought a constitutional case to the U.S. Supreme Court. His message for you is titled Resiliency Is a Learned Choice. Please help me welcome Dr. Thomas J. Powell.
Thank you, sir. Thank you. Still so weird to hear that. I'm just a ski bum. Imagine, come out with me. Cornice about this tall. You guys all just look over, and that's the drop straight down. And then you look down, you see 2 large granite rocks, and between those is a little pathway of white. Speeds are going to exceed 65, 70 miles an hour after you hit and you ski down. Now, in skiing, a lot of people think that it's the peak. But for any of the hikers out there, it's not the peak. It's the coming back down where we lose most hikers, right? And it's the same obviously in skiing as we start sliding down. And this talk really isn't about skiing, but it is about Resilience. Now resilience starts with being— one of the first things you have to do is you have to lean in when you go over, because if you fall back, guess what's happening? You're going straight down. Life's kind of like that, right? So Joe talked about the fact that, yeah, I lost my house when I was young. I didn't even think about that until I actually started writing the speech. You know, it's like 50-plus years ago. Didn't think about growing up cold, didn't think about growing up without parents. Most of the time I just thought that was my normal Childhood, right? I did start a business when I was 12. That also didn't seem unusual to me. But what I did do all of that for was because I had a love of skiing. And the reason, I think, all these years later that I found out that I really love skiing is because it taught me the 3 major things that have brought me a lot of happiness, a lot of success, And a lot of joy in my life, which it really wasn't about the skiing, it was about what it taught me. And the first one was to have big goals. The second one was to learn from others as much as I possibly could. And the third one was to get up when you've fallen down and to keep getting up.
Because?
Because you're going to keep falling down. And that, for me, is the definition of resiliency, is when your mind says— you're looking at that edge. And I think most of you can feel that, what that's like, right? You're looking right down there, 15, 20 feet before you touch, right? What do you want to do? You want to slide back. The brain says, no, you can't do this. Not today. No, we're not. That's resiliency. When you push past what the mind says you can't do or you shouldn't do. Now, as entrepreneurs, there's probably some times that we do push past when our mind says we shouldn't do it. And my wife lovingly says to me, you know, we have this theory that we say we can do it. Sometimes we probably should ask, should we do it? But, I don't think any of us have that button. I surely don't have that button. So, I usually go past that. So, goals. Let's start there. Why are big goals important? We talked about this yesterday. Actually, I think Joe just put together this whole program just so I could be able to do my talk. But, big goals are not important about what you achieve. Yeah, it's great to have an airplane. It's great to live in big houses and have properties and things all over the world. That stuff all is cool. Until you don't, right? So, Joe talks about when, you know, having fortunes, lost fortunes. One of my talks was how I lost $400 million. What he didn't talk about in that same year was I lost my best friend and business partner. She died suddenly. I lost my ability to do my business because of a business bureaucrat. I lost—
Your job.
What I thought were most of my friends and some of the family members, it was like a Job story, right? And then they found a tumor and took it out. It was the same cancer that my mom had died from 35 years ago, all in the same year. Kind of interesting, right? The important part of that, the big goals, was after all of those things, I realized I had become a person that, that really did not, I thought, impact. The reality is it did impact me, but I kept getting up. So that's the reason I implore you all to write and achieve big goals. It's not because of actually the achievement, it's about who you become in achieving that.
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Now the second one is get around the right people. Do that through books, tapes. The great thing about being ingenious is, is that I say tapes and now everybody's on iPods or whatever type scenario, but I still say tapes because that's where, you know, Joel Weldon— I got Joel Weldon tapes, right? I've got Earl Nightingale tapes and Jim Rohn tapes and You know, all of these Franklin Covey tapes, right? And at one point, I actually realized that for me to take on this fight that was going to be the biggest fight of my life that has led me to the US Supreme Court, that I'd have to get more education. So I went back to school and got 2 more advanced law degrees, right, to be able to do that. So the education never stops. And that also is about the same thing. It's about who you become, because once you have that— and I think Viktor Frankl says it so well— once you have it, they can never take it away from you. It doesn't matter. So you can always build back bigger, faster, stronger. So the last part is the resiliency. You fall, you get down, you get yourself back up. Your mind— how many of us have had That moment where our mind says, I can't do it anymore. Whether you're working on a tough math problem and you hate math and you're like, I can't, I just can't learn this. Or you're learning a second language or you're learning how to ski and snowboard or slide around on snow, which seems like it's an absolutely ridiculous thing, right? Well, let me tell you about the resiliency that I learned too, was that I knew I wanted to ski so bad. I don't know why I wanted to ski. When I was 8 years old, my mom's bedridden. I take money that I had from folding newspapers for the local paperboy. We used to have those, right? People that delivered papers to the houses. So I would fold the papers for them. I earned that money. I used that to be able to get onto the ski mountain. I borrowed ski equipment that was too big for me. It was adult size, and I was 8 years old, right? And I walked about a mile and a half to the bus. to be able to ride it up to the ski mountain. Now, it was the '70s, so we used to let kids do that. Right. So— but the big part of that was— it was the resiliency. Now, the talk here is about resiliency can be learned. I haven't talked about that at all yet. How do we build resiliency? Well, it is sticking to it on that math problem until you get it. Getting the help that you need to be able to do it and getting back up if you have to stop to come back and try it again. I do it generally in the physical side. So I do things such as the Death Ride, 16,000 vertical feet, 140 miles in one day. And so that's one thing I do. 3 ultramarathons in 3 days at, again, altitude. 29.029. Jesse did this thing where you can go out and you can climb the equivalent of Everest in one day, right? Which is kind of fun. You get to ride up, climb up, take a gondola back down. These are the things that every time you're doing it, the first thing you look at is go, why am I doing this? I want to stop. It's because the resiliency is learned in those moments when you know you can stop. And you don't stop. And the more you put yourself in those positions, I have found that that is the time you push through resiliency. That's the time that the goals that you're working towards actually come into vision and become achievable. And that's the time that the lessons that you've been learning from all those other people that are out there, when you're a lifetime learner, You're able to say, I can apply this here. So the 3 go together. Again, big goals because of who you'll become, the lifetime learning because of who you will become, and the resiliency so you have the strength to get through there and to not quit. Now, The great thing about that little mountain that I went to is when you become resilient, when you've had big goals, and when you've built things, you sometimes get to hold the door open for the people that are coming up behind you. And that's the greatest gift of all. So I'm the president now of that mountain. It's a nonprofit mountain. Teach thousands of kids how to ski and snowboard. Sounds not all that important, except it's really important to get kids outside if you want to have healthy, You want to get outside. And so I'm very proud to be a part of that. And the big thing about the hard things, we can all start. We can do 50 squats. Right, Reagan?
That's right.
And if you can't do 50, start 20, do 10. You can go there. So come with me. Look over that cornice. Take a deep breath. Know that you've prepared. You have the goals, the people, and you have the resilience.
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