How to Get Through the Hard Stuff
Why most advice about grit and resilience sucks and what to do instead
Grit is important. I get it — you get it — we all get it! But why does most advice about how to build grit suck?
Grit, sometimes known as resilience in more clinical places, is the ability to keep your life moving forward after setbacks. While it is a universal truth that no human life is without pain or problems, it often feels like so many people who choose to write about grit have never faced a setback in life that they didn’t have enough money to handle.
Better planning doesn’t solve poverty. Happy mantras don’t dispel years of abuse. Smiling won’t bring back loved ones who have passed on.
And while all pain is relative, the truth is that coming from a certain level of wealth protects you against the worst elements of the tragedies and traumas that most of us have to live through.
So much advice about resilience comes down to the simple lines from the wonderful children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt:
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!
Telling this to an adult as a way of saying you should have grit is a bit like telling someone who is drowning that their life would be…
