“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.” — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Much is made of intelligence and its role in allowing a person to assimilate new information and gain new skills. Intelligence is important, I agree. In fact, I have long maintained that intelligence is a moral responsibility. We must each cultivate, feed, and grow our intelligence in order to be effective human beings. Empathy and emotional intelligence have also garnered a lot of study and attention in more recent years. The ability to “read the room” and understand what people might be feeling, put yourself in their shoes and see the world from their perspective regardless of your own is a life skill I have found every bit as important and utilitarian as critical thinking and reasoning. People, after all, rarely if ever act out of rational thought and logic. It’s important to understand and be able to work with the real motives of action and decision-making if you mean to be an effective part of society. But times seem to be getting harder. Many of the solutions we are coming up with to alleviate the problems we face will bring with them a whole new crop of problems we’ve never anticipated. The magic bullet meant to put an end to the most dire situations we face will, almost inevitably, bring with it unanticipated circumstances and challenges we don’t have the wherewithal to overcome without some serious struggle. That’s why, sometimes, the first quality we have to cultivate - even ahead of intellect and emotional intelligence - is pure, simple, unfiltered grit.
In metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. Toughness is the strength with which the material opposes rupture. It doesn’t mean the material won’t change shape or show dents and dings - it means it will not fail. It’s not so different when it comes to people. Toughness is the quality that allows us to go through abusive times, painful trials, crushing life lessons, and come out on the other side without the lingering, crippling trauma that redefines some people as victims even in their own minds. Toughness is the quality that allows us to face the most grinding punishments life can dish out and remember always “I have a say in this. I am not some brittle thing that will shatter against sharp blows. Life will not break me as I sit idly, waiting for the cracks in me to widen and deepen and destroy me.” Toughness is not only the resistance to these things, but the ability to take the dents and dings and scars and move on without the trauma that caused them. The ding, the dent, the scar - those can be reminders. They can be the personal memorials to lessons learned and new mindsets and habits created. They can be the symbols that remind us that we have, in fact, lived through every single one of our “Worst Days Ever” and come through unkilled by the experience. Toughness lets us keep the lessons, but ditch the traumas. It allows us to be a meaningful force in any situation in which we find ourselves, no matter how many times similar situations have bested us. Toughness is the key ingredient in many things, including intelligence. Learning, thinking, requiring doubt of yourself, assailing those sacred ideas you hold dear without knowing why - all of that is hard! Without toughness, it’s all too easy to have your thinking challenged and shrink away from finding out whether your thinking was correct, or whether the challenge will undermine something you believe. It is the main ingredient in empathy as well. Without toughness, it can feel pretty impossible to bear up under the weight of your own thoughts, emotions, and problems and still find the will to put yourself compassionately in someone else’s place, openly understanding the weight of theirs. It can be brutally difficult to put someone else’s circumstances or situation or needs ahead of your own in the list of priorities requiring your attention. To be the boss that works 100-hour weeks to make sure your company does well enough to keep your employees on staff; to go without the things you’ve worked hard for so that your children can have the things they need to get a head-start; to hold back and not vent about the irritation in your day because someone you love is hanging on by a thread and needs you to be strong for them; to go and do the thing you committed to doing even though you feel run down or under the weather or you got too busy and over-booked yourself - and doing it because you committed to doing it. All of that takes toughness. Most can identify with that sort of toughness in one way or another. Most of you have sacrificed your own comfort to increase the comfort of another. Keep that in mind as you read this next paragraph. It means you’re capable of what I’m about to suggest. It means you have the capacity to do this, even if you’re not in the habit of it.
Toughness is also the capacity for building your own character using the raw materials provided to you by circumstance. Just as metal is forged into useful tools by fire and hammering, grinding and polishing, we are each individually capable of using the heat and pressure and abrasiveness of life and circumstances to shape and define us as we wish to be. Just as toughness empowers us to endure discomfort for the sake of others, it can be harnessed to confront our internal struggles. It grants us the capacity to confront our fears, face our shortcomings, and tackle our deepest insecurities with resolve. It doesn’t necessarily make it any more pleasant, but it allows us to see the value in what we must undertake, and to make that value exceed the pain of the undertaking. In doing so, we emerge from these internal battles not as victims but as victors. The struggle, even if we found ourselves in the midst of circumstances totally beyond our control, becomes something we undertake with purpose, with resolve, and with personal commitment. We stop being the cork on the wavetops, bobbing and tossing wherever the sea might decide to throw us, and we become a ship with sails and a rudder, capable of steering through the storm in the direction we choose.
Consider this: when we summon the strength to confront our own inner demons, our challenges, our circumstances, we embark on a journey of self-improvement that transcends the superficial. It's the grit and determination born of toughness that enable us to persist in the face of self-doubt, dismantle outdated beliefs, and adapt to new perspectives. We learn that to grow, we must be willing to question ourselves, challenge our assumptions, and embrace change—even when it's uncomfortable. If we can’t cultivate this ability, then we’re simply a collection of traumas that didn’t quite kill us. The scars are not memorials, but triggers. The experiences are not lessons learned or circumstances you’ve moved through, but neuroses that stop the present and derail all other priorities so that you can relive something ugly and painful and demoralizing.
Too often, people hear me talk about toughness and they conjure images of the bloodied fighter, spitting red through a shattered jaw, leaning in to face more punishment in a dogged refusal to lay down and die. Sure, that’s toughness. But toughness is also the ability to find a sense of serenity amidst your own personal chaos. It’s the will to genuinely smile when you’d really rather cry. Not to fake it or to put on a show for others, mind you, but to find a real reason for gratitude and grace and to use that to endure the next firing in the coals, the next blow of the hammer. Toughness is the resolve to let the lessons be your own - to sit with them when you’d rather distract yourself and to face them when you’d rather look away. It is the poise to walk on with your head high even as the world is beathing down on your shoulders and bending your knees. It is the recognition, no matter how dire the circumstance or taxing the fight may be, that you can find enough purpose to endure. When you think about it, that’s really what it comes down to. It is the ability to change your mind about things enough to let you walk toward something in the face of adversity rather than running away from something or resisting the situation. That takes a lot of different forms. All are valid.
As I look around at the world today, I see a lot of scared and fragile people defining the environment in which we all have to live. I see a lot of people mistaking their fragility and brittleness for righteousness. I see a lot of traditions being thrown away purely for the sake of being rid of them without any concern for their context or consideration of what problems they were created to solve. I see people who prefer to be defined by their trials and tribulations rather than by their outcomes don their suffering as if it’s some kind of regal cloak that entitles them to make the rules for the rest of the world. I see the creativity of these people focused on finding ways to avoid work, avoid stress, avoid discomfort, and to better wield whatever victimhood they can claim to silence and subdue any idea that might require any degree of mental toughness to process. They “do” only if it is easy to do. When they fail, it’s anything or anyone else’s fault. No lessons, no dings, no dents - just projection. I see people who mistake their access to information for knowledge and understanding. Never before have so many been so wrong while being so utterly convinced that they’re right. It all points to something I fear we won’t be able to avoid. Times are going to get very hard. As they get harder, two things will happen. The first is that those who lack any sort of real toughness will seek strength in mass movements that promise a utopian tomorrow in exchange for ceding control and authority today. Durability for them comes with the impassioned and committed masses that can hide one’s own individual fears and ineptitudes among the chants and slogans of the movement. Many will go this way. It’s easier, after all, to give up control and submit than it is to have to define your own vision and slog through all the setbacks and trials it takes to get there. The second thing we can expect is that we will see an avalanche of totally predictable, supremely avoidable problems arising in society. Those supremely confident ignoramuses who spend their time and energy on the tireless pursuit of suppressing anything that makes them uncomfortable will increasingly occupy high office. Partly, this will be due to their sheer numbers. Partly, it will be due to the inability of sane and rational thinkers to put up with the volume of bullshit required to share those high offices with the collectivists. This will bring about, in addition to the old and predictable problems, brand new ones. These new ones will rise from the “solutions” foisted on us all in the name of “protecting people” from such damaging and violent influences as free thought and expression. In the same way new drugs seem to create two or three brand new diseases as they try to cure one, the new social order will invariably find itself wrestling with new hydras of their own making. They’ll attempt to blame anyone and everything else for this, of course. They may even go so far as to completely flip-flop and race toward all of the sensible solutions they previously ignored on the basis of being posited by someone they didn’t like. The Biden administration is presently showcasing this in epic fashion, but I don’t want to take away from the main point here by going down that particular rabbit hole.
The point is, to get through it, we’re all going to need to be a little tougher than we’ve needed to be in the past. We will all need to become much better at finding our “whys,” because we are certainly about to face a dizzying variety of “hows.” Don’t wait to make toughness a habit.