Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: resilience

  • Extract Value From Failure—Fail Forward To Success

    Extract Value From Failure—Fail Forward To Success

    Extract Value From Failure
    Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

    # 75 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Living well involves extracting every positive thing of value from inevitable failures.

    It is a mistaken notion to believe that a good life is impossible unless only good things happen in it.

    Aside from its improbability—for anyone—as far as evidence suggests, it denies the value of improvement arising directly from the ashes of failure.

    Gregg Popovich, Hall of Fame NBA coach for the San Antonio Spurs, famously said of his teams that they were most vulnerable after a win (which they did often under his guidance). He said after a win you think you have nothing to learn and nothing to improve upon.

    “The measure of who we are is how we react when something doesn’t go our way.”

    ~Gregg Popovich

    Forgive quotes from a sports figure and not from the literati, but sports is one of those morality plays with lots of variables that pits opponents against one another in a test of comparable skill in which every night someone is undefeated for that day and someone else is a complete loser. 

    The winner gets to feel good about themselves and the loser has to find the fortitude to rise to the next day’s challenge. 

    The losers have to find something of value, some takeaway, to inspire them to their best effort in the next day’s contest. You know, like you and me when life trips us up. It is how we handle adversity, or how it handles us, that determines the quality of our lives.

    Not enough adversity?

    I recall an interview I saw with actor Mark Wahlberg (another famous literary figure… wink) in which he discussed his fears for his children. Wahlberg is a celebrity father who loves his kids, well known for his own gritty childhood in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, MA. The interviewer, talking to him about the difficulties he’d overcome as a young teenager on mean streets doing some bad things, asked what he feared most for his own children. 

    “That they won’t face enough adversity,” quipped Wahlberg in all sincerity.

    He knows the value of tenacity, perseverance, and resilience. He knew you cannot lie down when you get hit. You must get back up and keep moving. Those who have lived overly sheltered, pampered lives don’t.

    It is a truism that the severity of every person’s trials is relative. That truth gave rise to the atrocious, but true, phrase, “First World Problems”, as in 

    “OMG, There’s a crack in my iPhone’s screen protector! Uggghhh! FML!”

    It’s embarrassing. Still, everyone’s problems are existential threats and earth-shattering to them.

    Those of us who have faced down real difficulties know how tough real-world problems are, and we’ve learned how tough they’ve made us, right? We have learned how to extract value from failure.

    We’ve mined everything possible from the trials, tragedies, and travesties, learned from them, and we’re still standing. Standing and smiling. Smiling and moving forward. We know how to enjoy a good life and live well because we’ve seen the other side and we know how fortunate we are. Gratitude makes everything sweeter and makes living well easy.

    Don’t waste your failures!

    Fail forward.

  • Do Not Take Yourself Too Seriously—No One Else Does

    Do Not Take Yourself Too Seriously—No One Else Does

    Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously - Like this sailboat, you are in motion and changing.
    Photo by Kristel Hayes on Unsplash

    # 67 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Do not take yourself too seriously. You aren’t the same you as you were at five, or perhaps at twenty-five. You are fluid and dynamic. Today’s “you” may vanish tomorrow, just as a stormy, wind-tossed ocean may tomorrow be as smooth as glass.

    Learn to laugh at yourself

    The ability to laugh at oneself is a life skill to cultivate. It’s tied to the realization, often hard won, that you are fallible and sometimes weak but still resilient and worthy of love. You are a work in progress. The edits aren’t all in. So don’t take this present draft, this iteration, too seriously. 

    The capacity for change is one of the enduring and ennobling traits of this life. From birth, we change and morph and develop and grow. Our beliefs vacillate, our energies fluctuate, faced with defects we compensate, and all of this admixture forms a distillate; the current self occupying today. 

    So, for the semblance of stability, if we’re both lucky and wise, we discover some values around which to pour concrete and anchor down. We drop anchor on a belief, or a lover, or a quest. You can find us moored there for a while. 

    As sure as the wind changes, our course can change, too. We can hoist the anchor, scrape the barnacles, unfurl the mainsail, and ride the wind. You may not see me here tomorrow. It’s possible tomorrow’s version may be different altogether—other than the wrapper. If I haven’t spoken to you in 5 years, I’ll wager you’re a different person. The physical resemblance might prove vaguely familiar, but internally you will have changed. There is plenteous truth in the trope:

    “We are always in the process of becoming. Self-identity is a fusion of our prior decisions and our current thoughts.”

    ~ Kilroy J. Oldster: Dead Toad Scrolls


    Think of the applications in your life. Your age, your health, your knowledge, your experience; all are in flux. What’s your longest running good habit? Which version of you should we take seriously? Which is the real you?

    Nothing in life is static

    Now, lest I wax too poetic, or else get too serious in a ditty contrived to convince you not to take yourself too seriously, let me encourage you with those words of wisdom that have come to us through the years:

    This too shall pass.

    ~ Anonymous

    I hated hearing that during a struggle. Because in the middle of one you’re consumed. It’s serious business. Sometimes you can’t see your way out or to the other side. But friend, there is a way out, and there is another side. And either way, like it or not, the quote is true, and the struggles we face turn us into different versions of ourselves. I find it helpful to remember neither good fortune nor bad lasts forever, as it says so poignantly in the Grateful Dead’s Stella Blue: 

    “There’s nothing you can hold for very long.”

    ~ Grateful Dead: Stella Blue

    Since our layover on this plane of existence is so brief, let’s not get too bogged down in the mire and minutiae of personal insults and minor snubs. Better to smile, shrug, and move on. Exemplify resilience. On the other hand, when you’re riding high in April, remember not to gloat, May is coming.

    So, let’s laugh more than we cry and love more than we hate and like good boy-scouts, let’s leave things better than we found them. Do not take yourself too seriously. After all, no one is going to remember all the great things you do for yourself, nor all the high-minded opinions you espoused. They’ll remember what you did for them and how you made them feel. Take others seriously and you’ll do a lot more good, receive lots more love, and have a lot more fun.

  • Do Not Be Afraid Of Feeling Bad – It’s Good For You

    young man slumped against a wall in a dark hallway feeling bad
    Emotional moment: man sitting holding face in hands, stressed, sad, feeling bad, depressed, disappointed. We’ve all been here.

    # 11 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Do not be afraid of feeling bad. There are things to feel bad about, and the contrast is a wonderful reminder of why gratitude is so important.

    This is one of the most important Life Tips. It also swims upstream against the prevailing American cultural and social ethic. We are a country terrified of feeling bad. So, we medicate. We pre-medicate prophylactically to prevent even the chance we might feel bad. We’re so afraid to feel bad, we self-medicate. But you do not to be afraid of feeling bad. If you don’t know both how to, and when to, feel bad; if you make yourself artificially numb to negative feelings, then neither will you experience the full heights of feeling good.

    This one has been difficult to learn. Obviously, one doesn’t learn to feel bad by being gifted a million bucks. I heard a preacher once say that if you pray and ask God to take away your bitterness, He won’t do it by giving you a Cadillac. The point being, we all learn to feel bad by hard practice. But face it, this life deals everyone some hard, hard blows eventually. Not to be morbid, depressing, or nihilistic, but everyone you love is going to die some day. And you will join them if not precede them. This unavoidable truth doesn’t exactly feel like Disney World.

    But what do we do with that truth? I say, let’s wring all the pleasure and joy and love out of this short ride on the merry-go-round that we possibly can. And, let’s do so in the knowledge that being human is the experience of the full gamut of emotion: from heart-crushing grief to soul-enriching joy. We will face the things in life that feel bad and become more resilient, more capable of experiencing appropriate emotional responses, and more grateful.

    And here is the most important point. You will feel the worst over the loss of something you loved the most. They are two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to feel bad over something you couldn’t care less about. Bad feelings are the result when something that made us feel good goes missing, or is lost to us in some way.

    If you are afraid of feeling bad, my advice is never, NEVER, let yourself attach to anything that makes you feel good. 

    ”It all rolls into One.

    And nothing comes for free.

    There’s nothing you can hold

    for very long.”

    ~ Grateful Dead: Stella Blue

    It is important that we allow ourselves to put on the sweater of our bad feelings as Morrie would remind us in Mitch Albom’s excellent book Tuesdays with Morrie. There are things that will always bring some measure of hurt, pain, or sadness when we reflect on them. This is as it should be. Some things in life just hurt. This is the way of life. How dare we try to escape that by numbing out? To do so is to deny the very thing that makes us human. That sweater of pain will always feel bad whenever we choose to put it on. But we can also take it off and not wear it all day, every day.

    No friends, Do not be afraid of feeling bad. We are the species that loves, and marries, and feasts, and dances in the face of future imminent death. There is an undercurrent of sadness that accompanies our reality. You can accept that fact, face it, and choose to live as full of gratitude for the myriad good things that come your way in a world where nothing lasts forever, or you can numb out in the effort to escape it. Just be aware that if you are afraid of feeling bad, you’ll disqualify yourself from feeling good, really good.

    NOTE: I am not negating the fact of clinical depression, or crippling anxiety. Nor am I either vilifying or castigating those who suffer from these medical conditions. These conditions supersede mere emotional states. However, as this article from February, 2021 suggests, the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs is not without serious drawbacks, especially when many cases of depression and anxiety are contextual, non-pharmacological, and would respond better to psychotherapy than to dependence on medications.

    As a final thought on this topic, let me leave you with this beautiful song, from Rich Mullins, who was tragically killed way too young on his way back from a free benefit concert for Native Americans. A horribly sad thing indeed:

    “There’s bound to come some trouble to your life

    But that ain’t nothing to be afraid of

    There’s bound to come some trouble to your life

    But that ain’t no reason to fear”

    ~ Rich Mullins: Bound to Come Some Trouble