We generally think that people are good-natured and even the best of us, our idols, are resolute with our morals and values. You are the personification of your habits, so someone that is consistent with putting in the hours will undoubtedly be no stranger to hard work. Or someone that’s been a giver for years is more likely to volunteer their time to a charity or help someone in need. Although behavior is defined through repeated habits, I believe that anyone can change and do a 180 because of one bad day. All of your effort and results can be wiped away due to one action, event, and reaction.
It reminds me of this quote by Warren Buffet:
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”
The thought of the consequences of having one bad day came from playing a game called Injustice. If you grew up reading comics about superheroes, or even in pop culture, you’ll recognize names like superman, batman, wonder woman, the flash, etc., Especially the character of superman. If you can put together a person with the perfect ideology and morals, probably superman would be at the top of that list, and he’s written to be like that. Superman is selfless, patriotic, loving, empathetic, strong, gentle, and any other positive adjective you want to include in there. In this Injustice game, he gets tricked into sacrificing his morals by killing, something he has never done, and from there, it spirals out of control via a dystopian and ruthless dictator through superman. Easily the worse day of his life.
Even though it was a video game, imagine the most incorruptible person in your life, and then find out they’ve done a 180 and are committing a crime. It got me thinking that none of us are immune to having one bad day that will change the course of our lives. It might just take reckless driving from you to take another life or a market crash that robs you of all your financials, to trying a drug laced with something you don’t know about. Whether it directly or indirectly affects you, the question is how will you react to it. The impulse is to lose control and let whatever happens… happen. I see it as being on a ship and letting the winds take you wherever it wants. It feels like we’ve lost all control and that life is out to get us. What’s the point of trying when our failure seems inevitable? Why resist when we know the outcome? In those moments we find out who we truly are, and sometimes we fail that test of mental strength and resiliency. I’m arguing for it’s never over until you’ve taken your last breath.
Not until the fat lady sings
There’s something genius about how Seals select applicants—breaking them down through little sleep and extremely cold water and whoever doesn’t give up makes it through. It may sound very basic, and it is. Something about being in cold water breaks people, and those with mental fortitude often have a better chance of passing.
Jocko Willink, former Navy Seals commander, sums it up perfectly:
Water will kill you.
There’s a story of how Jocko, knowing how everyone felt about the cold and the sand and how the instructors were there to make them quit, willingly and enthusiastically would jump into the cold water and have sand in his mouth. He would convince himself it was a game, and it encouraged other people in his platoon to do the same, effectively making the “torture” not be so bad. This is an example of how we can prepare ourselves for tough times by changing the script and how we look at things.
I’m no exception to that reality and I’ve learned firsthand that I’m not as mentally strong as I thought I was. I’ve always thought I was capable of enduring pain, but it was a facade until I got sciatica. Sciatica is one of the symptoms of a herniated disk in your lower back and causes excruciating pain whether you’re standing or sitting. I basically folded under all of the pain and it taught me a life-changing lesson about how pain can change a person completely. I’m normally calm and easy-going, but during my bout with sciatica, I was rude, prone to emotional outbursts, pessimistic, and a terrible person to be around. I turned into a different person and I was negatively affecting the people around me. It’s interesting to see how we go back to our default settings once something catastrophic happens. We let our emotions take over and it’s back to fight or flight.
You can see these examples in almost every situation—at a retail store, or hospital, driving to work, texting someone, etc. Once something doesn’t go our way, we either take our anger and “explode” on someone or something, or we just shut down and get into a sad, depressive state. When you see someone yelling at an employee during dinner service, we can all agree that this person is a jerk. This person’s threshold is also very low since something minor will always trigger them to act.
If we’re always prone to react to anything, the chances of us making an irreversible “bad day” decision will be much higher. We have to start building a stress fort in which we continuously build layers of mental protection and resiliency for terrible situations. In order to do so requires one to do consistently do tough and challenging things every day. It doesn’t have to be physically tough, but something that makes you step outside of your comfort zone. Once you put yourself through tough things, you increase the threshold of what you can tolerate. The capacity for mental toughness slowly increases, and you learn the lessons of how you react when the going gets hard. At first, it will be a shock to the ego because you find out you’re not that tough after all, but it’s a necessary step to find out where you are at and then we can start building from there. It’s the start of a process that requires refining, readjusting, and re-evaluating.
It’s cliche, but never giving up and remaining calm is skills that can help you during the worse times of your life. Those sports movies where the coaches ask their athletes to “dig deeper”, or do “one more rep” isn’t as far-fetch as you think it is. When you push yourself outside your comfort zone, you learn more and more about yourself. You also start to transform yourself into a new identity—someone who doesn’t flutter and falter at the first sign of resistance. you’ll continue to push the goalpost further and further until the minor inconveniences become what they really are—Minor.
It’ll look different for everyone
I remember going to Elementary on the mainland and always making a serious attempt to beeline it to lunch whenever the bell rang. It wasn’t because of a competitive reason to be first—the food was that good and I felt so lucky to get such delicious food. I remembered looking around and seeing disgusted faces as kids forced themselves to eat food. Some kids even brought home lunch—something that was flabbergasting to me because I didn’t understand why someone would bring an alternative to the free and delicious food we are getting. To me, it was fine dining and I couldn’t believe that I could enjoy this 5 times a week. People looked at me like I was crazy for enjoying mediocre food. I simply saw it as these kids don’t know how good they had. The craziest part was the kids that threw tantrums because they didn’t get the meal they wanted. I get that the food isn’t Michelin star quality but to say “it’s the worse day ever” because of lunch food was spectacular to see.
Now, this isn’t a contest of who went through more or of how much one can endure. Everyone will have a different threshold for what they can endure, and it’s best if we figure that out as early as possible. It’s best to deal with the painful truth and map out the necessary actions to improve our capacity. It’s easy to fall into the “anti-empathy” trap whenever we seek to improve our mental strength. When I was on my journey to do so, I purposely did tough things to test myself and increase the limits of my tolerance. I also let my ego get the best of me and criticized those that came to me for help. I often told friends to suck it up and be better. Somewhere down the line, I forgot the empathy factor and told them the solution—my solution to what works. If you didn’t do it my way, there was no chance of getting tougher. If you just keep your head down and run through the proverbial brick wall, you’ll get stronger. This one-minded track might have worked on some, but in the end, my friends just wanted to be listened to.
If we genuinely want to help others get on the path, it’s best to hear them out and guide them into making their own decisions and plan. I had a friend that was stressed out about their financial situation. they were juggling a lot of things and got overwhelmed. It’s easy to tell them “stop being an idiot and stop spending money on stuff you don’t need”. Instead, we tried to fractionally cut out what we could. For the first month, we saved $50 dollars, which isn’t much but it’s better than being in the negative and accumulating debt. All we did was stop buying soda and snacks. It was something that was doable, but it led to giving my friend a lot of control back in their lives and allowed them to think that this is possible. Start small and keep building on it.
What if you lose your way?
Let’s say you messed up regardless of all of the time you’ve spent accumulating mental toughness. Just like superman, one fatal mistake will change your trajectory or who you are as a person. There isn’t an answer for this, and the repercussions are irreversible at times. There are a few tactics that may help whenever you’re in terrible duress — detachment and making small actions. They go hand-in-hand because detaching requires you to break free of any emotions you’re feeling and taking small actions allows you to make movements, albeit small, to help with inactivity and direction. These small actions give you the opportunity to make necessary adjustments without taking big steps that may cause you to instantly fail. Think of it as being on a landmine farm, you’re first getting to high ground or elevated position to see where you’re at before acting (detachment), and then taking small steps, using tools, etc. to detect where the landmines are. If you foolishly just run across the field, you’ll activate it for sure.
The goal is to give yourself some breathing room and to wiggle slowly and in the right direction in order to free yourself from the mess, you’re in. This isn’t easy to do, but like increasing our capacity for toughness, it’s something you can practice. Next time, as you put yourself in tough or stressful situations, force yourself to detach in order to make small decisions.
In the worst-case scenario in which you’ve hit rock bottom, just know that all the actions you’ve taken are things you’ve done before and can be repeated once more. The door is only closed when we allow it to. Granted it won’t be easy and the momentum is against us, but we know the end result if we put in the work. For many people, it’s hard to imagine what the end looks like because they haven’t achieved it, but if we lose our way, we know how to get back and that’ll be our advantage.
In many ways, our example of superman through that video game is an anomaly, an extremely rare occurrence. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but there’s one characteristic that we can copy from superman, that truly makes him “super”, and I believe it’s hope. In almost all iterations of superman, hope in self and humanity allows him to do the right thing. It’s a lesson we can take for ourselves and that hope gives us the ability to keep working regardless if we have a bad day or not.
Until next week,
Scott
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