Global Crisis / Innovation Blog

S**T HAPPENS!  Resilience: We Have True Grit, in Spades!

By Shlomo Maital

  

 

 Dung bettle: knows how to leverage S–T. So do we all.

Media have stressed the suffering, hardship and pain people suffered, and continue to suffer, during the global economic crisis 2007 – 9.  They fail to stress the upside: People have showed tremendous resilience in bouncing back from great hardship, and always have, throughout history.  People have “true grit”, just like the  drunken, hard-nosed U.S. Marshal and a Texas Ranger in the 1969 John Wayne movie (and 2010 Coen Bros. remake) who help a stubborn young woman track down her father’s murderer in Indian territory.  Even those born with silver spoons in their mouths show resilience, more often than not.

    I asked a large sample of Israeli innovators what is the key driver of Israeli entrepreneurship.  “Resilience” was #1 !  Israel has a culture of resilience, living in a bad neighborhood with frequent unexpected crises, wars, terrorism and hardship.  People have learned to bounce back. 

    Research by Columbia U. Teachers College scholar George Bonanno has documented how people adapt surprisingly well to whatever the world presents – grief, loss, terror, war, disease.  In his experiments, he and colleagues found that the Freudian notion that loss of a friend or relative left indelible scars and required therapy was untrue.  Bonanno has a clipping posted on his inner door, from a German newspaper item about his work, headlined: S**T HAPPENS!  It does indeed. And we clean it up, mostly.

     In my trips to India, I found the people of India spectacularly resilient, because they get to practice resilience  so often. Even high-income financial workers in Mumbai’s financial district are resilient – a flood there left waist-deep water, suspended transportation – so many of them simply walked home for miles through the waist-deep flood.

    As Gary Stix observes in his March 2011 Scientific American article: “The new science of resilience shows that one size does not fit all in coming to terms with what befalls us. Sometimes the worst does happen, but our innate capacity to bounce back means that most of the time things turn out all right.”  And by the way, belief in this sentence can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.    Hope is the world’s most powerful remedy, not penicillin.