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Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life
You cannot bounce back from hardship. You can only move through it. There is a path through pain to wisdom, through suffering to strength, and through fear to courage if we have the virtue of resilience.
In 2012, Eric Greitens unexpectedly heard from a former SEAL comrade, a brother-in-arms he hadn't seen in a decade. Zach Walker had been one of the toughest of the tough. But ever since he returned home from war to his young family in a small logging town, he d been struggling. Without a sense of purpose, plagued by PTSD, and masking his pain with heavy drinking, he needed help. Zach and Eric started writing and talking nearly every day, as Eric set down his thoughts on what it takes to build resilience in our lives.
Eric's letters drawing on both his own experience and wisdom from ancient and modern thinkers are now gathered and edited into this timeless guidebook. Resilience explains how we can build purpose, confront pain, practice compassion, develop a vocation, find a mentor, create happiness, and much more. Eric s lessons are deep yet practical, and his advice leads to clear solutions.
We all face pain, difficulty, and doubt. But we also have the tools to take control of our lives. Resilience is an inspiring meditation for the warrior in each of us.
In 2012, Eric Greitens unexpectedly heard from a former SEAL comrade, a brother-in-arms he hadn't seen in a decade. Zach Walker had been one of the toughest of the tough. But ever since he returned home from war to his young family in a small logging town, he d been struggling. Without a sense of purpose, plagued by PTSD, and masking his pain with heavy drinking, he needed help. Zach and Eric started writing and talking nearly every day, as Eric set down his thoughts on what it takes to build resilience in our lives.
Eric's letters drawing on both his own experience and wisdom from ancient and modern thinkers are now gathered and edited into this timeless guidebook. Resilience explains how we can build purpose, confront pain, practice compassion, develop a vocation, find a mentor, create happiness, and much more. Eric s lessons are deep yet practical, and his advice leads to clear solutions.
We all face pain, difficulty, and doubt. But we also have the tools to take control of our lives. Resilience is an inspiring meditation for the warrior in each of us.
9 pages, Audio CD
First published March 10, 2015
1147 people are currently reading
7689 people want to read
About the author
Eric Greitens
8 books161 followersEric Greitens was an Angier B. Duke Scholar, Truman Scholar, Rhodes Scholar, Navy SEAL, White House Fellow, champion boxer and sub-3 hour marathon runner. He is currently the founder/Chairman of the Center for Citizen Leadership in St. Louis, MO.
Eric's book of award-winning photographs and essays, Strength and Compassion , grew from his humanitarian work. His doctoral thesis, Children First, investigated the ways in which international humanitarian organizations can best serve war-affected children. He has worked as a humanitarian volunteer, documentary photographer, and researcher in Rwanda, Cambodia, Albania, Mexico, India, the Gaza Strip, Croatia, and Bolivia."
Eric's book of award-winning photographs and essays, Strength and Compassion , grew from his humanitarian work. His doctoral thesis, Children First, investigated the ways in which international humanitarian organizations can best serve war-affected children. He has worked as a humanitarian volunteer, documentary photographer, and researcher in Rwanda, Cambodia, Albania, Mexico, India, the Gaza Strip, Croatia, and Bolivia."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 398 reviews
May 28, 2015
Wow this book has so many five star reviews! I can see its appeal but the "man up and serve your duty. HOOOAH" military thinking combined with Greek philosophy wasn't what I was looking for. I picked up this book because I wanted to a deeper understanding of resilience. As it turns out I already have the type of resilience that the author describes; the type that allows one to grit, serve and survive.
Yes, through my depression I can prise myself out of bed, prepare a training session and deliver it with almost all the energy I have, squeeze a little more energy to take care of my home and family then crash back down again. Rinse and repeat. It's far from ideal but one can argue it has a cockroach-strength resilience to serve.
But maybe that's resilience and thriving is something else altogether.
However, I've only given it two stars because I found some things disturbing. For instance:
"The lesson was this: If your best is not good enough, make your best better. If you tried hard and failed, then try harder, or find a new way to try until you succeed. Trying hard is trying hard. Success is success. There is a difference.
Despite an overwhelming amount of well-intentioned nonsense that we now teach our children, it actually is not enough to try hard. Yes, it good to try hard and - after suffering numerous setbacks and working through hardship and pain and temporary defeat - to achieve, to master. Trying hard builds character, but it is only the achievement that follows the effort that builds true confidence. We teach children that it doesn't matter whether they win or lose, it's how they play the game. But this lesson can be taught poorly or well.
Taught poorly, this lesson results in children who are careless of the outcome of their actions, who are more concerned with double and triple-checking their inner state than with measuring themselves against the world.
Taught well, though, this lesson makes clear that while the valiant might lose many, many times, the object of the valiant is to preserve until victory."
---
Well, I thought that lesson was taught quite badly! Isn't it helpful to ask ourselves and our children "why did the outcome not happen?" Is it more the result of chance or process? Do you need to change the way you prepared or did you fail to get the desired outcome because of luck?" "Did you get the desired outcome more due to luck?" These questions are often not easy to answer definitively but asking them is still worthwhile rather than viewing yourself as having failed/not put in sufficient efforts because the outcome did not happen.
If you learned well and practiced hard and a bird flew into your face just as you were about to make the winning move and your opponent beat you, do you go back and train harder or change your training? It helps to assess and differentiate between chance and process before making the decision to work differently/harder.
Another part of the book that missed the mark (with me):
"The question we almost never ask, however, is the only one that really matters:
How: "How do you do that? How do you make yourself depressed every morning?"
That sounds like a harsh thing to say to someone who is down. It certainly is a hard question to ask. The only harsher thing is to not ask the question."
--
As someone who has given this considerable thought and reflection, I can say that while I am able to generate sadness and can give you the answer to "how", I cannot give a clear answer to depression. I can almost hear the author shouting in my ear "That's not good enough! And give me 137 pushups while you thinking harder, you sad imbecile!"
I think that sadness (emotion) and depression are quite different and his misunderstanding combined with his potential ability to fuel his readers with this mistaken understanding can cause more problems as readers try to help their loved ones with this line of questioning.
Yes, through my depression I can prise myself out of bed, prepare a training session and deliver it with almost all the energy I have, squeeze a little more energy to take care of my home and family then crash back down again. Rinse and repeat. It's far from ideal but one can argue it has a cockroach-strength resilience to serve.
But maybe that's resilience and thriving is something else altogether.
However, I've only given it two stars because I found some things disturbing. For instance:
"The lesson was this: If your best is not good enough, make your best better. If you tried hard and failed, then try harder, or find a new way to try until you succeed. Trying hard is trying hard. Success is success. There is a difference.
Despite an overwhelming amount of well-intentioned nonsense that we now teach our children, it actually is not enough to try hard. Yes, it good to try hard and - after suffering numerous setbacks and working through hardship and pain and temporary defeat - to achieve, to master. Trying hard builds character, but it is only the achievement that follows the effort that builds true confidence. We teach children that it doesn't matter whether they win or lose, it's how they play the game. But this lesson can be taught poorly or well.
Taught poorly, this lesson results in children who are careless of the outcome of their actions, who are more concerned with double and triple-checking their inner state than with measuring themselves against the world.
Taught well, though, this lesson makes clear that while the valiant might lose many, many times, the object of the valiant is to preserve until victory."
---
Well, I thought that lesson was taught quite badly! Isn't it helpful to ask ourselves and our children "why did the outcome not happen?" Is it more the result of chance or process? Do you need to change the way you prepared or did you fail to get the desired outcome because of luck?" "Did you get the desired outcome more due to luck?" These questions are often not easy to answer definitively but asking them is still worthwhile rather than viewing yourself as having failed/not put in sufficient efforts because the outcome did not happen.
If you learned well and practiced hard and a bird flew into your face just as you were about to make the winning move and your opponent beat you, do you go back and train harder or change your training? It helps to assess and differentiate between chance and process before making the decision to work differently/harder.
Another part of the book that missed the mark (with me):
"The question we almost never ask, however, is the only one that really matters:
How: "How do you do that? How do you make yourself depressed every morning?"
That sounds like a harsh thing to say to someone who is down. It certainly is a hard question to ask. The only harsher thing is to not ask the question."
--
As someone who has given this considerable thought and reflection, I can say that while I am able to generate sadness and can give you the answer to "how", I cannot give a clear answer to depression. I can almost hear the author shouting in my ear "That's not good enough! And give me 137 pushups while you thinking harder, you sad imbecile!"
I think that sadness (emotion) and depression are quite different and his misunderstanding combined with his potential ability to fuel his readers with this mistaken understanding can cause more problems as readers try to help their loved ones with this line of questioning.
August 10, 2016
In a different time, a different place this would not be a 5 star book but for our culture and our time it is a reminder of virtues and values we have almost lost.
It takes the form of a series of letters from one former SEAL to another one suffering from PTSD.
I loved all the classical references.
This book would be a perfect graduation gift for a boy or a girl and would be a great book for a high school junior or senior's reading list.
It takes the form of a series of letters from one former SEAL to another one suffering from PTSD.
I loved all the classical references.
This book would be a perfect graduation gift for a boy or a girl and would be a great book for a high school junior or senior's reading list.
March 21, 2015
The format of the book follows a series of correspondence between two Navy Seals, back in the civilian world. One is failing to cope, the other is trying to help. The author's letters are filled with references to philosophy, poetry, and basic self-help principles. The core of the book revolves around the title as it's concept.... i.e. the need for resilience!!
I believe that the suggestions contained in the book could be extremely helpful for returning soldiers trying to re-integrate into civilian life, individuals who have fallen on hard times, or those coping with massive loss. It is an excellent source of motivation and allows for comparison and a drive force for action. However, I am not so sure it would be helpful for those in hard times who do not have a solid base of accomplishment to draw from. This is not a criticism, just an observation that the target audience is smaller than one might at first imagine.
This is a book that I will keep in my library. It is an excellent example of a soldier not only remembering, but reaching out and helping his buddy. We could use a lot more of that!!
All the best,
Jay
I believe that the suggestions contained in the book could be extremely helpful for returning soldiers trying to re-integrate into civilian life, individuals who have fallen on hard times, or those coping with massive loss. It is an excellent source of motivation and allows for comparison and a drive force for action. However, I am not so sure it would be helpful for those in hard times who do not have a solid base of accomplishment to draw from. This is not a criticism, just an observation that the target audience is smaller than one might at first imagine.
This is a book that I will keep in my library. It is an excellent example of a soldier not only remembering, but reaching out and helping his buddy. We could use a lot more of that!!
All the best,
Jay
Currently reading
January 2, 2022Recommended by my esteemed GR friend, Tg. It's great!
May 25, 2015
Fantastic book by Navy Seal and PhD Eric Greitens, who also wrote "The Heart and the Fist" - another recommended read - and who has been named one of the most influential leaders in America.
This book is packed with practical wisdom about how to best live one's life to ones fullest potential. Greitens is obviously inspired by Marcus Aurelius' "Letters from a Stoic", and his books takes on a similar shape with the chapters consisting of a series of letters Greitens wrote to a navy seal friend of his, who after having served in many military missions and experienced a great deal of personal loss came to struggle greatly with what to do with and how to manage his life "after service". One of the key lessons of the book is that "service" never ends, and that to be truly happy and fulfilled we need to figure out how to constantly serve, in the sense that we must find work that inspires us, that we can do really well, and that brings great value to other people and so makes a dent in the task of making the world a better place for all of us.
Greifens draws upon wisdom from the ancient Greeks, the stoics, and many other philosophical traditions. He quotes and interweaves the thoughts of a wide range of philosophers: from Socrates and Aristotle to Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, and many more.
I really like books about practical philosophy and with a strong connection to people's every day lives, and this is one of the - if not just simply "the - best book of this kind I've ever read.
Highly recommended read for anyone interested in life reflections and self betterment!
This book is packed with practical wisdom about how to best live one's life to ones fullest potential. Greitens is obviously inspired by Marcus Aurelius' "Letters from a Stoic", and his books takes on a similar shape with the chapters consisting of a series of letters Greitens wrote to a navy seal friend of his, who after having served in many military missions and experienced a great deal of personal loss came to struggle greatly with what to do with and how to manage his life "after service". One of the key lessons of the book is that "service" never ends, and that to be truly happy and fulfilled we need to figure out how to constantly serve, in the sense that we must find work that inspires us, that we can do really well, and that brings great value to other people and so makes a dent in the task of making the world a better place for all of us.
Greifens draws upon wisdom from the ancient Greeks, the stoics, and many other philosophical traditions. He quotes and interweaves the thoughts of a wide range of philosophers: from Socrates and Aristotle to Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, and many more.
I really like books about practical philosophy and with a strong connection to people's every day lives, and this is one of the - if not just simply "the - best book of this kind I've ever read.
Highly recommended read for anyone interested in life reflections and self betterment!
May 18, 2015
Before you read another word of this, go buy this book, bring it into your home and read it, or maybe read it in the bookstore, or read it on your tablet, or have someone read it to you. Just read it. Then sit quietly for a moment, and read it again (OK, I haven't quite done this part yet, but I'm bound to do it at least once every year). I swear there is something of note, a parable, a lesson, an action to do, on every page of this book.
This book has entered into my list of favorite books. There are so many dog ears that I'm sure the second time through I'll have to expand my thoughts by scribbling and writing in the margins...
What Eric writes is timeless, it's clear, it's universal. It's like having the best counsil from the last 3000 years in one book. Consolidated life lessons and advice from great thinkers, politicians, poets, Warriors, Holocaust survivors and many others whose lives were not straight forward endeavors. All of this is easily accessible in very human, down to earth writing between one brother-in-arms to another.
For the most part it is simple language, which leaves the reader with no excuse not to understand each topic and to be honest with themselves about how they can live their lives with excellence in all that they pursue.
"Excellence is renewed through deliberate practice, day in and day out." -Eric Greitens
This book has entered into my list of favorite books. There are so many dog ears that I'm sure the second time through I'll have to expand my thoughts by scribbling and writing in the margins...
What Eric writes is timeless, it's clear, it's universal. It's like having the best counsil from the last 3000 years in one book. Consolidated life lessons and advice from great thinkers, politicians, poets, Warriors, Holocaust survivors and many others whose lives were not straight forward endeavors. All of this is easily accessible in very human, down to earth writing between one brother-in-arms to another.
For the most part it is simple language, which leaves the reader with no excuse not to understand each topic and to be honest with themselves about how they can live their lives with excellence in all that they pursue.
"Excellence is renewed through deliberate practice, day in and day out." -Eric Greitens
September 13, 2015
This is the best book I've read all year, and certainly one of the best I've read in the last few. This book offers a lot of wisdom for someone looking to engage life's challenges and grow along the way. Greitens applies the principles he learned with the SEALS and timeless wisdom from Socrates to Seneca to Jesus to Nietzsche to the issues of enduring hardship, using pain constructively, becoming reflective, and practicing virtue in order to become what he calls the "resilient" person. This is really good stuff that challenged me to question if I'm "living a life of excellence." I highly recommend Resilience if you feel you're in a place of being tossed around by your circumstances and want to take more ownership of the direction of your life.
November 4, 2019
My dear Wormwood,
As a young Tempter, let loose out of Hell, you will find very quickly that books written in letter format almost never work out. This book is supposed to be tough, practical advice from one veteran Navy SEAL to another about dealing with PTSD, readjusting to civilian life, and becoming a better man. Unfortunately, it reads like a very, very bad college humanities course as it might be taught by your high school gym teacher after a six pack or two. Definitely required reading in Hell.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
As a young Tempter, let loose out of Hell, you will find very quickly that books written in letter format almost never work out. This book is supposed to be tough, practical advice from one veteran Navy SEAL to another about dealing with PTSD, readjusting to civilian life, and becoming a better man. Unfortunately, it reads like a very, very bad college humanities course as it might be taught by your high school gym teacher after a six pack or two. Definitely required reading in Hell.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
May 15, 2017
Fantastic book. I would give it five stars but for the pervasive "even men can read books and have feelings too" theme. I don't fault the author for weaving that into his otherwise really well-written book since his target seems to be guys who believe being manly involves not reading or acknowledging emotions beyond anger but rather punching walls and kicking dogs. For me, not being that way at all, that theme distracted and annoyed me. Other than that I found the book well-written and deeply thought provoking.
November 19, 2016
One of my coworkers is a retired Marine turned lawyer. He requested that I read this book. He thoroughly enjoyed reading the author and Navy SEAL's take on being resilient to adversities.
From my perspective, it was just another self help book. I don't really care for them. I tend to get more out of an anecdote or history than I do from a philosophical soliloquy. That's not a jibe at the author as he sounds like an amazing individual and a clearly a great patriot. I just don't care for the book's presentation. I gave it three stars since it's not bad; it's just not for me.
From my perspective, it was just another self help book. I don't really care for them. I tend to get more out of an anecdote or history than I do from a philosophical soliloquy. That's not a jibe at the author as he sounds like an amazing individual and a clearly a great patriot. I just don't care for the book's presentation. I gave it three stars since it's not bad; it's just not for me.
March 7, 2020
This is THE BEST “self-help” book I’ve ever read. One of the best books I’ve ever read of all time.
Not all of the information or suggestions were new to me, but the author has a way of putting them together AND he gives plenty of examples to demonstrate concepts or how to put things into action 💯
Not all of the information or suggestions were new to me, but the author has a way of putting them together AND he gives plenty of examples to demonstrate concepts or how to put things into action 💯
July 30, 2018
Given the disproportionate number of 5 star ratings for this book, I was prepared to be greatly disappointed.
The original material comes from a series of letters the author wrote to his friend but in book form they read more like essays trying to imitate letters. I found the mix of styles distracting. The content is too well polished for the 'letters to a friend' motif. For this to work for me as a collection of letters I would have liked to read more of the friend's side of the conversation too. As it is, we only get occasional paragraphs quoted from the friend.
Another thing that I had trouble with was relating to the author. At one point he mentions taking his Kindergarten teachers out to lunch to show his appreciation for them as his teachers. Who does that? This guy does. I don't even remember the names of my teachers that far back.
I'm also not a Navy SEAL, or a world traveling humanitarian crisis worker, or a Greek scholar.
This guy is. These things do not diminish the quality of the book but for me they made the material less approachable.
Those things aside, this was an interesting read and would make a good book for a discussion group. And should you want to deep dive into any of the topics covered, there is an extensive bibliography provided.
Not 5 stars, but worth a read. Think essay rather than letter. Philosophy rather than self-help.
Just be prepared for some testosterone, frequent references to ancient Greece, and a tone that can feel condescending.
The original material comes from a series of letters the author wrote to his friend but in book form they read more like essays trying to imitate letters. I found the mix of styles distracting. The content is too well polished for the 'letters to a friend' motif. For this to work for me as a collection of letters I would have liked to read more of the friend's side of the conversation too. As it is, we only get occasional paragraphs quoted from the friend.
Another thing that I had trouble with was relating to the author. At one point he mentions taking his Kindergarten teachers out to lunch to show his appreciation for them as his teachers. Who does that? This guy does. I don't even remember the names of my teachers that far back.
I'm also not a Navy SEAL, or a world traveling humanitarian crisis worker, or a Greek scholar.
This guy is. These things do not diminish the quality of the book but for me they made the material less approachable.
Those things aside, this was an interesting read and would make a good book for a discussion group. And should you want to deep dive into any of the topics covered, there is an extensive bibliography provided.
Not 5 stars, but worth a read. Think essay rather than letter. Philosophy rather than self-help.
Just be prepared for some testosterone, frequent references to ancient Greece, and a tone that can feel condescending.
November 27, 2023
My favorite quote from this book:
"We all need something to struggle against and to struggle for. The aim in life is not to avoid struggles but to have the right ones; not to avoid worry, but to care about the right things; not to live without fear, but to confront worthy fears with force and passion."
Eric Greitens is a serious warrior and a serious philosopher. He was a boxer, a Navy SEAL, worked with refugees in war-torn countries, and now runs an organization that helps military veterans return to civilian life.
Greitens has given a lot of thought to what makes people effective. There are references to Epictetus and other Romans, but also the Talmud and various other philosophers. What I like about this book is that the advice is all practical. Mr. Greitens has been there. He's put a lot of heart and sweat into his craft, and it shows.
The value of this book (or any self-help book) is that it inspires you to take meaningful action. I just read the book so I can't put in perspective the effect it's had on my life. I can say that I hardly ever write book reviews, and I wrote a review here. Greitens is a role model for me and I hope he will be one for you as well.
"We all need something to struggle against and to struggle for. The aim in life is not to avoid struggles but to have the right ones; not to avoid worry, but to care about the right things; not to live without fear, but to confront worthy fears with force and passion."
Eric Greitens is a serious warrior and a serious philosopher. He was a boxer, a Navy SEAL, worked with refugees in war-torn countries, and now runs an organization that helps military veterans return to civilian life.
Greitens has given a lot of thought to what makes people effective. There are references to Epictetus and other Romans, but also the Talmud and various other philosophers. What I like about this book is that the advice is all practical. Mr. Greitens has been there. He's put a lot of heart and sweat into his craft, and it shows.
The value of this book (or any self-help book) is that it inspires you to take meaningful action. I just read the book so I can't put in perspective the effect it's had on my life. I can say that I hardly ever write book reviews, and I wrote a review here. Greitens is a role model for me and I hope he will be one for you as well.
March 5, 2017
Letter 1: Your Frontline – 1
Letter 2: Why Resilience? – 8
Letter 3: What is Resilience – 19
Letter 4: Beginning – 32
Letter 5: Happiness – 49
Letter 6: Models – 66
Letter 7: Identity – 79
Letter 8: Habits – 95
Letter 9: Responsibility – 106
Letter 10: Vocation – 115
Letter 11: Philosophy – 129
Letter 12: Practice – 147
Letter 13: Pain – 157
Letter 14: Mastering Pain – 168
Letter 15: Reflection – 192
Letter 16: Friends – 208
Letter 17: Mentors – 220
Letter 18: Teams – 238
Letter 19: Leadership – 244
Letter 20: Freedom – 252
Letter 21: Story – 260
Letter 22: Death – 269
Letter 23: Sabbath – 274
---
“Of the ancients who practiced this kind of life, one of my favorites is Epictetus, who started life as a slave and ended it as the wisest philosopher of his day. Here’s what he told his students about what they were trying to do together” “A carpenter does not come up to you and say, ‘Listen to me discourse about the art of carpentry,’ but he makes a contract for a house and builds it ... Do the same thing yourself. Eat like a man, drink like a man … get married, have children, take part in civic life, learn how to put up with insults, and tolerate other people.”
The test of philosophy is simple: does it lead people to live better lives? If not, the philosophy fails. If so, it succeeds. Philosophy used to mean developing ideas about a life worth living, and then living that life. It still can.” (Greitens, 15)
---
“Thoreau said that the best philosophies “solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” We can tell a philosophy is working, he said, if it produces “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.”
The question is, are you aware of the philosophy you have – the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas that drive your actions? Are you aware of the way those assumptions, beliefs, and ideas add up to shape your life? Can they stand exposure to the light of day?” (Greitens, 16)
---
“Here’s how he explained the Stockdale Paradox: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”” (Greitens, 30)
---
“So, start at the beginning. Approach each day as if you have something new to learn. Your task is not to begin in a noble place, but to end up in one.” (Greitens, 40)
---
“You don’t need to be a golden boy. You don’t need to be a hero. You don’t need to pretend – to yourself or to anyone – that you’re showing up with perfect motives.
If you wait to begin until you’ve mastered your intentions, you’ll never begin. Selfish, silly, vain desires can create real growth when you subject them to discipline.
Accept that you are imperfect and always will be. Your quest is not to perfect yourself, but to better your imperfect self.” (Greitens, 42)
---
“Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming.” (Greitens, 50)
---
“In fact, thinking about color can lead us to a good analogy for happiness. The human eye can perceive missions of colors. Yet we know that we can create this wide range of colors largely from just three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue.
In the same way that an infinite variety of colors can be created from three primary ones, we can think about the full range of happiness by looking at three primary kinds of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and the happiness of excellence.” (Greitens, 54)
---
“Joy, like sweat, is usually a byproduct of your activity, not your aim.
Remember what comes first. A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness.
The pursuit of excellence leads to growth, mastery, and achievement. None of these are sufficient for happiness, yet all of them are necessary.” (Greitens, 59)
---
“Some veterans come home from war and turn to alcohol or drugs: you been there, and thousands have been there before you. Why is it that the toughest people we know – people who went without a soft bed, a home-cooked meal, and comfortable clothes for months at a time – suddenly can’t go a day without a bottle?
A lot of people think veterans turn to drink and drugs to forget what they experienced in war. And some do. But that’s only a partial and distorted truth. More often, veterans turn to drink and drugs to replace what they experienced in war.
A veteran who comes home from war is returning from one of the most intense experiences a human being can have. Even if he was not under fire every day, he woke up every morning as part of the team. He started every day with a purpose, and a mission that mattered to those around him.
Even in the middle of the desert, when it’s a hundred degrees at 10 a.m. and your nostrils are full of sand, there’s happiness. Real happiness. It comes from working together, hurting together, fighting together, surviving together, morning together. It’s the essence of the happiness of excellence.
The conditions might be miserable, the larger mission might be misguided, but your purpose easily clear every day, even if it is only to bring your friends home with honor.” (Greitens, 61)
---
“We don’t choose our models in a spirit of passive, all-consuming admiration, as a child does. We must choose actively, as an adult does. We’re seasoned enough to know that no one exercises a perfect and complete set of the virtues. We can select the qualities we want to emulate, leaving aside the rest without regrets.
We can admire the profound wisdom of Plato without accepting or ignoring his deep elitism, which held that many of us have no hope of achieving wisdom at all. We can admire the freethinking genius of Thomas Jefferson without accepting or ignoring his ownership of other human beings. We can admire the audacity of Richard Wagner, a nearly self-taught musician who became one of history’s greatest composers, without accepting or ignoring his hatred of Jews.
We can admire without ignoring, because we are adults, and that is what adults are capable of.” (Greitens, 76)
---
“Most important thing to thing to let go of - the thing so many of us struggle to let go of – is the idea that our heroes are flawless. We have to put that ideal way, if only because such a view of heroes begins to limit our view of our own lives.
If we believe that our heroes are flawless, we begin to believe that we, being flawed, or incapable heroism. In this way, a belief in the protection of others can inhibit our own growth.
Adult heroism is different. The adult knows that all heroic lives are, in a sense, a heroic struggle to overcome our own limitations.” (Greitens, 77)
---
“Flawed heroes are still heroic. Every Achilles has an Achilles’ heel.” (Greitens, 78)
---
“Imagine you’ve trained two brilliant horses. Championship horses. Beautiful horses. Swift horses. They responded not to the whip or even the reins, but simply the sound of your voice, the total of your body.
Now imagine that you put those horses in the barn and leave them there – for a year. The horses are fed and watered and the stalls are clean. But for a year you don’t exercise them. For a year you don’t train them. You take’em them out of the barn after year. How good are they going to be?
Some things in life need to be done only once and they are done forever. This isn’t one of them. This is a practice that – like eating well, like keeping yourself clean – demands daily attention. And that also means there is no getting to perfect. There’s no point at which you’ve ever cleaned yourself so well that you never have to shower again. You never win an award for mastering your emotions and call it a day.
And if this is something you tackle every day – some days better, some days worse – then in the awareness of your own struggle you’ll find room to be forgiving of yourself and of the people around you.” (Greitens, 86-87)
---
“Smiling and breathing. These are simple things.
Exercising and serving. These are simple things.
Being grateful and gracious. These are simple things.
Acting with humility. Acting with courage. These are simple things. Some people try to make this business of living too complicated, Walker.
It’s hard, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Decide who you want to be. Act that way. In time, you become the person you resolve to be.” (Greitens, 88)
---
“You know why a lot of people don’t do this, Walker? Because they are embarrassed to think of themselves as being more than they are today. And here’s the crazy part: they don’t have to share this with anyone, and yet the very idea that they might think of themselves capable of greatness causes them to imagine a thousand critics, and they constrain their own sense of who they can be.
Shot down by a ghost sniper of their own creation.” (Greitens, 91)
---
“Think about a couple of the basic functions of any community; educating children and policing the streets. Today we spend huge effort and millions of dollars to bring more technology into the classroom, when the great majority of students in the great majority of circumstances can learn almost all of what they need to know with a supportive family, a pencil, some paper, good books, and a great teacher. The schools that produced Shakespeare and Jefferson and Darwin had some writing materials some printed books – and that was it.” (Greitens, 92)
---
“Millions of people, in all walks of life and in every endeavor, create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They’d rather, as Socrates warned, focus on what they have than on what they are.” (Greitens, 93)
---
“Eric Hoffer said this: “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.”” (Greitens, 110)
---
“How do excuses take hold? An excuse starts as a protective measure. It shields us from pain, saves our pride, keeps our ego from being punctured, allows us to obscure the brutal truth. That feels like a relief at first. We avoided the pain.
Then we lay another excuse on top of the first. Then another. Excuses make us feel safe. So, we think, why not add another? Soon enough, you’re wearing excuses like a knight wearing armor.
Well, what’s the harm in that? You’re a strong guy, Walker, but how fast do you think you’d be able to run wearing a suit of armor? How well could you climb a mountain? How well could you swim across a lake? How well could you hug your kids?
Excuses protect you, but they exact a heavy cost. You can’t live a full life while you wear them.” (Greitens, 111)
---
“All of these injuries have a hard truth in common. In the long term, the obstacle that stands between us and healing is often not the injury we have received, but ourselves: our decision to keep the injury alive and open long after it should have become a hard-won scar. It is not things which trouble us, but the judgements we bring to bear upon things.” (Greitens, 113)
---
“Philosophy demands clear thinking, and a quest for clarity often leads to consistency. But if philosophy addresses real life, it will also address life’s contradictions.
Consistency, like cleanliness, is usually good. But just as you can become obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness, you can become hyper-vigilant about consistency.
Some of the thinkers we most remember weren’t afraid of inconsistency, because they were daring enough to face up to the mess of real life. (And many of the thinkers we forget made careers out of pointing out these inconsistencies.)
Poets like Walt Whitman got this. He wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
When we were in BUD/S, I gave you a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Emerson had the same idea: “Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks again, though it contradicts everything you said to-day.”
Life isn’t neat. Life isn’t tardy. And philosophy needs to speak to life.” (Greitens, 131)
---
“There is value in rigorously testing the logic underlying our thinking. But the difference between a philosophy fixated on the consistent use of words and a philosophy that speaks to life is akin to the difference between dissecting a horse and riding one. We’ll measure the worth of our words by how they move us to live well.” (Greitens, 132)
---
“Remember that the intention of philosophy isn’t to help you live a good logical life. It’s to make you self-aware and help you live a good life.
Use logic, of course. But use it, don’t serve it. Logic is a tool, not a master. The mysteries of life are such that it’s unlikely that any set of propositions – no matter how rigorous, how structured, how measured – will ever be able to account for some of the most important things in our lives.
Take beauty, for example. What would it be to live without moments of beauty?” (Greitens, 133)
---
“Here’s a well-known saying from a Supreme Court justice: “Hard cases make bad law.” Extraordinary cases and extreme examples naturally pique our interest and invite our attention. And sometimes there’s something to be learned about life in general when we look at a famous case in particular. But it’s a mistake to root our thinking about rules for living in extreme examples. The tallest person in the world is over eight feet tall. That’s fine to know, but we shouldn’t expect it to guide the way houses and beds are built for the rest of us.” (Greitens, 133)
---
“What is real, though, is the tendency to give up on the search for principles that can guide our lives most of the time just because they fail to apply all of the time.” (Greitens, 133)
---
“There was a great dividing line between all of the speeches, protests, feelings empathy, good wishes, and words in the world, and the one thing that could stop the violence: protecting people through the use of force or the threat of force. In situations like this, good intentions and heartfelt wishes were not enough. The great dividing line between words and results was courageous action. One of the greatest gulfs in life is between sounding good and doing good.
We are ultimately measured by our results, by the way our actions shape the world around us. Without results, all the kind intentions in the world are just a way of entertaining ourselves.” (Greitens, 142)
---
“The “morality of intentions” – which would measure our goodness in terms of what we hope to accomplish rather than what we actually accomplish – tells us that our thoughts and feelings count for something in their own right. It’s an appealing philosophy to those who exist, or want to exist, in a world of pure thought or feeling.
But it can also be a selfish kind of morality. It elevates the helper above the one who should be helped. It says, “What matters is the fact that I have the right opinions, now that good my opinions do in the world. What matters is what I hope or intend, not what you deserve or receive.” In fact, a morality of intentions – even the best intentions – can distort your view of the world in a way that leads to great harm.” (Greitens, 143)
---
“Many people shaped by the morality of intentions find that their abilities atrophy. They talk more and more and do less and less. With each disappointment with the world, they retreat further into themselves, convinced evermore of their own righteousness and the world’s wickedness. People content with good intentions rarely make a difference.” (Greitens, 144)
---
“It’s nice that you want to make a difference. But here’s the hard truth: your wanting is irrelevant to the people who need your help. They don’t need your wanting. They need your strength in action, and they need you to be open to discovering what actually works.” (Greitens, 144)
---
“Philosophy is meant to be done, and not just studied. Only by using philosophy do you come to know it. It is a practice. It takes practice.” (Greitens, 146)
---
“Five variables go into training or practice of any kind: frequency, intensity, duration, recovery, and reflection.
Frequency is important because we learn through repetition. Our bodies and minds and spirits need to adapt between each practice.
Intensity is important because we grow only when we push ourselves beyond the boundaries of our past experiences.
Duration is important because we need to train as long as necessary for our bodies, minds, and spirits to adapt to our work.
Recovery is important because our bodies, minds, and spirits need time to adapt to what we have learned. When we sleep after exercise we can grow stronger. When we sleep after studying, we can grow smarter. Even monks take breaks from prayer so that their spirits can grow.
Finally, reflection is important because we have to consider our performance against the standards we have set, adjust ourselves, and integrate what we’ve learned into our lives. Our times of practice will become isolated islands unless we reflect. Reflection is the bridge between what we practice and the way we live our lives.” (Greitens, 152)
---
“You could make the case that Aristotle treated friendship as the single most important ingredient for a good life. His book on character and the pursuit of happiness, the Nicomachean Ethics, has ten chapters, each on a separate subject. Only one topic gets two chapters: friendship. No other subject in the book is discussed at greater length.
Aristotle viewed friendship as an essential requirement of both happiness and excellence. And as with almost everything he examined, Aristotle tried to break his subject down into manageable and measurable pieces. He believed that friendship could be based on one of three things: utility, pleasure, or virtue.
Friendships of utility bring together people who are useful to each other. Think of business partners, coworkers, teammates. Ideally you treat each other with respect and kindness. Over time, you may grow to like each other. But you’re initially drawn together because you’re useful to one another. Such relationships are part of every human life and can be genuinely valuable. But such friendships can also be fleeting: they are prone to disappear as soon as you stop being mutually useful.
A friendship based on virtue and excellence is different. Remember when we talked about the word arête – how it is usually translated as “virtue” but means something a bit closer to “excellence” in English.
This is important, because when people read Aristotle today and see that he thinks that the ultimate friendship is one based in “virtue,” it can read as if Aristotle is giving a long, boring Sunday school lecture (…) But if you see that Aristotle is talking about friends who enrich one another’s lives, who help one another live their best possible lives, then what he’s saying starts to make sense. ” (Greitens, 209-210)
---
Letter 2: Why Resilience? – 8
Letter 3: What is Resilience – 19
Letter 4: Beginning – 32
Letter 5: Happiness – 49
Letter 6: Models – 66
Letter 7: Identity – 79
Letter 8: Habits – 95
Letter 9: Responsibility – 106
Letter 10: Vocation – 115
Letter 11: Philosophy – 129
Letter 12: Practice – 147
Letter 13: Pain – 157
Letter 14: Mastering Pain – 168
Letter 15: Reflection – 192
Letter 16: Friends – 208
Letter 17: Mentors – 220
Letter 18: Teams – 238
Letter 19: Leadership – 244
Letter 20: Freedom – 252
Letter 21: Story – 260
Letter 22: Death – 269
Letter 23: Sabbath – 274
---
“Of the ancients who practiced this kind of life, one of my favorites is Epictetus, who started life as a slave and ended it as the wisest philosopher of his day. Here’s what he told his students about what they were trying to do together” “A carpenter does not come up to you and say, ‘Listen to me discourse about the art of carpentry,’ but he makes a contract for a house and builds it ... Do the same thing yourself. Eat like a man, drink like a man … get married, have children, take part in civic life, learn how to put up with insults, and tolerate other people.”
The test of philosophy is simple: does it lead people to live better lives? If not, the philosophy fails. If so, it succeeds. Philosophy used to mean developing ideas about a life worth living, and then living that life. It still can.” (Greitens, 15)
---
“Thoreau said that the best philosophies “solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” We can tell a philosophy is working, he said, if it produces “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.”
The question is, are you aware of the philosophy you have – the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas that drive your actions? Are you aware of the way those assumptions, beliefs, and ideas add up to shape your life? Can they stand exposure to the light of day?” (Greitens, 16)
---
“Here’s how he explained the Stockdale Paradox: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”” (Greitens, 30)
---
“So, start at the beginning. Approach each day as if you have something new to learn. Your task is not to begin in a noble place, but to end up in one.” (Greitens, 40)
---
“You don’t need to be a golden boy. You don’t need to be a hero. You don’t need to pretend – to yourself or to anyone – that you’re showing up with perfect motives.
If you wait to begin until you’ve mastered your intentions, you’ll never begin. Selfish, silly, vain desires can create real growth when you subject them to discipline.
Accept that you are imperfect and always will be. Your quest is not to perfect yourself, but to better your imperfect self.” (Greitens, 42)
---
“Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming.” (Greitens, 50)
---
“In fact, thinking about color can lead us to a good analogy for happiness. The human eye can perceive missions of colors. Yet we know that we can create this wide range of colors largely from just three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue.
In the same way that an infinite variety of colors can be created from three primary ones, we can think about the full range of happiness by looking at three primary kinds of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and the happiness of excellence.” (Greitens, 54)
---
“Joy, like sweat, is usually a byproduct of your activity, not your aim.
Remember what comes first. A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness.
The pursuit of excellence leads to growth, mastery, and achievement. None of these are sufficient for happiness, yet all of them are necessary.” (Greitens, 59)
---
“Some veterans come home from war and turn to alcohol or drugs: you been there, and thousands have been there before you. Why is it that the toughest people we know – people who went without a soft bed, a home-cooked meal, and comfortable clothes for months at a time – suddenly can’t go a day without a bottle?
A lot of people think veterans turn to drink and drugs to forget what they experienced in war. And some do. But that’s only a partial and distorted truth. More often, veterans turn to drink and drugs to replace what they experienced in war.
A veteran who comes home from war is returning from one of the most intense experiences a human being can have. Even if he was not under fire every day, he woke up every morning as part of the team. He started every day with a purpose, and a mission that mattered to those around him.
Even in the middle of the desert, when it’s a hundred degrees at 10 a.m. and your nostrils are full of sand, there’s happiness. Real happiness. It comes from working together, hurting together, fighting together, surviving together, morning together. It’s the essence of the happiness of excellence.
The conditions might be miserable, the larger mission might be misguided, but your purpose easily clear every day, even if it is only to bring your friends home with honor.” (Greitens, 61)
---
“We don’t choose our models in a spirit of passive, all-consuming admiration, as a child does. We must choose actively, as an adult does. We’re seasoned enough to know that no one exercises a perfect and complete set of the virtues. We can select the qualities we want to emulate, leaving aside the rest without regrets.
We can admire the profound wisdom of Plato without accepting or ignoring his deep elitism, which held that many of us have no hope of achieving wisdom at all. We can admire the freethinking genius of Thomas Jefferson without accepting or ignoring his ownership of other human beings. We can admire the audacity of Richard Wagner, a nearly self-taught musician who became one of history’s greatest composers, without accepting or ignoring his hatred of Jews.
We can admire without ignoring, because we are adults, and that is what adults are capable of.” (Greitens, 76)
---
“Most important thing to thing to let go of - the thing so many of us struggle to let go of – is the idea that our heroes are flawless. We have to put that ideal way, if only because such a view of heroes begins to limit our view of our own lives.
If we believe that our heroes are flawless, we begin to believe that we, being flawed, or incapable heroism. In this way, a belief in the protection of others can inhibit our own growth.
Adult heroism is different. The adult knows that all heroic lives are, in a sense, a heroic struggle to overcome our own limitations.” (Greitens, 77)
---
“Flawed heroes are still heroic. Every Achilles has an Achilles’ heel.” (Greitens, 78)
---
“Imagine you’ve trained two brilliant horses. Championship horses. Beautiful horses. Swift horses. They responded not to the whip or even the reins, but simply the sound of your voice, the total of your body.
Now imagine that you put those horses in the barn and leave them there – for a year. The horses are fed and watered and the stalls are clean. But for a year you don’t exercise them. For a year you don’t train them. You take’em them out of the barn after year. How good are they going to be?
Some things in life need to be done only once and they are done forever. This isn’t one of them. This is a practice that – like eating well, like keeping yourself clean – demands daily attention. And that also means there is no getting to perfect. There’s no point at which you’ve ever cleaned yourself so well that you never have to shower again. You never win an award for mastering your emotions and call it a day.
And if this is something you tackle every day – some days better, some days worse – then in the awareness of your own struggle you’ll find room to be forgiving of yourself and of the people around you.” (Greitens, 86-87)
---
“Smiling and breathing. These are simple things.
Exercising and serving. These are simple things.
Being grateful and gracious. These are simple things.
Acting with humility. Acting with courage. These are simple things. Some people try to make this business of living too complicated, Walker.
It’s hard, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Decide who you want to be. Act that way. In time, you become the person you resolve to be.” (Greitens, 88)
---
“You know why a lot of people don’t do this, Walker? Because they are embarrassed to think of themselves as being more than they are today. And here’s the crazy part: they don’t have to share this with anyone, and yet the very idea that they might think of themselves capable of greatness causes them to imagine a thousand critics, and they constrain their own sense of who they can be.
Shot down by a ghost sniper of their own creation.” (Greitens, 91)
---
“Think about a couple of the basic functions of any community; educating children and policing the streets. Today we spend huge effort and millions of dollars to bring more technology into the classroom, when the great majority of students in the great majority of circumstances can learn almost all of what they need to know with a supportive family, a pencil, some paper, good books, and a great teacher. The schools that produced Shakespeare and Jefferson and Darwin had some writing materials some printed books – and that was it.” (Greitens, 92)
---
“Millions of people, in all walks of life and in every endeavor, create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They’d rather, as Socrates warned, focus on what they have than on what they are.” (Greitens, 93)
---
“Eric Hoffer said this: “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.”” (Greitens, 110)
---
“How do excuses take hold? An excuse starts as a protective measure. It shields us from pain, saves our pride, keeps our ego from being punctured, allows us to obscure the brutal truth. That feels like a relief at first. We avoided the pain.
Then we lay another excuse on top of the first. Then another. Excuses make us feel safe. So, we think, why not add another? Soon enough, you’re wearing excuses like a knight wearing armor.
Well, what’s the harm in that? You’re a strong guy, Walker, but how fast do you think you’d be able to run wearing a suit of armor? How well could you climb a mountain? How well could you swim across a lake? How well could you hug your kids?
Excuses protect you, but they exact a heavy cost. You can’t live a full life while you wear them.” (Greitens, 111)
---
“All of these injuries have a hard truth in common. In the long term, the obstacle that stands between us and healing is often not the injury we have received, but ourselves: our decision to keep the injury alive and open long after it should have become a hard-won scar. It is not things which trouble us, but the judgements we bring to bear upon things.” (Greitens, 113)
---
“Philosophy demands clear thinking, and a quest for clarity often leads to consistency. But if philosophy addresses real life, it will also address life’s contradictions.
Consistency, like cleanliness, is usually good. But just as you can become obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness, you can become hyper-vigilant about consistency.
Some of the thinkers we most remember weren’t afraid of inconsistency, because they were daring enough to face up to the mess of real life. (And many of the thinkers we forget made careers out of pointing out these inconsistencies.)
Poets like Walt Whitman got this. He wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
When we were in BUD/S, I gave you a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Emerson had the same idea: “Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks again, though it contradicts everything you said to-day.”
Life isn’t neat. Life isn’t tardy. And philosophy needs to speak to life.” (Greitens, 131)
---
“There is value in rigorously testing the logic underlying our thinking. But the difference between a philosophy fixated on the consistent use of words and a philosophy that speaks to life is akin to the difference between dissecting a horse and riding one. We’ll measure the worth of our words by how they move us to live well.” (Greitens, 132)
---
“Remember that the intention of philosophy isn’t to help you live a good logical life. It’s to make you self-aware and help you live a good life.
Use logic, of course. But use it, don’t serve it. Logic is a tool, not a master. The mysteries of life are such that it’s unlikely that any set of propositions – no matter how rigorous, how structured, how measured – will ever be able to account for some of the most important things in our lives.
Take beauty, for example. What would it be to live without moments of beauty?” (Greitens, 133)
---
“Here’s a well-known saying from a Supreme Court justice: “Hard cases make bad law.” Extraordinary cases and extreme examples naturally pique our interest and invite our attention. And sometimes there’s something to be learned about life in general when we look at a famous case in particular. But it’s a mistake to root our thinking about rules for living in extreme examples. The tallest person in the world is over eight feet tall. That’s fine to know, but we shouldn’t expect it to guide the way houses and beds are built for the rest of us.” (Greitens, 133)
---
“What is real, though, is the tendency to give up on the search for principles that can guide our lives most of the time just because they fail to apply all of the time.” (Greitens, 133)
---
“There was a great dividing line between all of the speeches, protests, feelings empathy, good wishes, and words in the world, and the one thing that could stop the violence: protecting people through the use of force or the threat of force. In situations like this, good intentions and heartfelt wishes were not enough. The great dividing line between words and results was courageous action. One of the greatest gulfs in life is between sounding good and doing good.
We are ultimately measured by our results, by the way our actions shape the world around us. Without results, all the kind intentions in the world are just a way of entertaining ourselves.” (Greitens, 142)
---
“The “morality of intentions” – which would measure our goodness in terms of what we hope to accomplish rather than what we actually accomplish – tells us that our thoughts and feelings count for something in their own right. It’s an appealing philosophy to those who exist, or want to exist, in a world of pure thought or feeling.
But it can also be a selfish kind of morality. It elevates the helper above the one who should be helped. It says, “What matters is the fact that I have the right opinions, now that good my opinions do in the world. What matters is what I hope or intend, not what you deserve or receive.” In fact, a morality of intentions – even the best intentions – can distort your view of the world in a way that leads to great harm.” (Greitens, 143)
---
“Many people shaped by the morality of intentions find that their abilities atrophy. They talk more and more and do less and less. With each disappointment with the world, they retreat further into themselves, convinced evermore of their own righteousness and the world’s wickedness. People content with good intentions rarely make a difference.” (Greitens, 144)
---
“It’s nice that you want to make a difference. But here’s the hard truth: your wanting is irrelevant to the people who need your help. They don’t need your wanting. They need your strength in action, and they need you to be open to discovering what actually works.” (Greitens, 144)
---
“Philosophy is meant to be done, and not just studied. Only by using philosophy do you come to know it. It is a practice. It takes practice.” (Greitens, 146)
---
“Five variables go into training or practice of any kind: frequency, intensity, duration, recovery, and reflection.
Frequency is important because we learn through repetition. Our bodies and minds and spirits need to adapt between each practice.
Intensity is important because we grow only when we push ourselves beyond the boundaries of our past experiences.
Duration is important because we need to train as long as necessary for our bodies, minds, and spirits to adapt to our work.
Recovery is important because our bodies, minds, and spirits need time to adapt to what we have learned. When we sleep after exercise we can grow stronger. When we sleep after studying, we can grow smarter. Even monks take breaks from prayer so that their spirits can grow.
Finally, reflection is important because we have to consider our performance against the standards we have set, adjust ourselves, and integrate what we’ve learned into our lives. Our times of practice will become isolated islands unless we reflect. Reflection is the bridge between what we practice and the way we live our lives.” (Greitens, 152)
---
“You could make the case that Aristotle treated friendship as the single most important ingredient for a good life. His book on character and the pursuit of happiness, the Nicomachean Ethics, has ten chapters, each on a separate subject. Only one topic gets two chapters: friendship. No other subject in the book is discussed at greater length.
Aristotle viewed friendship as an essential requirement of both happiness and excellence. And as with almost everything he examined, Aristotle tried to break his subject down into manageable and measurable pieces. He believed that friendship could be based on one of three things: utility, pleasure, or virtue.
Friendships of utility bring together people who are useful to each other. Think of business partners, coworkers, teammates. Ideally you treat each other with respect and kindness. Over time, you may grow to like each other. But you’re initially drawn together because you’re useful to one another. Such relationships are part of every human life and can be genuinely valuable. But such friendships can also be fleeting: they are prone to disappear as soon as you stop being mutually useful.
A friendship based on virtue and excellence is different. Remember when we talked about the word arête – how it is usually translated as “virtue” but means something a bit closer to “excellence” in English.
This is important, because when people read Aristotle today and see that he thinks that the ultimate friendship is one based in “virtue,” it can read as if Aristotle is giving a long, boring Sunday school lecture (…) But if you see that Aristotle is talking about friends who enrich one another’s lives, who help one another live their best possible lives, then what he’s saying starts to make sense. ” (Greitens, 209-210)
---
June 5, 2017
A few thoughts on this book by our current governor:
1) If this is helpful to people with PTSD, then power to everyone involved. Or, you know, resilience to everyone involved. I'm not a psychiatrist, so I have nothing to say about its usefulness there.
2) If this is limited to being a work on what Greitens thinks people with PTSD need to hear, then see 1). If, however, this is some kind of statement of life principles for, well "living a better life" overall, on the other hand, I have some issues. Which isn't to say I disagree with everything in the book--in fact I agree with a lot of it. Resilience is in some ways just an updating of ancient Stoic philosophy into the modern setting. Which means it has all the strengths and weaknesses of ancient Stoicism. For example, some of what he has to say about virtues like endurance and courage and such can be useful. On the other hand, there's literally nothing in this book about virtues like forgiveness, compassion, or (perhaps above all) humility. (Note: this is not to say Greitens himself lacks these virtues, I don't know him personally and based on the way he talks about what he's done, it sounds like he has each of them in abundance.)
I particularly disagree with this worldview as a Christian. I admit that there are times when "get tough and get to work" is what people need to hear--but only times. What people always need to hear is repent and believe the Gospel. "Stand up under the burden of life" should always be trumped by "kneel in humility before the Lord" and "let Christ on the cross shoulder your burden of sin." The Gospel isn't, as someone who buys into the worldview of Resilience might argue, a wimping out of dealing with your problems--it is something that literally no human being is tough or strong or resilient enough to do in his own strength. (Though Greitens does not specifically make this argument in the book, the implication is clear enough.)
And, well, that's enough. I won't say not to read it--again, there is some good stuff herein. I will say to read with with a skeptical eye to how far its application extends in the whole of life.
1) If this is helpful to people with PTSD, then power to everyone involved. Or, you know, resilience to everyone involved. I'm not a psychiatrist, so I have nothing to say about its usefulness there.
2) If this is limited to being a work on what Greitens thinks people with PTSD need to hear, then see 1). If, however, this is some kind of statement of life principles for, well "living a better life" overall, on the other hand, I have some issues. Which isn't to say I disagree with everything in the book--in fact I agree with a lot of it. Resilience is in some ways just an updating of ancient Stoic philosophy into the modern setting. Which means it has all the strengths and weaknesses of ancient Stoicism. For example, some of what he has to say about virtues like endurance and courage and such can be useful. On the other hand, there's literally nothing in this book about virtues like forgiveness, compassion, or (perhaps above all) humility. (Note: this is not to say Greitens himself lacks these virtues, I don't know him personally and based on the way he talks about what he's done, it sounds like he has each of them in abundance.)
I particularly disagree with this worldview as a Christian. I admit that there are times when "get tough and get to work" is what people need to hear--but only times. What people always need to hear is repent and believe the Gospel. "Stand up under the burden of life" should always be trumped by "kneel in humility before the Lord" and "let Christ on the cross shoulder your burden of sin." The Gospel isn't, as someone who buys into the worldview of Resilience might argue, a wimping out of dealing with your problems--it is something that literally no human being is tough or strong or resilient enough to do in his own strength. (Though Greitens does not specifically make this argument in the book, the implication is clear enough.)
And, well, that's enough. I won't say not to read it--again, there is some good stuff herein. I will say to read with with a skeptical eye to how far its application extends in the whole of life.
September 11, 2021
His letters are more like lectures...…… There is profound Wisdom in this book.....
I have been going through it like a fine tooth comb this past year.
"Eat like a Man...Drink like a man...learn to put with a difficult brother...get married...endure criticism " Epictetus
"So let us keep our silent sanctuaries, for in them the eternal perspectives are preserved " Edith Hamilton
Philosophical...Lucid.....Poetic.....Powerful and Penetrating
"Look Walker for every Achilles there is an Achilles Heel. Your Heroes are flawed, Congratulations
so are you..so go out and be Heroic"
Chiron was a Centaur both man and horse...He was a talented archer, musician , teacher, and healer,
Of all the Characters in Greek Mythology Chiron had the purest and most selfless Heart
Heracles-- "Be sure that is for you to suffer, and go on and do great things "
This book is a seminal work of art....The Stoics would be Proud ………...
I have been going through it like a fine tooth comb this past year.
"Eat like a Man...Drink like a man...learn to put with a difficult brother...get married...endure criticism " Epictetus
"So let us keep our silent sanctuaries, for in them the eternal perspectives are preserved " Edith Hamilton
Philosophical...Lucid.....Poetic.....Powerful and Penetrating
"Look Walker for every Achilles there is an Achilles Heel. Your Heroes are flawed, Congratulations
so are you..so go out and be Heroic"
Chiron was a Centaur both man and horse...He was a talented archer, musician , teacher, and healer,
Of all the Characters in Greek Mythology Chiron had the purest and most selfless Heart
Heracles-- "Be sure that is for you to suffer, and go on and do great things "
This book is a seminal work of art....The Stoics would be Proud ………...
April 5, 2015
Decent but somewhat pedantic, as if the author is determined to show us his erudition and knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics.
September 11, 2015
Extraordinary is right.
This guy is a Renaissance Man- warrior, philosopher, humanitarian, and hopeful statesman.
Undoubtedly a personality to watch for in the future.
March 1, 2017
Challenging read because of the format but tons of wisdom and practical life challenges.
September 1, 2016
Great read! I’ve read it twice now and anticipate I will revisit more than once in my remaining time here. Timeless wisdom that has withstood the ages. This book encapsulates what good philosophy is in my opinion: pragmatic perspective about why and how to live a flourishing life full of well-being. If I ever meet the author I owe him some combination of a firm handshake, a hug, a beer, a bow for his support and compassion through hard times. I find it interesting that more often than not when you aggravate a person’s anxiety about their own death you’ll be labeled as, at best, a pontificator and, at worst a pretentious asshole. This book illuminates how vital it is to truly confront our own defense mechanisms. There is so much insight in this book so I’ve distilled a few ideas that stuck out to me in each chapter.
Your Frontline
“Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength -- if we have the virtue of resilience.”
Why Resilience
“Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.” ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
What Is Resilience
“There is only one road to true human greatness: the road through suffering.” ~ Albert Einstein
“What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences, they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives.”
Happiness
“Now, not everything that is good, useful, or beautiful can be defined. Can you define jass, or ballet, or painting? I certainly can’t. So we shouldn’t be surprised that we can’t come up with a set of words to describe the art of living.”
“Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming.”
“Aristotle, who did more than any other thinker to develop our ideas of humans flourishing, said that ‘happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence.’ It might be quality cooking, quality saxophone playing, or quality love-making-- a flourishing life is a life lived along lines of excellence.”
“The Greeks recognized that true flourishing is not always within our control. The tree needs good soil and good sun. People need a life that affords them scope. Starving people find it hard to flourish.
Flourishing, then, isn’t a passing feeling or an emotional state. Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in.”
“Few people think of happiness in this way anymore. You see that it took me a couple of hundred words to break down what we mean by a ‘flourishing life.’ Aristotle and the greeks express this idea in a single word: eudaimonia.
Isn’t it interesting that we don’t have any commonly used word or phrase for this idea in English? We find it hard even to say what it means to flourish, let alone to actually flourish.”
Models
“Rather than ask, ‘How can I achieve what they achieved?’ trying asking, ‘How can I create myself as they created themselves?’
Identity
“Identity → Action → Feelings.”
Habits
“If we are intentional about what we repeatedly do, we can practice who we want to become. And through practice, we can become who we want to be.”
“Some people think of habits as patterns of action that enslave us. They see someone who acts out of habit as an automation who lives without choice. But consider the ways in which habits can liberate you.”
Responsibility
“If you take responsibility for anything in your life, know that you’ll feel fear. That fear will manifest itself in many ways: fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of hurt.
Such fear are entirely natural and healthy, and you should recognize them as proof that you’ve chosen work worth doing. Every worthy challenge will inspire some fear.”
“Diablos is the ancient Greek word for devil. The literal translation is ‘one who throws an obstacle in the path.’”
“You have to master the one who throws obstacles in your way. Master yourself.”
Vocation
“The word ‘vocation’ comes from the Latin vocare, ‘to call. To have a vocation, then, is to have work that you feel you have been called to.”
“You want to know what your purpose is. I can’t tell you. I can tell you that, whatever it is, you’ll have to work for it. Your purpose will not be found; it will be forged.
What people experience as revelation is often a result of their resolve.”
Philosophy
“Think of what Socrates asked his fellow citizens to do: Examine your lives. Take a disciplined look at your actions. Test your beliefs. Ask the hard questions. Discover how much you don’t know.”
“...but some words, are so uncomfortable that they have to be silenced by any means necessary.
‘What if I’m living my life wrong?’
‘What if my faith isn't true?’
‘What if we aren’t the center of the universe?’
The deepest questions can also provoke the deepest discomfort, the deepest fear, the deepest rage. That often means they’re working.”
Practice
“Practice and purposeful repetition are what separate an idea that interest us for a moment from an idea that becomes a part of our character”
“It's helpful to know something about resilience, but to be resilient you have to practice, to train in resilience. Education is different from training. Education aims to change what you know. Training aims to change who you are. Practicing practice will enable you to -- in the words of the old Army commercial -- be all that you can be.”
Pain
“How do you begin to analyze pain, to understand it? Let me suggest this. Though there are many kinds of pain, all of them can be divided into two camps.
There is the pain we seek. And then there is the pain that seeks us.
The pain that comes from study, from training, from pushing ourselves -- all of that, as unpleasant as it might be to bear -- is pain we seek. Because we have brought it into our lives, it is easier to understand, plan for, and work through.
But there is also the pain that seeks us. In its milder forms, this pain is just the unfortunate and bad stuff that happens in a normal day. But in its most virulent form, this pain is the stuff of tragedy...This is a different kind of pain, and philosophers and theologians and counselors and pastors and priests and poets have all tried to explain where it comes from and what it means.
Philosophers have tied this kind of pain to the idea of fortuna, from which we derive the concept of ‘fortune’ or the pain of chance. Unlike a pain we might seek when we set out to accomplish a goal, the pain of fortuna hits us without regard to our desires and often without warning. Fortuna suggests that certain things are written into our lives, certain events are beyond our control.
There is no easy answer for this pain. There is no pill to take, no prayer to make that lets us wake the next day without pain. At some point, we all have to wrestle with the pain of fortune. All that can really be said about this kind of pain was summed up by Seneca: ‘ Fate guides the willing but drags the unwilling.’
Led or dragged, there are some places we have no choice but to go.”
“An unwillingness to endure the hardship of a depressed time keeps us from possibility of capturing the wisdom and strength and joy that can exist on the other side. There is a season to be sad. Painful things hurt. Allow yourself to be hurt.”
“If there is tension in your life, if there is some deep worry about living a worthy life, then good. That tension and worry is part of a well-live life.”
Master Pain
“There’s a difference between pain and suffering. You often don’t have a choice when it comes to feeling pain. You often do have a choice about whether you suffer, because suffering is created by your perception of, and relationship to, pain.”
“To describe your pain, you have to (metaphorically) step outside of it. You have to look at it, analyze it. Instead of being in pain, you are now thinking about what the pain is doing to you. What’s happened, at the most basic level, is that you’ve changed your relationship to pain.”
“What’s true about pain in this sense is similar to what’s true about fear. It does its worst work when it’s hidden. The minute we write down what we are afraid of, or take objective stock of what’s hurting us, we begin to gain control.”
“Thich Nhat Hanh writes that suffering is something we create through our attachments: what makes people suffer is not so much the physical sensation they experience, but the meaning they attach to their losses.
I believe that you can’t live a flourishing life without attachments to people and purposeful work. But there is wisdom in recognizing that certain attachments can be unhealthy and cause us pain. And part of the art of living is knowing the who, what, when, where, how, and why of being attached.”
Reflection
“Everyone has theories about how the world works. If we’re open to the possibility that we might be wrong, and we adjust our thinking based on what we learn, then over time theories become stronger and we can have more justified confidence in our ideas.
The right way to reflect on our lives isn’t too different from the scientific method. Start with a hypothesis, and then -- no matter how good it makes you feel, no matter how commonsensical it sounds, no matter whose authority you have to back it up -- test it. Test is honestly. Test is ruthlessly. See how it stands up to the facts of the world.
Then let the results of that test -- whether they affirm or contradict your hunch -- shape your understanding.”
“Just as scientists build sound theories through experimentation, you can use your experience to build principles and ideas to shape your life. But to do this, you need to do more than just hypothesize and more than just act. You have to reflect on your experience.”
Friends
“Aristotle viewed friendship as an essential requirement of both happiness and excellence. And as with almost everything he examined, Aristotle tried to break his subject down into manageable and measurable pieces. He believed that friendship could be based on one of three things: utility, pleasure, or virtue.
“A friendship based in virtue and excellence is different. Remember when we talked about the word arete -- how it is usually translated as ‘virtue’ but means something a bit closer to ‘excellence’ in English.”
“It’s been said that the deepest relationships are formed not when two people are looking at each other, but when two people are looking in the same direction.”
Mentors
“We can’t always achieve simplicity. Sometimes complex things must be appreciated in their complexity. But we can always seek clarity. Clear advice. Clear direction.”
“The best mentors must know two things: the challenge that’s being faced and the person facing it. A mentor who knows one but not the other may be good, but isn't really great.
What does it mean for someone to know your challenge? To know your challenge means to have experience of the central question before you. (Unfortunately, a lot of bad advice is given, and taken, because people fail to identify the central question they face before acting.)”
Teams
“People form even deeper bonds when they serve together. ‘Serve’ is not quite the right word, but it’s better than ‘work’. People can work with others and not feel any sense of common cause. Being in the same place, working for the same boss, even doing the same tasks can breed resentment, alienation, competition, and distrust just as easily as they can bring people together.
‘Magnanimity’ means ‘greatness of soul,’ and Aristotle thought is was suitable virtue for a successful and honorable person. The magnanimous person is not grasping, insecure, or jealous, not small or mean. The magnanimous person does not bear grudges or seek revenge. Rather, the magnanimous person is generous, eager to do a favor, quick to forget an insult, independent-minded, brave in the face of danger. The magnanimous move and speak with well-earned confidence. They are -- the word sounds old-fashioned now -- noble. People on successful team can often find ways to be generous and kind with each other.
Real success is usually a product of struggle. And it’s important to understand how shared struggle brings people together.”
Leadership
“To inspire is to put the spirit, the breath of life, into something. To inspire is to help someone answer a simple question: why?”
“Leadership isn’t a set of techniques or tricks. Like resilience, it’s a way of being.”
“If you want to inspire devotion, be devoted.
If you want to inspire belief, believe.
If you want to motivate, be motivated.
You can’t fake any of it. If you want to lead, get yourself right first.”
Freedom
“And if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll realize that there are moments almost every day when we are ruled by something other than what’s best in us. ‘Show me a man who is not a slave!’ said Seneca. ‘One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear.’”
“When people use the phrase ‘work-life balance,’ most of them imagine a seesaw or a scale. On one end is ‘work.’ and on the other end is ‘life.’ The two are linked in such a way that everything is a tradeoff. If work is up, life is down. If life is up, work is down.
More of one means less of the other.
This is insane.
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
Story
“Rilke put this well: ‘Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.””
“In storytelling we bring past, present, and future together in a way that helps us to make sense of events and make sense of our lives.”
“As with everything in these letters, Walker, there’s no free lunch here. It’s worth pausing to point out that ‘telling yourself a story’ doesn’t change what happened, and it won’t change what you do or who you become, unless you are also willing to make hard choices. Telling stories can devolve into delusion and fantasy just as often as it helps you to dig deep and push through.”
Death
“‘There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by and is lost.’ ~ Antiphon”
“But why are you reading these letters at all? Why worry about building resilience and creating happiness now? Why not put it off until tomorrow, or next week, or next year?
You know why: because your time is limited. It’s precious because it’s finite. You don’t know how much you'll get, so you know to appreciate what you’ve got.
And it’s in this way that death -- the source of our greatest fears, the fear behind all fears -- provides the urgency behind our greatest efforts.
None of this is news, Walker. We know we’re going to die. But we’re pretty darned good at forgetting it. Forget to long and you can spend a lifetime postponing and procrastinating. You can put off the life you want to live until you wake up to find that it’s too late. You study but never act. You plan but never traveler. You think it, but never tell anyone you love them”
“If it’s important that we don’t forget the fact of our death, it’s also important that we don’t fixate on it.
The best analogy I’ve ever heard about this says that death is like the sun. It infuses every part of our lives, but it doesn’t make sense to stare at it.
The urgency that comes from limited span of our lives pushes us to find meaning in the time we have. But fear death, obsessing over it, staring directly at it, blinds us to the possibilities of living.
The resilient person learns to live with the knowledge of death without being overcome by it.
How do you do that? Remember how, in the letter on practice, I said that you can practice anything? That includes death.
“A lot of ancient philosophers recognized that through disciplined reflection on death, we bring urgency and vividness and meaning to the days that we live.
They didn’t ‘practice for death’ because they were gloomy, or morbid, or because they wanted everyone to appreciate how ‘deep’ they were. They did it because they wanted to live more fully.”
Sabbath
“These have been letters about the work of your life. But now I want to add: not all of life is work. Not all of life is overcoming. Not all of life requires resilience.”
“We should move through fear to courage. We should move through suffering to strength. We should move through pain to wisdom. But sometimes we don’t have to move at all. We simply have to be, and to practice the virtue of restful joy in a world that is not at rest.
So, Zach, whether you use a religious tradition to sanctify time or you find your own way of setting time apart, what matters most is that you find time to stop. Stop striving, stop struggling, stop thinking about how to be resilient. Find joy and rest in a world that never stops moving.
Take a long walk. Eat a slow meal. Pick up a book. Daydream. Spend time with people you love.”
“You don’t celebrate the Sabbath to become more resilient. The Sabbath is the counterbalance to resilience. Excellence and enjoyment, resilience and rest: with the Sabbath we make our lives whole.
Your Frontline
“Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength -- if we have the virtue of resilience.”
Why Resilience
“Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.” ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
What Is Resilience
“There is only one road to true human greatness: the road through suffering.” ~ Albert Einstein
“What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences, they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives.”
Happiness
“Now, not everything that is good, useful, or beautiful can be defined. Can you define jass, or ballet, or painting? I certainly can’t. So we shouldn’t be surprised that we can’t come up with a set of words to describe the art of living.”
“Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming.”
“Aristotle, who did more than any other thinker to develop our ideas of humans flourishing, said that ‘happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence.’ It might be quality cooking, quality saxophone playing, or quality love-making-- a flourishing life is a life lived along lines of excellence.”
“The Greeks recognized that true flourishing is not always within our control. The tree needs good soil and good sun. People need a life that affords them scope. Starving people find it hard to flourish.
Flourishing, then, isn’t a passing feeling or an emotional state. Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in.”
“Few people think of happiness in this way anymore. You see that it took me a couple of hundred words to break down what we mean by a ‘flourishing life.’ Aristotle and the greeks express this idea in a single word: eudaimonia.
Isn’t it interesting that we don’t have any commonly used word or phrase for this idea in English? We find it hard even to say what it means to flourish, let alone to actually flourish.”
Models
“Rather than ask, ‘How can I achieve what they achieved?’ trying asking, ‘How can I create myself as they created themselves?’
Identity
“Identity → Action → Feelings.”
Habits
“If we are intentional about what we repeatedly do, we can practice who we want to become. And through practice, we can become who we want to be.”
“Some people think of habits as patterns of action that enslave us. They see someone who acts out of habit as an automation who lives without choice. But consider the ways in which habits can liberate you.”
Responsibility
“If you take responsibility for anything in your life, know that you’ll feel fear. That fear will manifest itself in many ways: fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of hurt.
Such fear are entirely natural and healthy, and you should recognize them as proof that you’ve chosen work worth doing. Every worthy challenge will inspire some fear.”
“Diablos is the ancient Greek word for devil. The literal translation is ‘one who throws an obstacle in the path.’”
“You have to master the one who throws obstacles in your way. Master yourself.”
Vocation
“The word ‘vocation’ comes from the Latin vocare, ‘to call. To have a vocation, then, is to have work that you feel you have been called to.”
“You want to know what your purpose is. I can’t tell you. I can tell you that, whatever it is, you’ll have to work for it. Your purpose will not be found; it will be forged.
What people experience as revelation is often a result of their resolve.”
Philosophy
“Think of what Socrates asked his fellow citizens to do: Examine your lives. Take a disciplined look at your actions. Test your beliefs. Ask the hard questions. Discover how much you don’t know.”
“...but some words, are so uncomfortable that they have to be silenced by any means necessary.
‘What if I’m living my life wrong?’
‘What if my faith isn't true?’
‘What if we aren’t the center of the universe?’
The deepest questions can also provoke the deepest discomfort, the deepest fear, the deepest rage. That often means they’re working.”
Practice
“Practice and purposeful repetition are what separate an idea that interest us for a moment from an idea that becomes a part of our character”
“It's helpful to know something about resilience, but to be resilient you have to practice, to train in resilience. Education is different from training. Education aims to change what you know. Training aims to change who you are. Practicing practice will enable you to -- in the words of the old Army commercial -- be all that you can be.”
Pain
“How do you begin to analyze pain, to understand it? Let me suggest this. Though there are many kinds of pain, all of them can be divided into two camps.
There is the pain we seek. And then there is the pain that seeks us.
The pain that comes from study, from training, from pushing ourselves -- all of that, as unpleasant as it might be to bear -- is pain we seek. Because we have brought it into our lives, it is easier to understand, plan for, and work through.
But there is also the pain that seeks us. In its milder forms, this pain is just the unfortunate and bad stuff that happens in a normal day. But in its most virulent form, this pain is the stuff of tragedy...This is a different kind of pain, and philosophers and theologians and counselors and pastors and priests and poets have all tried to explain where it comes from and what it means.
Philosophers have tied this kind of pain to the idea of fortuna, from which we derive the concept of ‘fortune’ or the pain of chance. Unlike a pain we might seek when we set out to accomplish a goal, the pain of fortuna hits us without regard to our desires and often without warning. Fortuna suggests that certain things are written into our lives, certain events are beyond our control.
There is no easy answer for this pain. There is no pill to take, no prayer to make that lets us wake the next day without pain. At some point, we all have to wrestle with the pain of fortune. All that can really be said about this kind of pain was summed up by Seneca: ‘ Fate guides the willing but drags the unwilling.’
Led or dragged, there are some places we have no choice but to go.”
“An unwillingness to endure the hardship of a depressed time keeps us from possibility of capturing the wisdom and strength and joy that can exist on the other side. There is a season to be sad. Painful things hurt. Allow yourself to be hurt.”
“If there is tension in your life, if there is some deep worry about living a worthy life, then good. That tension and worry is part of a well-live life.”
Master Pain
“There’s a difference between pain and suffering. You often don’t have a choice when it comes to feeling pain. You often do have a choice about whether you suffer, because suffering is created by your perception of, and relationship to, pain.”
“To describe your pain, you have to (metaphorically) step outside of it. You have to look at it, analyze it. Instead of being in pain, you are now thinking about what the pain is doing to you. What’s happened, at the most basic level, is that you’ve changed your relationship to pain.”
“What’s true about pain in this sense is similar to what’s true about fear. It does its worst work when it’s hidden. The minute we write down what we are afraid of, or take objective stock of what’s hurting us, we begin to gain control.”
“Thich Nhat Hanh writes that suffering is something we create through our attachments: what makes people suffer is not so much the physical sensation they experience, but the meaning they attach to their losses.
I believe that you can’t live a flourishing life without attachments to people and purposeful work. But there is wisdom in recognizing that certain attachments can be unhealthy and cause us pain. And part of the art of living is knowing the who, what, when, where, how, and why of being attached.”
Reflection
“Everyone has theories about how the world works. If we’re open to the possibility that we might be wrong, and we adjust our thinking based on what we learn, then over time theories become stronger and we can have more justified confidence in our ideas.
The right way to reflect on our lives isn’t too different from the scientific method. Start with a hypothesis, and then -- no matter how good it makes you feel, no matter how commonsensical it sounds, no matter whose authority you have to back it up -- test it. Test is honestly. Test is ruthlessly. See how it stands up to the facts of the world.
Then let the results of that test -- whether they affirm or contradict your hunch -- shape your understanding.”
“Just as scientists build sound theories through experimentation, you can use your experience to build principles and ideas to shape your life. But to do this, you need to do more than just hypothesize and more than just act. You have to reflect on your experience.”
Friends
“Aristotle viewed friendship as an essential requirement of both happiness and excellence. And as with almost everything he examined, Aristotle tried to break his subject down into manageable and measurable pieces. He believed that friendship could be based on one of three things: utility, pleasure, or virtue.
“A friendship based in virtue and excellence is different. Remember when we talked about the word arete -- how it is usually translated as ‘virtue’ but means something a bit closer to ‘excellence’ in English.”
“It’s been said that the deepest relationships are formed not when two people are looking at each other, but when two people are looking in the same direction.”
Mentors
“We can’t always achieve simplicity. Sometimes complex things must be appreciated in their complexity. But we can always seek clarity. Clear advice. Clear direction.”
“The best mentors must know two things: the challenge that’s being faced and the person facing it. A mentor who knows one but not the other may be good, but isn't really great.
What does it mean for someone to know your challenge? To know your challenge means to have experience of the central question before you. (Unfortunately, a lot of bad advice is given, and taken, because people fail to identify the central question they face before acting.)”
Teams
“People form even deeper bonds when they serve together. ‘Serve’ is not quite the right word, but it’s better than ‘work’. People can work with others and not feel any sense of common cause. Being in the same place, working for the same boss, even doing the same tasks can breed resentment, alienation, competition, and distrust just as easily as they can bring people together.
‘Magnanimity’ means ‘greatness of soul,’ and Aristotle thought is was suitable virtue for a successful and honorable person. The magnanimous person is not grasping, insecure, or jealous, not small or mean. The magnanimous person does not bear grudges or seek revenge. Rather, the magnanimous person is generous, eager to do a favor, quick to forget an insult, independent-minded, brave in the face of danger. The magnanimous move and speak with well-earned confidence. They are -- the word sounds old-fashioned now -- noble. People on successful team can often find ways to be generous and kind with each other.
Real success is usually a product of struggle. And it’s important to understand how shared struggle brings people together.”
Leadership
“To inspire is to put the spirit, the breath of life, into something. To inspire is to help someone answer a simple question: why?”
“Leadership isn’t a set of techniques or tricks. Like resilience, it’s a way of being.”
“If you want to inspire devotion, be devoted.
If you want to inspire belief, believe.
If you want to motivate, be motivated.
You can’t fake any of it. If you want to lead, get yourself right first.”
Freedom
“And if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll realize that there are moments almost every day when we are ruled by something other than what’s best in us. ‘Show me a man who is not a slave!’ said Seneca. ‘One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear.’”
“When people use the phrase ‘work-life balance,’ most of them imagine a seesaw or a scale. On one end is ‘work.’ and on the other end is ‘life.’ The two are linked in such a way that everything is a tradeoff. If work is up, life is down. If life is up, work is down.
More of one means less of the other.
This is insane.
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
Story
“Rilke put this well: ‘Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.””
“In storytelling we bring past, present, and future together in a way that helps us to make sense of events and make sense of our lives.”
“As with everything in these letters, Walker, there’s no free lunch here. It’s worth pausing to point out that ‘telling yourself a story’ doesn’t change what happened, and it won’t change what you do or who you become, unless you are also willing to make hard choices. Telling stories can devolve into delusion and fantasy just as often as it helps you to dig deep and push through.”
Death
“‘There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by and is lost.’ ~ Antiphon”
“But why are you reading these letters at all? Why worry about building resilience and creating happiness now? Why not put it off until tomorrow, or next week, or next year?
You know why: because your time is limited. It’s precious because it’s finite. You don’t know how much you'll get, so you know to appreciate what you’ve got.
And it’s in this way that death -- the source of our greatest fears, the fear behind all fears -- provides the urgency behind our greatest efforts.
None of this is news, Walker. We know we’re going to die. But we’re pretty darned good at forgetting it. Forget to long and you can spend a lifetime postponing and procrastinating. You can put off the life you want to live until you wake up to find that it’s too late. You study but never act. You plan but never traveler. You think it, but never tell anyone you love them”
“If it’s important that we don’t forget the fact of our death, it’s also important that we don’t fixate on it.
The best analogy I’ve ever heard about this says that death is like the sun. It infuses every part of our lives, but it doesn’t make sense to stare at it.
The urgency that comes from limited span of our lives pushes us to find meaning in the time we have. But fear death, obsessing over it, staring directly at it, blinds us to the possibilities of living.
The resilient person learns to live with the knowledge of death without being overcome by it.
How do you do that? Remember how, in the letter on practice, I said that you can practice anything? That includes death.
“A lot of ancient philosophers recognized that through disciplined reflection on death, we bring urgency and vividness and meaning to the days that we live.
They didn’t ‘practice for death’ because they were gloomy, or morbid, or because they wanted everyone to appreciate how ‘deep’ they were. They did it because they wanted to live more fully.”
Sabbath
“These have been letters about the work of your life. But now I want to add: not all of life is work. Not all of life is overcoming. Not all of life requires resilience.”
“We should move through fear to courage. We should move through suffering to strength. We should move through pain to wisdom. But sometimes we don’t have to move at all. We simply have to be, and to practice the virtue of restful joy in a world that is not at rest.
So, Zach, whether you use a religious tradition to sanctify time or you find your own way of setting time apart, what matters most is that you find time to stop. Stop striving, stop struggling, stop thinking about how to be resilient. Find joy and rest in a world that never stops moving.
Take a long walk. Eat a slow meal. Pick up a book. Daydream. Spend time with people you love.”
“You don’t celebrate the Sabbath to become more resilient. The Sabbath is the counterbalance to resilience. Excellence and enjoyment, resilience and rest: with the Sabbath we make our lives whole.
September 12, 2020
Rating: (all out of 5 stars)
Quality of the writing: 5 / 5
Prior to joining the Navy and becoming a Navy Seal, Eric Greitens was a Rhodes and Truman Scholar. While at Oxford he earned Master’s and Doctoral degrees.
His writing is clearly that of someone who is well educated and well read. It struck me as more eloquent, while approachable, than anything I have ever read.
Quality of the content/organisation/research: 5 / 5
See the prior comment. His writing, his examples, his Stoic quotes, it is absolutely impressive and awe inspiring to me.
Impact on my perspective: 5 /5
I have read on Stoicism for a fair period of time now and I am driven by a certain internal code; however, I have never codified that code in writing.
Eric Greitens codified how I feel on a myriad of subjects and codified it in a way that I don’t know I would be able to do.
While it may not necessarily change my perspective, it is a book that I can hand to my Sons, to my friends, to family, to colleagues and say you want to know what makes me tick. How I think. How to get ahead in life. How to live life. Then read this.
Personal resonance: 5 /5
This book resonates with me more than anything that I’ve read.
Recommendation potential: 5 /5
I was recommending this book to people before I finished it.
One of my close friends, an avid reader, a person with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and
self-improvement, picked it up off of his to read shelf and dove in.
Within days, he messaged me and said I have never highlighted a book so much in my life. I felt the same. It is a work of art on how to live the right life today.
This will be one of the most recommended books that I have ever read, alongside:
- Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
These are all books that change your perspective on life. Books that help you take a step to a higher level.
Overall score (averaged and rounded): 5/ 5
Personal:
Why I read Resilience:
I have a long-term life goal of pivoting into personal and career coaching.
Focus areas of my reading that will assist in driving my eventual practice are:
• Stoicism
• Buddhism
• Mindfulness
• Men’s Work
• Shadow Work
• Emotional Intelligence
Resilience, by Eric Greitens, was on a list of recommended books on Stoicism that I used to purchase ~ 30 books on Stoicism, which I am slowly working my way through.
Context of reading:
I purchased the thirty books on Stoicism a number of years ago and have slowly been working my way through them.
I also purchased a number of books on emotional intelligence, via the Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Series, and have been working my way through them.
I read this book during covid, during quarantine, when a healthy dose of resilience was warranted in life.
At the same time, I was reading a book on resilience in the HBR emotional intelligence series.
Where I heard about it/who suggested it:
As noted above, Resilience was in a recommended list of Stoicism readings, which I believe I either picked up through Farnam Street or the Daily Stoic, both great sites that provide a lot of solid learning for readers.
Review:
A summary of the book:
This book is based off of a series of letters between Eric Greitens and a friend from his days in the Navy Seals.
Eric’s friend is going through a rough stretch on his return to America after serving overseas. He’s fallen into Alcoholism and is spiraling out of control. Knowing this, he reaches out to Eric for help, for a lifeline.
Eric responds with a chain of correspondence between the two men over time that helps his friend out of the death spiral. Helps him remember who he is and what he’s capable of.
Eric draws on the tenets of Stoicism, amongst many other philosophies, through the course of the letters he writes. Each letter has one to two take-aways for the reader.
From Why Resilience -->What is Resilience --> Taking the first step --> on happiness --> role models --> identity --> habits --> responsibility --> philosophy --> vocation --> practice --> pain --> reflection --> friendships and more
Reading this should help anyone who is aimless in life. Who doesn’t know what their next step, their first step, should be. Someone who doesn’t believe in themselves and wants to know how to move forward in life.
My feelings/assessments of it:
This book resonated with me more than any book I have ever read and will become one of the most recommended books for me in the future, alongside Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy, which the book discusses and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Interesting titbits:
Some interesting tidbits are:
The best philosophies solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. We can tell a philosophy is working if it produces a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
We all need something to struggle against and to struggle for. The aim in life is not to avoid struggles, but to have the right ones; not to avoid worry, but to care about the right things; not to live without fear, but to confront worthy fears with force and passion
The first step to building resilience is to take responsibility for who you are and for your life. If you’re not willing to do that, stop wasting your time.
The essence of responsibility is the acceptance of the consequences – good and bad – of your actions. You are not responsible for every thing that happens to you. You ARE responsible for how you deal with what happens to you.
We become what we do if we do it often enough. We act with courage, and we become courageous. We act with compassion and we become compassionate. If we make resilient choices, we become resilient.
You can develop resilience, anyone can do it. No on can do it FOR YOU. YOU and YOU ALONE have to do the work.
It is possible to build virtues. It is possible to change your character. It is possible, therefore, to change the direction of your life.
Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.
Copy day after day. One day you’ll take stock and find what started out as copying, whether it’s your writing or your way of being a dad, or your way of facing up to a loss, has become something uniquely your own.
-Identity -> Action -> Feelings
-You begin by asking who am I going to be
-You then act that way
-The way you act will shape the way you feel
-If you want to feel differently then act differently
Those are enough tidbits, for more, read the book.
Thank you Eric Greitens for sharing such an inspiring book with the world.
Quality of the writing: 5 / 5
Prior to joining the Navy and becoming a Navy Seal, Eric Greitens was a Rhodes and Truman Scholar. While at Oxford he earned Master’s and Doctoral degrees.
His writing is clearly that of someone who is well educated and well read. It struck me as more eloquent, while approachable, than anything I have ever read.
Quality of the content/organisation/research: 5 / 5
See the prior comment. His writing, his examples, his Stoic quotes, it is absolutely impressive and awe inspiring to me.
Impact on my perspective: 5 /5
I have read on Stoicism for a fair period of time now and I am driven by a certain internal code; however, I have never codified that code in writing.
Eric Greitens codified how I feel on a myriad of subjects and codified it in a way that I don’t know I would be able to do.
While it may not necessarily change my perspective, it is a book that I can hand to my Sons, to my friends, to family, to colleagues and say you want to know what makes me tick. How I think. How to get ahead in life. How to live life. Then read this.
Personal resonance: 5 /5
This book resonates with me more than anything that I’ve read.
Recommendation potential: 5 /5
I was recommending this book to people before I finished it.
One of my close friends, an avid reader, a person with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and
self-improvement, picked it up off of his to read shelf and dove in.
Within days, he messaged me and said I have never highlighted a book so much in my life. I felt the same. It is a work of art on how to live the right life today.
This will be one of the most recommended books that I have ever read, alongside:
- Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
These are all books that change your perspective on life. Books that help you take a step to a higher level.
Overall score (averaged and rounded): 5/ 5
Personal:
Why I read Resilience:
I have a long-term life goal of pivoting into personal and career coaching.
Focus areas of my reading that will assist in driving my eventual practice are:
• Stoicism
• Buddhism
• Mindfulness
• Men’s Work
• Shadow Work
• Emotional Intelligence
Resilience, by Eric Greitens, was on a list of recommended books on Stoicism that I used to purchase ~ 30 books on Stoicism, which I am slowly working my way through.
Context of reading:
I purchased the thirty books on Stoicism a number of years ago and have slowly been working my way through them.
I also purchased a number of books on emotional intelligence, via the Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Series, and have been working my way through them.
I read this book during covid, during quarantine, when a healthy dose of resilience was warranted in life.
At the same time, I was reading a book on resilience in the HBR emotional intelligence series.
Where I heard about it/who suggested it:
As noted above, Resilience was in a recommended list of Stoicism readings, which I believe I either picked up through Farnam Street or the Daily Stoic, both great sites that provide a lot of solid learning for readers.
Review:
A summary of the book:
This book is based off of a series of letters between Eric Greitens and a friend from his days in the Navy Seals.
Eric’s friend is going through a rough stretch on his return to America after serving overseas. He’s fallen into Alcoholism and is spiraling out of control. Knowing this, he reaches out to Eric for help, for a lifeline.
Eric responds with a chain of correspondence between the two men over time that helps his friend out of the death spiral. Helps him remember who he is and what he’s capable of.
Eric draws on the tenets of Stoicism, amongst many other philosophies, through the course of the letters he writes. Each letter has one to two take-aways for the reader.
From Why Resilience -->What is Resilience --> Taking the first step --> on happiness --> role models --> identity --> habits --> responsibility --> philosophy --> vocation --> practice --> pain --> reflection --> friendships and more
Reading this should help anyone who is aimless in life. Who doesn’t know what their next step, their first step, should be. Someone who doesn’t believe in themselves and wants to know how to move forward in life.
My feelings/assessments of it:
This book resonated with me more than any book I have ever read and will become one of the most recommended books for me in the future, alongside Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy, which the book discusses and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Interesting titbits:
Some interesting tidbits are:
The best philosophies solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. We can tell a philosophy is working if it produces a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
We all need something to struggle against and to struggle for. The aim in life is not to avoid struggles, but to have the right ones; not to avoid worry, but to care about the right things; not to live without fear, but to confront worthy fears with force and passion
The first step to building resilience is to take responsibility for who you are and for your life. If you’re not willing to do that, stop wasting your time.
The essence of responsibility is the acceptance of the consequences – good and bad – of your actions. You are not responsible for every thing that happens to you. You ARE responsible for how you deal with what happens to you.
We become what we do if we do it often enough. We act with courage, and we become courageous. We act with compassion and we become compassionate. If we make resilient choices, we become resilient.
You can develop resilience, anyone can do it. No on can do it FOR YOU. YOU and YOU ALONE have to do the work.
It is possible to build virtues. It is possible to change your character. It is possible, therefore, to change the direction of your life.
Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.
Copy day after day. One day you’ll take stock and find what started out as copying, whether it’s your writing or your way of being a dad, or your way of facing up to a loss, has become something uniquely your own.
-Identity -> Action -> Feelings
-You begin by asking who am I going to be
-You then act that way
-The way you act will shape the way you feel
-If you want to feel differently then act differently
Those are enough tidbits, for more, read the book.
Thank you Eric Greitens for sharing such an inspiring book with the world.
December 18, 2020
This book is really full of knowledge. I think it's perfect for anyone who wants to get better, get motivated, and actually, learn and understand something. This book clarified a lot of things for me and I also had to write some quotes from this book 'cause it was so captivating for me. It also got me motivated to read books like Marcus Aurelius - Meditations and The Iliad and The Oddysey. Thank you so much writer, this work is excellent!
May 3, 2022
If you need a shot in the arm to get up and get things done, this might be your book. Glad I read it. A nice book on the 100 must reads for men.
April 7, 2016
When I first started reading this book, I thought it would be the sort of book that would provide a look at resilience, at overcoming difficulty, and it did, in a manner of speaking. This is a book where the structure of the book, as artificial and contrived as it is, is of the utmost importance. The author is a retired Navy SEAL who finds great purpose in encouraging other veterans, and this book is written as a series of letters about various topics to a colleague of his who had left the service with a diagnosis of PTSD [1] and fallen into alcoholism with the threat of jail and absence from his wife and young children. The resulting book is a strange mixture of qualities, being both “real” in the sense that it represents a man-to-man talk about how to live life well despite one’s traumas and wounds, and also unreal in the sense that it is edited and somewhat artificial in its discussion.
The twenty-three letters that make up this sizable book of 380 pages cover a wide variety of topics: the frontline of a veteran at home, why and what is resilience, beginnings, happiness, models, identity, habits, responsibility, vocation, philosophy, practice, pain, mastering pain, reflection, friends, mentors, teams, leadership, freedom, story, death, and Sabbath. The author is fond of namedropping playwrights and philosophers, blending biblical insights with the lessons of Kung Fu movies and Eastern religious tradition, along with the stoic heroes of Roman history, and this book shows a wide range of reading. The book also is full of the warmth and compassion that people show to those they know, but what we see is almost entirely only one side of the conversation, the erudite and scholarly letters written by the author, with only fleeting quotes of the other side of the conversation, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the correspondent has taken responsibility and improved his life over the course of the lengthy letters, seeing as there is no way this correspondence happened quickly.
What is one to make of this book, though, as it is. The book is obviously not all-encompassing, as the author accurately notes that it contains little about marriage and fatherhood, seeing as the author himself does not feel competent to discuss such matters. The book leans heavily on philosophy and does not appear to be a particularly religious sort of person, although the sort of discipline and habit and care for others that the author praises are precisely what tends to be the approach of those who are genuinely religious. At its core, this book is based on a contradiction between the realization of mankind’s fallen state and the impossibility of perfection and the steadfast refusal to surrender to God, but rather to seek to be wise and powerful on one’s own terms, to be the master of one’s ship, the author of one’s path, the one who decides what knowledge to seek and what way to live. The resulting contradiction is that the author professes to be wise, while showing himself to be immensely foolish in striving to be his own god. The book is at its strongest when the author recognizes other authorities, but these insights are weakened by the author’s insistence in proclaiming his autonomy, even as he correctly notes that genuine manliness comes about as a result of service.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
The twenty-three letters that make up this sizable book of 380 pages cover a wide variety of topics: the frontline of a veteran at home, why and what is resilience, beginnings, happiness, models, identity, habits, responsibility, vocation, philosophy, practice, pain, mastering pain, reflection, friends, mentors, teams, leadership, freedom, story, death, and Sabbath. The author is fond of namedropping playwrights and philosophers, blending biblical insights with the lessons of Kung Fu movies and Eastern religious tradition, along with the stoic heroes of Roman history, and this book shows a wide range of reading. The book also is full of the warmth and compassion that people show to those they know, but what we see is almost entirely only one side of the conversation, the erudite and scholarly letters written by the author, with only fleeting quotes of the other side of the conversation, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the correspondent has taken responsibility and improved his life over the course of the lengthy letters, seeing as there is no way this correspondence happened quickly.
What is one to make of this book, though, as it is. The book is obviously not all-encompassing, as the author accurately notes that it contains little about marriage and fatherhood, seeing as the author himself does not feel competent to discuss such matters. The book leans heavily on philosophy and does not appear to be a particularly religious sort of person, although the sort of discipline and habit and care for others that the author praises are precisely what tends to be the approach of those who are genuinely religious. At its core, this book is based on a contradiction between the realization of mankind’s fallen state and the impossibility of perfection and the steadfast refusal to surrender to God, but rather to seek to be wise and powerful on one’s own terms, to be the master of one’s ship, the author of one’s path, the one who decides what knowledge to seek and what way to live. The resulting contradiction is that the author professes to be wise, while showing himself to be immensely foolish in striving to be his own god. The book is at its strongest when the author recognizes other authorities, but these insights are weakened by the author’s insistence in proclaiming his autonomy, even as he correctly notes that genuine manliness comes about as a result of service.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
September 8, 2020
I am commenting on the written book---This is a Terrific and Noble Book---given in Philosophic Discourse fashion--He gives power-packed advice from History to his Seal buddy Walker
Some of my favorite take-backs were Edith Hamilton, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, and Seneca--
all of us have faced pain, suffering, grief, and loss--we have a history of Historic Writers and Poets who have left wise advice throughout history on how to push through these obstacles.
My favorite quote from the book is: "Start with this, not all pain matters"
I leave you with a quote from Seneca : Now go question yourself, if you are never downcast, if you are never apprehensive about what is about to come, if day and night your soul keeps on an even level upright and content with itself, you sir have found the greatest good a mortal can possess" Seneca's Epistle on "Pleasure and Joy"
I love his inclusion of Emile Zatopek--The Czech Olympian Runner---He was unorthodox in training--he literally grew up in poverty--but he pushed himself in training by going high volume with fast repetition and limited recovery--He pushed his body and Mind to the limit and became an Olympic Champion--maybe the Greatest Long Distance runner of all time---he trusted himself and his original training methods
I am adding to this review----I really liked his work and comments about the Dedication of Mother Theresa in Calcutta---we don't need something to do, but a worthy cause that will take hold of us:
"So let us win the way to victory in all our struggles, for the prize is not a palm, or a crown, nor a herald to proclaim silence at the reading of our names; but virtue, strength, and peace for all time if fortune has been utterly vanquished in any combat" Seneca
'make this your business in life, learn how to feel Joy" Seneca
Some of my favorite take-backs were Edith Hamilton, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, and Seneca--
all of us have faced pain, suffering, grief, and loss--we have a history of Historic Writers and Poets who have left wise advice throughout history on how to push through these obstacles.
My favorite quote from the book is: "Start with this, not all pain matters"
I leave you with a quote from Seneca : Now go question yourself, if you are never downcast, if you are never apprehensive about what is about to come, if day and night your soul keeps on an even level upright and content with itself, you sir have found the greatest good a mortal can possess" Seneca's Epistle on "Pleasure and Joy"
I love his inclusion of Emile Zatopek--The Czech Olympian Runner---He was unorthodox in training--he literally grew up in poverty--but he pushed himself in training by going high volume with fast repetition and limited recovery--He pushed his body and Mind to the limit and became an Olympic Champion--maybe the Greatest Long Distance runner of all time---he trusted himself and his original training methods
I am adding to this review----I really liked his work and comments about the Dedication of Mother Theresa in Calcutta---we don't need something to do, but a worthy cause that will take hold of us:
"So let us win the way to victory in all our struggles, for the prize is not a palm, or a crown, nor a herald to proclaim silence at the reading of our names; but virtue, strength, and peace for all time if fortune has been utterly vanquished in any combat" Seneca
'make this your business in life, learn how to feel Joy" Seneca
February 23, 2018
I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants a no-nonsense/no excuse approach to taking control of what can be in controlled in their lives. I've read and re-read this book, and personally, many of the lessons in this book were exactly what I needed to hear. I had many disjointed thoughts on how to be more resilient and muddled plans conjured from reflections on previous failures- this book helped immensely in uncovering areas I could improve on that I was either blind to, or perhaps too reluctant to face.
However, as he said with models (i.e. the model chosen for one challenge may not be appropriate for another), not every piece of advice in this book will resonate. The parts that stick out in memory to me were how he handled the topic of depression and trying/success in children. But Greitens makes it clear that the advice in his letters are not overarching or complete.
I've read many self-help books, and the advice and insights he gives are not revolutionary nor was that his intent. I liked the stories he provided from Ancient Greece, contemporary culture, and his own life to add color to advice that we might have heard many times before. He pulls from many scholars, martyrs, activists, athletes, and leaders to provide context for the traits of resilient people. I wish we could have heard the responses from Zach Walker as without them, some letters seemed a bit 'preachy' at times.
Overall, I found something helpful on almost every page, and took many pages of notes that I can use to shore up my own philosophy on living well. I'd gift this book to my friends who have been stuck in self-reflection, running in circles, and need a nudge in the right direction.
However, as he said with models (i.e. the model chosen for one challenge may not be appropriate for another), not every piece of advice in this book will resonate. The parts that stick out in memory to me were how he handled the topic of depression and trying/success in children. But Greitens makes it clear that the advice in his letters are not overarching or complete.
I've read many self-help books, and the advice and insights he gives are not revolutionary nor was that his intent. I liked the stories he provided from Ancient Greece, contemporary culture, and his own life to add color to advice that we might have heard many times before. He pulls from many scholars, martyrs, activists, athletes, and leaders to provide context for the traits of resilient people. I wish we could have heard the responses from Zach Walker as without them, some letters seemed a bit 'preachy' at times.
Overall, I found something helpful on almost every page, and took many pages of notes that I can use to shore up my own philosophy on living well. I'd gift this book to my friends who have been stuck in self-reflection, running in circles, and need a nudge in the right direction.
December 15, 2017
I mostly listened to this book while I was working on some mindless activities. I found that whenever I actually read parts of the book, I enjoyed it a lot more. Greitens does his own reading for the audiobook and I didn't like his reading style. He would chuckle through parts of it, sometimes stifle a yarn, and often would end phrases or sentences with a rising inflection making it sound more like a question. It took me about half the book to get past that to where I could enjoy the content.
As far as the content goes, he's got a lot of good stuff in here that resonated with me. I think that anyone who reads this book can take some lessons from it, but I don't necessarily think the book is for everyone. It took me a while to make it through the book. I think it would be good to read through this book again because he has a lot of good stuff to share, but I just don't think I can do it again. I think I would pick out chapters and re-read those.
The book is focused on resilience and that encompasses every aspect of our life, but the biggest thing I really took away from this book is to be excellent at everything you do. That doesn't mean be perfect, but strive for excellence in everything. That means you will also fail, but that's how you learn to be excellent. For me personally, it's often too easy to give up after failing. Failing does not mean you are a failure. It just means you failed and you need to find a different way to succeed. Be resilient.
As far as the content goes, he's got a lot of good stuff in here that resonated with me. I think that anyone who reads this book can take some lessons from it, but I don't necessarily think the book is for everyone. It took me a while to make it through the book. I think it would be good to read through this book again because he has a lot of good stuff to share, but I just don't think I can do it again. I think I would pick out chapters and re-read those.
The book is focused on resilience and that encompasses every aspect of our life, but the biggest thing I really took away from this book is to be excellent at everything you do. That doesn't mean be perfect, but strive for excellence in everything. That means you will also fail, but that's how you learn to be excellent. For me personally, it's often too easy to give up after failing. Failing does not mean you are a failure. It just means you failed and you need to find a different way to succeed. Be resilient.
August 13, 2016
Starting this book I had no idea that Eric Greitens is actively involved in politics as I only start looking for information regarding the author once the book is done reading. I have to admit that the person that I have imagined as going along with the book and the one that I saw being displayed as a candidate for governor of Missouri are quite different, however that is not influencing my opinion about his past writings, including this one.
The book is structured as letters written by the author to his close friend, resilience being the main theme, with emphasis on titles such as identity, habits, responsibility, vocation, and reflection. There are numerous references to Greek mythology and ancient philosophers, and as you would expect, our history is always around to teach us about our present and future.
Going through the notes that I have highlighted from the book, I am writing down my favourite one, so you can make an idea of what to expect in case you decide to give this book a go.
"There will come a day when the lights go out one last time, a day when the work and the living and the loving is all done. No one knows for certain what lies beyond that day. But if you've lived well, you can hope to become part of a story that others are proud to tell."
The book is structured as letters written by the author to his close friend, resilience being the main theme, with emphasis on titles such as identity, habits, responsibility, vocation, and reflection. There are numerous references to Greek mythology and ancient philosophers, and as you would expect, our history is always around to teach us about our present and future.
Going through the notes that I have highlighted from the book, I am writing down my favourite one, so you can make an idea of what to expect in case you decide to give this book a go.
"There will come a day when the lights go out one last time, a day when the work and the living and the loving is all done. No one knows for certain what lies beyond that day. But if you've lived well, you can hope to become part of a story that others are proud to tell."
July 25, 2016
A parte l'ammiccamento, fuorviante per chi volesse leggere il libro ma è in qualche maniera ostile a tutto ciò che riguarda la guerra, al trend "militare" dalla copertina, al titolo, al rimando ai SEAL, corpo d'elite della Marina USA (il titolo originale è Resilience - Resilienza), il libro è un interessante percorso tramite lettere a un compagno di esperienze militari su come trovare, recuperare e applicare la resilienza nella vita normale, quando si pensa di aver perso gli stimoli o ci si è trovati in difficoltà, in questo caso dopo il rientro nella vita civile.
Le lettere sono piccoli passi ed insegnamenti che stimolano il fare con l'essere, condite da citazioni di esperienze del passato (Seneca, Marco Aurelio, Aristotele ed altri) che mostrano che in fine tutto è già stato detto, tutto è già stato vissuto e che si può attingere alla saggezza del passato per poter vivere in modo migliore, anche se non perfetto perché gli errori e i fallimenti fanno parte della vita e siamo noi a doverli "capitalizzare" per continuare il nostro percorso di vita
Le lettere sono piccoli passi ed insegnamenti che stimolano il fare con l'essere, condite da citazioni di esperienze del passato (Seneca, Marco Aurelio, Aristotele ed altri) che mostrano che in fine tutto è già stato detto, tutto è già stato vissuto e che si può attingere alla saggezza del passato per poter vivere in modo migliore, anche se non perfetto perché gli errori e i fallimenti fanno parte della vita e siamo noi a doverli "capitalizzare" per continuare il nostro percorso di vita
August 3, 2017
Awful. A book by a man for men. It's like the world exists only for men; women are shadows with no worth or contribution. Just an outright slog. NOTE: I knew nothing of this writer before picking up the book; I didn't even read his bio on the dust jacket. After finishing the book (I want those hours of my life back), I discovered he is a right-wing anti-choice rabble-rouser masquerading as an intellectual because he's read Greek philosophy. He's a hack. He gives psychological advice (he's not qualified) to those who are depressed and he practically parrots Nancy Reagan circa 1981 with her advice for depressed people to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." Where are the stories about the mothers, the sisters, the daughters who are underwriting your machismo? Disgusting. Made me physically ill. I hope Missouri isn't duped by him into voting him into public office. This writer has MUCH to answer for.
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