I thought resilience was the capacity to endure pain, so I asked Adam how I could figure out how much I had. He explained that our amount of resilience isn’t fixed, so I should be asking instead how I could become resilient. Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity — and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.

Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity — and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.

Resilience is the ability to embrace what happened.

Mental resources like determination, self-worth, and kindness are what make us resilient: able to cope with adversity and push through challenges in the pursuit of opportunities. While resilience helps us recover from loss and trauma, it offers much more than that. True resilience fosters well-being, an underlying sense of happiness, love, and peace. Remarkably, as you internalize experiences of well-being, that builds inner strengths which in turn make you more resilient. Well-being and resilience promote each other in an upward spiral.

Being resilient is the ability to thrive and to survive,” Voraakhom said. “We have that ability as human beings, but our urban infrastructure does not have it and doesn’t allow us to have it.

Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. It comes from gratitude for what’s good in our lives and from leaning in to the suck. It comes from analyzing how we process grief and from simply accepting that grief. Sometimes we have less control than we think. Other times we have more. I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.

Resilience isn't predicting the correct future and preparing for it; resilience is acting in ways that make sense across the widest range of possible futures.

Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes—while not becoming an extremist. Most companies don't do paradox very well.

The ability to overcome adversity and failure is an evolved capacity that is essential to countless organisms, including humans. The capacity to develop an anti-fragile response to repeated failures is a fundamental, necessary, and beneficial feature of life. No meaningful goal can ever be achieved without resilience and effort.

For us, resilience is quite simply the difference between life and death, between regression and progress

I don’t think there’s any skill more critical for success than resilience...I think about resilience as the speed and strength of your response to adversity.

The concept of resilience is an important component of our security, as well as a key factor in protecting democracy.

To bring a gift for people to know that resilience is something that you can actually live to achieve, and that the fear of the unknown doesn’t need to be something that limits your ability to thrive in life...Those qualities will be important for everybody to be able to take in.

Women of color are regularly praised for our resilience, but what's too often overlooked is that our resilience is a response to so many forms of violence. For us, resilience is more than a noble trait; it's a lifestyle that oppression has demanded of us. Either we adapt or we die. Even so, we need not be mere caricatures. Our stories matter, despite what the rest of society would like us to believe.