#resilience

#resilience

"The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character." ~Arnold Schwarzenegger The gym. Just saying the word makes some people break into a sweat-and not the good kind. Bright lights. Mirrors everywhere. What do I wear? That "everyone is staring at me" feeling (spoiler: they're not; they're staring at themselves).

Even as new GLP-1 agonists with brand names like Wegovy and Zepbound make it easier to achieve weight loss, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors ( SSRIs) like Prozac and Zoloft provide a hedge against depression, there is growing interest in an old idea: psychedelics. The drugs are not being researched as a diversion from life, but instead as a therapeutic intervention to help us handle life's challenges in more creative ways.

We Generation X people are made of stern stuff. The latchkey generation; the ones raised on convenience foods that probably bordered on the radioactive; the kids sent out at daybreak and told to return only when the street lights came on.

When you fix the "problem," it teaches kids that you don't think they can handle it. Helping a child be flexible-to adapt when things don't happen as they expect or want-builds resilience. Resilience and flexibility are attributes that ultimately make kids happy. I call this the "taping the pretzel" trap: Your child flips out when something unexpected happens and demands you undo it,

a year ago, i was scared that i'd never release music again,

Cloudflare recently published a detailed resilience initiative called Code Orange: Fail Small, outlining a comprehensive plan to prevent large-scale service disruptions after two major network outages in the past six weeks. The plan prioritizes controlled rollouts, improved failure-mode handling, and streamlined emergency procedures to make the company's global network more robust and less vulnerable to configuration errors. Cloudflare's network suffered significant outages on November 18 and December 5, 2025, with the first incident disrupting traffic delivery for about two hours and ten minutes

People with very high expectations have very low resilienceand unfortunately, resilience matters in success, Huang said during an interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe.

A grounding connection forms between the moon in seductive Scorpio and Venus in committed Capricorn, setting a serious tone to your morning. Living up to promises, especially those made with a loved one, is non-negotiable. The moon's eclectic opposition to disruptive Uranus throws a wrench in your afternoon plans. However, Saturn's steady support of the moon is a reminder to stay in control of your emotional reactions, even when the unexpected occurs.

Throughout many immigrant experiences, stories collected from family members can be a starting point for migrants. The memories gleaned from parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles-who crossed dozens of borders at great risk and with immense pain-can settle into the consciousness of new host communities for decades. For the migrants, these stories and memories represent the first step into a new world and contain lifelines with the potential and promise to build new, resilient identities and a sense of belonging in often hostile environments.

It is embedded in how I live. Specifically, writing everything that I dream of, and everything that fails me, all of the emotional reality. Often, there are things I'm afraid to say, and then I put them in my writing, and they're said. Then I can say it! I can read it in the book, and people aren't that shocked by it. Often, what people are shocked by has nothing to do with what I'm afraid of.

One of my dear friends was recently caught up in this swirl and roil. An attorney in the Department of Justice, the days of DOGE forced her to choose among uncertain options and to try to find firm footing in a landscape that shifted from solid to sand on a dime. Should she stay or go? Retire early or risk being fired? Each option had potential consequences beyond where she might clock in each day. What of her career trajectory? Her sense of purpose?

AI, however, is forcing the firm to rethinkthe types of applicants it considers in the hiring process, CEO Bob Sternfels said. On Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast podcast this week, Sternfels said the firm used AI to analyze its past 20 years of hiring data to understand where it may have overlooked talent for its coveted class of partners. The firmfound that applicants who had setbacks and recovered were more likely to become partners.

When the world feels chaotic-when grief, uncertainty, or heaviness settles into your body-gratitude can feel distant. Yet these are often the very moments when giving thanks becomes a steadying force. Naming what we're grateful for can't erase hardship, but it can anchor us. It reminds us what is good and what is possible, even in the hardest seasons. Gratitude, from the Latin gratus-thankful, pleasing-is a multidimensional experience.

Now, listening in late 2025, I no longer felt heroic. Instead, what I felt most strongly was tenderness. Tenderness for that young man who believed he could outwork any obstacle, who thought the American dream was just a matter of refusing to quit. He had no idea what was coming-the failures, the losses, the ways life would refuse his tidy narrative.

"Cyber-attacks can take vital public services offline in minutes, disrupting our digital services and our very way of life," he said. "This plan sets a new bar to bolster the defences of our public sector, putting cyber-criminals on warning that we are going further and faster to protect the UK's businesses and public services alike. "This is how we keep people safe, services running, and build a government the public can trust in the digital age."

The concept of the BANI World was proposed by Jamais Cascio in 2018 and further refined in 2020 to describe four major characteristics of future society: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Compared to the previous VUCA ( Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and A mbiguity) World, the BANI World more accurately depicts the increasingly complex and volatile global situation and trends. "Brittle" refers to social systems being more susceptible to shocks and damage, often accompanied by the risk of sudden collapse.

Every January, millions of us set goals that promise control: eat better, exercise more, stress less. Yet the most transformative resolution may not be about controlling life-it's about expanding our capacity to engage with it. Stress isn't something to eliminate-it's something to train for. Just as we lift weights to strengthen our bodies, we can stretch our emotional tolerance to strengthen our minds.

After getting laid off in 2023, marketing veteran Julie Levin worked part time as a bartender for about six months as she considered her next steps. Levin is now the head of brand partnerships at Two Things, a New York City consultancy specializing in business transformations. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity. I moved across the country from LA to the New York area in 2022 for a really exciting job that I thought would mark the next phase of my career.

There are two ways of looking at this. Either you could say Ger Copeland is lucky, that he has no divine right to be alive, and focus on how he's defied outrageous odds not just to live, but to live the way he does - winning marathons and scaling unfathomable heights for a man in his condition. You could look at the 10 per cent chance of survival he once had and think how fortunate he is to still be around.

Her father, a chef, took her to the kitchen. He filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Once the three pots began to boil, he placed potatoes in one pot, eggs in the second pot, and ground coffee beans in the third pot. He then let them sit and boil, without saying a word to his daughter. The daughter, moaned and impatiently waited, wondering what he was doing.

Throughout human history, individuals and societies have advanced when they upheld rigorous standards that develop and advance merit, competence, effort, skill, and capability. The construction of monuments, architectural knowledge, the development of engineering systems, and the advances in scientific knowledge all required precise alignment with universal laws of mathematics, geometry, and physics (Haklay & Gopher, 2020; Trigger, 1990). For example, in the case of the Egyptian pyramids,

If you want to be more successful with holding onto a positive goal change, current research reports the key will be goal adaptation. Goal adaptation, also known as goal flexibility, refers to the ability to view setbacks with patience and kindness. Approaching your New Year resolution this way allows for wiggle-room, so adjustments can be made to your desired outcome. Goal flexibility also leads to greater feelings of success and well-being.

To be clear, the people and entities on this list are by no means weak or pitiable. Quite the opposite: They are the most resilient, unbreakable individuals and communities we can think of. This list celebrates their strength and the inspiration they give to all of us. Per tradition, we've peppered some of the entries with a bit of humor, another important means of resistance. Here's to hoping for a new year that finds power in the hands of the many, not the few.

[Narrator] Developing tools to overcome trauma. When we began to become confident that we really had identified something real, this resilience trajectory I've talked about, we've identified it in many studies at this point. It's been identified convincingly in the majority and over 100 research studies by other people than myself, lots of other people. So it's very much a real thing.