Stop Trying to Bounce Back — You’re Built for Better Than That

You're not fragile.

You're not even resilient.

You're built to get stronger from being challenged, and comfort is disabling it So

my friend, welcome to the Daily Podcast.

Today, we're gonna talk about three important things.

Let's talk about fragility, resilience, and anti-fragility.

And we're gonna talk about how these relate to your life and how

some of the difficult, challenging things that you may be resisting

may actually be here to serve you.

You see, if something is fragile, it breaks under stress.

So imagine like a beautiful vase and it's super fine porcelain, and the slightest

bump or tap or it just gets knocked over, it shatters really instantly.

And that's the kind of person that the smallest things, their, their taco is

not quite at the right temperature, just completely derails their day.

And so you move from fragility to resilience.

Now, resilience simply means the ability of something to return to

its original shape after stress.

I did a seminar on this years ago for a bunch of young people.

We were talking about the need to develop resilience, and I taught them.

I can't remember what I took with me.

I think it was like a, a big sponge.

And I said, "Yeah." Got somebody in the audience to squeeze it really

tight and push it into a ball.

And then when you let it go, like one of those big sponges for washing a car,

it just goes back to its original shape.

So that's resilience.

Like you go through something difficult, you go through a hard season, and then

once enough time passes, you end up pretty much back to the same way you were.

You're back to your normal self, okay?

And that's a good thing.

But there's a step beyond that, and that's what we call anti-fragility.

And anti-fragility means that when you go through difficult things, you

don't just go back to your original shape, you get much stronger.

Now, there's parts of the human, um, anatomical system that already do that.

So muscle, for example, if you train it, it gets bigger.

It responds and grows from stress.

I'm in the studio here this morning.

I'm gonna be in the gym in a couple of hours, and I've been training

for, I think forty years or something now, close to thirty-five years.

And all of those years, what I'm doing is pushing muscle fibers to the point of

micro tears, and then that muscle fiber is stretched and strained, and then it

f- it receives it as a stress, and it responds to that stress by getting a

little bit bigger, a little bit stronger.

Bone density is the same.

You know, often a lot of old people really struggle with bone density because as

they age, they're not exercising as much.

And there's so much research at the moment that lifting into your

older age and keeping mobile, even walking increases bone density.

Think of your immune system.

Your immune system when you're young, you know, you can often get a lot of colds and

flus and you get this bug and that bug.

But over time, your immune system gets stronger and stronger as it encounters

all these different pathogens.

And even your character.

You've been… You know, there's been times when you could have taken an easy

option and you did something a little bit harder, and you grow through that.

So these are all anti-fragile systems that exist within us all the time.

Now, here's our problem The modern system that we live under, the modern,

uh, the era of our modern system, and as I always say, there is so

much great about our modern system.

My… You know, for example, I always say to people, "Don't underestimate

the importance of a flushing toilet."

You think of most of humanity never had that.

So there's a lot of, there's a lot that's great about modern life.

People are too easy, are too quick to downplay this modern

world and how terrible and all the problems in the world.

Yes, there are many, many problems, but there are also many things

that you would not change.

But one of the things we would possibly wanna change is that we've got to a place

where we tend to engineer as much stress as possible out of our life So most of our

homes and offices have climate control.

It's, uh, technically about minus six degrees here this

morning outside the studio.

So, uh, here in the studio we have heating, so we've--

actually, that's not a bad thing.

But you can see that we've begun to engineer all discomfort out of life.

We have a huge focus on convenience.

You know, we have Amazon packages.

Everything just arrives.

You don't have to walk anywhere.

Everything just comes to you.

So comfort is a thing, and it's a big part of our modern culture, and we

call it progress, and I guess it is.

But one of the things that no longer happens is we're built to feed on stress.

Well, not stress, but we're built to respond to stress and challenge,

and stress and challenge is being engineered out of our lives.

And one of the challenges for young people is that they often

get everything kinda too easily.

I'm starting to sound like an old person now.

No offense to old people.

I'm just pretending not to be one of them.

But often with younger people, there's this pressure, there's this, uh, to

protect them from things, so they're not building even resilience because

they're not being tested or stressed.

So couple of important distinctions here.

Chronic stress we don't want.

If you live under chronic stress, you tend to get sick, and it has

very serious inimitable consequences, things that we don't want.

But chosen stress, choosing to place ourselves under difficulty and

challenge can have extraordinarily positive benefits for us.

In my first book, Bridging the Gap, I actually wrote about this.

It's the concept of sort of liminal spaces and pushing ourselves into threat-

what I call threshold experiences.

If you wanna get a copy of that, just go onto y- onto any podcast

engine and just look for Bridging the Gap with Jonathan Doyle.

My complete book is there for free, my audiobook, Bridging

the Gap, Jonathan Doyle.

Go check that out because there's a whole chapter on threshold

experiences about the decision to place ourselves in very specific

circumstances makes a huge difference.

Before I came in the studio, you can see it on Instagram this morning,

I was out running at about five AM.

It was minus two when I went out.

So the decision to place myself in these challenging environments

has changed me over many years.

I remember recently I went out, and I ran six half marathons in six days,

so simply every day I got up and ran a half marathon for six days straight.

And there's people that could go out and run six full marathons in six days.

But my decision to choose these environments made a

significant difference to my life.

So at the age I am now, 52, my life's pretty much built around this.

I, every single day, I choose difficult things that are hard to do.

Mostly around fitness, training, weightlifting, and then how I

try to approach work, and then I play a lot of golf, so golf is

constantly testing my character.

So I genuinely do this.

My life is very much built around, you know, know, just constantly

choosing difficult things.

And in the last sort of year or so, even less, last six months,

I've had a sense that this is gonna be hard for the rest of my life.

You know, I've, I've kinda thought maybe this gets easier and the discipline

and the mindset where you gotta just keep showing up and keep doing

hard things and keep lifting heavy weights and keep going out at 4:00

AM, 5:00 AM in subzero temperatures.

And I, I came to this point more recently where I just went, "No, this is gonna…

To be honest, this is gonna suck for the rest of your life. Like, this is

just going to be difficult." And I don't know, I'm just wired that way now.

I've sort of done this for so long that I don't know if you're listening to

me going, "But don't you wanna rest?"

And I go-- And the fact is I do rest.

And Karen, my wife, will tell you this.

One of the big changes again for me in the last sorta six months has been the

realization that rest is so crucial.

Like, my approach to sleep is like no one I know.

I take sleep so seriously, and I work incredibly hard, but when

I, when I turn off, I'm off.

I'm just done So I mention this to, just to balance this so you don't

think that I don't take rest seriously.

I really do.

But when I'm not doing that, I'm choosing to do difficult, challenging

things on a very constant basis.

So there's a great quote here from Nicholas Taleb who says, "Some

things benefit, benefit from shocks.

They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder,

and stressors." One more time, "Some things benefit from shocks.

They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness,

disorder, and stressors." So can I tell you one last thing?

A while ago, I went through an incredibly challenging mini season of life.

It was, uh, probably the most challenging season I'd been through.

There was a whole bunch of stuff going on and really calling me to

change and grow and step up and, and really lead in our business in

a whole bunch of different areas.

And I was like, even last night I remember thinking, "That was

the toughest, toughest season."

And I know this is gonna sound crazy, but you know what?

I miss parts of it.

I actually miss parts of it because that season really forced me to grow.

It really forced me to change and to find the absolute best in myself.

So I can promise you that if you will stop always seeking comfort and you

will start to choose some difficult, uncertain things that will stress

and challenge you, you're not gonna break because you're not fragile.

And I'd like to think that if you're listening to this sort of

content, you're not even resilient.

Anybody can kind of work their way back to where they were, but I'm hoping

that you're actually anti-fragile and you understand that you can genuinely

grow from the difficult, hard things that you can sometimes choose.

I mean, life's gonna send you plenty of them anyway, but we're talking

about another level of operation here.

We're talking about the decision to actually go looking for difficult things.

I'm about to wrap up, so please make sure you've subscribed to the podcast.

Hit that subscribe button for me.

Share this with family and friends.

I'm on Instagram every day @jdoylespeaks, uh, YouTube, Jonathan Doyle Speaks,

and on the website jonathandoyle.co.

So that is it for today.

I wanna leave you with a quote as I have begun to do each episode,

and it's this: "Your job isn't to avoid volatility. It's to become the

kind of person that feeds on it."