What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

What an extraordinary statement. “What does not kill me, makes me stronger” states the eighth aphorism of Götzen-Dämmerung by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This quote endorses and feeds our Western culture, full of individualism and ‘can-do, macho’ mentality. Just do it! “The weather is extremely dangerous, but I am still going to the top of Mont Blanc. I can do it! I'm already at least 15 minutes late. I’ll quickly run through the red light. At this time, there’s not much traffic anyway. I can do it! I will overtake my biggest competitor. I will go into massive debt, but in the long run, everything will be alright. I can do it!”

“Work it, make it, do it, makes us harder, better, faster stronger”, sings Kanye West and Daft Punk in the song ‘Stronger’, taking their cue from Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is an unfathomable philosopher, but it’s clear that one should not take his statement too literally. It’s highly unlikely that his statement is simply a call for reckless behaviour. “I pull up to the top of Mont Blanc and, maybe in doing so, I trigger a whole rescue operation to get me off a mountainside. I drive through a red light, maybe just as a young cyclist enters the intersection. I overtake my biggest competitor, but I soon run out of money and have to lay off a lot of workers”.

Many interpret the statement as meaning that setbacks, pain and misery make you stronger. But setbacks, pain and misery only make you stronger if you learn from them for the future. Because even if you get back on your feet after a setback, if you don't grow and learn from it, the next setback will hit you even harder.

The life of Friedrich Nietzsche, an esteemed professor at an internationally-renowned university, was a long one. Suffering from long-term migraine attacks and worsening blindness, he was forced to leave his Chair. After that, he mentally collapsed. Crying, he embraced a horse that had been beaten in the street and threatened to kill the German emperor... all painful experiences that Nietzsche endured and from which he couldn’t find the strength to recover and grow. His life ended after 11 years of physical and psychological deterioration.

What does not kill me, makes me stronger. Yes, if I have enough resilience. Resilience is a relatively new field of research in developmental psychology. One investigates which aspects are needed to deal with a crisis mentally and emotionally – and perhaps even come out stronger.

American psychologist Emmy Werner followed a group of nearly 700 children in Hawaii for 32 years. One-third of these children were at high risk of severe stress due to poverty, family circumstances or psychological disorders. But she found that not every child reacted the same way to a stressful situation. During her research, she noticed that two-thirds of these children suffered from severe learning or behavioural disorders at the age of 10. The other group, however, turned out to be competent, confident and caring young adults. Emmy Werner discovered two important characteristics in these resilient children. They often had a strong bond with a supportive teacher, family member or mentor. And they always responded to their environment in an active, positive way. They were autonomous, independent and believed that they influenced their performance. The resilient children had what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control’; they believed that they, and not their circumstances, influenced their performance. They saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own destiny.

Let me focus on two important elements of this internal locus of control – the growth mindset and the circle of influence.

“I’ve missed more then 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed” said Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players ever. Mistakes and setbacks are an inherent part of life, of growing up, of a professional career. Making mistakes is part of learning, it is a process of growth, where we climb the learning curve step-by-step. The American Professor, Carol S. Dweck, at Stanford University developed the theory of the growth mindset. She states that people react to failure according to two patterns. People with a fixed mindset believe that skills are mostly innate and interpret failure as a lack of the necessary basic skills, while people with a growth mentality believe that they can acquire a certain skill if they put effort into it or study it. Some differences between the two mindsets:

I experienced the difference between the two mentalities perfectly with my 15-year-old son Thomas. Since pre-school, Thomas has been a real passion for science. For him, a 9 or 10 for maths and science is ‘normal’. He’s fully mastered the subject matter and probably isn’t challenged enough. But the perseverance he showed in swimming lessons as a little boy was a real example of growth mindset. Thomas was afraid to hold his head under water when swimming. After many lessons, he finally overcame his fear and mastered the technique. Since then, he swam for several years with great dedication and enjoyment at the swimming club.

Maybe that’s why I was captivated by the example of the American Olympic swimming team in The Art of Performanceby Jeroen De Flander. In the summer of 1988, the American swimming coach Nort Thornton had to decide which athletes would participate in the Summer Olympics. To find out which swimmer would react best to a setback, he set up the following experiment. He asked his swimmers to swim a top time over a distance of 100 metres. After this distance, he called out the time to the swimmer, but added between one and five seconds. Result: the athlete had swum a terrible time according to the information he had received. Thornton advised the athlete to rest and think. The resilient swimmers thought about what had gone wrong in the process and how they could improve their technique. They subsequently swam a better time. The swimmers with little resilience had difficulty digesting the poor performance and attributed it mainly to external factors. They subsequently swam a worse time. The swimming coach Nort Thornton immediately knew which swimmers to select.

Stephen Covey describes in The Seven Habits of Effective Leaders how you can enlarge this circle of influence. Every person is involved in a number of things – health, work, family, friends. So you have a circle of involvement of things you are emotionally and mentally involved with. Within this circle, you have another circle – the circle of influence. By being proactive, you can enlarge that circle. I can choose. Maybe there are other solutions. I can do things differently. I determine my own feelings. And this is in contrast to blaming, denying or running away from others. Proactive people seek refuge in actions, reactive people in feelings.

Let me finish with Dawn Staley, an American basketball player and coach, three-times Olympic gold medalist. She was born in a deprived neighbourhood in Philadelphia. As a little girl, she loved basketball and wanted only one thing – to play on the court. In the Netflix series ‘Playbook’, she explains that this was far from obvious and could only be achieved with a lot of creativity and perseverance. After all, the big boys had taken the only big field. “You should be in the kitchen” and “Go put on a skirt” they shouted. So she thought of a way to enlarge her circle of influence. She always walked the streets with a basketball and had one golden rule. The boys could only play with her ball if she was allowed on the court. After a while, she made enough progress to reach the top 10 and secure a permanent spot on the court.

And so we come back to “What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger”. The question is whether you have enough resilience to turn a setback into a learning experience. Do you act like the poor little girl Dawn Staley with a lot of guts and creativity and force the boys to allow you a place on the court or do you stay on the sidelines full of self-pity?