Resilience or Stubbornness?
In a recent conversation with an entrepreneur, I became aware of the emotional toll she was experiencing. It was not the first time she had invested energy, time and emotion in an idea. Nor was it the first time she had encountered obstacles, prolonged deadlocks and difficult negotiations that ultimately ended in rejection. And yet, she kept going.
I found myself admiring her resilience and what it demands: recovering from disappointment, rebuilding hope and exposing oneself once again to the possibility of rejection.
I recognise a certain degree of projection here, because I was once an entrepreneur too. Perhaps for that reason, and thinking about some of my own mistakes, I became curious about the point at which the ability to keep going is a force for progress, and the point at which it becomes a barrier.
What physics can teach us
In materials science, resilience is not the ability to remain unchanged when subjected to force. Quite the opposite: it is the capacity to absorb energy, deform and recover. It is closely associated with elasticity.
A material that cannot accommodate deformation may be brittle: like glass, it can break suddenly, with little warning.
This metaphor challenges the somewhat heroic idea that resilient people are unshakeable. My experience tells me they are not. Leaders can be deeply affected by losing a business opportunity or seeing a project fail and still be resilient.
Feeling the impact is not the opposite of resilience, provided that recovery follows. But every attempt leaves a mark, however subtle, and those marks can teach us to change the way we respond to what comes next.
If, after repeated rejection, we continue to think in exactly the same way and try exactly the same solution, what we are witnessing may no longer be resilience. It may be rigidity, stubbornness… fragility.
But we only know at the enD…
Looking back, it is easy to call perseverance resilience when it eventually worked, and stubbornness when it did not.
Apparently, the criterion is the outcome. But the outcome only becomes known after we have already made the decision to persevere, either by doing more of the same or by changing something along the way.
In the middle of the story, that criterion is simply not available to us.
The difference between resilience and stubbornness is not how many times we try again, but what changes in us between each attempt.
It happens to all of us, entrepreneurs and executives alike: the product that fails to gain traction, the project that refuses to move forward, the business model that no longer works.
From the inside, the two forms of perseverance can feel exactly the same. Both can feel like courage.
We therefore need another signal, one that does not require us to wait for the outcome, to distinguish resilience from stubbornness.
The truth is that persevering in the face of adversity is often essential. Many important ideas would never have existed if the first few “no’s” had been interpreted as an instruction to stop.
But there is a difference between persisting in a purpose and persisting in a solution.
We can remain committed to the ambition while abandoning the strategy. We can radically change our approach, recognise that the timing is wrong, or even conclude that something we deeply believed in may, after all, have been wrong. That is the signal.
The difference between resilience and stubbornness is not how many times we try again, but what changes in us between each attempt.
The more we invest in an idea, the harder it becomes to assess it from a distance. We invest not only time and money, but also reputation (ego?), expectations and, sometimes, part of our own identity (more ego?).
Changing direction then starts to feel like a statement about who we are. And that is why resilience requires a quality that may seem almost its opposite: humility. The ability to keep believing while, at the same time, remaining open to the possibility that we may be wrong.
Humility is the key to resilience
Perseverance without humility is stubbornness.
And this is why we need people around us who are able to tell us what we do not want to hear. Teams, peers, boards or coaches with enough independence to ask us what has genuinely changed in our approach since the last time we tried.
I do not know whether the entrepreneur in this story should keep going. I suspect that the repeated rejections contain information she has not yet been able to hear. But that is only my suspicion, not a certainty.
The answer must be hers. And she will only find it if she pauses long enough to think and ask herself:
Is what drives me to persevere today still a source of strength, or has it become the reason I am unable to change?
This article was originally published in Portuguese in Executiva.
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