On Resilience

Someone I respect wrote a piece about resilience. He has watched a lot of founders, up close, for a long time, and he believes resilience is the quiet thing that decides who survives. Optimism. Naivety. Character. He calls it destiny.

He would know. He was there for some of mine.

But he was watching from the outside, and from the outside resilience looks like one clean thing. From the inside it was at least two, and they did not feel the same at all.

Some of what he saw as resilience was the judge. I have written about him elsewhere: the voice that arrives with the verdict already formed, that turns shame into fuel so efficiently that I came to trust it as the only engine I had. Looked at from across a room, a founder driven that hard looks like a founder that will not quit. And it is true that I did not quit. But not always because I was brave. Often because stopping felt more dangerous than continuing. When I left my first job to do this, I did not call it risk. I called it continuation. That is not the same as courage. It only photographs the same.

The naivety, though, he has exactly right. We were twenty something. We did not know the odds, which is the only reason we were willing to bet against them. If we had understood properly how unlikely it all was, I am not sure we would have stood at the edge of the empty thing and stepped in.

So if that were the whole story, it would be a slightly bleak one. Resilience as a man who could not let himself rest, mistaking the inability to stop for the strength to go on.

But it is not the whole story, and the part that is missing is the part I actually want to say.

There was a second kind of resilience, and it was not mine. It was lent to me.

The judge hands down sentences in advance, in my own voice, so that I am already convicted before anyone outside has said a word. For most of my life that has been the loudest voice in the room. But every so often someone has stood in front of me and said the opposite, this is good, you are good, go, plainly, with no obligation to be kind. And on the rare occasions I have managed to believe one of them over the judge, my whole life has changed direction.

He was one of those people. He came the length of the country to a city everyone had written off, looked at three young founders, and saw something we could not see in ourselves. Then he told us to leave - the hardest verb there is, for someone like me - and he believed it before I did.

I did not become resilient that day. I borrowed it. I borrowed it from a man who had crossed the country to lend it.

That is the thing I would want him to know. He thinks resilience comes only from deep within, that he can bring capital and encouragement and advice but not the thing itself. I think he is mostly right. But he is wrong about the edges. For an founder whose own inner voice is a prosecutor, the belief of someone who is under no obligation to believe is not nothing. It is a different sentence, handed down by someone else, and for once it is one I got to keep.

So: resilience is destiny, maybe. But some of mine was given to me by people who believed before I could. He was one of the first, and I have never properly told him so.