Truth Bomb Tuesday: I don’t want to be ‘resilient’
“I should be able to do it myself, shouldn’t I?”
I feel like I hear this a lot. Especially as someone who coaches people into success through property investing, I hear it all the time.
“Sure, Dymphna. You could coach me into property investing. But I should be able to do it myself.”
But it’s not just in property investing. People carry this idea into everything they do. Every plumber has a war-story about some DIY project that’s gone pear shaped.
“It’s just installing a toilet. I should be able to do it myself.”
It’s part of our hyper-individuated, glorifying-resilience culture. You should be able to do it yourself… while carrying your wounded mate through the trenches… with a broken knee… while wearing linen and doing beautiful bespoke craft candles with your children.
All of it. You should be able to do it all yourself.
And resilience is the buzz word of the moment. But too often resilience just seems to be another word for the ability to keep doing it all yourself, just now you’re dealing with flood and fire as well.
Screw resilience, I want a cuddle.
And partly this is about pushing back on the pressure to be a totally independent super-human.
But it’s also about reclaiming our super-power.
Think about what it is that makes humans special.
It’s not our size. It’s not our claws. It’s not our teeth. It’s not our ability to hibernate for 9 months at a time beneath the desert sands.
It’s our ability to coordinate.
A single human in the Savanah is easy pickings. But a group of humans, coordinated through language – that’s a force to be reckoned with.
And with the invention of the written word, our ability to coordinate was liberated from the confines of time and space.
The sum total of everything Sir Isaac Newtown ever knew is now only a single Chat-GPT prompt away.
We are the uncontested apex predator of the world because we know how to coordinate.
But when we try to be resilient and go it alone, we’re turning our back on the only thing that makes us special.
We’re giving up the only competitive advantage we have.
May as well just go ahead and cut off our opposable thumbs while we’re at it.
We are powerful when we work together.
And when I met a new cohort of students, I can tell you right away which ones who are going to be successful.
It’s not the smart ones. It’s not the ones who can drive a spreadsheet like a Ferrari. It’s not the ones who have a keen eye interior design.
It’s not even the ones who work well in a team.
It’s the ones whose first instinct is to be part of a team – to find others they can work with – rather than going it alone.
It’s the ones who aren’t afraid to harness the superpower of the human.
So yes, independence and resiliency is great. Awesome. If you can do it yourself, fantastic.
But this is not where you start.
Start in your power.
Start in together.
DB.