#resilience

#resilience

Anastasiya Buchkouska, a 20-year-old student from western Ukraine, gently brushes away layers of snow and ice from her father's grave. She pauses, looking up at the photograph fixed to the gravestone. His face bears a striking resemblance to hers. When her father was younger, he had served in the military. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he was called up almost immediately and sent to the front line.

Before became the dominant lens through which we interpret human suffering-and before resilience became the preferred word for recovery- adaptation was one of the central concepts used to understand how human beings survive, change, prepare, and continue developing under pressure. In early psychology, psychiatry, ethology, and evolutionary biology, adaptation was not a moral term. It was descriptive, not prescriptive. It referred to the organism's capacity to reorganize itself-biologically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially-in response to changing conditions.

You've just had a crummy day, and you wish you hadn't. Your first instinct is to pick up the phone, call your best friend, and complain. But you also know deep down that you want to be more positive. You know that complaining emphasizes the negative in your life, and you'd like to create a shift for yourself. You recall that you started a gratitude journal, and when you use it, you find you really enjoy noticing the good things more than the bad.

In places where inclusion is part of the infrastructure of their economy-supply chains, procurement processes, capital access, or business ownership-people thrive. Inclusive economies create more resilience by expanding the base of potential business owners who can build, own, innovate, and hire. They allow more opportunities for homeownership and investing in the longevity of communities. As our economy becomes increasingly stratified and volatile, we need as much resiliency as we can get.

Microsoft first acknowledged the issues at 0900 UTC (although the status page for the service stated it spotted the problem at 0922 UTC). At the time, Microsoft blamed the Azure OpenAI Service's availability issues on "an unhealthy backend dependent service, which led to cascading failures." The Windows behemoth noted problems when using modes such as GPT-5.2, GPT-5 Mini, GPT-4.1, and related APIs.

As a documentary filmmaker, anticipating the unexpected is part of the job. We learn to obsess over what could go wrong-equipment failures, weather shifts, emotional volatility, permissions falling apart, safety concerns, or a once-in-a-lifetime moment slipping away. We become experts at scanning for danger, preparing for the failure before it arrives. It isn't neurosis-it's craft. It's training. It's how we keep the work alive.

In an era obsessed with shortcuts, overnight success, and polished social media profiles, adversity is often treated as something to avoid. Something unfortunate. Something that signals failure. That assumption is completely wrong. Adversity is not a flaw in the entrepreneurial journey; it is, in fact, the training ground, the pressure that sharpens one's judgment, accelerates their adaptability and forges the kind of resilience no accelerator, MBA or funding round can manufacture.

You know what's strange? The people who've been hurt the most often end up being the kindest souls you'll ever meet. It doesn't make sense at first. Logic would suggest that repeated betrayals, disappointments, and wounds would harden someone's heart. Build walls, create cynics, and yet (somehow) certain rare individuals manage to stay genuinely warm and compassionate despite everything life throws at them.

But here's what I've learned after interviewing over 200 people: The real test of mental strength isn't how brilliant you are in your prime. It's whether you can maintain certain crucial traits as the decades roll by. Think about it. Anyone can be resilient when they have the energy of youth on their side. But can you bounce back from setbacks when you're sixty? Can you stay curious when you've "seen it all"? That's where true mental strength reveals itself.

"The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character." ~Arnold Schwarzenegger The gym. Just saying the word makes some people break into a sweat-and not the good kind. Bright lights. Mirrors everywhere. What do I wear? That "everyone is staring at me" feeling (spoiler: they're not; they're staring at themselves).

Even as new GLP-1 agonists with brand names like Wegovy and Zepbound make it easier to achieve weight loss, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors ( SSRIs) like Prozac and Zoloft provide a hedge against depression, there is growing interest in an old idea: psychedelics. The drugs are not being researched as a diversion from life, but instead as a therapeutic intervention to help us handle life's challenges in more creative ways.

We Generation X people are made of stern stuff. The latchkey generation; the ones raised on convenience foods that probably bordered on the radioactive; the kids sent out at daybreak and told to return only when the street lights came on.

When you fix the "problem," it teaches kids that you don't think they can handle it. Helping a child be flexible-to adapt when things don't happen as they expect or want-builds resilience. Resilience and flexibility are attributes that ultimately make kids happy. I call this the "taping the pretzel" trap: Your child flips out when something unexpected happens and demands you undo it,

There's no mystery, it's a broken toe. You just have to deal with the pain, you just have to deal with the situation. I'm German, so we are strong, we can deal with pain, so you just have to find solutions. We found some good solutions, and I can deal with that so it's good. I don't want to miss a game for AC Milan.

a year ago, i was scared that i'd never release music again,

Cloudflare recently published a detailed resilience initiative called Code Orange: Fail Small, outlining a comprehensive plan to prevent large-scale service disruptions after two major network outages in the past six weeks. The plan prioritizes controlled rollouts, improved failure-mode handling, and streamlined emergency procedures to make the company's global network more robust and less vulnerable to configuration errors. Cloudflare's network suffered significant outages on November 18 and December 5, 2025, with the first incident disrupting traffic delivery for about two hours and ten minutes

People with very high expectations have very low resilienceand unfortunately, resilience matters in success, Huang said during an interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe.

A grounding connection forms between the moon in seductive Scorpio and Venus in committed Capricorn, setting a serious tone to your morning. Living up to promises, especially those made with a loved one, is non-negotiable. The moon's eclectic opposition to disruptive Uranus throws a wrench in your afternoon plans. However, Saturn's steady support of the moon is a reminder to stay in control of your emotional reactions, even when the unexpected occurs.

Throughout many immigrant experiences, stories collected from family members can be a starting point for migrants. The memories gleaned from parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles-who crossed dozens of borders at great risk and with immense pain-can settle into the consciousness of new host communities for decades. For the migrants, these stories and memories represent the first step into a new world and contain lifelines with the potential and promise to build new, resilient identities and a sense of belonging in often hostile environments.

It is embedded in how I live. Specifically, writing everything that I dream of, and everything that fails me, all of the emotional reality. Often, there are things I'm afraid to say, and then I put them in my writing, and they're said. Then I can say it! I can read it in the book, and people aren't that shocked by it. Often, what people are shocked by has nothing to do with what I'm afraid of.

One of my dear friends was recently caught up in this swirl and roil. An attorney in the Department of Justice, the days of DOGE forced her to choose among uncertain options and to try to find firm footing in a landscape that shifted from solid to sand on a dime. Should she stay or go? Retire early or risk being fired? Each option had potential consequences beyond where she might clock in each day. What of her career trajectory? Her sense of purpose?

AI, however, is forcing the firm to rethinkthe types of applicants it considers in the hiring process, CEO Bob Sternfels said. On Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast podcast this week, Sternfels said the firm used AI to analyze its past 20 years of hiring data to understand where it may have overlooked talent for its coveted class of partners. The firmfound that applicants who had setbacks and recovered were more likely to become partners.

When the world feels chaotic-when grief, uncertainty, or heaviness settles into your body-gratitude can feel distant. Yet these are often the very moments when giving thanks becomes a steadying force. Naming what we're grateful for can't erase hardship, but it can anchor us. It reminds us what is good and what is possible, even in the hardest seasons. Gratitude, from the Latin gratus-thankful, pleasing-is a multidimensional experience.