How do you keep going when the idea keeps getting knocked back?
By being anchored in the truth underneath the idea rather than in the idea itself. Ideas die. If the insight is real and you actually believe it, it survives every version, and you can keep making new ones out of whatever is to hand.
Resilience is being able to return to your own good condition.
Early ideas are full of promise and very easily killed. Resilience is what is left standing between yours and the people who would rather it went away.
Resilience is not bouncing back from one blow
Think, do, be. Almost everything written about this treats it as a single event. You get hit, you recover, you are resilient.
That is not what it looks like in a working life. What it looks like is a chain. Something dies, you carry something out of it, and the thing you carry becomes the next attempt, which may also die.
Nobody can teach you a technique for that. What you can do is know what you are carrying.
Two that died, and the one that did not.
Covid, 2020. There was a wonderful founder working in frequency and sound, with extraordinary technology and her own investor behind her. I brought in my mate James Scroggs, a CEO, and the two of us partnered with them to build a mental health and performance app we called Patterning. We went hard at it.
Then the venture wound down. Her investor was not prepared to keep going, which was his call to make.
That is one.
Milan and I kept talking, and we had an idea. Use the sound coming out of a person’s throat, put AI on the patterns, and let somebody cough into their phone in the morning to find out whether they had Covid. We called it Cough4Earth. The plan was to train the algorithm to 95 per cent confidence. What we wrote on the front of it was: no more lockdowns.
Turned down.
That is two.
We stayed in touch anyway. Then Milan rang to say he was working on some sleep technology to do with stillbirth, and I said I would help. Not for a stake. Not with a plan. Just to be around and support a mate.
Two years later that is Wspr, the patent is approved, and it is coming out of clinical trial.
Look at what survived and what did not
Every idea died. Patterning died. Cough4Earth died.
What did not die was an insight, sound and what it does to a body, and a relationship with one person who found the same thing interesting.
I teach people to go back to the insight underneath the idea rather than to the idea itself, because if the truth is real and you believe it, that belief holds even when the idea has to change shape three times.
I did not do that deliberately across those six years. I just kept turning up. But that is what was happening.
What the science says.
The best summary of resilience I have read is Diane Coutu’s, in Harvard Business Review in 2002, and it has been in this program for years. She found that almost every theory of resilience overlaps in the same three places, and that you can get by with one or two, but you are only truly resilient with all three.
A staunch acceptance of reality.
Not optimism. She tells Jim Collins asking Admiral Jim Stockdale, held prisoner in Vietnam for eight years, who did not make it out of the camps. Stockdale’s answer was: the optimists. The ones who said we would be out by Christmas, then by Easter, then by Christmas again. "I think they all died of broken hearts."
A deep belief, usually anchored in values, that life is meaningful.
Frankl’s work sits under this one. Meaning is what builds a bridge from a bad present to a better future, and makes the present manageable rather than overwhelming.
An uncanny ability to improvise.
Psychologists borrow Lévi-Strauss’s word for this: bricolage. Making do with whatever is at hand, putting things to unfamiliar uses, imagining possibilities where other people see a dead end.
What to do on Monday.
What is the truth underneath the idea you are defending? One plain sentence you personally believe. If you can write it, you can lose the idea and keep going, and you will know roughly what to build next. If you cannot write it, the wobble is not a resilience problem. It is telling you something.
That relationship is your actual resilience. Not your grit, and not your positive attitude. Ideas die. Insights and people are what carry you to the next one.
Coutu, D. L. (2002). How resilience works. Harvard Business Review, May 2002. The three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. Already in the program, in the Resilience week 8 toolbox. hbr.org/2002/05/how-resilience-works
Within Coutu: the Stockdale exchange comes via Jim Collins; the meaning argument rests on Viktor Frankl; bricolage is Claude Levi-Strauss’s term.
BIF source: the COVID_COUGH4EARTH_V2_APR2020 deck (Communicare Salutem / MiHeart and BIF). Milan Bates MD FRCS, cardiac surgeon, Bristol Heart Institute. James Scroggs is a CEO and Matt’s friend, brought in by Matt as a partner, not as the investor; he is listed on the BIF team in that deck and as Chairman of CALM UK.
The full evidence for Resilience, with the room it came from and the citations with DOIs.