Resilience 2.0

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it". - Lou Holtz

Nov 02, 2025

Resilience is often framed as grit, grind, and “never quit.” That story is incomplete. In practice, founders who last do something subtler than apply brute force and ego to shoulder adversity: they regulate, reframe, and reconnect. Today let’s explore an alternative take on what resilience really is - and where to find more of it.

Resilience as a social construct

Far from the myth of the lone genius, resilience in entrepreneurship is often a socially supported endeavour. Social support – whether emotional (encouragement, empathy) or instrumental (advice, tangible help) – acts as a buffer against stress, fulfilling basic psychological needs of relatedness and reassurance that boost motivation to persist.

When business setback occurs, an entrepreneur with a mentor or peer group to confide in is less likely to spiral into despair. One study on online entrepreneurial communities during the pandemic found that engaging with peer support forums significantly bolstered entrepreneurs’ well-being and resilience, compensating for the loss of in-person networking.

You probably underestimate your own ability to be more resilient. Affective forecasting research is clear: people overestimate the intensity and duration of future distress (impact bias). We adapt faster than we predict and so we can endure more than we can imagine.

“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” - Bob Marley

Resilience comes from reframing your self story

I recently listened to an audio series on resilience by Amanda Knox. I highly recommend it to all founders. Amanda was wrongly jailed and convicted by Italian authorities for a murder she had nothing to do with. She spent 4 years in prison, globally vilified, all while knowing she was innocent. She managed to find daily wins, find ways to be present, to act with a little agency, so that even if she shouldn’t be in prison, she would at least approach her reality in a more mindful and deliberate manner. By shifting her inner story she realized she could gain more resilience and keep facing the most dire of situations instead of shutting down mentally, physically.

If the real workout starts at the last rep when you want to give up, real resilience begins when your self-story gets you mentally stuck. The fixed stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are a version of the “elephants on the rope”1; a strong belief can become a self-imposed limitation, even when the initial barrier is gone. Reframing your stories positively is like the elephant who finally decides that ropes are no longer going to be the limiting factor in their lives.

Startup founders are all familiar with pivots. You iterate, you change directions in hope of finding a product that brings a real solution, real value to a problem many people experience. It should be the same with pivoting your identity, discarding dead end narratives in order to debunk false beliefs and prioritize the positive, empowering self narratives.

Resilience comes from strategic empathy

Strategic empathy is deliberate perspective-taking in service of better choices. In negotiations and high-stakes disputes, it disarms hostility and opens creative options; in organizations, it reduces blind spots and raises adaptability. This is not niceness; it is a planning tool that changes behavior on both sides of the table.

Before a tense call, draft the adversary’s paragraph: what they fear, what they want, the constraint they can’t say out loud. Use it to design a proposal that acknowledges their reality while advancing yours. It also helps debunk your own biases, while using those of the other party. Empathy here is not self-sacrifice; it is strategic search for levers.

But empathy is double-edged. Affective empathy—absorbing others’ distress—predicts compassion fatigue and burnout. Train teams to name emotions, but pair it with skills to keep distance when needed. Cognitive empathy—accurately modelling others’ motives and feelings without being flooded—predicts better mental health and better conflict outcomes. Founders need that type of empathy.

Resilience comes from play, laughter and awe

During COVID-19, adults high in trait playfulness were markedly more resilient. They were just as realistic about risk as peers yet generated more positive experiences, reframed hassles into games, and maintained optimism and engagement—a pattern researchers labeled “lemonading.” Critically, playfulness can be cultivated.

I have experienced these benefits first hand. During Covid I started playing guitar and learn music theory. Five years on, it’s clear this playing habit has helped me emotionally process the hard events in life that are just out of your control, it helped me to avoid overthinking, to let go and trust life as process. Music for me is self-regulation, therapy and a means of connection. 100% music helps me stay resilient and optimistic.

Humor and playfulness triggers endorphins, dampens sympathetic arousal, and raises pain tolerance. Viktor Frankl called humor a way to rise above the situation “for a few seconds”—enough to regain perspective and choose. In teams, shared laughter restores cohesion without trivializing the stakes.

Third, awe is a contact with something vast that reframes the self—it produces increased vagal tone, reduced sympathetic activation, less inflammation, and a calm-alert state. Daily awe correlates with lower stress and fewer somatic symptoms, even during chronic crisis. In experiments, inducing awe broadens cognition, reduces the need for closure, and boosts flexible thinking—the exact ingredients you need before a pivot decision.

I think humans have always sensed how awe can play a key role in making decisions that are complex, high stakes, and demand clear judgment. Nature and a sense of awe seems to have played a direct role in the decisions by Genghis Khan, who built the Mongol empire into history’s largest contiguous empire. According to Mongolian tradition and primary sources (The Secret History of the Mongols), Genghis Khan visited Burkhan Khaldun and treated it as a sacred place tied to his leadership and decision-making. It was in this place he made some of history’s most consequential decisions.

The payoff of awe is quite practical: awe shrinks ego threat, loosens rigid narratives, and makes alternative models easier to imagine. Engineers might know this as “defocusing before a hard problem.” Founders can engineer it with nature, art, music, or witnessing unusual human excellence.

Unique sources of resilience from entrepreneurial mindset

Entrepreneurs as a group show a contrast with the overall population that can help us understand why founders tend to be seen (and view themselves) as more resilient.

Cognitive flexibility fuels creativity under stress. In founder samples, cognitive flexibility directly predicts entrepreneurial creativity; entrepreneurial alertness and self-efficacy mediate part of that effect. Flexible founders generate more options and better novel combinations when circumstances are dynamic. One mechanism is that resilient entrepreneurs experience negative events as challenges to solve rather than threats – this positive reappraisal keeps the creative problem-solving regions of the brain engaged rather than shut down by anxiety. The move is to practice deliberate re-framing and “multiple model” thinking on demand.

Ambiguity tolerance is a competitive edge. Neuroscience work comparing founders to managers shows entrepreneurs remain more resilient to ambiguity in valuation decisions. Under uncertainty, they reduce valuations less and keep pricing opportunities optimistically above expected value, whereas managers devalue sharply. This isn’t recklessness; it’s a different calibration that keeps action possible when information is incomplete.

Self-efficacy and internal locus of control predict “failing forward.” After failure, founders high in self-efficacy/internal control are more likely to keep engaging in entrepreneurship and to recognize new opportunities. Confidence is not a slogan; it’s a predictor of recovery behaviour.

We need a fresh take on resilience

I hope this post helped convince you that resilience is so much broader than the conventional definition we assign to it. Yes, being gritty, anti-fragile and persistent are sources of resilience. But so is peer wisdom and support, intentional shifts in your self stories, empathy towards your adversaries, and injecting play and laughter in the middle of hard, stressful times. Resilience has many forms and comes from many places2.

Happy Sunday ✌🏼🌕

Tao of Founders

“Elephants on a rope” is a metaphor about how a strong belief can become a self-imposed limitation, even when the physical barrier is gone. The story describes how a baby elephant is tied with a rope it cannot break; after repeated failed attempts, it gives up and accepts the rope as an unbreakable limit. As an adult, the same elephant will no longer try to break free, even if the rope is now weak enough to snap, because it has internalized the belief that it is impossible.

Sources and further reading:

Tao of Founders

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