Perseverance and Resilience in Resilience by Eric Greitens Essay Example

📌Category: Books
📌Words: 882
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 10 April 2022

Everyone struggles, but to persevere they must have resilience. Resilience defines whether someone can turn the bad to good, suffering to wisdom, pain to strength. The book Resilience shows that people can persevere through struggles by being resilient. In this book an ex-navy seal named Walker struggles with PTSD, drinking, being a father, a leader, and his value/purpose in his community. Due to all of this, he writes to his friend and also former navy seal, Eric. Throughout the book Eric and Walker write back and forth about the philosophy of great leaders, soldiers, and actors and also their own experiences to overcome Walker’s struggles. It portrays the theme of perseverance, through Walker's struggles with purpose, how to find purpose, and how to be resilient through the struggle by understanding flawed experiences and how those experiences create struggle.

Now according to the dictionary, resilience is the continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition by turning the bad to good. How are you supposed to be resilient though without a purpose as a reason why you need to be? Well that is what needs to be figured out. According to Eric Greitens “One of the reasons you are suffering right now is precisely because the purpose of your struggle is unclear. What are you working toward? What are you fighting for? Who are you going to be?” (Greitens 17).  This simply means that to be resilient, find what purpose, because then there will be a reason to keep fighting once you’re knocked down instead of just giving up. The next thing is “What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences; they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives. In time, people find that great calamity met with great spirit can create great strength.” (Greitens 23). Along with finding a purpose, experiences are a tool to find ways to make that journey easier. So to be resilient or to persevere, keep fighting and make experiences tools or weapons to make that fight easier to achieve purpose.

Purpose, though, can only be achieved by realizing what experiences have taken place or are taking place. “The first step to building resilience is to take responsibility for who you are and for your life. If you’re not willing to do that, stop wasting your time reading this letter. The essence of responsibility is the acceptance of the consequences—good and bad—of your actions.” (Grietens 25). This is important because without understanding who you are and what you’ve been through, how are you supposed to know where you’re going or how to get there. The first and most important step to a journey is first to know where the start is, and how to get to the end point. “If you take responsibility for anything in your life, know that you’ll feel fear. That fear will manifest itself in many ways: fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of hurt. Such fears are entirely natural and healthy, and you should recognize them as proof that you’ve chosen work worth doing. Every worthy challenge will inspire some fear.” (Greitens 109). There will be some challenges and fears along the way.. Even with the fears and flaws, if a person can get through it knowing that the fears are there, that person will be so much stronger and more resilient. In order to improve something, a flaw needs to be seen or realized first.

Others have definitely gone through the same thing. So knowing that there has been someone, with the same experiences, people can learn from them and learn from their philosophies. “Good teachers and trainers know that the exercise of power is a responsibility:” (Greitens 229). Just like teachers who have already taken responsibility for their actions, the person with the flaw must do the same. Although they are actions of an individual, someone has already done it or been through the same thing. So try to learn from them and get better based on their knowledge. “As a practical matter, the Greeks usually did not “read” philosophy in the way that you are reading this letter—silently and to yourself. Reading philosophy meant reading aloud to others; practicing philosophy meant living in a community.” (Greitens 14). When someone reads about others' experiences and their philosophies, they can’t just read it, they have to practice it. Reading is only the accumulation of words in your mind, but practicing builds habits that can carry you through life. In the same way, if a friend reads magazines about baseball, that friend will know about the game, but once they practice it and keep practicing only then can they ever be good at it.

Eric Greitens Resilience shows that to persevere through struggles with purpose, how to find purpose and how to be resilient through the struggle by understanding the struggles first. So first you have to find purpose and have a reason to keep fighting for it. Second, understand the good and bad parts of life so that you can know where you need to go and how to do it. These are the most important things to be resilient and persevere. Without  resilience people can persevere but to know resilience and have it, life and struggles that someone is trying to persevere through will become so much easier. Find those who struggle with the same issues as well, because learning from others’ experiences and how they have overcome it is a tool. People are not alone, because I guarantee others have or are going through the same thing that they are. This can help release some weight from trying to be so resilient that they fall apart.

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