Mental Fortitude In The Modern World

There is a lot of talk about mental fortitude on the internet with grand metaphors, platitudes, and inspirational stories but I wanted to talk about what it means in the reality of our boring day-to-day lives. When you are alone in the forest of your mind. When you find yourself in the dark room of helplessness. When you are aware that there is help out there in the world but at that specific moment, no one can open the door for you. It’s you that has to make the impossible possible.

Mental fortitude is not about showing up every day whatever the situation be or looking into the face of fear or some other cliché. It’s about training your mind to the point that your intuitions become separate from your instincts. Its essence lies in the clarity of thought — when they are unclouded from emotions. You need to detach the situation from your identity. To see what really works by?accepting?what doesn’t work. You can’t develop it by showing up every day without learning anything. Nobody likes a fool constantly showing up without any hindsight. In meme wisdom, it’s taking the L with grace.

Mental fortitude is practicing the art of accepting the output without judging yourself or the environment where you execute your ideas. Today, work environments are mostly digital and they change fast. Fast change means fast mistakes. To survive, you need to up the game of forgiving mistakes. You only obsess over mistakes when the mission is cloudy. When that’s the case, your identity and outputs become inseparable. We all know that’s a dark place to be in. When the mission is clear, mistakes actually help you to see where?not to go. The destination feels closer and the pull of achievements overpowers the cravings for validation. And that’s a good thing,?always.

Since it’s about clarity of thought, you should clearly see if your thoughts are really?your?thoughts. Are you assessing a situation from the eyes of society or from the vector of the mission? Do you get charged or curious in stressful situations? It’s a subtle difference between making the situation at hand about yourself or following your innate curiosity — especially where critical thinking is required. Curiosity is universal. Identity is mostly social.

Mental fortitude doesn’t come by retiring to a mountaintop and becoming a sage. To successfully live a mentally strong life, you have to practice it within the society itself. We often think of society as this static beast of rigid beliefs than are untameable. This belief forms through years of rigid conditioning through school and college years. We merely learn how to be useful and very little about how things really work. When we remain fixated on how things should be, we miss how things actually are. It’s a common pattern that takes years of unlearning. However, it comes naturally to entrepreneurs. They quickly realize that to remain in the game, they have to first deeply know what customers want rather than what an ideal solution looks like. Most of the time, a middle ground is needed before any disruption. This kind of feedback isn’t available to someone detached from society. You can’t have your own cake and eat it too.

When you think of yourself and society evolving together at different rates, the relationship has more space to be symbiotic rather than exclusive. Society influences you with culture and you influence society by integrating with one person at a time. This kind of integration through influence is healthier than any form of escapism.

The classic method of developing mental fortitude is to just keep acting, learn from your mistakes, have humility, and have a mission. Same old hero’s journey. Or in simple terms, learning from your scars. The undertone of this method is life is a war and you have to fight. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, you are operating strongly from the source of your suffering. There’s no point in stopping to ponder. Just act and see for yourself.

But times have changed. Nothing useful gets done through the sheer force of adamant action. We now live in an extremely collaborative world. And collaboration means the speed of action and increased complexity of thought. We all are knowledge workers know. The battleground is not outside of the physical world. It’s our own minds. Now, you can’t go searching for solutions outside. Escaping doesn’t work anymore. A mental shift is needed. To treat our minds as landscapes of exploration.

The point is you can’t operate from the source of pain anymore. It has to be curiosity. And for curiosity to have a chance, you need to quickly forgive your mistakes. Actually, this is what high-performance individuals already do. They know where to exercise their identity and where to let it go. They live in and embrace reality. When you live in reality, you focus on actions rather than emotions.

The best way to improve your life is by watching the delta between what you think your life should be and what actually happens in your life.

I remember the night when I fell from my motorbike. I landed point blank on a flyover road. At that time I didn’t know that I had broken both of my wrist bones. However, my first instinct wasn’t a sense of dread towards life. Rather, it was gratitude towards getting to live another one. I realized after a while that I already had this attitude toward life for a long time. But that incident slammed it into my memory forever. Note that I’m not referring to having a positive or negative outlook. I’m referring to the fact that how you decide to take a situation decides how you deal with similar ones in the future. Along the same lines, keeping strong beliefs about your past events also rupture this capacity. It’s because most people see their past through the lens of association instead of integration. A lot of people are good storytellers but not so good at holistic thinking.

In hindsight, I developed most of my mental fortitude during my work in software development. I was good at problem analysis and decent at programming. A dirty truth of software development is that best practices are often best in theory. Software moves so fast that only battle-tested wisdom works. A lot of people early in their careers often fail to land on this realization. I’ve always been a keen observer of patterns in real-life situations. So luckily I learned this lesson very early on in my career. There are times in software development when you hit a dead end and no one knows the solution. In those situations, you can beat yourself up or you can forgive yourself and see the bigger picture.

A good sign of mental fortitude is calm in uncertain situations. It is to realize those uncertain situations aren’t there because you did something wrong. It’s the part and parcel of life. Whatever the situation, you have to filter all your thoughts through the battle-tested fort of values that you’ve built over the years. It is to realize that the default instincts don’t come from the same source where your intuitions come from. Instincts are hardcoded human reflexes in thoughts. Intuitions are sculpted inside the fort of your experience and observations.

An oft-ignored characteristic of mental fortitude is your curiosity about the situation at hand. If you are in a bad place in work that you chose, then it’s never a big problem. As long as you are curious, something will come around. When this happens over and over, you automatically develop mental stamina without really putting in much conscious effort. Note that this is only possible when you are absolutely interested in the work. Curiosity and mental fortitude are inseparable.

I’ve got a friend who was a bit loudmouth in my graduate years. He always trusted himself in whatever he did. A lot of people do that. It’s nothing special. But a lot of people stop learning after they get a cushy job. But he always used to integrate new insights into his existing beliefs. He never stopped learning. And I’m not talking about learning for the sake of growing in your career. I’m talking about learning in real time. The life stuff. Today he’s doing a lot better than the people who used to laugh at his eccentricity. The lesson here is that ultimately it comes down to trusting in yourself. Trust strengthens when you are open to the world and weakens when you shut yourself to the changing times. Lack of trust breeds fear. We like to think that fear exists outside or in the future but fear is always inside us. Mental fortitude can’t keep up if you stop learning. The arrow of time waits for no one.

To sum up, mental fortitude isn’t about merely dealing with problems or enduring pain. The meat of it lies in dealing with the fear of uncertainty. Everybody deals with problems. There’s nothing new about it. However, not everyone is good at peeking into the opportunity that lies beyond fear. They get too consumed in dealing with problems, and most of them might not be real problems. They might be just fear parading on your thoughts. Problems stop being problems when you know they are not permanent. And you can only?know?that when you are mentally strong.

If we have our own “why” of life, we shall get along with almost any how. – Nietzsche