The Power of Resilience

Sometimes the best parts of Davos are the least expected.

Earlier this week over dinner, I heard two amazing stories. This first came from my good friend and Chairman of the National Institute of Financial Research in China, Zhu Min, while we were talking with a group about our aspirations growing up and the unexpected ways our careers evolved. He told us that when he was 14 the Cultural Revolution started in China and all the schools were closed. Two years later, he was sent to be a factory worker. For ten years(!), as a porter, he carried 200-pound bags of sugar day in and day out in the factory. Only at age 25, when Deng Xiaoping came to power and reopened the university, could he go to college. He eventually became one of the most respected economists in the world. He said at age 20 there was no way he could have imagined that his life could possibly have turned out the way it has. But even back then, he always loved reading and was always looking for books to consume, which carried him forward during these hard times.

Then after dinner, I was talking to a great BCG Partner colleague, Stefan Larsson. He was telling me how he now has a Syrian refugee living with his family in Stockholm. This young man had been imprisoned in Syria at 16-years-old and tortured every day for three years. Despite this brutal situation, however, he felt it was his best learning experience, because alongside him was a priest, a lawyer, and a doctor and they used all the hours each day when they weren't being tortured to teach him everything they knew. Now this young man, in less than two years, has learned Swedish flawlessly as well as English, and is looking to go to college and possibly become a psychologist.

Both stories filled me with amazement and inspiration about how some people, even living under conditions most of us can’t imagine, can survive and then go on to thrive and seek to give back so positively to the world. There are many great human qualities. Resilience (and the positive energy that underpins it) must be among the very most important—and the most inspiring.