Resilience

Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

Eric Greitens

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780544323995
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A masterpiece of warrior wisdom: how to be resilient, how to overcome obstacles not by "positive thinking" or self-esteem, but by positive action. The best-selling author, Navy SEAL, and humanitarian Eric Greitens offers a self-help book unlike any other.
"Eric Greitens provides a brilliant and brave course of action to help navigate life's roughest waters."—Admiral Mike Mullen, seventeenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In 2012, Eric Greitens unexpectedly heard from a former SEAL comrade, a brother-in-arms he hadn't seen in a decade. Zach Walker had been one of the toughest of the tough. But ever since he returned home from war to his young family in a small logging town, he'd been struggling. Without a sense of purpose, plagued by PTSD, and masking his pain with heavy drinking, he needed help.
Zach and Eric started writing and talking nearly every day, as Eric set down his thoughts on what it takes to build resilience in our lives. Eric's letters — drawing on both his own experience and wisdom from ancient and modern thinkers — are now gathered and edited into this timeless guidebook.
Greitens shows how we can build purpose, confront pain, practice compassion, develop a vocation, find a mentor, create happiness, and much more. Resilience is an inspiring meditation for the warrior in each of us.
"This book is a gift not only to Greitens's comrades-in-arms, but to readers everywhere."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Notes

LETTER 1: Your Frontline

[>] “awful grace of God”: Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 194.

[>] “killed the birds in the air”: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in An Oresteia, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009), 30.

LETTER 2: Why Resilience?

[>] “into an enjoyable challenge”: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 200.

[>] “as our legitimate property”: Quoted in Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 277. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Posthumous Fragments,” in Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, trans. Pierre Hadot (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), 5.2.552–53. When people quote Nietzsche, they often feel the need to apologize for some reason. Let’s acknowledge this about Nietzsche: he was a bit nuts, a bit destructive, and just as I wouldn’t recommend his life to anyone, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone swallow his whole philosophy unexamined. Still, some of what he wrote is brilliant. And we should learn from it. Let’s not throw away diamonds of genius because they were produced by imperfect people.

[>] “Culture” was originally a word: Of course, this way of thinking about culture has ancient roots in Eastern as well as Western thought. Two and a half millennia ago, for instance, Confucius was asked which of his disciples loved learning the most. He answered, “There was one Yen Hui who was eager to learn. He did not vent his anger upon an innocent person, nor did he make the same mistake twice.” The student who loved learning the most was not the one who had mastered the most facts; he was the one whose character had been shaped most deeply by what he’d learned. Confucius, The Analects, VI.3, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), 81.

[>] “culture is innate”: Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 22.

[>] “fighting done by fools”: This quotation is often attributed to Thucydides. Its real source seems to be a nineteenth-century British general, William Francis Butler. The original line reads: “The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.” Butler, Charles George Gordon (London: Macmillan, 1892), 85.

[>] “nature of the subject allows”: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1094b19-26 (emphasis added).

[>] “we bring them back”: Hamilton, The Greek Way, 9–10.

[>] “people love old truths”: Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, Réflexions et Maximes, trans. F. G. Stevens (London: Humphrey Milford, 1940), §400.

[>] “set before our eyes”: Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistle XCIV, in Moral Epistles, vol. 3, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917–1925), 27–29.

[>] “and tolerate other people”: Epictetus, Discourses, 3, 21, 4–6. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 267.

[>] “magnanimity, and trust”: Henry Thoreau, Walden (Philadelphia: Courage, 1990), 13.

[>] “face of the void”: Boris Cyrulnik, Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past, trans. David Macey (New York: Penguin, 2009), 47.

LETTER 3: What Is Resilience?

[>] “heavily for their acquiring”: Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 192.

[>] “through these labors”: Sophocles, Philoktetes, trans. Seth L. Schein (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2003), 85.

[>] “The wounded man knows something”: Robert Bly, Iron John (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 32.

[>] “the road through suffering”: Quoted in Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 147.

[>] “What’s done cannot be undone”: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.1.71, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1998), 83.

[>] “strong at the broken places”: Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 249.

[>] “free from freedom”: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 31.

[>] “or rather, all the difference”: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1103b25–26.

[>] “who botch the business”: Terry Eagleton, “The Nature of Evil,” Tikkun, Winter 2011, 80.

[>] “whatever they might be”: Quoted in James C. Collins, Good to Great (New York: Harper Business, 2001), 85.

[>] “Give no ground”: In Richmond Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 3.

[>] “Exactly like it, just as round”: In Guy Davenport, trans., Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 38.

LETTER 4: Beginning

[>] “don’t let me f*** up”: Quoted in Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 198 (and still known as “Shepard’s Prayer”). However, Shepard himself later reported the quotation as, “Don’t f*** up, Shepard.”

[>] “beginning of philosophy”: Plato, Theatetus, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 12, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), 155d.

[>] “one cannot feel tamely”: Hamilton, The Greek Way, 141.

[>] “able to find those words”: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (New York: Norton, 1934), 27.

[>] “wisdom to know the difference”: Deborah Galasso, Living Serenity (Cicero, NY: 5 Fold Media, 2014), 12.

[>] “reconciled to the uncontrollable”: Solomon ibn Gabirol, A Choice of Pearls, XVII, trans. Benjamin Henry Ascher (London: Trübner and Co., 1859), 41.

[>] “saying no to that situation”: Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 83.

[>] “purification of the motive”: T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,...