Resilience is the cheat code.

I can prove to you that the most important attribute for success in your life is resilience. The proof follows a simple thought experiment. Imagine you’ve decided to complete any task. Is there a greater than 0% chance you’ll face some challenge, some resistance, some unexpected outcome? If the chance that things won’t go exactly as planned is greater than zero, then by the definition of probability, you are going to have to respond to both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.

But do you want to know the secret of the people who find success despite the certainty of ending up on the wrong side of the bell curve? They treat the normal distribution as a win-win.

When I achieve success, I celebrate briefly. Then, very quickly, I think about what worked and what didn’t, and I’m already updating my process to do better next time. And when I don’t achieve success, I still win, because I spend almost zero time feeling sad about the mistakes. I treat them as lessons for how to improve and overcome those challenges next time. And the next time comes at the earliest opportunity.

Some people look at the successful and say they just got lucky. What I say is that everyone gets an opportunity for a lucky break — because of that same bell curve and normal distribution we’ve been talking about. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But what really separates the leaders from the pack is that the leaders have been spending their defeats thinking about how they can improve themselves, while the pack has been spending their defeats thinking about the things beyond their control.

Resilience is the cheat code.