Resilience

I first became intimately acquainted with the word resilience when I listened to Angela Duckworth's TED Talk.

If you have a similar interest, especially if you have or work with children, you will want to read Maria Konnikova's New Yorker article "How People Learn to Become Resilient." Here is how she begins the piece:

"Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag."