The Hidden Blessing in Adversity

Success is about thriving in the face of challenges.

So how is it possible to not only survive but thrive when life throws us curveballs? For starters, the sooner we become students of life, the better. I’ve learned a few lessons over the course of my 6 decades on this earth. They’ve served to instruct me, sometimes harshly, on how to get through adversity.

Number one, we have to understand that every bad thing that’s ever happened to you, every bad thing you still might be going through now, has to become fuel for the fire, or “grist for the mill,” as Napoleon Hill said 100 years ago.

I remember 30 years ago, my dad died while I was sitting in prison.

He died young. In fact, younger than I am now, he died at age 59. Not long after that, I remember beginning this journey of trying to figure out what life was really about. Not just questions of why he had to die young, but questions about how to find true peace and happiness. How can I turn my life around? How can I begin earning a living while practicing integrity? How can I start living out my own lofty goals when I haven’t yet made a dent in them?

During these first initial weeks, I tried to find the answers on my own. And I did begin a healthy journey of daily practices. And what came next changed me forever and is something I still do today.

I walked out of my cell one day and went down to the end of the cell house. There was a room about the size of a broom closet. And in that room was a big cardboard box full of books. Law enforcement would sometimes come in and would donate books, tossing them into that box. That was kind of the library for this housing unit. I started rifling through this box, looking for something to read. Up to that point, I’d been reading Stephen King and James Michener.

I found so many helpful books there, but on this day, I happened to pick up a book called Man’s Search for Meaning.

I cannot recommend it enough. It’s a brilliant book written in 1946 by Victor Frankl. Victor was a Jewish psychiatrist who was interned in 4 concentration camps in Nazi Germany over the course of almost 3 years during World War II. He lost most of his family as a direct result of the camps or gas ovens, including his wife, who was kept at a separate camp.

As a psychiatrist, he became very curious about what makes people motivated to survive the horrors of war and what motivates survivors to become successful while others don’t.

At the camps, he witnessed people giving up all hope. When they gave up psychologically, they lost the idea of hope and would walk over to the fence to grab it. They knew anyone who touched the fence would be shot by the tower guards. This was their form of committing suicide, their manifestation of completely giving up hope and then their lives.

Victor became perplexed by this reality. How is it that some people could deal with these horrible conditions and somehow see light at the end of the tunnel? They had been tortured, starved, and were freezing in the harsh winters of Germany. Yet some people, like Frankl himself, were able to get through it, somehow keep their mental health, and then prosper later on after the war.

He discovered through years of research (he was a professor as well as a psychiatrist), that those who found meaning and purpose in their suffering are the ones who could press through the pain and survive.

People who saw the situation as random and meaningless pain were much more likely to give up.

I remember reading that and being struck down by it. I was in prison at the time, having already done six years of my sentence, with seven years left in front of me. It was the first time in my life that I ever even considered the prospect that this prison time and all my life’s struggles might have some meaning. Is it possible that all of that was for a bigger reason?

I eventually came to believe that my past experiences did serve some purpose. I had no idea at the time that I’d go on to write books and do public speaking for decades, but I simply came to the belief that my challenges had not been just random suffering. It was the most empowering thought, the most empowering understanding I ever had in my life. My life became so much easier to live after this realization.

Those last seven years in prison were some of the most peaceful, calm years of my life because I finally understood that life and suffering have meaning and significance.

So I would highly recommend a new outlook on struggles, whatever the type. Don’t let a moment, a circumstance, or an event define your limitations. It might still eat away at you, but I can’t stress enough that life can be so much more when those experiences make you hungrier for success. And whatever your goals, reach beyond them. Because there’s purpose in our struggles, and it’s an important part of the success formula. I don’t speak this because I’ve read it; I speak it because I’ve lived it. You can too.