So even though this work was anonymized, the story of Mo Farah suddenly makes this really vivid sense. There’s that resilient word again, the resilient word, which is pretty much saying you’ll be alright, we’re doing nothing. And, they’re just about emotions, but they do these graphs and charts and they’ve developed a big Instagram following. Which superficially is a book about depression, but it’s sort of very adjacent to the themes in my book. So resilience appears to exist, but the term has been appropriated by people who are kind of trying to sell snake oil, people are trying to sort of pretend that they’re offering you this magic that exists elsewhere.

We follow him as he faces beatings from his father, attends a vicious boarding school, runs away from home, and grows to biological adulthood while staying in many ways a boy. I think I say in the book, never in the history of resilience has anyone been more resilient by being told to be more resilient. With every issue being given this same brush, consideration of the wider societal barriers get overlooked. To some extent the racism and the abuse alongside football and sport was, you know, I think there’s cultural differences there. Can you sort of, can you articulate something complex, but relatable, but in as few words as possible, can you get from A to B?There are certain stories we tell ourselves about the hardships we face—we can become paralyzed by adversity or we can adapt and overcome. This interesting book lifts the cover on the resilience myth that we've all been sold, and shines a light on how and why resilience is not what we think it is, and not what we should aspire towards. It’s… there are systematic issues and we are trying to fix them or people are trying to shift the responsibility for them onto the people at the receiving end and say, you need to be more resilient. Having identified resilience as the villain of the piece, the book finishes strong by introducing us to the hero, Fortitude. You know, the start of this year, if you said to people, like, who represents a thoughtful ever-dynamic, innovative… now, if you said who represents the biggest jackass on the planet, it’s like, you know, he’s gone from one to the other in eight months.

Negative childhood experience is principally experienced as shame, it’s experienced as something that really damages someone’s sense of identity. Drawn from many sources, including accounts by Hands themselves, these brief essays provide a fascinating insight into the lives of this small band of individuals, whose rank is unparalleled in religious history and who, in the words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, 'have diffused widely the Divine Fragrances, declared His Proofs, proclaimed His Faith, published abroad His Law, detached themselves from all things but Him, stood for righteousness in this world, and kindled the Fire of the Love of God in the very hearts and souls of His servants'. The latter half of "Fortitude" plays out the rocky beginning of his marriage to the beautiful, vain Clare, who seems to have little interest in his writing and little ability to tolerate any stress in her comfortable only-child existence.

A fascinating and important pushback against the narrow, joy-eroding version of 'resilience' that would leave us to sink or swim alone, Fortitude is an indispensable guide to a more energising, human, and effective approach to working and thriving in a post-pandemic world. People who are able to transcend the most, the grimmest misfortune, you know, whether in war or crises or whatever.

It’s hard to think of someone who can speak with more authority on all of those than Bruce Daisley, ex-European head of Twitter, host of the No. I think one of the things that language can do and which you’re doing in the sense with the use of fortitude, is you can jolt people out of the narrative, out of the baggage that comes with a term and force them to sort of look at it again, which is interesting. Abdu'l-Bahá, in Memorials of the Faithful, referred to other believers as Hands of the Cause and in His Will and Testament.As humans we often attempt to learn from those who are successful, and ignore the less fortunate many.