How To Truly Build Toughness - Greg Everett | Modern Wisdom Podcast 300

... he gets seen by a fishing boat finally, after 76 days, and he's so dialed in and, like, accepting of his situation that when the guys come to save him, he goes, "No, no, no, you guys go ahead and finish fishing and then pick me up when you're done." So he literally sat there and waited for these guys to finish their day of fishing, just waited in this raft. He's like, "Hey, 76 days, what's another six to eight hours?" (wind blows)

What do most people have wrong about toughness? What is it not?

Uh, well, what... I think the, the biggest common, uh, mistake people make is that it's... we see it as being, uh, a masculine quality or somehow inherently related to manhood or, or the, the condition of being a man. Um, and I spend a lot of time in that early on in the book, really breaking it down and explaining what exactly being tough truly is. And it has nothing to do with sex, gender, or any of these things. They are totally independent elements, uh, that anybody can attain with the proper, you know, work and understanding. Um, and the, the, the, kind of the secondary part of that is that it is associated a lot of the times with kind of violence or aggression or, uh, that, that sort of, um, need to demonstrate our ability or our superiority over others. And again, totally unrelated to what being tough truly is. Uh, but we, we have these associations in our minds, especially based on our past experiences with people who claim to be tough or whom others tell us are tough, which is often far, far off the mark.

There's been a recent, I would say in the last five years I've noticed quite strongly, a surge in content around fortitude and resilience and toughness, and people like David Goggins are being really upheld and cold showers are becoming a thing and, you know... W- why do you think people are drawn toward a discussion about toughness in 2021?

I think because you simultaneously have it becoming less of a normal trait for people than it used to be, but more and more necessary for us to get through our lives now, and those things are related, certainly. Uh, y- you look back at, say, like, my grandfather's generation, uh, going through the Great Depression, World War II, uh, these sorts of things where, you know, my grandparents grew up on farms. They were dirt poor. Uh, there were traits that you developed as a child growing up in a situation like that, that, you know, a lot of people still do in, in, you know, both of our countries of course, but where it wasn't this thing that you sought out, it was just something that naturally you developed because there was no other choice. You wanna eat? Well, you better figure out how to eat, and it's gonna take some work. Versus my daughter's generation, like, "Hey, I wanna eat." They boop, boop, boop, and someone delivers food to their door 20 minutes later while they're sitting there watching, you know, 15,000 different shows on TV. Uh, so it's, it's this totally different experience that we're having in our lives, and I think what's happening is that more and more of us are recognizing that there is something missing, that we're... there's an absence of experience, um, and, uh, you know, a, a sense of fulfillment and contentment and accomplishment because we're not required to engage in things that are difficult and demanding and require commitment, um, a- and, and an understanding of who we truly are and what's important to us. So we're kind of just flailing around, uh, searching for ways to entertain ourselves and distract ourselves, which temporarily is satisfying, but in the long term kind of leaves us having a, a, you know, a continual series of midlife crises, right? So instead of having one midlife crisis like the olden days, now we have one every five years where it's like, "What have we been doing? What do I wanna do? Who am I? This is awful."