Dwyane Wade and Resilience

I find inspiration in so many different places and just few days ago — I got to know more about Dwyane Wade. I never had much interested in NBA, but I loved the story of this man and his comments about resiliency.  

He was interviewed in TIME magazine and this Q and A was a pleasant surprise:

Q: One of the current issues one duration theory is the importance of resilience. Did your upbringing give you a level of resilience that few people have?

A: I give a lot of credit to my upbringing in Chicago. It taught me to be tough, to want more, to want to be better. It made me appreciate things. But all my dreams and vision had to come from within. Or I had to do find someone on TV. Knight Rider was big in my life. Obviously, Michael Jordan was big in my life. 

What I took from this brief reading was this:

Resilience is falling down or going through suffering, learning from it and keep going. Today, I look at parents protecting their children with all their might. I see them praising the children for every significant and insignificant achievement.

I see them put their kids under a protective cover and assure them that everyone else is wrong and only their kids are right, no matter what they do. I find this sad especially since every great leader — every — had to overcome a challenge or a difficulty, and was not overly protected from life.

Failing and going through tough times builds us and gives us strength for other things to come (and other things always come up, just the way life is). We must experience NOT having in order to want more. We must fail to learn about ourselves and clarify what it is that we want.

If I can expect one thing of myself as a parent, is that I will let my children fail and fall, over and over again. And then I hope to talk about it and create a plan about next steps. What made you resilient?

My friends will often hear me say "I am warm, I have a shelter, I have food, noone is shooting at me — life is good." Because of my experience of growing up during the war, appreciation for small things is important.

Every day I say how lucky I am to had a lovely home one could only dream of, enough food of all kind and safety that envelopes me. I had to experience rough times to be appreciative of good things in my life. What have you gone through that makes you appreciate things right now?

Every time I hear Brian Tracy, Oprah or Tony Robbins speak, it inspired me because they beat the odds. These people are resilient, have great appreciation for their life and are able to inspire others. When I hear a story of someone who went through hardship and yet kept going, someone who believed in their vision and wanted to do the work for the highest good of all — it gives me hope in my days when I don't see "IT". It makes me believe again and reaffirms that it is possible.

Dwyane Wade just joined the list.

Find people and stories that uplift and inspire you and see what impact they have and where you can apply that. So, how is your role model today?