RESILIENCE IN TIMES OF CRISIS
Hi everyone!! I’m Jorge, Guadalajara Ambassador.
I believe “RESILIENCE” is the one word that defines me, and I want to share some thoughts with you.
One of the many things that we, as a society, tend to encourage is perseverance in seeking happiness and success, we see in these two as a goal, so important that we begin to idealize their concepts until they detract from all achievable reality and deny ourselves everything that means getting apart from them. Since we were children we were told phrases such as "don't cry about it", "show me a smile", "big boys don't cry" every time we feel discomfort and as we grew up, those phrases were adapted to the new challenges of adult life, becoming "Cheer up, life goes on", "you must be strong, this will pass", "don't cry, you have to keep a smile on"; We have reached a point where we mistakenly believe that success is achieved when you feel no more pain, when there are no more obstacles, when everything is easy and pleasure abounds, a new hedonism of the modern era, a false dogma which we have all embrace at least once.
Yet reality is a total different one from this idea, achieving success in any project, goal or objective that we have will involve a path where 90% are obstacles, losses, disappointments and failures, situations that will throw you to the ground and that will hurt enormously, many times leaving a void difficult to fill, but it is right then, just in those moments of despair, when the difference between succeeding and letting yourself fall is made, when you take all the remaining forces in yourself to show what your true bravery and courage is, when you stop calling yourself optimistic or pessimistic because reality overcomes both of those states and you start to be guided by a new force, at that moment when you take the present and decide to find the way to stand up and rice again, at that moment you are doing what the great minds of history have done before, seeing reality as it is and deciding that no matter how it is, you are able to take it and improve it, to push yourself until you break the limits you thought you had using your own motivation, being resilient.
Resilience is the ability that every entrepreneur, creator, and innovator develops at some point in their career, it is the strength needed to be able to understand that things are going wrong, accept it and be able to plan on that present in order to improve the future. Resilience is an inherent skill of the human species, regardless of culture, time era or living situations, it is something that is repeated throughout history and we can see it in every nation in this world, in every history book and in every monument that rests on the achievements of a genius.
I have seen this throughout my short life in the 25 countries I have visited, because although as a planet we have a huge amount of differences, one of the few things that all countries in the world share are that their past and present are united thanks to the resilience their people have shown. Let's just think about it for a moment, the social movements that gave rise to the most stable democracies of the present world began as lost battles against their tyrants, the great technological advances occurred only after a thousand erroneous tests were made and most of the artists whose great works of art hang on the walls of the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Prado or any renowned museum were once called rookies in their living days, van Gogh was called a "madman", Klimt a "poor", Da Vinci a "pervert" and Picasso a " painter for the dumbs ”, but they went from being called in such a way to being some of the greatest exponents of their art because in the moments of weakness they dedicated their energy improving, continuing with their passion and giving their souls in each of their works of art.
It is a fact that nowadays the world is changing, we face a situation that has paralyzed our cities, discovered our weak points and has cut the normality that we did not know we had overnight, our societies begin to present challenges that they had never contemplated before. Today the Gran Via in Madrid closed its shops, Times Square in NYC turns off its lights, thousands of prayers no longer come out of St. Peter's Basilica, boats stopped at Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong and the gondolas no longer set sail in Venice; Our current world shows a vulnerable face, a face of need that will only be possible to overcome if we find in ourselves the resilience needed to find solutions to these day-to-day problems, ideas that help those who need it the most, projects that give an answer to challenges that our present is showing us.
As entrepreneurs we have a different vision of the future, of course, we fear, but our vision must go far beyond the borders of fear, towards where challenges are born and where the panorama has a fertile ground for innovation; we are the generation that will have to receive a damaged world, take it and begin to rebuild the structures that we knew, we will be the generation that receives a weakened world economy, collapsed government structures, surpassed service systems and entire desolate cities, there is no doubt that we received an incredibly huge amount of challenges, but there is doubt either that there are no challenges we can not overcome.
The world may have changed but the spirit of entrepreneurship remains the same, at the end of the day the resilience of each person will be the light that clears the path to get out of this crisis and take it as an opportunity.
And… this is me at Harvard!