Myths about resilience - and the joy of crisps
What I learnt from former Twitter VP Bruce Daisley (and also from life)
Bruce Daisley was in Beirut when the city was rocked by the third biggest explosion in any city in history. “The building shook like the biggest earthquake I could imagine,” he told me, “and then all the windows were sucked out”. This, on top of an economy that had collapsed, with lifetime savings wiped out and a currency in free fall. The Lebanese waited for international help, but, he said, it never came. The media just kept saying: “the Lebanese are resilient.”
That was when Daisley decided he loathed the word “resilience”.
I smiled when I saw that his latest book was called Fortitude. When Caroline Sanderson interviewed me for The Bookseller about my book, Outside, the Sky is Blue, she talked about the quality my parents had and (she said) passed on to me. We agreed that we hated the word “resilience”. It has become a business buzzword, something for motivational speakers and Instagram gurus to use to peddle their wares. The word she plucked from the air, in the end, was “fortitude”. Yes, I thought, that’s it. And now Daisley, a former Vice President of Twitter, and bestselling author of The Joy of Work, has written a book all about it.
Resilience, he points out, has become a political issue. If you tell people they’re resilient, it means you can leave them to sort their own problems out. “You end up,” he told me in our podcast conversation, “with this sort of strange victim blaming”. All of these things, he pointed out, “are at the church of individualism”. The godfather of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, is, he said, “a classic, old-style Republican” who believes in small government. That doesn’t stop him taking taxpayers’ cash. The “resilience training” he developed for the US army cost American taxpayers millions. Oh, and it didn’t work.
We will clearly all need to be extremely resilient in the light of today’s budget, which we’re not allowed to call a budget. It’s a “fiscal event”, which means it can’t be scrutinised by the Office for Budget Responsibility. You can see why they’d want to avoid scrutiny. The pound is tanking, the markets are panicking, and pretty much every economist alive is saying this will be a disaster. It will make the rich richer. It will make the poor poorer. And it looks likely to wreck our economy in the short to medium term. No wonder politicians have talked about our need for resilience. We will be paying the energy bills of the super-rich for decades to come.
Daisley told me that the research about “resilience”, “growth mindset” and “grit” just isn’t backed up by the evidence. I told him about a “growth mindset” workshop I did in a primary school some years ago. I spent a week preparing for it, but made a total hash of it. When I had to collect the feedback forms at the end of the day, my cheeks burned. I was the disappointing understudy to the guru. But I don’t believe in gurus. I believe everything is complicated and difficult, and that unconfident people are likely to make a better fist of things than people full of blazing certainty.
That, unfortunately, doesn’t make you rich.
More cheeringly, Bruce told me about “crisp Thursday”, an innovation introduced by a receptionist at a company. “She said: ‘this is the worst place I’ve ever worked. The culture is awful. No one talks to each other.’” So, he said, she “took it into her own hands, went out and bought a carrier bag full of potato-based snacks, laid them all out on paper plates and sent an email around the office saying ‘ladies and gentlemen, it’s crisp Thursday.’” Before long, people were saying it was the highlight of the week.
I would like to shake that woman’s hand. When I was running the Poetry Society, I was so well known for my love of “potato-based snacks” that my leaving card was dotted with tiny packets of crisps. During a SWOT analysis on an away-day, I asked the staff what they thought our weaknesses were and one member of staff yelled out “Kettle Chips!”.
Daisley also told me that having a best friend at work is “the best predictor” of whether you like your job. Which is tricky if you’re freelance and work from home. And it ties in with what I was writing about in this newsletter last week. Most of my friends are former colleagues. There’s nothing like working together to forge deep bonds. There’s nothing like what Émile Durkheim calls “collective effervescence”. It’s part of what I think we found in the Queen’s funeral. We need more of it. I need more of it. I’m going to think about how to get more of it in my life.
I loved talking to Bruce Daisley. He was the first guest in my new (second) series of The Art of Work. Do, please, listen, share and subscribe! And if you like it, I’d be very grateful if you could rate it, and/or leave a review, as it really does help other people find it.
“The summary of the book,” Bruce told me “is that resilience is the strength we get from other people.” Well, Amen to that. There is, in other words, such a thing as a society. If only someone would tell Liz Truss.