This week’s Wednesday Wisdom comes from Coach John Wooden’s book The Pyramid of Success where he describes his perspective on adversity paired with some of my own closing thoughts:
“We cannot allow difficulties to discourage us. Roadblocks may cause us to alter our course a bit, but we cannot let them deter us from our destination. I have often said that we grow stronger through adversity.
We become stronger physically through a weight-lifting program. Our muscles work against heavy objects. That’s adversity. We get stronger mentally through the progressive difficulty of education. We don’t start with calculus; we start with arithmetic. After we learn the basics, we move on to algebra, then to geometry and so on. We work our way up to calculus.
In the same way, we grow stronger spiritually through the tests of life. Losing my beloved wife, Nellie, was the hardest event in my life. For a couple of years, it slowed me down; but it didn’t stop me. In the end, even her loss has made me stronger. In every way – physically, morally, emotionally and spiritually, we increase our strength when life is hard; therefore, we must not dread adversity, nor can we allow it to stop us from becoming the best we can be through the steadfast pursuit of our goals.”
No one is interested in watching a story where the hero doesn’t have to overcome a lot of adversity. That would be incredibly boring. We were born to chase lions and climb the mountains in our lives.
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