Adam's Blog

The word resilience has become a cultural slogan. We tell people to “be resilient” the way we once told them to “be positive,” as though endurance were a personality trait one could summon by choice. Yet anyone who has lived through sustained uncertainty knows that resilience has little to do with mood. It’s a structure, not a feeling. It’s something you build so that when your energy and optimism collapse—as they inevitably will—you have a system strong enough to hold you until they return.When I teach creative leaders and entrepreneurs, I see how easily they confuse persistence with stamina. They think they must push through every obstacle with force of will. But persistence isn’t about willpower; it’s about design. A resilient system anticipates that you will falter. It plans for recovery. In production, we build this idea into the schedule: contingency days, secondary suppliers, back-up plans. Yet when it comes to our personal and creative lives, we forget to do the same. We behave as if motivation will always be available on demand. It won’t be.

“Hope is not a strategy.” That phrase, attributed to General Gordon R. Sullivan, has been passed around boardrooms and business schools for decades. It’s usually said with a shrug, a knowing smile, and an implied lesson: that serious people make plans, not wishes. When I mention it in my classes at the Haas School of Business, I see my MBA students nod. They’ve heard it from venture capital mentors or read it in startup blogs. Hope, in their training, belongs to the realm of naïveté.I understand why the phrase endures. Hope, on its surface, looks like soft thinking. It can seem vague, emotional, even unmeasurable—the opposite of what a spreadsheet or a pitch deck demands. But the longer I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and creatives, the clearer it’s become to me that the people who build lasting ventures and meaningful work all rely on hope. They just don’t call it that. They call it vision, resilience, faith in the process. Whatever the name, hope is the fuel that keeps them iterating when the metrics lag behind the mission.