Intelligence accounts for only 30% of your achievement. So what accounts for the rest?

Mental resilience.

In almost every area of your life — work, school, family — it is your mental resilience that determines your success. Your ability to deal with the unknown and ever-changing situations. Mental resilience isn’t just about how you respond to the extreme situations of life — death, bankruptcy, etc. — rather it’s about how you respond to the challenges of everyday life.

Our hypothesis that grit is essential to high achievement evolved during interviews with professionals in investment banking, painting, journalism, academia, medicine, and law. Asked what quality distinguishes star performers in their respective fields, these individuals cited grit or a close synonym as often as talent. — Angela Duckworth

Mental resilience is a habit you can foster every day by challenging yourself. By breaking your routine patterns. It is so easy to grow accustomed or even entitled to the simple conveniences of modern life. Have you ever caught yourself at the brink of fury because your phone battery died? Or your wifi stopped working?

How would the ancient Stoics respond to these situations?

Seneca gave his friend Lucilius the advice to “…set apart certain days on which you shall withdraw from your business and make yourself at home with the scantiest fare. Establish business relations with poverty.” He advises practicing poverty as a way to confront yourself with a new (and uncomfortable) situation. By physically challenging yourself you will toughen your mind and become more resilient.

The Stoics also focused on putting themselves in uncomfortable situations (through fasting, cold showers, and other means) as a way to practice self-imposed discomfort. They realized that mental resilience is a muscle — it needs to be worked to be strengthened. Any by controlling their reaction to these self-imposed discomforts they trained themselves on how to respond during actual challenges.

If you can’t push yourself when times are good then there is little chance that you can hold up when life throws you a curveball.

As you begin this week how will you challenge yourself in a new way? Will you take a cold shower tomorrow morning? Or maybe you’ll sleep on the floor tonight?

-Sean