All we need is to be resilient before others

What is the most importance characteristics we should have to achieve our goal?

Yes, resilient is all we need!

In this post, we will have a talk about resiliency as the fundamental characteristic we should have before other important characteristics such as deep work, diligence, perseverance, endurance, dedication, consistent, focus and others.

You may argue resilient is not the most important. Well, that is ok.

We will discuss this resilient and explain this trait via stories of modern inventors.

Why resilient matters

We understand there are many traits or characteristics we must have to make us able to achieve our goals.

Those important traits include commitment, focus, dedication, resilient, hard work, deep work, respect, and others.

However, the most important one trait that we must have first before the others is resilient.

By definitions, resilient is the ability to withstand or recover from difficult conditions.

If we look at resilient from mechanical perspective it is like a spring or coil that can spring back into shape after external forces such as bending, stretching or compression.

Similarly, from global positioning system (GPS) perspective, resilient is the ability to recover position and timing after disruptions, such as signal interferences and blockage.

From this resilient trait, all the other good traits will automatically be formed and developed within us.

That is, being resilient will force us to develop focus, dedication, fight spirit, consistency, effort and hard work to achieve what we want to achieve.

Indeed, we will feel very boring and vague if we only talk about resilient theoretically by definition.

In the next section, we will learn directly from the true story of modern technological inventors that are still living among us at the moment.

Resilient is at the heart of great inventors

Resilient can be understood clearly only with practical and real examples. In our lifetime, there are many examples of great inventors who have resiliency in their trait such that they can become great inventors in our time.

Here, we will look at the stories of three inventors: James Dyson, Prof. Geofrey Hinton and Jack Ma.

Although we can’t do justice to other not presented inventors to our time in this post, we hope these three people can be enough as examples to explain “resilient”.

James Dyson performs thousands of prototype trials to invent the cyclone technology for bagless vacuum cleaners

Dyson is the first company that invents bagless vacuum cleaners. This type of vacuum cleaners leverages the principle of cyclone that suck particles through the centre of the cyclone and then throw them outwardly via centrifugal forces of the cyclone.

With this cyclone principle, a bagless vacuum cleaner can be produced where the dust will not block the air suction flow. Hence, no power suction loss we will get regardless how much dust we have in the vacuum.

To develop the bagless vacuum cleaner with the cyclone technology, James Dyson needs to create up to 5000+ prototype iterations until he got the expected version of the bagless vacuum cleaner.

During these prototyping phases taking up to around 15 years period, he faced many failures or unexpected results as well as his family financial strain. But James kept being resilient and get back to work on making the next better version of the prototypes.

From this resilience, James developed endurance, focus, attention to detail and other many good traits that keep him going and finally being successful to achieve his expected bagless vacuum cleaner.

James’ resiliency embraces failure as a step stone and guide for the next improved iteration of his bagless vacuum cleaner.

Nowadays, Dyson is a global technology company that produces not only bagless vacuum cleaner based on cyclone technologies but also produces other vacuum and/or cyclone-based products, such as air purifier, hairdresser, vacuum robots as well as advanced headphone.

Prof. Geoffrey Hinton keeps going when being told that ML will not work

Prof. Geoffrey Hinton is a Nobel laurate in physics in 2024. He got his noble price for his contributions on the foundation of artificial neural networks.

This artificial neural network is the building block of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution we can use now, such as Open AI Chat-GPT or Microsoft Co-Pilot.

This appreciation of his work does not come easily.

Prof. Geofrey Hinton faced many scepticisms during his PhD form his supervisor. Because after many times re-trying to improve his neural network model, Prof. Hinton cannot get expected results.

However, he keeps being resilient by always trying to improve his work on artificial neural network.

At that time, he believes that artificial neural networks can work as long as large data and computational power are available.

Of course, at that time, these large dataset and humongous computational power were not available.

Even after his PhD, during his post-PhD research, the community does not believe in artificial neural networks.

Especially during the period of 1990, many artificial intelligence researchers abandon artificial neural network and pursue other technologies such as support vector machine (SVM) and other kernel-based methods.

With his resiliency, he kept pursuing this artificial neural network research. With his PhD student, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky, they build AlexNet, a type of artificial neural network with many layers and at that time a very large parameters, they can win the ImageNet computer vision competition.

This eureka event sparks attention from many other artificial intelligence researchers and triggers the massive research studying artificial neural network models.

From Prof. Hinton’s resiliency, he developed traits of strong belief and focus on our work and was not being affected by “noise” from others.

Also, his resiliency creates his perseverance and dedication in artificial neural network field leading to the maturity and massive beneficial of artificial neural network technologies for our daily life.

Jack Ma continuous trying after many rejections and failures

Jack Ma is the co-founder of Alibaba, one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

Before being famous as the co-founder and CEO of Alibaba, Ma’s journey is not easy. His pathway to achieve what he is now is full of difficulties.

From University, he is not a very strong student, he fails few times on his university entrance and also need to apply many times to Harvard until he got accepted.

He also has been rejected from numerous jobs, such as KFC!

After his comeback to China from US, in 1995, he found China Pages, a web-based company that act as directory and bridge among companies in China.

Then, in 1999, he co-founded Alibaba as e-commerce company in China. There were a lot of scepticism about this e-commerce as many believe it will not work in China.

He keeps being resilient, he went forward with this e-commerce idea and finally beats eBay in China.

During his education and job carrier journey, he always tries and tries again after failures.

His resiliency causes him to develop endurance, strong belief, opportunity observance and other excellent traits that lead hi to become one of China and the world influencing people.

From these stories, we can see that we will face failure during our journey. Hence, we need to get back from that failure and keep moving forward and improve!

Conclusion

In this post, we have discussed resilient as the most important characteristics we should have before other important one such as deep work, diligence, commitment and others.

Resilient is the ability to withstand or recover from difficult situations. That is, it is the ability to keep “stand up” after “falling” and after falling until we can achieve our goals.

This is the most fundamental trait we must have before other important traits such as deep work, diligence, focus, commitment, consistent and other traits.

From resilient, we will eventually develop and acquire those other important traits we need to achieve our goals.

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