Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Don't get numb to adversity
Adversity is some bad thing that went down and shouldn't have, done to you: a drought for a farmer, stolen crops, pests. Once overcoming it becomes a way of life, it just becomes very normal. A bad day gets a shrug and an interesting, instead of anger.
Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher was once asked in an interview how he handled the stress of running an airline. He told the interviewer he didn't handle it, he liked it.
A calm that deep has a cost. There is an extra power in being bothered by something that is wrong, and a person can get so zen they lose it. Very few things stress a seasoned founder out anymore, so the important things become the place to channel fierceness: what is right and what is wrong. Fierceness with calm on the inside is where that ends up.
Why does stress feel smaller over time?
Psychologists call the process habituation when the response to a repeated stimulus fades, and hedonic adaptation when emotional reactions return to a baseline. In a 1978 study, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared lottery winners with people who had suffered serious accidents. The lottery winners were not much happier than comparison groups, and the accident victims rated their happiness higher than researchers expected. Repeated exposure shrinks reactions in both directions.
How did Southwest Airlines survive its first years?
Herb Kelleher and Rollin King founded Southwest in 1967 to fly between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Rival airlines sued to keep it grounded, and the case worked its way through the Texas courts. Kelleher, who was a lawyer, argued the case himself. The airline's first flight did not take place until June 1971.
More from David Senra
