“Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.” — Jack Ma

Our world is filled with challenges, whether you are facing a job loss, or a devastating illness, or the death of a loved one, the key is turning adversity into wisdom.

It’s that wisdom that helps you develop your resilience and achieve indestructible happiness.

1. Learn How to Deal with Life’s Toughest Challenges

An undefeated mind is one that never gives up.

To possess an undefeated mind: is not just to rebound quickly from adversity or to face it calmly, even confidently, without being pulled down by depression or anxiety, but also to get up day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade — even over the course of an entire lifetime — and attack the obstacles in front of us again and again and again until they fall, or we do. 

An undefeated mind isn’t one that never feels discouraged or despairing; it’s one that continues on in spite of it. 

Even when we can’t find a smile to save us, even when we’re tired beyond all endurance, possessing an undefeated mind means never forgetting that defeat comes not from failing but from giving up.

2. Strategies Fail, but Missions Endure

One way to stand strong is to have a personal mission you believe in.

A personal mission gives you strength.

A strategy might fail, but you can find another way to continue your mission.

First, I told him, because strategies often fail.  Companies go bankrupt. Sculptures sit unsold. 

Teachers lose their jobs. 

A mission, on the other hand, endures. 

No matter how devastated we may feel when a strategy fails, no matter how much we may have loved doing it, if underneath that love also lies a commitment to the mission our strategy served, we’ll eventually be able to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and find another strategy we loved just as much.

3. You’re Not Looking for Something That Excites You

The mission makes it meaningful.  The strategies make it exciting.

Figure out a meaningful mission and then find the strategies that light your fire.

You’re not looking for something that excites you. You’re looking for something that gives your life meaning, which you can best discover by means of something that excites you. 

I don’t know if even a sculptor gets excited about filling the world with beauty. 

He gets excited about sculpting — but only because that’s how he fills the world with beauty, the activity that makes his life feel most significant.

4. Use Adversity as a Springboard for Value

Don’t deny, dismiss, or ignore your problems.

Instead, find the benefits for yourself and others.

This means neither denying our problems exist nor denying they make us suffer. 

Rather it means learning how to use suffering as a springboard for creating benefit. 

For when confronted by harsh circumstances over which we have no control, we become capable of enduring them only by finding a way to create value with them.”

5. Regaining Self-Confidence

If you want to get your self-confidence back, take more action.   Trial and error teaches us what thinking and theories can’t.

Ironically, the best way to regain self-confidence when we find ourselves facing a problem, we have no good idea how to solve may be by flinging ourselves, however blindly; into action, doing whatever we think we can. … what we get from trial and error that rumination can’t provide is the chance to view things from vantage points we can’t acquire through theorizing alone.

6. Action Creates Feelings

The toughest thing to do when you’re down is to take action.

But that’s exactly what you need to do.

Unfortunately, as a result of becoming discouraged, we often lose the desire to take action. 

Perhaps a failed romance ruins our interest in dating, or a failed business ruins our interest in entrepreneurship. 

When this happens, people often naturally assume they need to first focus on rekindling their feelings before attempting further action. 

But research suggests that action creates feeling almost as often as feeling creates action.

7. Our Resolve Solves Problems

Our resolve determines our ability to solve problems.

If we think of a mission as a car that can take us to a more resilient place, then resolve, or commitment, must be considered the engine that makes it go. 

Indeed, the ability to soldier on when obstacles block our way to any goal, whether our life’s mission or our most trivial wish, has to be considered as much a part of resilience as the ability to survive and thrive in the face of adversity. 

Yet many of us fail to grasp the full extent to which our resolve determines our ability to solve problems, and as a result we often fail to focus on the mustering of resolve when setting out to accomplish a goal.

8. Smash Negative Beliefs to Pieces

Self-confidence is the key to your resolve.  Defend your self-confidence by defeating negative beliefs.

Nothing dismantles our resolve more quickly than the loss of self-confidence. 

For this reason, we have much to gain from conceiving of self-doubt not as a character flaw but as a mortal enemy. 

In fact, preserving our self-confidence represents the single most important and challenging part of any attempt to accomplish a goal, a fierce moment-by-moment struggle that requires us to smash to pieces even the most fleeting of our negative beliefs.