AdaptAbility

Your Source for Resilience and Innovation

In my last newsletter, here, I spoke about how millions of humans every day are outsmarted by something that doesn’t even have a brain, a virus. Many of them can not be killed and are almost immune to our constant barrage of attacks on them, changing just enough to keep one step ahead.

Quite often cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy reduce the size of their tumour, but after the cancer seemingly shrinks or disappears it is not uncommon for it to come back with a vengeance, seemingly out of nowhere.

The French after the First World War built the Maginot Line which was a long line of walls, forts and armoured defences that was supposed to deter the Nazi party from invading France. The line itself was quite formidable so the Nazis invaded through the Ardennes. Something seemingly impossible.

All of these paragraphs have one thing in common, adaptability.

Adaptability is life’s greatest weapon when it comes to survival and opportunity. For billions of years, adaptability through gene mutation or environment changes has produced small iteration, after small iteration after small iteration. It’s how everything that is here on this Earth right now came to be. Nature is ruthless. It’s top-down thinking. Us, monkeys, viruses and cancers are bottom-up thinkers. We’re the ones who need to adapt to changes and stressors, not nature.

The individual when faced with stressors in life can learn from Phil Knight, the founder of Nike has a quote that can sum this up nicely ‘You grow or you die’.

We are faced with many stressors daily, let alone throughout our lives. Most trivial, some potentially fatal. Does the stressor itself precede the adaptation or does the adaptation precede the stressor? In evolution, the adaptation that precedes the stressor could be because of a slight gene mutation that reacts positively to a stressor or environmental change. Like how certain animals (octopuses, chameleons etc) can change colour.

This is certainly true but that doesn’t help us, the individual right now. It benefits the human gene pool as a whole if we can become immune to viruses but perhaps not the individual. The genes are selfish and want only to keep adapting and evolving.

So how can we use adaptability?

In modern lingo, if someone is adaptable they are deemed to be flexible, resilient, or immune.

The Nazis, when faced with an impenetrable feat of French engineering, but shortsightedness, came up with perhaps the most spectacular form of modern warfare, Blitzkrieg. They penetrated through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes and got right where the French didn’t want them. Behind them and on their way to the capital to run a mock.

There is seemingly a numerical disadvantage to things that we can and can not control in our lives. But one thing we can, and always should have, is the ability to choose how we respond to events, words and things that happen to us. This is where the adaptation happens after the stressor and I think, because we are terribly bad at predicting things, is where the individual has the most opportunity to adapt. To change. To grow.

My personal and biggest adaptation came when I was 19 years old. I’d just enrolled for the longest and supposedly arduous basic military training in the world. The Royal Marines Commando training. A gruelling 32 weeks minimum, so long as you passed everything the first time or didn’t get back trooped (basically, sent back to another troop because they didn’t think you were good enough). If you passed everything the first time you were an original. Something everyone wanted to be.

There were around 80 of us who started on day one. From different parts of the UK and the Commonwealth. All different ages, sizes and from totally different backgrounds. Some working class, some toffs, some mummies boys and some trying to emulate their father. Some failed athletes trying to regain pride. Some running from something, often prison time. All of them are there for one joint reason though, to attain and get to wear to coveted green beret.

If you knew me at the time you would have given my chances as ‘no chance’. I’d not shown anything prior in my life to suspect that this could be something I could do. However, week after week that number began to fall. And fall. Suddenly, there I was at week 32, with my ceremonial Blues uniform on, marching around camp in front of my family. One of the greatest moments of my life and something nobody can ever take away from me.

There were 13 of us (originals) who passed out on that day and if you were a betting man at the start you’d have done well to pick us 13 out. Some were obvious yes, the ones born with god’s gift in everything they do but most were not. And it’s that word, that’s a pillar of the Royal Marines, adaptability that got me there.

You can not pass training without undergoing change. They strip you of every bias or belief that you have and rebuild you into their mould. You simply can not do this if you can not adapt to change. People’s preconceived beliefs, about themselves and their egos are the biggest obstacle to change. Others just simply refuse to believe that they can do what’s being asked of them. From an evolutionary viewpoint, these individuals perish. Only the men willing first and then able will get to the end.

Amazon started as a bookstore and is now the world’s biggest e-commerce business and one of the most successful companies in the world.

Tiffany, the iconic jewelry shop started out by selling stationary.

In one of my recent articles here, I speak about how Ernest Shackleton and 27 of his crew survived shipwrecked in the Antarctic in 1915 for nearly 18 months living on ice floes and hunting penguins with their bare hands.

How you can become adaptable

So how is this going to help you? There are many ways that you can use the framework of adaptability to enhance your life. Here are a few:

1. Navigate change: Use adaptability to navigate transitions in your personal life, career or crisis to help shift your mindset to where it needs to be to succeed. Remember, a lot of people don’t get past this hurdle because of the limited or pre-existing beliefs they have about themselves and the world.

2. Problem solving: Adaptable people are flexible so when there is a problem that seemingly can’t be solved they don’t just accept the status quo. They think of ‘out-the-box’ methods for solving complex problems.

3. Growth: Adaptable people foster better mindsets than those who are not. They are willing to step outside of their comfort zone where the most change happens. Even from a holistic point of view embracing new changes, new environments and new challenges can invigorate people and change their lives.

4. Resilience: Adaptability enhances resilience and people who are willing to learn and go again from setbacks are often the people who succeed in life. Failure isn’t fatal, it’s an opportunity to learn.

5. Relationships: Often when couples, family members or friends are at loggerheads with each other it’s because one or both of them are not willing to hear the other side of the story and accept change. Change is scary for people because it’s outside your comfort zone but as mentioned above this is exactly where the best things in life happen. Empathy, understanding and flexibility will better every single relationship you have.

So the next time you’re scared to make a change just remember that there have already been a stupid amount of adaptations (perhaps billions, trillions gazillions I don’t know I’m not a scientist) to get you to where you are now. You need only make one more that could change your life.