“Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently told a group of students at Stanford University, his alma mater. “I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you.”

“I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee,” he continued.

The billionaire tech boss might be blunter than some about his belief in the character-building power of persevering through pain. But Huang is far from alone in extolling the importance of pushing through pain. The business media (including Inc.) is full of articles insisting resilience is key for success. Researchers agree the trait has big benefits.

So why on earth is this article arguing that resilience is overrated?

The dark side of resilience

It’s important to note that no one, including me, is saying that resilience isn’t a good thing to have. If you collapse in the face of the slightest adversity, you almost certainly won’t get very far. The problem, according to a host of fascinating experts, is that we often take our admiration for resilience way too far.

When we fetishize suffering Huang-style, we often miss out on other approaches to navigating hardship. The results can be nasty, for both companies and individuals.

“Resilience has become one of the most overused words in management. Leaders praise teams for ‘pushing through’ and ‘bouncing back,’ as if the ability to absorb endless strain were proof of strength,” wrote a pair of professors from British business schools in an article recently published in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

This worship of resilience is built on a misunderstanding. Many leaders see resilience as the ability to endure difficulty. But “the more a team relies on heroic effort, the more fragile it becomes,” they claim. Instead of building systems that help employees avoid whiteknuckling through suffering, they celebrate resilience. The result is burnout culture.

Or as the professors pithily put it: “Many organizations don’t build resilience; they simply expect employees to endure more.”

What happens when you’re the grittiest employee

Employees are on to this trick. When mental health journalist Tanmoy Goswami asked his thousands of followers “what their first, unfiltered reaction would be if their employer urged them to develop ‘resilience,’” the replies were brutal.

“Oh, god, not this crap again,” said one respondent. “Anger. Because it seems [they are] trying to manipulate me into making their problems disappear,” replied another.

Employees can clearly spot that praising resilience is often just a way for bosses to dodge their responsibility to create a culture where pain isn’t a routine part of the job. (Often because doing so costs more than tacking up an inspirational poster about the glories of grit.) But that doesn’t mean employees are immune from over-valuing resilience themselves.

Christy Zhou Koval is another business school professor with a special interest in self-discipline. “As a researcher who has spent years studying” highly disciplined individuals, she recently wrote on The Conversation. “What I found was surprising: the very trait that makes them valuable — their high levels of self-control — can also come with hidden costs.”

Across a series of experiments, Zhou Koval and her collaborators demonstrated that even though pushing through difficulties takes a big mental toll on everyone, onlookers think it costs those who do it regularly and with grace less effort. As a result they pile more and more work onto those perceived as being exceptionally resilient.

“The more capable you seem, the more you’re asked to carry. For high self-control individuals, that reputation can become a fast track to burnout in the office and at home,” the researchers found.

We do this to ourselves, too

Not only do people ask others to unfairly and unsustainably overload those they perceive as resilient. Perceiving yourself as resilient can cause you to do the same to yourself. Just as overloading others because of a belief in the magical powers of resilience leads to burnout, overloading yourself happens for the same reasons and ends up in the same place.

Behavioral scientist Darlingtina Esiaka has shown that people who see themselves as resilient rely more often on their ability to mentally muscle through challenges. They end up paying a high cognitive price.

People with “higher levels of grit reported greater cognitive difficulties such as trouble concentrating, forgetfulness and feeling mentally fatigued, despite their strong motivation to persevere,” she has explained.

Excessive amounts of resilience “can essentially overwork certain parts of the brain,” Eskiaka notes. Not only can this lead to mental fogginess, over time it can also increase your risk of high blood pressure, stroke, and depression.

Reset your relationship with resilience

Life and business can both be tough. Resilience, I reiterate, is a great trait to have. But all this evidence suggests a lot of us put way too much faith in people’s ability to just power through. Even the strongest beam will break if you overload it enough. We’d be less likely to crack if we worshipped resilience a little less.

In practice that often means switching from praising the capacity to knuckle through to looking for strategies that mean people don’t have to.

At work that might look like“shifting attention from motivation to mechanics — how work is structured, how decisions are made, and how recovery is built in.” instructs the Sloan Management Review article before offering concrete suggestions. Here’s a whole Greater Good Science Center piece full of ideas about how to build this type of “organizational” rather than “individual” resilience.

Individuals too might want to ungrit their teeth and try other strategies, like asking for more help or practicing self-care.

Looking for other solutions rather than John Wayne-ing your way through challenges starts with acknowledging that resilience isn’t magic. Yes, grit is useful. But, whatever Jensen Huang might think, it doesn’t make you bulletproof to stress and hardship. Over time in fact too much just makes you weaker. Maybe it’s time we all try looking for other, healthier coping strategies instead.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/despite-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huangs-belief-in-suffering-resilience-is-overrated/91310277