How to be more resilient

When we meet people, we often ask them the question, “What do you do?”

The answers that follow are often focused mostly on what we do, which often is defined as how we spend the meat of our days. Our identities are tied very closely to the answer we rattle off to this question. If we rarely find time to do more than talk about work, think about work, communicate about work, and travel for work, our identity is our work.

Diversify is often a term we hear when we are talking about our finances. Not often do we hear the term paired with our identity. I mean, how would we even diversify our identity?

Diversifying our identity is about, yes, having a job, but also having different ways to source our identity, like friends, hobbies, and varied interests. Diversifying is about doing just that. It’s about having multiple friend circles, multiple hobbies (even the ones you aren’t good at, but enjoy immensely) and other things you focus on throughout your day besides your work and relationships.

Diversification makes us resilient. Like our finances, when we invest parts of ourselves in different activities if one takes a hit or things don’t go as planned, we don’t feel a complete loss of self. We are able to do our other activities, see our other friends, and continue on with our lives.

Our whole sense of self doesn’t rely on one thing. So go out there, do the activities you enjoy and are good at, and even the ones you enjoy and aren’t good at. Do more of what you enjoy regardless of the result, the return, or your skill.

What matters most is that you do it.