Resilience is overrated. This is what keeps businesses alive and thriving

Resilience is a favorite buzzword for many entrepreneurs. You’ll see it throughout pitch decks, founder stories, and Linked In posts. The idea is, if you’re able to endure enough, you’ll successfully come out the other side. Some 83% of founders experience high stress, struggling with imposter syndrome and rapidly losing confidence in the idea they were certain would work out. In this context, the resilience story is a motivating one. But the idea is also highly misleading. Among the 90% of startups that fail, most founders are likely resilient right up until the end. They push through setbacks and persist with their idea, despite plenty of evidence suggesting that it won’t work. Take Theranos, which likely started with good intentions, forging on despite its product failing to live up to its claims. Ultimately, this resulted in the founder and her deputy being sent to prison. Or MySpace, once the leader in social media, which continued to focus on aggressive monetization over user experience, even as Facebook stole market share. The unfortunate truth is that one of the key factors of being an entrepreneur is knowing what challenges aren’t worth enduring, and when a change is needed instead. It’s adaptability that makes the difference As a founder, one of my most formative experiences was getting robbed in Los Angeles. I had a flight booked to leave the United States and head back to Europe. Yet, without my ID or immigration documents, I had to stay an additional six months while waiting for replacements. I spent the days afterward telling myself not to worry and that everything would be okay, until it dawned on me that wishful thinking wouldn’t keep a roof over my head. I had to accept the reality of the situation and find a way to deal with it before my problems became a whole lot worse. So I took a job as a director’s assistant on a film set, and spent the next few months there. That ordeal taught me an incredibly valuable lesson: When things go wrong (and they in