Michael Hopf wrote in his 2016 novel, Those Who Remain, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
In the years since Hopf’s book, this phrase has taken a life of its own and been paraphrased and applied in different contexts. It has become a meme and even a title of a separate book, Hard Times Create Strong Men by Stefan Aarnio. It’s also been used by coaches in speeches, for example by Aaron McKie.
Long before Hopf in the 1800’s, the founder of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum is credited with the phrase that visually captures this idea. “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.” In The Sovereign Individual, authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg note that this cycle was observed in the eighteenth century by Adam Ferguson. Davidson and Rees-Mogg offer Ferguson’s theory writing, “Countries go through a cycle from poverty and hard work, to riches, to luxury, to decadence, and on to decline.” Aristotle made a similar observation of this cycle some 2,400 years ago noting, “Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.”
The framework suggests that growth and decline are inevitable. The phrases suggest four distinct phases.
- Hard times create strong men.
This is the strength of scarcity idea. When constrained, we’re forced to make better decisions. Some difficulties are desirable. From adversity comes strength. Pain points, hurt helps. It’s only once we hit rock bottom that we can begin to crawl our way up and out of the hole we’ve dug. It is in tough times that we find out of what we’re truly capable. The French philosopher Albert Camus noted in Lyrical and Critical Essays, “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet, wrote “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” As the slave turned Stoic philosopher, Epictetus observed, “The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.” Along the same vein, Henry Ford observed, “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”
- Strong men create good times.
The character forged from the fire of failure leads to motivated and resilient people. Personal responsibility is prized. People are willing to work. They believe in earning over entitlements. Their efforts are rewarded with progress. These stories multiplied by many create strong families, teams, businesses, and countries. The late American pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick captured this idea well when he wrote in The Power to See it Through, “There is a Scandinavian saying which some of us might well take as a rallying cry for our lives: The north wind made the Vikings! Wherever did we get the idea that secure and pleasant living, the absence of difficulty, and the comfort of ease, ever of themselves made people either good or happy? Upon the contrary, people who pity themselves go on pitying themselves even when they are laid softly on a cushion, but always in history character and happiness have come to people in all sorts of circumstances, good, bad, and indifferent, when they shouldered their personal responsibility. So, repeatedly the north wind has made the Vikings.” Successful structures are erected from extended efforts. It requires strength to do the work of building. Builders, creators, and doers deliver progress. Strong men are like electricity to the kettle, they bring the energy to boil the water.
- Good times create weak men.
This is the opposite of tough times creating tough men in that good times produce an abundance of resources and choices. Constraints aren’t imposed. Everything is easy. There’s no need to be cautious, prudent, or precise with allocating resources. There seems to be an endless supply of everything, so who cares if we waste a little here and there. Author Nassim Taleb has written, “The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it is to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” It’s another way of suggesting that nothing fails like success. Wim Hof, the enthusiast of the ice bath, has said, “The things we have made to make us comfortable, have made us weak.”
Shakespeare captured this phase when he gave us, “Plenty and peace breeds cowards.”
The well fed aren’t hungry. They’re fat and happy. The beneficiaries enjoy the buildings constructed by others. They then take things for granted. Comfort creates complacency. Complacency leads to apathy. Apathy becomes erosion into entropy and the rut of rot which is phase four.
- Weak men create hard times.
The extension of taking things for granted is a sense of entitlement. The weak expect something for nothing. Having had things easy for so long, they’re not willing to work. Sacrifice, like struggle, are things to avoid not embrace. Instead of earning things, we’re either extracting anything we can from what was created by others before or ignoring things. We drain the Golden Goose until she’s no longer able to lay any eggs. When we leave our hot coffee on the table, it eventually becomes room temperature. We can’t keep things warm while doing nothing. We’re not reinvesting in sustaining or improving. We’re letting entropy run its course. We’re vultures picking the carcass of what was hunted by others. Eventually, the carcass has been picked clean and the cycle reverts to the first phase.
It can be viewed as a framework for seeing the cyclical nature of growth and decline. Of the four phases, the 1st and 3rd are opposites as are the 2nd and 4th.
In essence, a life of ease breeds dis-ease. A life that’s easy makes us uneasy. We see this in the stark inverse relationship between the wealth of a nation and the mental health of its citizenry. Western nations today are the richest the world has ever seen, yet there’s an epidemic of mental health ailments afflicting all ages. There seems to be an almost volcanic eruption of anxiety, depression, and more that are endured by youth and adults in greater numbers in Western nations today than in the past as well as today relative to other poorer, developing countries.
We can also see health being compromised and lifespans shrinking in Western countries. Staggering rates of obesity seem to be the result of abundant and cheap food being available to everyone in rich, Western nations. This abundance comes with a cost. Diabetes, cancers, and other metabolic illnesses are on the rise in these same countries. A life of ease appears to breed disease.
Outside of our health, business success can be compromised when things are good. In The Right Fight, the authors Joni and Beyer introduce research that “found that the single greatest predictor of poor performance in a business group is when the employees are happy.” This seems like a counterintuitive result but may in the context of our framework make perfect sense. We’re often told business benefits from a strong culture. Staff that get along may be more productive. However, does happy equal lazy? If one is happy, they’re not looking for challenge, they’re seeking the status quo. The satiated sit still as they’ve had their fill. It’s the hungry that are willing to work. These findings may be an example of good times creating weak men.
In Warning to the West, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Human nature is full of riddles. One of those riddles is: How is it that the people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?”
This riddle is solved when looked at through this framework. Those that have suffered under the thumb of oppression value freedom very much. They’re willing and grateful to do the work to forge a productive future for themselves and their children. However, those that received something for nothing, know not what it took to create. They discount it and any work to sustain it.
It is a framework that helps us understand things through the lens of hindsight. Part of its appeal is that it explains growth and decline across time, countries, and contexts. It is as applicable to individuals as it is to families, sports teams, businesses, and nations. It has less predictive power. Its limitations are that we don’t always know (or agree) where we are within the cycle, and we don’t know the time associated with each cycle. How close are we to the end of one phase and the start of another? What influence do we have over the timing associated with changing phases? Nonetheless, we can use it in each context to seek to develop awareness as to which phase we’re in. From here, our goal should be to either prolong time in the second phase or do what we can to get back to this phase.
We follow this cycle in our personal health and fitness as well. We hit rock bottom, a state where we’re deeply disappointed with our health on some level. Perhaps, we can’t run the way we used to or we’ve packed on some pounds that makes looking in the mirror tough. From the position of pain we decide to do something about it. We monitor our diet and increase our exercise. Slowly, we drop a few pounds and regain some physical ability. The tough times, create a stronger person. We then pat ourselves on the back for our progress. Perhaps, we include a cheat day into our workout weeks. Our diet drops on these days. Maybe, we let our cheat days increase. Our comfort with the gains we’ve made leads to less effort, not more. Good times create a weak person. We then slip back losing our wins on the scale and gaining pounds. The weak person reemerges and we fall back upon tough times. And, so it goes.
Success can lead to a mess. We need to learn that craving comfort is the same as embracing entropy. Decay becomes our destiny. We need to develop a healthy skepticism towards comfort and value difficulties. The Israeli writer, Haviv Rettig Gur, recently noted, “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.” Clinging to comfort doesn’t create resilience or toughness, it does the opposite. We need struggle to learn to sacrifice. It’s through sacrifice that we develop capabilities. With capabilities we develop the confidence to be resilient and persistent. Struggle serves. Tough times teach.
We need struggle of some kind to stay sharp. Where we weaken the will, we scare off skill. This truth may be a bitter pill. Instead, we want to escape entropy by committing to challenge. Consider making your mantra, “I fail you when I make things easy for you.” Or, look to adopt the Latin phrase, Luctor et Emergo which means, “to wrestle with and overcome.” Or channel a separate Latin phrase adopted as the motto for the State of Kansas: Ad Astra Per Aspera which translates “to the stars from difficulty. Don’t look for things to be easy. Advance towards adversity and see struggle as a stepping stone to strength.
