In sport and business it pays to master the “art of acquiescence”

In 1922, a young, struggling, starving artist named Ernest Hemingway was trying to make his way as a writer in France. His wife, Hadley, traveling to meet him and a well-known editor, packed up all the writing Hemingway had accumulated in their tiny, unheated apartment—manuscripts, short stories, poetry, and an unfinished novel.

As Hadley waited during a stopover at the Gare de Lyon train station, her bag went missing. Was it stolen? Did she forget where she left it? It doesn’t matter. It was an enormous, nearly unbearable loss. Years of work had been lost in an instant, impossible to recover.

Of course, you know the end of Hemingway’s story and can probably guess how this “obstacle” contributed to it. Hemingway would go on to be one of the greatest writers of his generation. The loss of his back catalog forced him to start fresh, partly driving him to reinvent his literary style.

But no one gets there immediately. “I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenilia?” Hemingway wrote in a letter to the writer Ezra Pound. “You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood. I worked three years on the damn stuff.”

It’s a certifiable fact that most of what we despair over and resist turns out to be good for us. We change because of it, respond to it. Still, that doesn’t change the heartbreak. It doesn’t change the moment.

It doesn’t change the fact that in order to be able to respond, to move on, to see the “good,” we have to begin with acceptance. And that acceptance takes time. It is no small thing.

It took time for Hemingway to accept what had happened, to reach that mood . . . but then again, not too much time. Within a few weeks he was writing again. Within a few months, the wound was no longer so raw. Within a few years he would actually fictionalize the experience in one of his short stories. “I could see already,” he has the man who lost a manuscript say, “as you begin to see clearly over the water when a rainstorm lifts on the ocean as the rain carries it out to sea, that I could write a better novel.”

The skateboarder Tony Hawk began his professional career at age fourteen, essentially when he was still a child. He was so much smaller than the other skaters, so small generally, that getting air off the ramp was difficult. This was frustrating, difficult, unfair even. Only when Hawk accepted that he simply could not do what the bigger skaters could naturally, easily do was he able to invent his own way of doing it—ollying as he left the lip of the pool—to compensate.

This little innovation did more than help Tony Hawk level the playing field. It revolutionized the entire sport.

It doesn’t always feel that way, but constraints in life are a good thing. Especially if we can accept them and let them direct us. They push us to places and to develop skills that we’d otherwise never have pursued. Would we rather have everything? Sure, but that isn’t up to us.

It’s easy to observe that people who are deprived of one of their senses often find that others are heightened. But imagine being Thomas Edison and losing your hearing as a young boy. Imagine actually being Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind. They had to wrestle with this cruel deprivation first, come to terms with it, and then bravely move through life without these senses.

Acceptance, too, often feels like resignation to us, especially when we are young, ambitious, and determined. I can’t just give up! I want to fight! You know you’re not the only one who has to accept things you don’t necessarily like, right? It’s part of the human condition. If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane. If we met someone who was fighting gravity or the sunset, we’d pity them.

Life deals us unavoidable, inalterable things. It tells us to come to a stop here. Or that some intersection is blocked or that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour. We can’t argue or yell this problem away. We must simply accept it.

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That is not to say we allow it to prevent us from reaching our ultimate destination. But it does change the way we travel to get there and the duration of the trip.

When a doctor gives you orders or a diagnosis—even if it’s the opposite of what you wanted—what do you do? You accept it. You don’t have to like or enjoy the treatment, but you know that denying it only delays the cure.

After you’ve distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren’t (ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin), and the break comes down to something you don’t control . . . you’ve got only one option: acceptance.

The shot didn’t go in.
The stock went to zero.
The weather disrupted the shipment.
Say it with me: C’est la vie. It’s all fine.

You don’t have to like something to master it—or to use it to some advantage. When the cause of our problem lies outside of us, we are better for accepting it and moving on. For ceasing to kick and fight against it, and coming to terms with it. The Stoics have a beautiful name for this attitude. They call it the Art of Acquiescence.

Let’s be clear, that is not the same thing as giving up. This has nothing to do with action—this is for the things that are immune to action. It is far easier to talk of the way things should be. It takes toughness, humility, and will to accept them for what they actually are. It takes a real man or woman to face necessity.

All external events can be equally beneficial to us because we can turn them all upside down and make use of them. They can teach us a lesson we were reluctant to otherwise learn.

For instance, in 2006 a long-term hip injury finally caught up with Lakers’ coach Phil Jackson, and the surgery he had to fix it severely limited his courtside movement. Relegated to a special captain’s-style chair near the players, he couldn’t pace the sideline or interact with the team the same way. Initially, Jackson was worried this would affect his coaching. In fact, sitting back on the sideline above the rest of the bench increased his authority. He learned how to assert himself without ever being overbearing the way he’d been in the past.