Chapter 23: Others Have Gone Through Worse

His legs locked around her waist, pinning her in place.

"Pull down your drawers."

She was eight. She hesitated, trapped, half expecting rescue to burst through the door at any second, her mother, her brother Bailey, anyone. No one came. He loosened his grip just enough to yank her underwear down and drag her closer. Then he turned up the radio, loud enough to drown out the room.

"If you scream, I'm going to kill you. And if you tell, I'm going to kill Bailey."

She believed him. Not because she understood it, but because his certainty left no space for doubt. She could not comprehend why he would want to kill her brother. Neither of them had done anything.

Then the pain came, sudden and absolute. A breaking and entering, as Maya Angelou would later describe it, where even the senses are torn apart. The body yields because it must. The mind of the violator cannot, so the child is the one who gives.

She thought she had died.

When she opened her eyes, the world was white. It had to be heaven. But he was there. Mr. Freeman, washing her in a tub, his hands shaking as he tried to steady her small body. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he said. "But don't you tell. Remember, don't you tell a soul."

Maya Angelou did not remain that powerless child. She became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, a voice of precision, strength, and moral clarity.

What feels unbearable in the moment often exists on a spectrum far larger than we are willing to see. David McCullough called history "a lesson in proportions. You think times are tough? You think you are beset by bad luck? Others have gone through worse. Others have triumphed over many more difficult obstacles." The point is not that pain is trivial. The point is that it is survivable. And more than that, it can be transcended.

What separates those who are broken by suffering from those who are built by it is not the severity of what happened. It is what they did next. One group builds an identity around the wound. The other uses it as fuel.

The Comfort of Being Wronged

There is a version of pain that hardens into an identity, and it is seductive because it explains everything and demands nothing. Nassim Taleb has said he doesn't know what leads to success, but he knows what leads to failure: a temperament of complaint, the mentality of permanent victimhood, and the propensity for lamentation. Shakespeare drew the type perfectly in Iago, who causes nearly every catastrophe in Othello while presenting himself as a man wronged by circumstance, and who is believed.

The identity is easier to adopt than it should be, because the evidence that would contradict it is deliberately hidden from you. When you are young, you assume other people are healthy, and they are not. Nearly everyone is managing something and has decided not to tell others. Arnold Schwarzenegger told his wife and children he was taking a trip, then went and had open heart surgery. Rihanna spent her childhood hiding crippling migraines so classmates wouldn't think she was abnormal. "I never expressed how I felt," she said. "I always kept it in." You are comparing your interior to everyone else's exterior, and concluding you were singled out.

Circumstance matters here in a way most people find counterintuitive. Measured PTSD rates are higher in wealthy countries than in poor and violent ones. Canada's is roughly six times Mexico's. Some of that gap is diagnostic: rich countries have more clinicians looking for it. But not all of it, and the direction is the opposite of what anyone would predict. As conditions improve, we do not become sturdier. We become more susceptible to the idea of suffering.

The real danger is moral rather than psychological. People who see themselves as victims often believe they have license to mistreat others, on the logic that having been wronged, they can do no wrong. That premise permits selfishness, aggression, and revenge. It is the common thread running through nearly everyone who has done monstrous things. Hitler believed he was a victim. Read the journals of school shooters and you will find people who considered themselves wronged first and acted second. Martha Stout observed that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him. Watch for it in other people, and keep your distance when you see it. The person who cannot do wrong will eventually do wrong to you.

It is worth watching for in yourself as well. Huxley warned that no one can concentrate on evil and remain unaffected, that being more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous, and that every crusader is apt to go mad, haunted by the wickedness they attribute to their enemies until it becomes part of them.

Gray, Not Black and White

The line between oppressor and oppressed is not a line. It is a gradient, and we move along it constantly, in both directions. Everyone is a victim of circumstance in some domain: a health problem, a financial problem, a family problem. Accepting your particular allotment is the price of a good life. That you privately rank your problems above someone else's grants you nothing. Your life is almost certainly better than Viktor Frankl's. Would he have been entitled to hate you?

Telling victims that they are victims is counterproductive if your aim is actually to help them. So ask what the aim is. Do you want to help the victim, or do you want to punish the person you have cast as the villain?

Abandoning the victim mentality does not require pretending nothing unfair happened. It requires focusing on what remains in your power. It is your own bad strategies, not the unfair opponent, that are to blame for your failures, and you are responsible for the good and the bad in your life. Robert Greene has spent a career on that point, and the shortest version of it is this: it may not be your fault, but it is still your responsibility.

Blaming your parents is a dead end for the same reason, even when they are truly at fault. Schwarzenegger has said that if his father had been kinder, he might never have left Austria, and the Arnold we know would not exist. The cruelty was the propellant. Mary Oliver wrote that someone she loved once gave her a box full of darkness, and that it took her years to understand that this, too, was a gift. The practical conclusion is uncomfortable but clear: become powerful, so that you are harder to victimize.

Real Victims Who Refuse the Role

Real victims exist. The people murdered in the Holocaust were victims. So are people caught in disasters and terrorist attacks. The question is never whether something was done to you. It is whether you take up residence in it.

Oprah Winfrey was born in Mississippi in 1954, a state with more lynchings than any other in the Union, at a time when a Black man walking down the street minding his own business could be subject to any white person's accusation or whimsy. Jim Crow reigned. Black teachers, themselves scarcely educated, taught from ragged textbooks discarded by white schools. She dreamed of being a Girl Scout and could never afford the uniform. She was raped at nine, and the abuse continued for years. As a teenager she gave birth in secret; the baby died in the hospital. She kept it to herself for decades.

Every element of that is a permanent excuse, and she has never once spent it. She built the highest-rated talk show in the history of American daytime television and became the first Black woman billionaire in the country. When she finally spoke about the abuse, she did it on her own terms, in her own time, in front of an audience she had assembled herself. The distinction is not whether the wound was real, but who controls what it is used for.

Brendan Fraser's case is instructive precisely because he was wronged and knows it. In the summer of 2003, leaving a Hollywood Foreign Press Association luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he was stopped by former HFPA president Philip Berk, who reached out to shake his hand. Berk described what followed as a pinch, in jest. Fraser describes a hand that reached around, grabbed him, and kept moving. He was overcome with panic. The aftermath was a slow erasure: he was rarely invited back to the Globes, and he wondered whether he had been blacklisted. "The silence was deafening," he said. The HFPA denies any retaliation and maintains his career declined through no fault of its own.

Everything else went at once. By the third Mummy film his body was, in his own words, put together with tape and ice. His marriage ended in divorce. He spent years in surgery on his back, knees, and vocal cords while fighting in court over alimony. He described the experience as making him retreat and become reclusive. And then, in 2023, The Whale. He came back. What happened to him was real, and it was not the end of him.

Charlie Munger's instruction sounds harsh until you know its source: never feel sorry for yourself, even if your child is dying of cancer. He buried his nine-year-old son Teddy, dead of leukemia, in 1955.

Adversity as Fuel

Horace observed that adversity elicits talents that would have lain dormant in prosperous circumstances. Two thousand years later, the observation holds so consistently that professional investors use it as a screening tool.

The simplest version runs on wanting. Larry Ellison had, by his own accounting, all the disadvantages necessary for success. Born on the south side of Chicago, he wanted to be somewhere better, and wanting drove everything after. He was adopted, as were Steve Jobs and Paul Le Roux, which may account for some of their need to prove themselves. The mechanism is indifferent to where it points: Le Roux used his to build an international criminal enterprise. Bruno Mars was twelve when his parents divorced, living in one room with his father and brother, sleeping on rooftops, in the back of a car, and for two years in an abandoned bird zoo. Harry Truman's father lost everything betting on wheat futures, and from the age of eighteen hardly a day passed that Truman wasn't worried about money. Running for reelection in 1940, he could not afford the stamps to write old friends asking for donations. He had slept in his car. Five years later he was president.

A second version runs on fear rather than wanting. Kissinger, the historian Jeremi Suri argues, became obsessed with power because as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany he saw exactly what happens to people who have none. George Soros's father changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros; Soros was fourteen when the Nazis took Budapest, and he spent the occupation in the attics and basements of family friends, learning to read a situation faster than it could read him. He has made a career of nothing else. Andy Grove survived that same occupation as a child, hidden under a false name while his father was held in a camp, and escaped into Austria a decade later when the Soviets crushed the 1956 uprising. He arrived in New York speaking almost no English and eventually ran Intel on the principle that only the paranoid survive, which was not a slogan he thought up in a boardroom.

Privilege can stunt ambition just as the lack of privilege can fire it. That is Doris Kearns Goodwin's phrasing, and her former student Walter Isaacson reached the same conclusion writing about Musk, arguing that the great almost always feel like outsiders as children, and advising others to harness their demons and integrate their shadow, because a difficult childhood can fuel success later in life. Musk himself grew up first with a single mother and then with an abusive father. Maye, his mother, moved the children hundreds of miles to the coast near Durban and worked as a model and a dietician, buying secondhand books and secondhand uniforms. Her ex-husband sent the boys back from visits with no clothes and no bags, forcing her to buy everything again, telling her she would eventually come back to him because she would be too poverty-stricken to feed them.

When It Doesn't Work

The correlation is real, and it is not a guarantee.

Edgar Allan Poe rented a collapsing cottage for three dollars a month and could not pay it. When the dandelions bloomed in the yard, he and his wife Virginia boiled them and ate them, day after day. She died there of consumption on a straw mattress, without enough clothing to keep her warm, her mother rubbing her hands while Poe rubbed her feet and coaxed the cat to sleep against her. He could not afford to bury her. Only a neighbor's kindness kept her out of a pauper's grave.

He produced work that outlasted almost everything else written in his century, and it did not save him. He was dead within three years, at forty, in circumstances nobody has ever fully established. Suffering is not a deposit that entitles you to a withdrawal. Plenty of people are broken by their childhoods and never recover, and plenty of happy children grow into formidable adults.

But the pattern is difficult to miss. Margaret Thatcher claimed two great advantages at the start of her life: no money and good parents. Pain plus reflection equals progress, in Ray Dalio's formula. The second term is the one people skip.

The Big Question

Barbara Walters's sister Jackie was, in the language of the time, diagnosed as mildly retarded; Walters later wondered whether she had been autistic. Jackie's stutter made her nearly impossible to understand. She needed help combing her hair. She would never marry, hold a job, or live alone. Their father owned a failing nightclub, and one night, after a headliner failed to show, he swallowed handfuls of the sleeping pills he had been taking for years and lay down to die. The quantity left no doubt about his intent. His stomach was pumped and he was placed in a ground-floor room, a precaution for suicidal patients who might jump. Walters understood immediately what it meant. She had no husband and no paycheck, and she was now responsible for a suicidal father, an anxious mother, a disabled sister, and herself, for the rest of their lives.

She then spent fifty years becoming the most recognizable interviewer in American television, and the rest of her life wondering whether her family's collapse had caused it. Bob Iger, discussing their childhoods with her, said that the Barbara everyone witnessed, with all her resilience and toughness and competitiveness, was very much a product of that upbringing. She called it "the big question": if her parents had not descended into financial ruin, would she have had the success she had? She insisted the answer was definitely yes, that her career was her destiny.

She was almost certainly wrong. Nothing about the pattern is guaranteed, but in her case the mechanism is visible: it was the absence of money that made her want it that badly. Had she grown up with it, she would not have chased it, and it is hard to construct a version of her career that survives the removal of that hunger.

Adversity as Capacity

Difficulty does not merely motivate. It expands the capacity to handle more difficulty, which is a different and more durable asset.

Watching Churchill, John Black Atkins compared him to a strong wire that always springs back when stretched, prospering under attack and enmity and disparagement, living on excitement, needing more to fight for the more he scented frustration: the greater the obstacles, the greater the triumph. The inverse is equally reliable. Alfred Adler warned that once someone adopts the view that life's difficulties must be avoided, they invite anxiety in, and once inside, it reinforces the view that produced it.

Franklin Roosevelt lost the use of his legs in forty-eight hours. Paralysis spread through his limbs, back, bladder, and sphincter while the first doctors misdiagnosed him. For weeks he lay in bed unable to perform the most basic bodily functions, his wife learning to use a catheter, a fundamental blow to his identity as a man. The physicians agreed he would not stand or walk under his own power. Neither Eleanor nor Louis Howe believed otherwise. His discharge chart read: "Not improving." He was elected governor of New York seven years later and president of the United States four years after that.

The adaptability that became the defining trait of his presidency was not discovered at thirty-nine. It had been forced on him at eight, when his father suffered a heart attack that left the older man an invalid and permanently rearranged the household. Polio found someone who had been practicing since childhood.

George Orwell found something stranger still at the bottom. Being genuinely down and out, he wrote, brings a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure. You have talked so often of going to the dogs, and here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety. That is the hidden dividend of the worst case: once you have survived it, you stop fearing it, and a person who has stopped fearing the worst case is difficult to control. Shackleton's men drank seal blood to keep from dying of thirst, and every one of them came home.

The dividend is not automatic, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Elon Musk's grandfather Walter fought for six years across North Africa and Italy and watched every one of his friends die. He came home with a level of PTSD that made him refuse to speak of it, and he won medals he never mentioned once; his grandson learned about them long afterward. His only lesson from all of it was that no one should ever want war. There is a floor below which the exchange stops working. Almost nothing you will face is anywhere near it, and that is the point of knowing the floor exists.

Hardship also supplies raw material. Tolkien fought in the First World War, and The Lord of the Rings renders war accurately because he had seen the bloodiest one in history. Nietzsche wrote through migraines and stretches of near-blindness in twenty-minute bursts, a constraint visible in the aphoristic form of books like The Gay Science; the illness did not interrupt the work, it determined its shape. Leonor Fini, a peer of Kahlo and Dalí, developed rheumatic conjunctivitis at sixteen and spent months with both eyes bandaged. She credited that darkness with teaching her to build elaborate images in her imagination. Her parents wanted a lawyer. When her sight returned she drew like someone making up for lost time. A coach of mine spent two childhood years almost completely deaf and a year of his thirties bedridden and unable to lift. Losing both music and movement made him unwilling to waste either. His motivation, he says, is gratitude.

The Story

Freud promised that one day, in retrospect, the years of struggle would strike you as the most beautiful. He was describing something true about the shape of a life: it is experienced forward and understood backward, and struggle is what makes the backward view worth having. When in doubt, do what makes for a better story. Imagine a documentary crew following you through this period, filming the origin sequence of your success. What would you do differently right now?

Some setbacks pay directly. Oprah has said that what looks like a dark patch is often the universe pointing you somewhere else, and that had she not been demoted from her six o'clock anchor post in Baltimore in 1977, the talk show would never have happened when it did. But some suffering has no upside at all, and for that kind, the story is the only compensation available.

Amor Fati

The people who make it rarely have regrets, and the reason is not stubbornness. It is that they understand luck. They know their outcome hung on a chain of small accidents, and that revising any link would revise the result. They won. There is nothing to change.

Nietzsche gave the disposition its name. His formula for greatness was amor fati: wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity, and not merely bearing what is necessary, still less concealing it, but loving it. Cheryl Strayed made it an obligation: you have no right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt, and an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you are holding.

Attitude does more work than circumstance. Two people in the same place, doing the same work, with the same money and standing, can be miserable and content respectively. I have seen as many happy faces among peasants working with primitive tools in punishing heat as in air-conditioned offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Abraham Lincoln was nine when his mother died of milk sickness, poisoned by a cow that had eaten the wrong plants. His father buried her, then left him and his twelve-year-old sister alone for seven months while he went back to Kentucky to find a new wife. Lincoln remembered "a wild region" where the panther's scream filled the night and bears preyed on the swine. When his stepmother arrived, she found two children living like animals, ragged and dirty, in a floorless cabin that lacked even a door. There were no beds. He would go on to bury his sister and two of his sons, and to preside over the deadliest war in his country's history. Most folks, he concluded, are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. He was not offering that as consolation. He was reporting a finding.

Sam Altman described making the switch deliberately. A great deal had gone wrong, the experience had been intense and often unpleasant, and he simply decided to learn to love the hard parts: to be grateful for the tension and the competition, to find enjoyment in them. It worked, and it had to, because something goes wrong every day. His reasoning was that someday he would be retired on a ranch watching plants grow and missing the drama and the anger and the pressure, so he might as well find the gratitude now, while it is still happening. It was nothing more than a phrase he repeated to himself.

The largest lesson available from history is also the simplest. Others have endured worse than you and overcome more than you, and they did it by refusing to be limited by what was done to them. What was done to you is finished. What you do with it is not.