TORC

Bugs Bunny & Daffy Duck: wacky embodiments of tenacity & resilience

In his 1988 autobiography, Mel Blanc, the voice behind so many cartoon characters, tells how, following a serious car accident in 1961, he was miraculously brought back from a coma.

After 3 weeks of mounting frustration, his doctor found the key in an innocent throw-away question: “how are you today, Bugs Bunny”.

To which, Blanc awakened with a response straight from the wise-cracking wabbit’s  mouth:

 “Eh … just fine, Doc”.

Resilience & tenacity in the cartoon strips
Looney Tunes’  fans wouldn’t be surprised, I’m sure.

After all, how many times have Bugs, Daffy and the Road Runner themselves been flattened, only to instantly come back to fight another day.  

And, how equally their arch rivals (Elmer Fudd and Wild E. Coyote) never give up, no matter how many times they are outwitted, humiliated or made a fool of.   

For, in the world of the comic strip and animation, we are all very comfortable with the extraordinary degrees of resilience and tenacity displayed.

Resilience & tenacity in real life
But in real life, these qualities don’t seem to come quite as naturally.

Consider the case of the individual who in 1980 sold his rights to the original PC operating system for just $50k - to Bill Gates, who in turn, went on to license it to IBM & set the stage for Microsoft’s future dominance.

Or, the Xerox executives who, at about the same time, ordered their Palo Alto Reseach Center to give away their object orienting programming to Steve Jobs – who grabbed it with open arms to launch the Mac revolution.

These examples speak to how short-term hurdles can obscure future possibilities in some and not in others – and, how this can be the key ingredient leading to resilience differences in people.    

Bill Gates & Steve Jobs - transcending vision
For, Gates & Jobs were themselves also going through a tricky patch at the time.

In both cases, their in-house development attempts were in serious trouble – Gates was behind on his operating system and Jobs’ Apple 2 was (in his own words) ‘running out of gas’.

Gates & Jobs, however,  both had a transcending vision for their companies and this was the fire in the belly that had them prospecting on the outside for solutions to get over any immediate hurdles.  

The contrast with Xerox was telling, as Jobs himself explained in a PBS documentary:

”Basically they (Xerox) were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been you know a company ten times its size”

Gates & Jobs: common traits of resilience
Gates & Jobs are often seen as quite different personalities – Jobs the artist and Gates the businessman.

Nonetheless, thirty years on, we can see that, in large part, it is their common traits of resilience and tenacity that has been most to the fore throughout their careers – as Dan Farber, editor-in-chief at CNET and a longtime observer of both remarked in a 2007 broadcast:

“I think of their tenacity, I think that they are very persistent and have a very strong vision and know what they want and tend to get things done and that is how they have survived for so long and be able to stay on top ….. they are basically pretty much the same from a personality, from a work ethic, from just the way they handle things, as they were thirty years ago”.

Seligman’s model of resilience
And, the good news for the  rest of us, according to University of Pennsylvania professor,  Martin Seligman,  is that such resilience is not innately magical, but rather readily learnable - with training and practice.

Seligman’s model operates along 3 dimensions: personalization, pervasiveness and permanence (the 3 p’s).

Accordingly, when we suffer a setback, Seligman advises that we simply need  to keep things in perspective - by rationalising the setback in terms of time, scope and personal responsibility.

This mindset restores balance by having us see that the setback mostly involves:

1. aspects for which we are not responsible  -  ie. it is not all personal
2. scope ranges  that remain unaffected  -  ie. it is not all pervasive, and
3. time durations that will pass  -  ie. it is not all permanent.

The result is a glass that is always …  more than half-full!

PS. No. 1.  For details on our Leading with Resilience, 1-day training programme, please click here.

PS. No. 2  For a related piece of ours, featured in the Irish Times, Friday, Aug. 27, 2010, please click here.