How to Turn Adversity into Advantage

Turning Adversity into Opportunity

Everyone faces adversity at some point in their lives. People may experience many different challenges including personally, professionally and socially.

Greg Lindberg, entrepreneur, philanthropist and author, provides recommendations on how people can navigate adversity and turn it into growth and opportunity.

Lindberg, who authored the book Failing Early and Failing Often, underscores the importance of failure as part of one’s journey to achieving success.

“Failing helps you succeed,” says Lindberg. “You can’t experience success and growth without failing early and failing often.”

Reacting to Adversity

Everyone goes through adversity or tough times, but how you react to those challenges is extremely important.

Adversity helps people face their fears, strengths and hopes. It also helps their personal, professional and social growth.

“Always welcome and accept adversity and try to get comfortable with the uncomfortable,” says Lindberg. “Our brains thrive and survive during challenges, and that’s when we have an opportunity to get stronger and better. There is no progress in peace and comfort.”

Taking Action

You may feel overwhelmed or undefeated when you fail at something, but that’s your opportunity to get inspired not discouraged. 

During failure it’s important to set priorities and goals, practice self-compassion, develop self-discipline, get organized and continue to self-improve to be better on the other side.

“In failure, you have to decide what you want,” says Lindberg. “If overcoming the failure requires learning a new skill, getting a new college degree, joining a networking organization or reworking your resume, you need to create a vision board, think about it and obsess over it until you make it happen.”  

Staying Healthy

When life gets tough, it’s easy to fall into an unhealthy daily lifestyle that can negatively affect your overall health and wellness. No matter how tough the challenges are, try to maintain a healthy mind and body. 

Lindberg says you should make your health and wellness a priority during tough times. It’s important to create some daily healthy habits by incorporating exercise and a better diet, practicing meditation and taking walks in nature.

“You can take simple wellness steps that can make a huge difference,” Lindberg says. “Do a 30-minute workout, improve your diet, try to get at least seven hours of sleep every night, go to a yoga class or take a simple walk outside. These things will help you ease your mind, improve your focus and get you to a happier place.”

Lessons Learned

Failures help you learn many lessons throughout your life. During challenges times, it’s important you learn from life mistakes or inconveniences, acknowledge them, embrace them, and use them as a guide to help you succeed in the future.

“Failure provides us with an opportunity to learn, grow and build resilience,” said Lindberg. “No matter how rich or successful you are, you’re going to experience challenges. You must fail to succeed.”

For more information, get a copy of Greg Lindberg’s books here.