In 1957 a biologist ran an experiment I keep coming back to. I do not know his name, the man is long dead, and there are a lot of rumors about the details, so take the numbers as the shape and not the measurement.
He put domesticated rats into a deep glass jar of water. They swam, they kept their heads up, they fought to breathe, and at about fifteen minutes they drowned.
Stay with that for a second, because the number means nothing until you do. Imagine you are the one in the water. God forbid, and I hope neither of us is ever there, but imagine it. You are drowning. You are pushing your head up, trying to get some oxygen, trying to survive, trying to breathe. Fifteen minutes of that, and then you are gone.
Then he did it again with a second group, and this is the brutal part. He watched each rat until it was about to go under, and at that moment he lifted it out. Dried it with a towel, let it rest, gave it a little food. Then he put it back in the water.
The second group did not last fifteen minutes. The lowest figure I have read is sixty hours, and some accounts say eighty, so I will take sixty. Sixty hours against fifteen minutes, out of the same animal in the same jar.
Same jar, same water, same animal. What did the second group have that the first did not?
Hope, and nothing else. That's the hope that kept them alive. Not conditioning, not muscle, not a training program. One group had been pulled out once, so it carried evidence that being pulled out was a thing that happened in this world, and that single piece of evidence bought it two and a half days of endurance. Over and over I see that it is not the smartest people who win this. There are plenty of smart people who are not successful, and plenty of people with doctorates living miserable lives. It's not about what you know it's about what you believe, and belief is built out of evidence somebody actually handed you. And when you see it that way, life is not about getting a job and it is not about getting a salary. It is a long journey, and sixty hours of it runs on one rescue.