Ian Robertson

At the beginning of the book [Twilight of the Idols] Nietzsche lists forty-two separate maxims, one of which is, What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger. He makes it clear that this isn’t a new concept, quoting from the Roman poet Aulus Furius Antias ‘spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound’ to illustrate his point.

You need to respect yourself, I had learned, if you are to benefit from stress through your brain rising to challenge rather than shrinking from threat.

People who believe they have some control over their lives, no matter what the objective circumstances are, are more likely to see stress as a challenge to face up to, rather than as a threat to retreat from.

If you let your mind wander, you’ll make yourself unhappier.

A wandering mind, then, is an unhappy mind. If you can focus on your day-to-day tasks and save your daydreaming for when you choose, you will be able to cope with the sorts of stress that earthquake victims suffer much better than if you are a mind wanderer. Resilience then, needs focus. If you keep your mind on the moment-to-moment tasks of ordinary life, you’ll shield yourself from extra stress which saps your energy and hence your strength.

Experiencing success, in other words, can be a little like taking a tranquilizer and an energy drink combined.

That sense in people with a high need to achieve of being almost physically impelled to succeed is not an illusion, then: the more driven by ambition we are, the greater the level of neural activity that will be fired up deep in the brain. And the critical aspect of this drive is that it comes from inside, from intrinsic motivation; it is not triggered only by external motivations.

Achievement motivation, then, is a crucial ingredient for success in life, and part of the recipe for what makes a winner.