The Measure of Resilience

Avinash Kaul

Why the distance travelled often matters more than the height achieved

We often measure success by where people finish and not by where they started.

We admire the entrepreneur who built a successful company, the executive who reached the corner office, the student who topped an examination, the athlete who stood on the podium. We see the destination and assume we understand the journey.

But we rarely ask a more important question: where did the climb begin?

The true measure of resilience is not how high someone reaches. It is how far they had to travel to get there.

I learned that lesson long before I entered a boardroom.

In 1988, I failed my mathematics pre-board examination. I scored 22 out of 100. I was sixteen years old.

Where I grew up, academic performance carried enormous weight. The disappointment was immediate. So was the ridicule. For a while, I believed that one number would define me.

Instead, it became my first lesson in resilience.

I worked harder, sat the examination again, and eventually scored 142 out of 150 in the board examination. Looking back, the marks themselves are unimportant. What mattered was discovering that setbacks are rarely permanent unless we decide they are.

At the time, I thought that was a major challenge.

I had no idea what was waiting around the corner.

Two years later, on the night of 19 January 1990, I left Kashmir.

I was seventeen.

My father took me to the KMD bus stand at Lal Chowk and put me on a bus leaving for Jammu. The buses were overflowing. I sat on the bonnet. The winter air was freezing while the engine beneath me was burning hot. Before the bus left, my father handed me to the driver and said simply, "Take him to safety."

That was the last time I saw my life as it had existed until then.

Like thousands of Kashmiri Pandits, my family was displaced. Like thousands of others, we arrived in Jammu with uncertainty, very little money and no idea what came next.

Jammu responded with a generosity that deserves to be remembered.

The city was under immense strain. Nobody had planned for such an influx. Yet what I remember are not the shortages. I remember neighbours who made room, families who shared what they had, and ordinary people who helped strangers because they knew help was needed.

For the first few months, I lived in a neighbour's garage. Later, when my family managed to build a modest house, six displaced families lived under the same roof. It was crowded. Privacy was scarce. But dignity remained intact.

Experiences like these change the way you look at adversity.

When you stand in a migrant registration queue with your future uncertain, many of the assumptions you once held about security and success disappear. You realise that circumstances can change overnight. You also realise that resilience is not a slogan. It is a decision.

At some point, every person who experiences hardship faces a choice.

You can spend years asking why something happened to you.

Or you can ask what you intend to do next.

The first question anchors you to the past.

The second allows you to build a future.

This is why I have always been drawn to the story of Hanuman. According to tradition, he possessed extraordinary strength but had forgotten it. He did not need new powers. He needed to be reminded of the powers he already had.

Many people today are in a similar position.

Not because they lack talent, intelligence or capability. They lack belief.

An early failure, a difficult childhood, a family setback, a displacement or a rejection can quietly convince us that success belongs to people who began with advantages we did not have.

My experience suggests otherwise.

Some of the most resilient people I have met are those who started furthest behind. The very hardships that appeared to disadvantage them often became the source of their strength. When you have rebuilt your life once, rebuilding it again no longer feels impossible. When you have survived uncertainty before, uncertainty loses much of its power.

The depth from which you started becomes part of the reason you succeed.

This is especially important for young people to understand.

We live in an age of constant comparison. Social media exposes us to the finished product of other people's lives while hiding the difficulties that shaped them. It creates the illusion that everyone else started ahead.

Most did not.

Every achievement sits on top of a story that is usually far more complicated than it appears.

The next time you find yourself measuring your progress against someone else's, remember to include the starting point in the calculation.

The height someone reaches matters.

But the distance they travelled to get there matters too.

And sometimes that tells us far more about who they really are.

(Avinash Kaul is the author of The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose, written with Priya Kumar and published by Harper Collins. The book traces his journey from displacement and adversity to leadership, and explores the lessons resilience teaches us about success, purpose and reinvention.

The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose releases on 3 July 2026. Readers interested in the complete story can preorder the book on Amazon: https://amzn.in/d/00BvTihf)