Pray for Hard Times, Build Resilience
Published on
Ayman Al-Abdullah 🧱
@aymanalabdul·Sep 12
Pray for hard times
One of the worst things to happen to an Entrepreneur is a period of easy
When things get stormy they forget how to sail
They get stuck in the storm
Find yourself, adjust the sails, and power through
Comfort is a terrible teacher. If you’re building a business, the seasons of chaos, panic, and “oh crap, are we dead?” are usually when you actually grow. This piece flips the script: instead of begging for calm waters, you start welcoming storms as the gym where your founder muscles get built.
The Psychology Behind It
When things are easy, you stop practicing the skills that kept you alive in the first place: selling, cutting costs, innovating, talking to customers, making hard calls fast. Then when a real storm hits, you’re rusty. Praying for hard times is really about craving reps under pressure, so when chaos shows up, you’re the calm one who’s seen this movie before and knows how to adjust the sails instead of freeze.
How to Actually Build Resilience
- Deliberately take on hard projects with short deadlines to normalize pressure.
- Run “what if it all broke tomorrow?” drills on your revenue, team, and systems.
- Track problems you survived in a simple log to remind yourself you’ve done hard things before.
- In every crisis, ask: “What is this forcing me to learn that comfort never would?”
Real-World Storm Sailing
Airbnb survived the 2008 financial crisis by selling novelty cereal boxes to raise cash and learned how creative scrappiness could keep them alive in brutal downturns.
Shopify pushed through the 2008–2009 recession by doubling down on product quality for small merchants instead of retreating, which built the resilience that later fueled its explosive growth.
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