The line between stubbornness and resilience

You can’t tell whether someone is resilient or stubborn by looking at them in the middle of the story. The usual way we draw that line is by waiting to see how it ends.

If it works, we call it resilience. If it doesn’t, we call it stubbornness.

That should make you suspicious.

A distinction that depends this much on the ending probably isn’t a real distinction. It’s a narrative trick. We take the outcome and project it backward onto the character. Success turns repeated attempts into grit. Failure turns the same behavior into delusion.

My dad is a good example of this.

He immigrated to the U.S. from Korea when he was seven. New country, new language, parents working odd jobs to make ends meet. Years later, he set his sights on the Naval Academy, which is hard to get into under the best circumstances. He didn’t get in on the first try. Or the second. Or the third. He applied almost five times.

Because he eventually got in, the story scans as resilience. It feels inevitable in retrospect. Of course he kept going. Of course it paid off.

But imagine pausing the story after the third rejection. Or the fourth. At that point, you don’t have a triumphant arc. You just have a person repeating an action that hasn’t worked yet. If he were still applying today, many people would probably use a different word. Not resilient. Stubborn.

Same person. Same behavior. Different label. The only variable that changed was the ending.

That’s the first clue that outcome is doing too much of the work in our definitions.

The problem is that you don’t live at the end of the story. You live in the middle. There is no narrator explaining whether your current effort will later be called grit or denial. There’s just uncertainty and the next move.

So if the distinction between resilience and stubbornness is going to be useful, it has to work without reference to success. It has to help you decide what to do on attempt four, not just help historians tidy things up later.

From the outside, resilient and stubborn people often look identical. They both keep going. But internally they’re running different algorithms.

This is what I found:

Resilience is persistence plus learning. Stubbornness is persistence minus learning.

Resilient people treat each attempt as an experiment. They hold the goal steady but let their tactics mutate. Failure isn’t a verdict; it’s information. They ask, “What does this tell me?” and then adjust something concrete—skills, preparation, strategy, timing, presentation.

Stubborn people protect the plan from reality. They keep going, but in the same way, as if the world’s feedback were optional.

If you look more closely at my dad’s case, it wasn’t the same application mailed into the same void five times. Each attempt was different. Better grades. Stronger recommendations. Improved fitness scores. A clearer articulation of why he wanted to be there. He changed everything he could below the level of the goal and refused to change the goal itself.

That’s resilience.

If, instead, he had resentfully sent in the same packet every year, ignored advice, and refused to revise anything, that would have been stubbornness—even if by some fluke it had worked. The difference isn’t the number of attempts. It’s the learning rate between them.

This suggests a few tests you can apply in real time.

First: Does new information change your behavior, or only your mood? If feedback makes you upset but doesn’t alter your approach, you’re probably being stubborn.

Second: How many knobs are you willing to turn? Timing, method, collaborators, preparation, even the framing of the problem—these are all adjustable. If the only lever you’re pulling is “try harder,” you’ve collapsed a multidimensional problem into one dimension.

Third: Have you defined any conditions under which you’d stop? “Never quit” sounds admirable, but it’s often a way of avoiding judgment. Real persistence includes the possibility of exit, even if you rarely use it.

There’s another asymmetry worth noticing. When a rigid strategy happens to succeed, we retroactively call it vision. When an adaptive strategy fails because the goal was impossible, we call it denial. Again, the labels follow the plot.

Stories are especially dangerous here. They compress years of iteration into a clean arc. You see the early struggle and the eventual success and infer that the lesson is “just keep going.” But what actually made the fifth try different from the first was not fate. It was revision.

The real line between resilience and stubbornness runs not through effort but through updating.

If the world keeps talking to you and your behavior doesn’t change, you’re probably on the wrong side of the line—no matter how heroic it feels.

There’s one final complication. Even if you’re persistent and adaptive, you can still be pointed at the wrong target. Resilience attached to a bad goal simply gets you to the wrong place more efficiently. So judgment matters twice: once in how you pursue the goal, and once in choosing it.

Family stories can blur this. When you grow up hearing about how persistence eventually paid off, it’s easy to infer a simple rule: never stop. But the real rule is subtler. Never stop thinking. Keep the goal if it still deserves you. Betray the plan as often as necessary.

If you’re in the middle of your own fourth or fifth attempt, don’t look ahead to the ending you hope for. Don’t look back at the story you’d like to tell. Look sideways at your behavior.

Are you loyal to the goal but willing to revise the plan? Or are you loyal to the plan and hoping the goal will eventually justify it?

Resilience is loyalty to the goal and betrayal of the plan.

Stubbornness is loyalty to the plan and betrayal of everything else.

If you keep those separate, you don’t have to wait for the ending to know which one you’re practicing.