What to Do When Life Knocks You Flat (Without Staying Down)

Most people are not where they want to be in life, not from a lack of desire but from a lack or resilience.

Picture this: Face down on the Fuji mat, tasting blood from a split lip, with the weight of my training partner’s knee pressing into my back as he secured a submission that I saw coming but couldn’t stop.

This was my third tap-out in that fourth 5-minute round during my early days of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training at age 58.

Every part of my body ached, my ego was bruised worse than my ribs, and a voice in my head whispered what it had whispered to countless others before me:

“You’re too old for this. Just quit.”

But as we reset, slapped hands and bumped fist, I heard an echo from my childhood in Hawaii — a Japanese proverb my girlfriend’s grandmother used to repeat:

“Nana korobi ya oki” — fall down seven times, get up eight.

That simple phrase had guided me my whole life.

The proverb matched perfectly with what I’d learned in decades of martial arts:

“A black belt is nothing but a white belt who got thrown down 1,000 times and got back up 1,001 times.”

Non-martial artists might know this principle from Thomas Edison’s response to critics who said he failed over 10,000 times trying to create a commercially viable lightbulb: “No, I found 10,000 ways it wouldn’t work…”

This is the one thing that separates winners from losers, badasses from bitches, champions from crybabies: you can’t beat the person who refuses to quit.

But here’s what most people don’t understand about resilience — it’s not just about having the heart to get back up.

It’s about having systems in place to handle the three specific challenges that knock most people out permanently: distractions that scatter your focus, disappointments that kill your motivation, and defeats that make you question whether the fight is worth continuing.

The Modern Quit Culture Epidemic

Walk through any gym after New Year’s resolutions fade, observe startup failure rates, or track how many people abandon challenging goals when they hit their first real obstacle, and you’ll witness the same phenomenon that has created a generation of quitters: most people have never developed systematic approaches for handling setbacks.

The Three-Strike Mentality:

Our culture has sold us a dangerous lie: that successful people don’t face significant obstacles, or if they do, they overcome them quickly and dramatically.

• Movies show montages of rapid progress.
• Social media presents highlight reels without the struggle footage.
• Success stories focus on the breakthrough moments while glossing over the years of grinding through failures.

This creates what I call “the three-strike mentality” — people expect some difficulty, but when they face their third or fourth major setback, they assume they’re not cut out for success and abandon their goals entirely.

The Resilience Deficit:

Unlike previous generations who grew up with physical hardship, economic uncertainty, and limited safety nets, many modern high-achievers have been protected from significant failure for most of their lives.

When they finally encounter real adversity in their careers, relationships, or personal challenges, they lack the emotional and practical tools for recovery.

During my time on the mat learning hapkido, my biggest heroes weren’t the ones who were physical and tactical badasses. My heroes were the typical-Joes who showed up day-after-day, sometimes year-after-year, just training.

Some of them wouldn’t even be on the demo team but they were heroes in my eyes because they kept becoming better, not compared to anyone but to who they were in the past.

Two of my biggest heroes were Bill Jenkins and Maureen Tobin.

And what I learned from them was the difference wasn’t toughness or luck. It was having specific protocols for handling the three types of setbacks that destroy most people’s momentum.

Level 1 — The Distraction Destroyer: Building Unshakeable Focus

Your first mission involves creating systems that make it nearly impossible to get derailed by the constant stream of urgent-but-unimportant demands that pull most people away from their crucial objectives.

The Distraction Audit:

For one week, track every time you get pulled away from important work by something that didn’t deserve your attention:

• Social media notifications during focused work time
• Emails that could wait but felt urgent
• Conversations that went longer than necessary
• Projects that seemed important but didn’t align with your main goals
• Entertainment that you used to avoid difficult tasks

Most people are shocked to discover they’re spending 60-80% of their time on activities that don’t move their most important goals forward.

The Environmental Defense System:

Instead of relying on willpower to resist distractions, design your environment to eliminate them:

Physical Space Control: Remove distracting items from your workspace. Keep only what directly supports your current priority project.

Digital Boundaries: Turn off notifications for everything except true emergencies. Use apps that block distracting websites during focused work periods.

Time Blocking: Schedule specific periods for different types of work. Protect your most important projects during your peak energy hours.

Social Filtering: Limit time with people who consistently pull you toward unproductive activities or negative thinking patterns.

The Simple Life Protocol:

Complexity breeds distraction, this was the main reason why I kept my life so simple. Before I met my wife, I would simply work and work-out, after I met my wife, I shifted to building our relationship and our businesses.

The more complicated your life becomes, the more opportunities exist for getting knocked off course:

• Reduce the number of projects you’re working on simultaneously
• Eliminate commitments that don’t align with your primary objectives
• Automate routine decisions to preserve mental energy for what matters
• Say no to opportunities that sound good but don’t support your main goals

Your Level 1 Milestone: You can work for extended periods without feeling pulled toward distracting activities because you’ve designed your environment to support focus rather than fight against it.

Level 2 — The Disappointment Navigator: Maintaining Momentum When Plans Fall Apart

Once you can protect yourself from external distractions, the next challenge involves handling the internal disruption that comes when reality doesn’t match your expectations.

As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

The Expectation Recalibration Framework:

Most disappointment comes from the gap between what we expected and what actually happened.

Instead of trying to predict outcomes accurately (impossible), develop the skill of maintaining momentum regardless of specific results.

The Plan A/B/C Strategy:

When I was running electrical crews in construction, for every project I would give to my guys, I would ask them to give me 3 approaches to the project.

I found that this way they were continually challenging, learning and being able to adapt, they were teaching themselves on how to be better.

You can apply this with every important goal or project, develop three approaches:

• Plan A: Your ideal scenario if everything goes perfectly
• Plan B: Your adaptation strategy when obstacles arise
• Plan C: Your minimum viable outcome that still represents progress

This mental preparation prevents disappointment from becoming paralysis.

When Plan A fails (and it often will), you immediately shift to Plan B instead of starting over from scratch.

The Progress Redefinition Practice:

Most people define progress too narrowly, focusing only on their ultimate goal rather than the skills, relationships, and knowledge they’re building along the way.

When external results disappoint, internal development can still provide momentum.

Ask yourself weekly:

• What skills did I develop through this week’s challenges?
• What did I learn about myself, others, or my field?
• How did I become more resilient through handling difficulties?
• What relationships were strengthened through working together on problems?

The Emotional Reset Protocol:

When disappointment hits, use this sequence to process the emotion without letting it derail your progress:

1. Acknowledge: “This didn’t go as I hoped, and I feel disappointed.”
2. Extract: “What can I learn from this experience?”
3. Redirect: “What’s one small action I can take right now to move forward?”
4. Reframe: “How might this setback actually position me better for future success?”

Your Level 2 Milestone: You bounce back from disappointing outcomes quickly because you’ve trained yourself to find value in every experience, not just the ones that match your original expectations.

Level 3 — The Defeat Processor: Rising from Total Failure

The highest level of resilience involves handling complete defeats — the moments when you didn’t just miss your goal, you got thoroughly beaten.

This is where champions separate themselves from everyone else.

The Defeat Analysis System:

When you face significant failure, resist the temptation to either ignore it or wallow in it. Instead, conduct a systematic analysis:

Tactical Review: What specific decisions or actions contributed to this outcome?

Strategic Assessment: Was the overall approach sound, or does the strategy need fundamental changes?

Skill Gap Identification: What capabilities would have made success more likely?

External Factor Analysis: Which elements were outside your control, and how can you prepare for them next time?

The Comeback Planning Protocol:

True defeats require more than just getting back up — they require getting back up smarter and stronger:

1. Recovery Phase: Take time to heal physically, emotionally, and mentally before making major decisions
2. Skill Development Phase: Address the specific weaknesses that contributed to the failure
3. Strategy Revision Phase: Modify your approach based on what you learned from the defeat
4. Gradual Re-engagement Phase: Return to challenges progressively rather than immediately attempting the same level that led to failure

The Anti-Fragile Mindset:

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Instead of just bouncing back to where you were before defeat, use setbacks as opportunities to become stronger than you were originally.

This requires reframing failure from “something that happened to me” to “information that will make me better.”

Every major defeat contains valuable intelligence that success can’t provide. The question is whether you’ll extract that intelligence or let the experience destroy your confidence.

The Multiple Defeats Preparation:

Prepare mentally for the reality that significant goals require surviving multiple defeats.

Edison’s 10,000 “failed” experiments weren’t separate events — they were part of a systematic process where each failure provided information for the next attempt.

Success isn’t about avoiding defeat; it’s about developing systems for learning from defeat faster than your competitors do.

Your Level 3 Milestone: You view major setbacks as tuition payments for advanced education rather than evidence that you should quit, and you consistently come back stronger from defeats than you were before them.

Level 4 — The Resilience Teacher: Helping Others Get Back Up

True mastery involves not just personal resilience, but helping others develop their own systems for handling setbacks.

At this level, you become someone others seek out when they’re facing their darkest moments.

The Perspective Offering Approach:

When someone you care about is dealing with defeat, don’t try to minimize their pain or offer quick fixes.

Instead, help them see possibilities they can’t currently perceive:

• “This is incredibly difficult, and it makes sense that you’re struggling. What’s one small thing we could focus on to start moving forward?”
• “I’ve seen you handle tough situations before. What did you do then that might apply here?”
• “If someone you cared about was facing this same situation, what advice would you give them?”

The System Sharing Strategy:

Share your frameworks for handling distractions, disappointments, and defeats — not as prescriptions, but as examples of what’s possible when someone develops systematic approaches to resilience.

The Long-Term Perspective Gift:

Help others zoom out from their immediate pain to see how current struggles might serve their long-term development. This doesn’t minimize their current difficulty, but provides hope that the suffering has purpose.

Your Level 4 Milestone: Others consistently reach out to you during their toughest moments because they know you’ll help them find a path forward rather than just offering sympathy.

Putting It On the Mat

This week, I challenge you to begin building your systematic approach to resilience by choosing one area where you’ve been letting setbacks derail your progress.

Your 7-Day Resilience Building Challenge:

Days 1-2 (Assessment): Identify which of the three resilience challenges (distractions, disappointments, defeats) most frequently knocks you off course.

Days 3-4 (System Design): Choose one specific protocol from the appropriate level and implement it in your daily routine.

Days 5-7 (Testing): Apply your new system when you face the next inevitable setback, however small.

The Monthly Resilience Protocol:

Each month, focus on strengthening one aspect of your resilience system:

• Month 1: Distraction elimination and focus protection
• Month 2: Disappointment processing and momentum maintenance
• Month 3: Defeat analysis and comeback planning
• Month 4: Teaching others your resilience frameworks

Your Weekly Resilience Check-in:

Every Sunday, spend 15 minutes reflecting on:

1. What knocked me off course this week, and how quickly did I get back up?
2. Which resilience system served me best during challenging moments?
3. What evidence am I building that I can handle whatever life throws at me?

Remember: The goal isn’t to avoid getting knocked down — it’s to develop such reliable systems for getting back up that setbacks become temporary inconveniences rather than permanent roadblocks.

The mat will always be there, ready to teach you that you’re stronger than your setbacks and more resilient than your defeats.

Every time you get back up, you’re not just recovering from a failure — you’re building the character that will carry you through every future challenge.

Your willingness to fall down seven times and get up eight isn’t just about achieving your goals.

It’s about becoming the kind of person who others can count on when life gets tough, because they know you’ve mastered the art of not staying down.