What a Flat Tire Taught Me About Resilience |
Take our Resilience Test
Find a therapist near me
Systems built for maximum efficiency often collapse under ordinary disruptions.
Burnout rarely comes from one catastrophic event—it's the accumulation of small demands with no buffer.
Research shows people with even small amounts of flexibility handle stress better than those with none.
The announcement came casually over the intercom at my gate at the airport, almost absurdly so: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing a delay due to a flat tire."
There was a pause, the kind where you expect the follow-up to be simple: a quick fix, a short delay, someone somewhere swapping it out while we all checked email and pretended not to be annoyed.
But then came the second part: "We do not have a replacement tire available at this airport. One is being brought in from Detroit."
I was sitting in Cleveland, and I laughed out loud, the kind of laugh that comes from something being so completely out of proportion that there is no other response. A commercial aircraft, an entire system of logistics and precision and scale, grounded by something I keep in the trunk of my Mini Cooper: a spare tire. Yet, they did not have one, and just like that, everything stopped.
As we sat there, the ripple effects started to become visible: missed connections, rebooked flights, frustrated gate agents trying to reassemble a schedule that had just unraveled because of one missing piece. The system had no margin for something as ordinary as a flat tire.
It would be easy to chalk this up as a fluke, but the longer I sat there, the more it felt like a signal.
We have built systems, and lives, that are optimized for efficiency. And in the process, we have quietly removed the........