Lessons on Resilience from Charles Darwin

This week I was happy to have the chance to sit in on my husband’s (Jay Phelan) Life Science class at UCLA. It’s the start of a new quarter and it’s always fun to sit in class and watch Jay in action. Watching him do what he’s so good at, and see the students perking up and paying attention as he so adeptly weaves stories from his own life and that of others into the topic of the day.

On Tuesday the topic was evolution by natural selection. And while Jay doesn’t devote a huge amount of time time to history, he’d be remiss (in a class about evolution) not to spend some time talking about Charles Darwin and his game-changing discoveries.

You might have learned things about Darwin yourself in a biology class at some point. You likely heard about his travels around the world and observations of finch beaks and the like.

You perhaps know that he traveled on a ship named the Beagle, and wrote a best-selling book called On the Origin of Species.

What you might not know is that Darwin was not a good student. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, but he didn’t have the stomach for it and dropped out of medical school. And on top of that, he had health issues of his own to contend with.  

He later wrote that his father and his teachers found him to be “…an ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect.”

Image courtesy of Jay Phelan.

As Jay tells the story of Darwin’s life and the events that led him to go on a five-year journey around the world, he describes struggles Darwin encountered; Missteps, disappointments and failures.

He even describes how Darwin almost got “scooped” because he sat on his groundbreaking findings and ideas about how species evolve, for many years after returning from his trip.

I’ve written before about how Jay himself was a poor student. I’m pretty certain that his father thought he had a higher than standard intellect, but he still floundered and stumbled in his educational journey and made mistakes.

Jay talks about his own failures with his students too. He turns them into stories to illustrate points in his class.  

And yes, they make him cringe and squirm and feel uncomfortable. But in describing his less-than-stellar moments, he can dissect and discuss them and help others learn from them as he did.

As Jay teaches, he periodically pops up on the screen a Take Home Message. Something that summarizes the key idea(s) of the preceding section.

After describing Darwin’s path to making his revolutionary discoveries and how he finally wrote them up in a book that became wildly successful and influential (to say the least), Jay puts up this Take Home Message:

Image courtesy of Jay Phelan.

A great reminder that early failures don’t necessarily mean that all is lost and that we will end of a “disgrace”. In sharing Darwin’s more complete journey, and not just the ultimate success of his books and ideas, Jay pulls back the curtain on the learning process. How it’s possible to overcome and learn from setbacks—even ones that feel, at the time, insurmountable.

Perhaps not everyone is destined to make discoveries that change the world, or write a best-selling book. But most of us have aspirations to achieve something. And whatever your goals and ambitions, it’s valuable to understand that failure does not signal the end of all hope.

That it’s possible to recover and thrive in the face of struggles and disappointment. And when we highlight the ups and downs in the journeys of those who succeeded, it’s possible to help others who have stumbled or are currently stumbling, to more clearly visualize constructive alternative pathways forward.

A valuable Take Home Message, for sure!