Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.
G. Michael Hopf captured in one sentence what Ibn Khaldun observed across civilizations in 1377 and what Arnold Toynbee confirmed across 26 of them in 1949. We are living that cycle now.
America's mental health data among young people is not ambiguous. Anxiety, depression and fragility are at historic highs, produced not by a harder world but by a softer one. We engineered discomfort out of childhood, failure out of education, and consequence out of adult life. We removed dodgeball and handed 13-year-olds unrestricted access to platforms engineered to be addictive. We protected children from everything except the things that actually harm them.
I have spent decades in environments built on the opposite principle. Marine Officer Candidate School does not care about your feelings regarding its demands. Neither does the fourth quarter of a losing game, a campfire that won't light or a patrol that goes wrong. What these environments produce are people who have discovered, through experience, that they are capable of more than they previously believed. That discovery cannot be granted. It must be lived.
The science confirms what every veteran already knows. Martin Seligman proved that optimism is learned. Angela Duckworth proved that grit, not talent, predicts success. Viktor Frankl argued from a concentration camp that meaning is the most essential human capacity. Adm. McRaven distilled it to 10 principles and one unforgettable sentence: make your bed.
Resilience is not nostalgia for a harder world. It is preparation for the one that exists, that remains, despite our innovations in comfort, a place of loss, failure and change.
The person, the family, the unit and the nation that has practiced meeting those conditions will navigate them. The one that has not will be surprised, repeatedly.
Make your bed. Lead from the front. Let your children fall and get back up. We should not wait for harder times to begin the work.

Jay Rogers has spent decades as a coach, Scoutmaster and father of three boys, the oldest a West Point graduate and Army aviator. He is a 30+ year investment professional and guest lecturer at the USC Marshall School of Business.