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These are terrible times. Looking at the devastation all around caused by the coronavirus and our collective inability to prevent it from continuing unabated, many of us are getting severely depressed. In an effort to know how to deal with the present and develop resilience, I came across two lessons, one from a very unconventional source—endurance athletes and another from a conventional one—prisoners of war.
Can doing a good deed make you more resilient to deal with pain, misery and distress? Kurt Gray, Professor at University of Maryland tried to find out whether doing a good deed made elite athletes perform better. And lo and behold! He actually found it to be so. Now there is a lot of published research that is statistically valid but does not make any sense—often the findings are outliers and do not hold true in subsequent research. I was about to dismiss this one to be one such case, when the explanation of the correlation, between doing a good deed and more endurance, caught my attention.
[This article has been published with permission from IIM Bangalore. www.iimb.ac.in Views expressed are personal.]