“Resilience matters in success. Character is not formed out of smart people. It is out of people who have suffered. I wish upon you pain and suffering.” —Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to a group of Stanford students

Getting beat up by life—periodically, of course, with some time in between to recover—may just save your life. Hard times can strengthen us, and when we're strong, it increases our capacity to celebrate and enjoy our lives.

Jensen Huang has gone through significant struggles himself. Long story short: Huang was born in Taiwan, moved to Thailand, and was then sent away to Washington, to a school for “difficult” children. His main chore as a nine-year-old was to clean the toilets in the dorm.

I can relate to struggle. Despite the many privileges I've been blessed with, I’ve had my share of difficult experiences. In retrospect, I'm grateful for this. I grew up with a speech impediment and an auditory-processing learning disorder and was bullied constantly in elementary, middle, and high school. I used to be afraid of answering the phone because I feared I could not say "hello" in time before the person calling would hang up from the silence on my end.

In high school especially, I was also chronically teased because of acne, called "pizza face" routinely in class and recess. I periodically ate alone at school. It wrecked my self-esteem, appetite, well-being, and relationships.

Fortunately, channeling what I see as my own resilience and post-traumatic growth (PTG: experiencing positive shifts in outlook, purpose, strength, wisdom, relationship improvements, and meaning above one's previous baseline before the hardship occurred) and receiving EMDR trauma therapy transformed my life. Those past experiences don't bother me anymore; in fact, they've become conduits to my success.

It turns out I'm not alone. Many people don't suffer from PTSD after facing significant hardship; as many as 70 percent of survivors of various forms of trauma report experiencing some positive change in at least one domain of life.

Human nature is to be resilient. It turns out resilience (bouncing back from hardship and returning to baseline) and PTG can be summarized down to certain skills, practices, and traits that we can cultivate, develop, and strengthen with time, in and out of therapy. Here's how (with personal examples):

Hardship forces us to grow and learn. It can have unintended positive consequences and a "silver lining." My own experiences, those of others, and the research suggest PTG is more commonplace and accessible than you may imagine. How has your struggle strengthened you?