RESILIENCE & MINDSET

What Being a Refugee Taught Me About the Only Thing You Can Control

People sometimes ask me how I stay optimistic. They see the keynotes, the TV appearances, the investments, the book — and they assume the optimism comes from success. It does not. It comes from the mountains between Iran and Turkey, where I died at three years old and was brought back to life by Kurdish women who had nothing but knowledge and will.

My parents were political dissidents in Iran. My mother carried weapons under her cloak with me as cover. She had cyanide capsules under her tongue in case we were captured. We arrived in Sweden as refugees with nothing — no money, no language, no network. Our neighbor in Husby was later discovered to be a spy for the Iranian embassy, paid to surveil and potentially attack our family.

I tell these stories not for sympathy but for a specific purpose: to illustrate a principle I have carried my entire life.

We are, broadly speaking, a product of our genes and our environment. But there is a third factor that is critically important and almost always overlooked: the individual’s own mindset. We do not choose where we are born. We do not choose our genetic hand. Rich or poor, man or woman — these are beyond our control. The only thing we truly control is how we respond.

The women who fought alongside my parents never called themselves victims. They had been tortured, watched family members executed, endured the unimaginable. And they rose every morning and continued. Not with bitterness. With determination. With a fire in their eyes that I recognized even as a child.

That fire is what I call resilience. Not the motivational-poster version — the neuroscientific one. Post-traumatic growth is a documented phenomenon. The brain can rewire itself around adversity, turning the wound into the source of strength. But it only happens if you choose it. If you choose the narrative of growth over the narrative of victimhood. If you choose to use your history as fuel rather than as an excuse.

Resisto ergo sum. I resist, therefore I am.

Does it mean you have to work twice as hard? Maybe. Three times? Perhaps. But the alternative — defining yourself by the obstacles rather than the response — is a prison you build for yourself. And I have spent my entire life escaping prisons.