Dr. Michael Ungar owns a small excavator. Yes, a real one, parked at his suburban house. For an upper-middle-class professor, that’s already odd, but it gets stranger when you hear why he bought it.

Ungar describes himself as a white, upper-middle-class, highly educated man, which happens to land him in one of the loneliest, most socially isolated groups. He didn’t think golf or a men’s group would fix it. So he bought a backhoe. His neighbors always needed a ditch dug or a stump hauled out, and the machine is what pulls him into their yards and toward actual friendships.

I came to our conversation looking for research. He handed me parables instead, one after another, each circling the same stubborn idea about what resilience really takes.

He’s spent four decades studying resilience across cultures and contexts. I’d watched him keynote an addiction medicine conference, a room built to think about the neurobiology of dependence, and he stood up and talked about everything sitting underneath.

The excavator is his whole thesis in one image. What rebuilds one person may have nothing to do with what the next one needs.

What Resilience Actually Is

Most of us assume resilience lives inside a person. You’re either tough, or you’re not. It’s the most American idea there is, that the outcome is yours alone and you’re the only one holding the controls (you know… bootstraps).

The science tells a different story. Ungar defines resilience as the process of navigating toward the resources you need and then negotiating to have them delivered in a way that actually fits your life (Ungar & Theron, 2019). His shorthand is two Rs: ruggedness and resources. Ruggedness is the internal stuff. Problem-solving, self-regulation, and some belief that tomorrow is worth showing up for. Resources are everything on the outside: stable housing, work that means something, a boss who isn’t poison, people who’ll catch you. Neither one does much alone. Ruggedness gets you reaching for opportunities; good resources are what make you optimistic enough to reach. Pull one out and the other starves.

The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes

Once people let go of the willpower story, they tend to overcorrect. If it isn’t all internal, it must be all social. So hand the struggling employee a raise or a yoga mat, and surely something will stick.

Ungar told me this is the trap he’s watched people fall into more than any other in his career. The data doesn’t back the all-social story any more than it backed the all-internal one. Throwing every intervention you can think of at a person is just guessing with a bigger budget.

What the evidence rewards is specificity. Whether a given factor matters at all depends on the person’s risk profile, their context, and their culture (Ungar et al., 2012). There’s a principle in his field called equifinality: a lot of different roads can reach the same healthy destination.

So there’s no universal lever. There’s a right one, for this person, in this situation, today.

Here are two examples he gave me, about as far apart as they come.

Picture an emergency room physician. High earner, brutal days, and a very particular kind of pain: moral injury, the grind of moving patients through so fast you can’t give any of them the care you trained to give. What lever helps here? Not a raise or more time off. These doctors were burning out because the stress of the job kept them from actually taking care of patients the way they wanted to. What helped was almost embarrassingly simple and human. The doctors made a pact: When someone caught a case that deserved real attention, a colleague quietly absorbed the volume, and management agreed not to punish the dip in that one person’s efficiency numbers.

Then there’s the mother of three who’d done all of it right. Night school. A retraining program. Motivation to spare. She was ready to climb out of years of poverty, and she couldn’t move, and the thing pinning her wasn’t her mindset, and it wasn’t time. She didn’t have a car. A caseworker talked a dealership into donating an old beater as a write-off, and that one rusty car reset her independence, her parenting, and the entire arc of her family.

Hand that car to the half-million-dollar physician and it means nothing. Give the mother more time, and you’ve solved a problem she didn’t have. From a distance, the two struggles rhyme: hopelessness, burnout, a life running well below capacity. Up close they needed opposite things.

Personalization Requires Attention, Care, and Empathy

Resilience Essential Reads

My second book, Unhooked, makes an argument with the same bones as Ungar’s. People fall into addictions and compulsions because something underneath hurts. I call that thing underneath a hook. The drinking, the heavy porn use, the compulsive 70-hour work weeks are just the exits that reliably quiet the pain. We stare at the exit because it’s the part we can see. The hook is where the work actually is.

Everybody wants to kill the behavior. But the behavior is the smoke, not the fire.

Here’s where it maps onto Ungar’s data. Addiction behaves like a syndrome, not a disease. A disease has one cause. A syndrome is a pile of symptoms that can come from completely different places, which is exactly why the one-size protocol keeps failing. Two people can walk in with the same behavior and need opposite things to get well.

I’ve watched this play out for almost 20 years. One person’s anxiety traces back to a childhood that never sat still, and the medicine is consistency. The next person’s anxiety looks identical on paper, but grew out of burying every creative instinct they had to chase success, and their medicine is picking the guitar back up.

That’s what personalized care is. Not a workbook telling every struggling human to exercise on Monday and meditate on Friday. Yes, there are patterns. A handful of them show up most of the time. But patterns only tell you where to look. The job is getting a specific person to the resource that actually means something to them, aimed at their particular hook. And that almost always takes an outside set of eyes. We are all terrible at seeing our own lives from above.

The executives I work with would never put themselves in the same sentence as someone in addiction treatment. The machinery is identical. The same note lands in their 360 every single year, and they still can’t budge it. The standard advice: Be more available, throw a team barbecue, book the workshop. For some of them, that’s precisely backward. They’re the excavator type, better shoulder to shoulder on a shared problem than at any event designed to manufacture connection.

What to Do With This

The move is not to try everything. It’s to find the one or two things that knock the rest over.

If you’re helping someone, map the whole system before you touch the symptom. What’s actually in the way, across every layer? Internal capacity, relationships, environment, resources, meaning. Whatever they walk in complaining about is rarely the real thing.

Then go hunting for the lever with leverage. Move the right single factor, and it spreads, fixing things you never laid a finger on. The car lifted the mother’s parenting and her optimism at once. The coverage pact rebuilt the doctors’ trust and their engagement. You’re not looking for the biggest intervention. You’re looking for the one that tips everything else. The big domino.

For more on the hidden drivers behind the patterns we can’t seem to change, see my book Unhooked.