Adversity
Most all postsecondary and professional schools prompt applicants to describe times of overcoming adversity. What is important is not the fact that you’ve suffered through adversity; what is important is how you succeeded despite it, and how it aided in transforming your personal characteristics and worldview.
Cicero wrote that pleasure should be derived from past troubles; this is because you realize how you’ve changed because of your past, and how easy those same troubles would be to combat if they happened to you again.
Embrace challenges, embrace hardship, embrace adversity—eliminate what Iyanla Vanzant calls “PMS”—poor-me-syndrome.
Florida Scott Maxwell, who has written over this subject, is worth quoting at length:
The Measure of My Days
“Hardihood is a quality supposedly created by difficulty, and I have always felt it to be a stimulating virtue. I like people who have it, and that must mean that I like people who have been disciplined by hardship, which is true. I find them realistic, not easily daunted, and they make few childish claims. This also means that the hardness of life I deplore creates the qualities I admire…
“Suddenly I wonder – is all hardness justified because we are so slow in realizing that life was meant to be heroic? Greatness is required of us. That is life’s aim and justification, and we poor fools have for centuries been trying to make it convenient, manageable, pliant to our will…
“What I cling to like a tool or a weapon in the hand of a man who knows how to use it, is the belief that difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive…
“If we could renew our sense of a noble calling, not to settle into mediocrity but to strive for our own personal forms of greatness, if we could come to appreciate the meaning of life as creative striving with love, we would be preparing ourselves to take on a new outlook toward the phenomenon of change.”