Resilience is overrated: Unlock the real secret to business longevity

I first met Andrew Markell in the dense rainforest outside Portland, Oregon. We hiked for two hours through dripping cedars and hemlocks, talking about the fractures in modern society — and what it might take to mend them. Andrew moved through the forest like someone entirely at home in dissonance: steady, alert, unhurried.

Andrew is part philosopher, part fighter — a man who defies easy categorization, bridging worlds that rarely meet. A trauma specialist and co-founder of The Dawn Collective (“healing solutions for service members”), he’s also a martial artist trained in yiquan, a discipline that trains through the nervous system to develop speed and power.

In recent years, he’s trained some of the world’s most accomplished investors, entrepreneurs, special forces veterans, and CEOs in the same practice — how to find clarity and composure amid uncertainty. For decades, he has studied how people and organizations work effectively with conflict and create order from chaos. His work weaves together science, ancient training and healing systems, and the fighting arts to examine how systems — whether human bodies or family enterprises — fracture under pressure or transform because of it.

Since that hike, Andrew and I have met many times, each conversation spiraling deeper into the same questions we began with in the forest. We also discussed Outlast — my book project on the world’s oldest companies, and how they’ve managed not just to survive upheaval, but to evolve through it. Those conversations kept returning to the same questions: How do we work effectively with threats, crisis and collapse? How do we build systems — personal, cultural, economic — that don’t just resist dissonance, but grow because of it?

This edited distillation of our many talks covers what the world’s oldest businesses can teach us about endurance; why resilience has become a trap; and how desire — not discipline — may be the most under-appreciated creative force in human history.

Eric Markowitz: You started our conversation by saying, “Companies that are resilient have already died.” That’s a provocative statement. What did you mean by that?

Andrew Markell: We’ve glorified resilience as this virtue — bounce back, return to normal, weather the storm. But the literal definition of resilience is the ability of a system to return to its original baseline after being disturbed. That’s fine if you’re a rubber band. But in nature — and in human systems — survival doesn’t come from returning to where you were. It comes from becoming something you weren’t before.

The most enduring systems — biological, social, or economic — don’t revert. They evolve. Resilience is static. It’s about homeostasis. Evolution is dynamic. It’s driven by dissonance, by collapse, by moments of rupture that force entirely new structures of being to emerge.

Eric Markowitz: So in your framework, conflict and collapse aren’t signs of failure — they’re essential?

Andrew Markell: Exactly. In every long-lived system, there’s what I call a creative collapse. You grow and stabilize for a while — then you hit dissonance. You enter chaos. The system either dies or reorganizes at a higher level of complexity. This is what great family enterprises have done for centuries. They’ve learned to metabolize conflict. They don’t flinch from it; they train for it. What separates them from ordinary companies isn’t better strategy. It’s nervous system capacity — the ability to stay coherent under massive stress without fragmenting. That’s not metaphorical. It’s literal physiology.

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Every family, company, or civilization operates through bodies — through people. And every person has a nervous system that either contracts under stress or expands to hold it. The oldest family companies — some going back forty generations — train their heirs, consciously or not, to expand their capacity for contradiction, tension, and uncertainty. That’s the true inheritance.

They don’t hand down just financial assets; they hand down nervous systems capable of coherence amid chaos. And they encode that training in rituals — ceremonies, daily practices, ways of speaking and deciding — that outsiders might dismiss as quaint or superstitious. But those rituals are how they transmit the code.

Eric Markowitz: So rituals are really a form of internal technology?

Andrew Markell: Yes. Rituals are the operating system of any enduring organization. They look decorative from the outside — anniversary ceremonies, family mottos, annual gatherings — but they carry the mythic DNA that keeps the company coherent.

Over time, as the original practice gets diluted, ritual takes over as a memory device. It encodes values, relationships, ways of perceiving reality. The families that outlast are the ones whose rituals are self-generated and coherent. They’re not chasing whatever the culture tells them to do. They’re not reshaping their identity every five years to align with social media trends or political correctness. Most modern corporations are doing exactly that — constantly performing new, incoherent rituals. It creates fragility.

Eric Markowitz: You draw a distinction between adaptation and evolution. How do you see the difference?

Andrew Markell: Adaptation is reaction. Evolution is creation. If I’m adapting, I’m responding to external pressure — dodging, compensating, negotiating with the environment. But in evolution, something emerges that was inconceivable to the previous system. That’s why I say: the moment you’re adapting to your opponent’s moves, they already own you. True mastery — whether in martial arts, business, or life — means you’re no longer reacting. You’ve changed the game itself.

Eric Markowitz: That sounds like Sun Tzu (author of The Art of War): the idea that victory happens by owning the mind of your opponent.

Andrew Markell: That’s right. In combat, the goal isn’t to block or parry. It’s to own the centerline — to own your opponent’s mind before they act. It’s the same in markets or politics or relationships. The ones who endure understand both their own mind and the mind of the adversary so fully that they no longer engage on the other’s playing field. They define the terrain. That’s not resilience. That’s power. And power, in its purest sense, is awareness so total that conflict dissolves into clarity.

Eric Markowitz: You also make a strong argument against “discipline” as a source of endurance. Why?

Andrew Markell: Because discipline, as we usually understand it, is suppression. It’s control. We’ve built entire societies on the belief that progress comes from overriding your sensations — ignore fatigue, conquer emotion, suppress desire. That’s why so many soldiers, CEOs, and high achievers eventually burn out or break down. 

Real transformation doesn’t come from control. It comes from desire. Desire is the animating force of creation. It’s what drives a craftsman to perfect his art, a scientist to pursue discovery, a founder to build something of worth. Every great company began with desire — not discipline. When desire gets twisted — repressed, moralized, or shamed — it becomes pathology. But when you honor it, train it, and direct it, it becomes the most stabilizing energy in the world.

Every artist, athlete, or entrepreneur who outlasts is following a pure thread of desire. Discipline might sustain the structure, but desire is the fire. The problem is that we’ve made desire suspect. Religious traditions, educational systems, even corporate cultures tell us to mistrust it. But the Dionysian impulse — the wild, ecstatic, creative urge — is the source of all vitality. When that energy is blocked, it turns violent or destructive. When it’s expressed, it becomes beauty, innovation, and endurance.

Eric Markowitz: How does that idea of desire intersect with business? It’s not a word you hear in boardrooms.

Andrew Markell: Exactly — and that’s the problem. We talk about productivity, performance, KPIs — but not desire. Yet every great company was born from it. What keeps a 400-year-old Japanese cloth-maker or a 500-year-old Italian gunsmith alive? Desire. A desire to see what’s on the other side of mastery. A desire to make something more perfect today than it was yesterday. Desire fuels continuity. When you remove it, you get bureaucracy.

Eric Markowitz: You’ve worked with CEOs and special operations veterans. How do you train people to develop this kind of awareness or capacity?

Andrew Markell: The first step is to make what’s invisible visible. Most leaders don’t need more strategy — they need to see what’s already true in their nervous system, in their teams, in their rituals. You can’t think your way into clarity. You have to train for it. That’s why I work with people physically — through breath, stance, awareness. It’s not abstract. When your nervous system is coherent, time slows down. Your perception expands. You gain spaciousness, which means you can choose instead of react.

Eric Markowitz: Do you think we’re living in a more chaotic time than ever before?

Andrew Markell: Yes — and no. Every age believes it’s the most chaotic. But I think ours is unique because of the speed and scale of dissonance. We’re saturated with incoherence — fragmented media, endless information, constant moral redefinition. The nervous systems of most people can’t keep up. That’s why so many are anxious, medicated, or disembodied. But here’s the paradox: the more dissonance there is, the greater the opportunity for breakthrough. It’s Dickens: “the best of times and the worst of times.” Those who train for it — who build coherence, clarity, and capacity — will evolve. The rest will collapse.

Eric Markowitz: You’ve said that the people running long-lasting companies understand their role as both descendants and ancestors. Can you explain that?

Andrew Markell: That’s the key to longevity — remembering that you are both a descendant and an ancestor. You’re not just maintaining a business. You’re extending a lineage. You’re inheriting wisdom from the past and preparing the ground for those who come next. That awareness creates humility and continuity. It’s what the CEO of Tsuen Tea in Japan meant when he told you: we study our ancestors and respect the past. Modern companies obsess over the future. But the future is unknowable. The past is the only map we have.

Eric Markowitz: What does it mean to you, then, to “outlast” in this era?

Andrew Markell: It means coherence in a world of chaos. It means reclaiming the myths, rituals, and desires that make us human. To outlast is not to resist change — it’s to metabolize it. It’s to build systems, bodies, and cultures that grow stronger through dissonance. The companies and leaders who do that — who understand that endurance is not a state but a practice — will carry civilization forward. The rest will fade.

Eric Markowitz: Last question: you’ve said before that “our job is to make shit workable.” Why do you think that message resonates so deeply right now?

Andrew Markell: Because everything feels unworkable. People are overwhelmed by contradictions — between who they are and who they think they should be, between what they want and what’s allowed. Business, politics, even spirituality are saturated with noise. But beneath all that is something ancient: the desire to remember what’s real. To remember the body. The breath. The ritual. The craft. The lineage. Remembering is the first step toward coherence — and coherence is the foundation of everything that endures.