We're tempted to believe we know ourselves from our comfortable routines and pleasant choices, but Schultz points to something harder: adversity acts as a kind of truth serum, stripping away the person we *thought* we were. When a small business owner suddenly faces bankruptcy or a trusted colleague betrays you, you discover whether you're actually the resilient person you imagined, or whether resilience was simply a luxury of easier times. The real value here isn't sentimental—it's that adversity doesn't build character so much as *reveal* it, which means the work of becoming who we want to be happens long before crisis arrives, in the small choices we make when the stakes feel low.