The real wisdom here isn't about toughness—it's about the irrelevance of your circumstances compared to your response. Stallone distinguishes between power (what you possess) and resilience (what you do with what happens to you), which means a person with fewer advantages might actually be stronger than someone who's never needed to recover. When a parent loses their job and still shows up to help their child with homework that evening, they're demonstrating exactly this: not the absence of the hit, but the choice to move forward anyway. That's why underdogs have always fascinated us more than champions who've never stumbled.