“Tessa, we’d like to make you an offer.”

Tessa holds her breath on the other end of the phone. “Here it comes,” she thinks, “finally, the opportunity I’ve been waiting for!”

A friend recently shared with me how her husband fell into a yearlong depression after he was laid off from his finance job during the global economic meltdown of late 2008. He’d worked hard all his life, thrived on the pressures and challenges of his work, and enjoyed the money he earned. Becoming unemployed for the first time in his mid-forties was a huge kick in the gut, and one he didn’t cope with very well.

There are no two ways about it—losing your job is hard. Whether it has everything to do with your performance, or nothing at all, it’s still hard. However, if you look at job loss, like any setback, from an enlarged perspective, you realize that success in life is measured far less by our opportunities than by how we respond to life’s setbacks and challenges.