Stephen Hawking on Disability & Resilience

Hawking did not often speak about his disability, and he disliked being defined by it. But when he did address it directly, the result was some of the most quoted advice of his life, valued well beyond the community of people living with illness or disability.

"Concentrate on things your disability doesn't prevent you doing well."

His best-known advice to other disabled people was characteristically practical. Focus, he urged, on what your disability does not stop you doing well, and do not waste energy regretting what it interferes with. And then the crucial second half: do not be disabled in spirit as well as physically. It is advice rooted entirely in his own experience. His disease left his mind untouched, so he poured everything into the work it allowed, and refused to let physical limitation become mental limitation.

"However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at."

This line, which also belongs among his reflections on life, is at its most powerful read as advice about resilience. It is not a promise that everything will be fine. It is a claim that there is always something, some task, some contribution, that remains within reach, and that finding and doing it is the work. From a man whose physical capabilities shrank year after year while his achievements grew, it is hard to dismiss.

Refusing self-pity

Across his interviews and his memoir, the consistent note is a refusal of self-pity. Hawking acknowledged the difficulty of his situation plainly, he did not pretend it was easy, but he declined to dwell on it or to ask for sympathy. He often said that his expectation of an early death had made him appreciate life more, not less, and that having something to live for, his work and his family, had pulled him through the darkest period after his diagnosis.

A life as the argument

The reason these words resonate is that the life backed them up. It is one thing to advise resilience; it is another to live with a terminal degenerative disease for fifty-five years and produce, in that time, some of the most important physics of the age. Hawking's example did enormous good simply by existing, showing millions of people that a diagnosis is not a verdict on what a life can contain. His own account of that life is in his memoir, My Brief History, and the disease itself is explained on the page about motor neurone disease.

If you or someone you know is affected by motor neurone disease, the MND Association offers information and support, and you can find ways to help on the support page.