The Truth About Adversity That Most Leadership Books Will Never Tell You
Joseph spent 13 years in situations he didn't choose. Here's what he understood about suffering that changed everything.
There is a statistic that stops most leaders cold when they hear it for the first time.
According to research from the Center for Creative Leadership, nearly 70% of executives say the most significant growth they experienced in their careers didn’t come from promotions, training programs, or mentors. It came from their hardest seasons. The job they nearly got fired from. The business that failed. The team that fell apart under their watch.
Seventy percent. Think about that.
And yet, when we find ourselves in the middle of those seasons, we treat them like a malfunction. Like something has gone wrong with our story that we’d rather avoid for life. Like God must have taken a wrong turn.
Joseph would have something to say about that.
His story is one of the most detailed biographies in all of Scripture, and it reads far from a highlight reel. Here’s a snapshot:
Sold into slavery by his own brothers at seventeen.
Falsely accused of assault by the woman he refused.
Imprisoned for years without a trial.
Forgotten by the man he helped get out of prison.
By any modern standard, Joseph’s career trajectory looked like a disaster.
But decades later, standing as second-in-command of the most powerful nation on earth, he looked at the very brothers who betrayed him and said this:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
—Genesis 50:20 NIV
That sentence contains more leadership wisdom than most people will ever discover in a conference room.
The Standard Nobody Rewards
Long before Joseph stood in Pharaoh’s court, he was running someone else’s household.
Genesis 39 tells us that when Joseph was brought to Egypt as a slave, he was purchased by a man named Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials. And within that position, something remarkable happened. Joseph didn’t shrink back or minimum-effort his way through captivity. He performed at a level so high that Potiphar noticed, trusted him with more, and eventually put him in charge of everything he owned.
“The Lord was with Joseph so that he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned.”
— Genesis 39:2-4 NIV
Think about what that requires.
Joseph had no reason to believe excellence would be rewarded. He wasn’t networking his way to freedom. There was no LinkedIn post, no performance review, no one from his old life watching. He was a Hebrew slave in Egypt, stripped of everything familiar, building something that nobody in a position of power back home would ever see.
That’s the part that challenges most leaders today.
We’ve been trained to scale our effort to match our audience. So we give our best when the stage is big. We show up fully when the reward is visible. But then we save our energy when the room is small. But Joseph didn’t operate that way. He brought the same standards to the pit that he would have brought to the palace.
And then he got falsely accused and thrown into prison.
But the pattern of his effort remained true. Scripture tells us that even inside prison, Joseph managed things with such consistency that the warden stopped managing anything in Joseph’s care at all. Same standard. Different cell. No applause either way.
Excellence without an audience. That’s where most people find out who they actually are.
What Those Thirteen Years Actually Built
There’s a gap in Joseph’s story that most people rush past.
He was seventeen when his brothers threw him in the pit. He was thirty when he stood before Pharaoh. Thirteen years of slavery, false accusation, and imprisonment stretched between the dream God gave him as a boy and the day that dream came true.
Thirteen years. We don’t like to sit with that number.
We’re a generation that wants the promotion without the work required. We want an expedited process to success. The influence without the formation that makes influence sustainable. We read Joseph’s story knowing how it ends, and so those middle chapters feel like filler. They are not filler.
Those thirteen years were where Joseph’s identity got tested and clarified.
Slavery taught him that his worth wasn’t tied to his position.
Prison taught him that his purpose wasn’t dependent on recognition.
Betrayal taught him that his future wasn’t controlled by the people who hurt him.
By the time opportunity walked into the prison in the form of Pharaoh’s cupbearer, Joseph had already become the man capable of handling what was coming.
That’s the question worth sitting with today is not “why is this taking so long,” but “what is this building in me that I’ll need later?”
The pit doesn’t interrupt the development. The pit is the development.
When Joseph finally stood before Pharaoh and interpreted the dream that would reshape the ancient world, he demonstrated something no leadership program can manufacture.
He had emotional steadiness under pressure that carried spiritual clarity in the middle of chaos. He had the ability to think about the well-being of others while he himself had been treated unjustly.
Pharaoh wasn’t just looking for someone with a gift. He was looking for someone with the character to carry it.
“Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom is the spirit of God?”
— Genesis 41:38 NIV
Joseph passed that test. Not in the throne room. He passed it in the pit, in the household, and in the prison, long before anyone with real authority was paying attention.
The Decision That Defines Everything
When Joseph’s brothers finally stood before him in Egypt, terrified and powerless, the scene was set for the kind of retaliation that human nature craves.
He had the authority. He had the justification. He had every reason that a person can have to settle a score. And instead, he wept.
Not from weakness. From freedom.
I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.
— Genesis 45:4-5 NIV
What Joseph understood that his brothers couldn’t yet grasp was that holding onto bitterness would cost him more than it would cost them.
Resentment is a weight that only the person carrying it can feel.
It gives the people who hurt you ongoing influence over your emotional state, your decisions, and your future. And for a man who had been given the kind of authority Joseph now carried, allowing his brothers to live rent-free in his mind would have quietly corrupted everything he was called to steward.
Forgiveness was so much more than just a spiritual discipline for Joseph. It was a decision to stop letting the past write the rules for the future.
This is the sticking point for a lot of leaders. We carry wounds from past seasons into new opportunities. The team that betrayed us shapes how much we trust the next one. The organization that passed us over shapes how we treat the people below us now. The bitterness never announces itself. It just quietly narrows every room you walk into.
Joseph did something harder. He used his position to restore the very people who had tried to destroy his life. He provided for them during famine. He wept when he saw them. He chose proximity over distance, and generosity over payback.
That’s not born out of a personality trait. It’s born out of a decision. And it’s one of the most countercultural things a leader can commit to.
The Bigger Picture Many Can’t See Yet
Here’s the part of Joseph’s story that requires the most theological courage to accept.
The suffering wasn’t random. I know that’s tough to hear sometimes, but it’s true.
Looking back, every injustice served a purpose that Joseph couldn’t have seen while he was living inside it.
The pit led to Potiphar’s house. Potiphar’s house led to prison. Prison led to the cupbearer. The cupbearer led to Pharaoh. Each door that closed behind him positioned him for the next one. The brothers who sold him into slavery survived a famine because of the journey their betrayal set in motion.
“But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”
— Genesis 45:7 NIV
Now. Before going any further. That truth does not minimize the injustice. Joseph’s suffering was real. The false accusation was wrong. The years in prison were taken from him. Scripture doesn’t dive deep into that. But it does offer a perspective that changes how we hold those hard seasons, and that perspective is this:
God is writing chapters you can’t read yet.
What if the role you can’t stand right now is teaching you something the role you’re praying for will require of you? What if the setback that stung the most is building in you the kind of empathy that will make you a leader worth following? What if the delay that’s frustrating you is, right now, protecting you from a level of responsibility you’re not yet ready to carry?
Joseph couldn’t see any of that at seventeen. He couldn’t see it at twenty-five or twenty-eight either. He saw it at thirty, looking backward. And the view from thirty made sense of everything that hadn’t made sense before.
Faith isn’t the ability to see the full picture. It’s the decision to keep showing up when you can’t.
What to Do With Your Own Pit
Most leaders reading this won’t face slavery or imprisonment. But the pit shows up in other forms.
It shows up in the positions you didn’t choose but got placed in anyway. It’s in the organization that passed you over. The colleague who took credit for your work. The season where doing the right thing seemed to consistently produce the wrong results. The years where you built faithfully and watched people with less integrity advance faster.
Joseph’s story doesn’t promise that faithfulness gets rewarded quickly. It promises that faithfulness gets rewarded fully. The timeline isn’t yours to control.
Here’s where to start.
Decide right now that the quality of your work will not be determined by the size of the room. The standard you hold in private is the foundation for the opportunity you’re not yet holding. Be excellent with the small things.
Get honest about what this season is producing in you, not just doing to you. Resilience, perspective, the ability to lead people through difficulty because you’ve walked through it yourself. Stop treating this season as something to survive and start asking what it’s building.
Take inventory of what you’re still carrying from past wounds. Unresolved bitterness is a slow leak. The people who hurt you do not deserve permanent residence in your leadership.
Stay open to what you can’t yet see. Joseph couldn’t read the end while living through the middle chapters. You can’t either. But you can trust the Author who’s writing them.
Show up with the same standard tomorrow that you’d show up with if the stakes were at the highest. The truth is that they may already be. You may be in your most important season right now, and the only evidence is that it doesn’t feel like it yet.
The View From the Other Side
Joseph was thirty when everything changed.
He’d been in the pit at seventeen. And somewhere in those thirteen years, alone and overlooked, he built the kind of character that made Pharaoh say there was no one wiser in all the land.
Your current season is not wasted time.
The pit you’re in right now is not a detour from the story God is writing. It may be the most important chapter in it.
Keep showing up. Keep holding the standard. Keep extending grace when you have every right to withhold it.
Keep being excellent, Leader.
— Jared