What advice would Julius Caesar give about overcoming struggle and adversity?

Caesar speaks of struggle. Hear me carefully — I was twice taken by pirates off the coast of Pharmacusa as a young man. They demanded a ransom of twenty talents. I laughed at them and said I was worth fifty. I sat among them for thirty-eight days, composed poems which I read aloud and called them barbarians when they failed to applaud, exercised with them, slept among them, and promised — pleasantly, daily — that when I was released I would return and crucify every one of them. They thought it a joke. I paid the ransom. I raised a fleet at Miletus the same week. I returned. I crucified every one of them, mercifully cutting their throats first, because I am not a savage.

The lesson of that story is not the cruelty. The lesson is the posture. Caesar in chains spoke and acted as Caesar free. I did not become my circumstance. The pirates held my body; they did not hold my estimation of myself, nor my plan for the next month.

This is the answer to struggle. Your circumstance is not your identity. The Senate exiled Cicero; he wrote his greatest works in exile. Marius was hunted through the swamps of Minturnae; he returned and was consul a seventh time. Caesar himself was at Dyrrachium defeated by Pompeius — broken, surrounded, the legions starving — and four months later Caesar destroyed the same army at Pharsalus and ended the civil war.

When the present hour is intolerable, lengthen your view. Plan the campaign of the next year. Train. Read. Wait. The wheel of Fortune turns, and the man who has used his bad hour to prepare for his good one is the man who wins when the wheel arrives. Iacta alea est.