It's hard to imagine this advice being given to a young woman during the grandfather's time, or even today. It comes from a time when there was a tremendous amount of hard work that needed to be done and existential wars to be fought. These burdens were placed upon the men of the society while the women were tasked with the more social and emotional work of actually keeping our families glued together and raising the next generation.
This advice would have been good advice then, but today gender roles are much less rigid, and a well-rounded human understands how to balance hard work and purposeful relaxation, how to be strong and persevere and when to lean on others and be vulnerable, and knows the right time to speak up and voice one's grievances.
The grandfather's advice is one formula for a certain type of masculine stoic life, but if you were to follow it too rigidly, you'd miss out a lot of the emotional richness that modern life has to offer.
