Individuals with a comparable tau burden show several-fold variation in atrophy and clinical decline. Resilience is commonly quantified as a tau–cognition (TC) mismatch that uses cognition as the dependent variable of the residual, and this signal appears attenuated in the cognitively unimpaired, amyloid-positive preclinical stage where baseline cognition is compressed by a floor effect. Here we quantify resilience from neuroimaging as a tau-to-neurodegeneration (TN) mismatch, and examine whether this anatomy-anchored axis separates prospective clinical trajectories in the preclinical cohort where the cognition-based axis weakens.