Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

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Steve Magness is one of the giants of modern thinking about high performance across domains, blending a broad knowledge of cutting-edge psychology with hard-earned practical experience from the world-class athletes and other experts he coaches. In his new book, he takes on an age-old question—who triumphs, and why, when the going gets tough?—and reveals that many of our cherished instincts and assumptions are wrong. A crucial read for anyone who cares about delivering their best when the stakes are highest.” Counseling, Popular Applied Psychology, Popular Psychology Personality Study, Success Self-Help, Personal Development, Leadership, Productivity, Business, Science, Mindfulness, Happiness, Sports Journalism Table of Contents How can you attain this level of toughness? Well, studies show that even four days of mindfulness training can vastly improve outcomes for coping with negative stimuli. An even simpler solution? Stop trying to push through pain. Ironically, this creates a double-down effect. If you’ve ever been told to chill out when you’re incandescent with rage, you’ll know how completely useless – and even infuriating – that advice is. Yet this is a move we pull on ourselves all the time when we’re in pain. The message of Do Hard Things is going to awaken the dreams and passions of thousands of young people all over the world. How do I know this? This radical, yet relatively simple idea, has changed my life." I’m not exactly a teenager anymore. But as I was reading I began to see how this can apply to anyone. It’s never too late to start. I absolutely cannot wait to suggest this book to the ‘kidults’ in my life.”

Old school toughness is all about projecting a facade – creating an image of toughness that depends on overstating your endurance levels and capabilities. The problem? It’s demotivating when our expectations don’t match up, at least partly, with reality. So if you’ve said that learning Icelandic will take you six months max, but it’s six months in and you’re still struggling with basic grammar, you’re likely to give up. And giving up isn’t exactly “tough,” is it? Do Hard Things (2022) explodes mythologies around the popular conception of toughness. It shows how traditional markers of toughness, like putting on a brave face and pushing past pain, can actually hinder physical and mental performance outcomes in the long term. Instead, real resilience comes from listening to your body and embracing your emotions. Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the latest science and psychology. In Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we can work with our body – how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action can be the true indications of cultivating inner strength. He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience: This book is amazing. It changes your whole way of thinking. I believe that every single teen needs to buy a copy of this book. Thanks, Alex and Brett for challenging us!" Why does interoception give professionals in tough fields the edge? Well, being able to engage with and identify your emotions can also help you control them. It can even help you change them. Let’s say you’re experiencing sweaty palms. If you attribute that sensation to anxiety, you actually heighten any anxiety you may be feeling. But if you attribute it to excitement, you can actually transform a potentially negative emotion – anxiety – into a positive one. Pretty neat, right?Acting tough and being tough are two different things. Moving away from flawed notions of toughness and instead listening to your body, your emotions, and your inner voice will allow you to develop the lasting resilience to overcome even the most daunting challenges.

Steve Magness is a world-renowned expert on performance, coauthor of Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success and The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life, and the author of The Science of Running: How to Find Your Limit and Train to Maximize Your Performance. Collectively his books have sold more than a quarter-million copies in print, ebook, and audio formats. Do you want to learn how to be tough and resilient in the face of hard things? Do you want to discover the surprising science and psychology behind what it means to be truly tough? If so, you might want to read this book review of Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness by Steve Magness. Humans have three psychological needs: autonomy, competency, and belonging. If you can cultivate a feeling of autonomy, competency, and belonging during a difficult endeavor, you will dramatically increase your odds of finishing that endeavor. As well as simply finding many of the scientific studies really interesting, the main ideas I'll take away are: Life Changing. Two words that describe what this book has done for me. It has given me a new outlook...a better perspective on life and what I am to do.Magness was a columnist for Running Times magazine and is now the co-host of two podcasts: The Growth Equation podcast, with Brad Stulberg, and On Coaching with Magness and Marcus, with Jon Marcus. His writing has also appeared in Runner’s World and Sports Illustrated. In addition, Steve's expertise on elite sport and performance has been featured in The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Men’s Health, The Guardian, Business Insider, and ESPN The Magazine. The book is a refreshing and insightful take on a topic that is often misunderstood and oversimplified. Magness does a great job of explaining the science and psychology behind resilience and how it can be applied to various situations and challenges. He also shares his own personal stories and experiences as a coach and an athlete, which add credibility and authenticity to his message. Viktor Frankl, his famous book Man's Search for Meaning, and his Logotherapy. Post-traumatic growth (PTG). Purpose can help us overcome severe trauma. And sometimes, it is within severe trauma that we find our purpose. You may have heard of post-traumatic stress. Less well known is the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth. Individuals with post-traumatic growth experience renewed purpose and a greater appreciation of life after severe trauma. A study of POWs from the Vietnam War assessed the prisoners’ response to trauma. Counterintuitively, it showed that those who stayed in captivity the longest experienced the most growth. Their trauma was so severe that it shattered their worldview and their assumptions – in short, their facade. For some, this breakdown revealed a path to a new sense of purpose that allowed them to dig deep, persist, and survive. Now that is real toughness.

Do Hard Things is the textbook for anyone who works with teens; it's a philosophical and foundational must-read." This book is a wake up call to a generation that is down in the dumps. It's like a coach screaming from the sidelines, 'You can do it!!!'. I'd recommend it to anyone, young or old." I love the way it is written. It is crystal clear, to the point, interesting, funny, challenging, encouraging, and an easy read."Reappraise: When we take a test, we can interpret nervousness as a sign we are not prepared for a test, or we can see it as a sign the test is important, and our body is providing us with additional energy to focus. When we reappraise, we identify ways in which discomfort is beneficial. The more we reappraise, the more likely we are to deal with discomfort in a productive manner (rather than running from it or ignoring it). Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, whether it is on the sports field, at a boardroom, or at the dining room table. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado, and hiding any sign of weakness. In other words, the old model of toughness has failed us.

Four key behaviors form the foundation of real resilience. Each of the next chapters will guide you through one of these behaviors. Let’s start with the first behavior. Toughness isn’t about projecting confidence; it’s about uncovering authenticity. In other words, to be tough, you need to ditch the facade. Reassure: Experienced meditators are so good at calming themselves down after a stressful experience because they’ve spent thousands of hours observing thoughts and emotions come and go and understand that everything is temporary. We need not meditate for thousands of hours to know that discomfort is a fleeting sensation that rises and falls. If we use discomfort as a cue to tell ourselves, “This too shall pass,” we can return to a state of equanimity. Perhaps you’ve projected false confidence but failed to deliver. Perhaps you’ve pushed through physical pain only to find that the more you ignored it, the more unbearable it became. Perhaps you’ve ignored emotions until they found a way to burst out – spectacularly. Steve delivers a critical message for our current age of posing and performance: real toughness is not about callous bravado, but instead about the ability to navigate difficulty with grace and an unwavering focus on what matters."If you are interested in learning more about this book and how it can help you develop resilience in your personal and professional life, read this article for more information and resources on performance science and coaching. A calm conversation, on the other hand, makes room for a more thoughtful response. It might sound something like this: Oh no, this hurts. That’s OK – that’s normal. Stay loose. Keep breathing. You’ve got this. However, surrounded as we are by a culture that expects teens to be irresponsible, disrespectful, and lazy, we've fallen prey to those misconceptions. We've lost a true understanding of what the teen years are all about, and we fit like perfect puzzle pieces into the picture of modern teen apathy. This sounds more radical than it should because we’ve failed our young people by lowering our expectations and enabling them to lower theirs. But raising expectations and following Christ wholeheartedly is a refreshing and long-overdue message countless teenagers are longing for and will gladly embrace. As a volunteer high school coach, I spend lots of time with teenagers and I plan to give them Do Hard Things.