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

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This book would be great for coaches or parents looking to find ways to foster toughness and grit in their players/kids. Others retreat, trying to cocoon themselves from anything, or anyone, who might invoke inner conflict. It’s training the mind to handle uncertainty long enough so that you can nudge or guide your response in the right direction. If you teach someone to work hard when they're showered in praise, what do you think happens when you're not there to hand out the stickers?

It stalls the jump from difficulty to complete despair, from fear and anxiety to full-blown freak out. Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the latest science and psychology.it was written by teens for teens and while it's all great to learn from adults talking about adult stuff to their adult audience there's something freaking special to hear this message from someone like you meant for YOU. The problem is, the Harris brothers wrote about things everyone has already heard a million times before. On the other hand, if we see the stressor as an opportunity for growth or gain, as something that is difficult but that we can handle, we’re more likely to experience a challenge response. Do Hard Things is one of those books that you read and think "Wow that was amazing, I learned so much".

When we haven’t experienced discomfort for a while, or when we’ve been told over and over that a mask or other item is dangerous and threatening, our brain listens. Once upon a time, he ran a mile in 4:01 in high school, at the time the 6th fastest high school mile in US history. If you’re honest with yourself, and acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses, what you’re capable of and what might scare you, then you can come to terms with what you’re facing and deal with it. Our appraisal of a situation as a threat or as a challenge depends on the perceived demands of that stressor versus our perceived abilities to handle them. He is the co-host of two podcasts: The Growth Equation podcast, with Brad Stulberg, and On Coaching with Magness and Marcus, with Jon Marcus.

Magness shows how we can reframe our mindset to emphasize cognitive flexibility, an understanding of purpose, and a focus on the whole person and relationships to drive our success and satisfaction. 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. Despite the title sounding somewhat like it would be talking mostly about grit, it is more of a broad-based look, that focuses on self-betterment and performance; across all endeavours. Magness's outstanding critique of the traditional/harsh/calous view of toughness, with clear reasoning as to why it doesn't breed true success. Rather than just pointing at the author's lives of how they did "hard things", they pull out examples of teens all over the world accomplishing hard things both big and small.

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. There's the message "if you're too scared to ever do anything, your life will waste away" pumped into just about every motivational book and movie, yet the Harris brothers acted like they were the ones to come up with it. He has coached seven athletes to top Top-15 finishes at a World Championship, twelve athletes to births on the World Championship or Olympic teams, and guided more than twenty-five Olympic Trials Qualifiers. In a world that pushes us towards reacting, slowing down to respond is a skill society desperately needs. I’ve always subscribed to this type of mentality, and I believe that having an easy life just leaves us feeling unfulfilled, contrary to our preconceived theories.He has written for Runner’s World and Sports Illustrated, and he 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, and he has been featured on NPR and CNN International. We hold on to ideas that better resemble a middle school football coach’s ideal of toughness than reality. The section on the brain and the inner voices was helpful and something new I’ve walked away with from this book. A book, mask, online troll, ideology, or a slight sensation of physical effort and fatigue makes us feel out of sorts, and we seek to eliminate that sensation as quickly as possible.