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

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They exist to put people in situations that simulate the toughest parts of what they might face on the job. We want our perception of the difficulty of a challenge and our ability to handle it to be realistic and overlap.

From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things. In this section he gives some concrete ways to change our self-talk to help us push through those mental barriers.Author Steve Magness is a world-renowned expert on performance, coauthor of Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, and The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, and the author of The Science of Running: How to find your limit and train to maximize your performance.

This book runs through a lot of topics around toughness and busts the myth of suppressing and ignoring negative emotions and tough situations. But Magness then redefines toughness in this way, “Real toughness is experiencing discomfort, or distress, leaning in, paying attention and creating space to take thoughtful action. 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. It’s training the mind to handle uncertainty long enough so that you can nudge or guide your response in the right direction. Magness even references Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in this section, and as someone who spent most of their career dealing with Maslow, it made this former teacher’s heart smile.

And the surprising science of real toughness did not seem to have much rigorous science quoted and discussed at length, only select studies cherry picked and quoted which confirmed the author’s priors. If you are interested in self-betterment, and/or high performance - then this one needs to be on your to-read list.

The title suggested that the author would be discussing both how people get resilience wrong, and the ‘surprising science’ of real toughness. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado, and hiding any sign of weakness. The biggest downside of the tough guy macho man boss, coach, or parent is that their attitude breeds fragile humans.

Do Hard Things tasks us with re-thinking the ingrained ideas we have about the traditional model of toughness, while at the same time, providing us with the mental tools to develop real toughness. 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. A study of elementary school students found that overconfident readers often chose books way above their level of comprehension. You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.

This section of the book deals with learning to know when and how to push through certain situations. Those players had more technical fouls (an indicator of aggression) throughout the rest of their career.Unfortunately for the author, who clearly cannot be expected to look at examples from just outside his cultural landscape, the resilience part of the book was incredibly banal, at least in my part of the world. Perhaps you’ve pushed through physical pain only to find that the more you ignored it, the more unbearable it became. Magness’ anecdotal advice, especially when they involve marrying ideas from Buddhism as well as self-help and discipline combined with basic biology, provide very reasonable guidance for individuals looking to better their lives, and confront reality on a more sound footing.