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

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But you don't train firemen by sending them repeatedly into burning buildings and saying "The good ones will survive". 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.

Collectively his books have sold more than a quarter-million copies in print, ebook, and audio formats.

You train first, nurture progress, then you evaluate and put those who can't do the work through even more training. In one study of over 1,200 parents, authoritarian parenting was linked to a much higher rate of child misbehavior. This section of the book deals with learning to know when and how to push through certain situations. When we go in with bravado, it backfires because at the first inkling that we may not be able to succeed, our brain freaks out. A lot of stories trying to explain his points on the book, but everything had a reason and helps you digest the true meaning of Do Hard Things.

The subtitle of this book is “Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness”. 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. 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. Throughout the book Magness discusses not only dealing with physical pain and barriers but with mental barriers to performance.Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the latest science and psychology. This section has a lot of good insight into having different ways to respond to situations and knowing which response is appropriate for which situation. Small signals that you are in control, that you can have an impact, will be enough to turn our prefrontal cortex back on. My summary can't replace the way Magness weaves story and science together to change who you are as a person.

I get that sports are as much about the mental game as anything, but just not what I'm really looking for. Turns out what we need is something akin to compassion, self-reflection and emotional awareness… Steve Magness really has flipped the script.It fails in sport, where athletes who fall for the old model play out of fear, leading to worse performance. I didn't need a lot of the stories, but they can be very helpful/interesting for many readers, so I see their value.

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. There are lots of additional approaches (Buddhism for example) that readers may want to explore in addition to the helpful ideas here. I even joined their Patreon community to get early access to their content and of course, to support their work. When we satisfy basic needs, we create an environment where people play to win, instead of playing not to lose. You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.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.