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

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First, emphasizing core skills that aid performance, including confidence, goal setting, attention control, arousal control, imagery, self-talk, compartmentalization, and mental skills foundation.

Magness's outstanding critique of the traditional/harsh/calous view of toughness, with clear reasoning as to why it doesn't breed true success. If I had known this was written by a pair of nineteen year olds, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading it.Magness has served as a consultant and speaker for NASA, the Houston Rockets, Murphy Oil, the Brooklyn Nets, the Cleveland Guardians, the Seattle Sounders, the New Orleans Pelicans, Athletics New Zealand, Canadian Athletics, New Zealand High Performance, and more. I recommend it to any and every teen who has a desire to turn their life around and make a difference. You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec. Understand who you are and your capacity, bravado won’t save you, be in the moment, learn to grind, root your effort in larger meaning.

The author’s experience is in sports so there are a lot of sports stories in the book, but he also uses stories from many aspects of life to illustrate his ideas.Have high expectations so people have that necessary challenge for growth then offer support and nurture to help them get there. 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. Online Course: 25+ hours of written, video, and audio content to walk you through improving your mental game. Do Hard Things has made me not only want to do more hard things but do them without complaining as well.

Fortunately for the author, this book’s review will be similarly colored, and so the reader is advised to take whatever I have to say with an even larger than usual grain of salt. Compounding our confusion, we’ve resorted to tying toughness to masculinity and an ethos of machismo. Learning how to navigate, not avoid or bulldoze through, works in the psychologist’s office just like it does out on the athletic fields or military training grounds.

Stress inoculation doesn’t work unless you have acquired the skills to navigate the environment you will encounter. This section focuses on training our brain to create space so that when we encounter difficult situations we can stay in the present and focus on what is really happening and not respond to an exaggerated perception of reality. This approach works from a life improvement perspective but may not be ideal from book review perspective, as my reviews can get colored by what I can extract from and incorporate from the book.