Do Hard Things by Steve Magness

Book Summary

This is a comprehensive summary of “Do Hard Things” by Steve Magness. The book explores why we get resilience wrong and the surprising science of real toughness.

what’s in it for me? ditch outdated ideas about toughness, and cultivate true resilience.#

Introduction

steve magness.

do hard things.

in the popular imagination, being tough means projecting confidence, pushing through pain without complaint, and ignoring soppy emotions.

you might have even tried to adopt these strategies for yourself.

you might have found they didn't work.

perhaps you've projected false confidence but failed to deliver.

perhaps you've pushed through physical pain only to find the more you ignore it, the more unbearable it becomes.

perhaps you've ignored emotions until they find a way to burst out spectacularly.

let's get one thing straight.

if something like this has ever happened to you, the problem is not that you're not tough enough.

the problem lies in society's toxic definition of toughness.

in these chapters, we'll share a new definition of toughness, one grounded in science and psychology.

what's more, we'll guide you through strategies for building this toughness in yourself.

toughness isn't about projecting confidence.

toughness isn’t about projecting confidence – it’s about uncovering authenticity.#

it's about uncovering authenticity.

who do you think of as tough?

many people will think of a john wayne type, someone who suffers silently, stoically, ignores pain, and wouldn't be caught dead talking about their feelings.

but this popular image of toughness is deeply flawed.

in fact, science and psychology find that stereotypically tough behaviours such as these are counterproductive to cultivating lasting resilience.

it's about time we redefine toughness.

four key behaviours form the foundation of real resilience.

each of the next chapters will guide you through one of these behaviours.

let's start with the first behaviour.

toughness isn't about projecting confidence.

it's about uncovering authenticity.

in other words, to be tough, you need to ditch the facade.

let me explain.

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 to yourself or to others that learning icelandic will take you six months max, but six months in, you're still struggling with basic grammar, you're likely to give up.

and giving up isn't exactly tough, is it?

true resilience depends on being real with yourself.

it might not feel tough to admit that it will take you years to pick up a new language.

but when your expectations and reality overlap, you're more likely to ultimately succeed.

being honest with yourself is what will allow you to pursue your goals relentlessly, improving your endurance and performance over time.

need more convincing?

a study of elementary school students found that overconfident readers often chose books way above their level of comprehension.

think, a third grader trying all 607 pages of the final harry potter book.

unsurprisingly, those readers typically abandoned their book after the first few paragraphs.

what's more, they were unlikely to pick up another book, any book, afterwards.

the readers who were realistic about their abilities, you guessed it, they steadily improved over time.

so how can you ditch the facade and get real?

here are some strategies.

set authentic goals for yourself.

when you're all about image, you set goals designed to impress other people.

i'm going to run a marathon or i'm going to marry the most attractive partner i can find.

but if these superficial goals don't resonate with your actual desires, you're unlikely to meet them.

projecting a facade of confidence often leads people to push away feelings of doubt or insecurity.

don't fall into this trap.

you need to listen to those insecurities.

and just to warn you, you'll hear me saying that word, listen, a lot over the course of these chapters.

doubts are often the brain's way of alerting us that our expectations are way overstepping our capabilities.

listening to doubt allows us to reassess, recalibrate and set up for long-term success.

you can cultivate true confidence, not just a confident facade, with a trick called raising the floor.

set an unrealistic goal, say, doing 100 push-ups a day when you're not in shape.

and when you fail to meet that goal, you have to lower the bar.

lower the bar too many times and it's tempting to give up on push-ups and get back to netflix.

raising the floor simply requires you to set a manageable target, perhaps even an easy target.

you'll soon find you're exceeding your expectations of yourself.

your body is smart. listen to it.#

your body is smart.

listen to it.

according to the old-school definition, it's tough to ignore your feelings and emotions.

actually, when you ignore your feelings, you're wasting a huge opportunity to become more resilient.

think of emotions as the brain's first line of defence.

they're giving you a signal that something is up.

and the better you're able to sit with and listen to your emotions, the tougher you'll become.

think of situations that typically require toughness.

dealing with an unexpected diagnosis, suffering through a traumatic injury, weathering a financial crisis, a relationship breakdown, or a professional disappointment.

each of these situations brings a whole tangle of feelings and emotions with them.

the better you're able to identify and interpret these, the more likely you are to cope with the difficulties you face.

ever heard of interoception?

basically, it's your ability to identify and interpret emotions.

and having high levels of interoception actually correlates to toughness.

elite-level athletes are more likely to have finely honed interoception.

so too are professionals in another high-stakes realm – stockbrokers.

a study by uk psychologists uncovered that stockbrokers with higher levels of interoception performed more profitably and had more longevity in a field with notoriously high levels of burnout than their less touchy-feely colleagues.

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.

actively engaging with and identifying emotions can also help you control them.

sweaty palms – if you attribute to unease, you heighten that sense.

if you attribute that sensation to excitement, you can actually transform a potentially negative emotion, anxiety, to a positive one.

pretty neat, right?

while we're on the topic of listening to your body, let's talk about the voice in your head.

the one that sometimes says you're not good enough, or you should have that extra drink, or it's raining, so you should skip that jog.

yes, with one caveat.

but before i tell you what that caveat is, here's a story that seems totally unrelated.

i promise, it's not.

in 1982, a yacht on a round-the-world trip collided with a whale and immediately sank.

the captain and one crewman made it to the life raft.

but their distress calls went unanswered.

they were in the middle of the atlantic, with limited supplies of potable water.

their survival depended on being able to ration the water, even as they endured the most extreme thirst imaginable.

every day, the crewman, whose name was stephen callaghan, begged the captain to give him more than his ration of water.

every day, the captain held firm.

thanks to the captain, stephen callaghan survived the ordeal.

and the captain?

well, he survived, too, because he was also stephen callaghan.

stephen was parched and desperate.

when he tuned into his inner monologue, he heard one voice tempting him to drink more water.

he knew that he wouldn't survive if he caved to the voice that just wanted a drink, but he also knew that ignoring it would only make it grow louder.

so he assigned roles to different aspects of his inner voice.

the desperate crewmember expressed and vented his frustration, but the stoic captain, representing stephen's more rational voice, won out.

so what's the caveat?

you should listen to your inner voices.

don't ignore the negative or destructive voices in your head.

that will only make them louder.

but don't just stop there.

listen to the voices that are giving you good advice and authentic support.

trust me, they're there if you'll let yourself hear them.

once you're tuned into your voices and listening to what they're saying, instead of ignoring them in an attempt to feel tough, it's easy to make sure the right voice is talking at the right time.

learn to respond instead of simply reacting.#

learn to respond instead of simply reacting.

as part of an experiment by the university of wisconsin, two groups of people were subjected to a hot probe placed on the sensitive skin below the wrist.

it sounds sadistic, but it was all in the name of science.

see, the experiment was designed to measure how we experience pain.

and while one group was selected at random, the other group were all elite-level meditators.

both groups gave the same rating to the intensity of the pain, but the meditators rated the experience as about three times less unpleasant than the non-meditators.

why?

meditation, with its focus on non-judgment and being present in the moment, helps create space between a stimulus, in this case a hot probe, and how we calibrate our response to it.

the random group experienced a triple dose of unpleasantness.

they didn't just register the pain of the probe, but the discomfort of anticipating the stimulus, and the automatic, negative emotional response that kicked in immediately after.

the meditators experienced the pain, but were able to slow down, calm themselves, and stop reflexive habits kicking in.

in other words, they feel the feeling, but stop the freak-out coming on.

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 enough, 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 when we're in pain all the time.

instead, acknowledge pain through a calm, internal conversation.

imagine a marathon runner whose hamstrings are burning.

a conversation like this doesn't create much space between stimulus and reaction.

oh no, this hurts!

this is agony!

ignore it, push through it.

but it hurts so much!

a calm conversation creates space for a more thoughtful response.

it might sound something like this.

oh no, this hurts!

that's okay, that's normal.

stay loose.

keep breathing.

you've got this.

this tactic works just as well for emotional pain.

from frustrating arguments with your partner to road rage, the more space you can create between stimulus and response, the more calmly and productively you'll be able to work through issues and triggers.

here are the keys to calm internal conversations.

acknowledge the sensation that's triggering you.

don't pretend you don't feel it.

your brain will just signal more and more frantically until you really can't ignore it.

get to know your thought patterns.

where are your thoughts going in response to a stimulus?

is there a pattern you can identify?

why do you think they always move in this direction?

admit when you have the urge to give up or explode.

try and use self-talk to pass through that urge.

this is a high-level mental manoeuvre and you won't always accomplish it perfectly, but the more space you can create between experience of feeling and capitulating to the urge for a freak-out, the more likely you are to successfully navigate challenging situations.

the secret ingredient to real resilience is drive.#

the secret ingredient to real resilience is drive.

what separates world champions from other elite athletes?

what is the x factor that means one smart, innovative thinker can found a company or invent a product that makes waves, while their equally smart, innovative peer makes barely a ripple?

why can some people push themselves harder for longer and achieve excellence beyond the average?

drive.

even when you feel completely exhausted and at the point of collapse, you can keep going.

your brain has a vested interest in keeping you alive and healthy.

it wouldn't let you keep going until you had literally 0% left to give.

but some of us can deplete our tanks far further than others, taking them almost to empty.

the reason?

a strong sense of motivation and drive.

before we dig into drive, let's take a sidebar on the topic of motivation.

edward deasy, a professor of psychology, once conducted an experiment where two groups were given blocks and asked to recreate an elaborate construction.

group a were given no incentive, but found intrinsic motivation in completing their task well.

group b were given an extrinsic motivation, meaning a motivation that comes from outside the self.

in this case, that was a financial reward for each construction.

so, which group was more motivated?

group b, yes, obviously.

at least, to start with.

once the financial reward was removed, they got way less motivated.

some individuals stopped building altogether.

the lesson here is that intrinsic motivation is more important than extrinsic motivation.

it's also more sustainable.

extrinsic motivations can change or disappear at any time.

intrinsic motivation is steadfast.

so if you want to succeed at something, tap into intrinsic motivation.

and if you can't find any?

maybe ask yourself if you're pursuing the right goals.

individuals with exceptional levels of drive have all found an intrinsic motivation to keep pursuing their aims.

it's that sense of unchanging purpose, a purpose connected to spirituality, intellect, community or mission that allows them to dig deep.

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.

it showed that those who stayed in captivity longest counterintuitively 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's real toughness.

let's move away from toxic toughness that demands we suffer in silence, repress our feelings and push through pain.

true toughness and profound resilience comes from listening to your body, acknowledging your emotions, responding thoughtfully to challenges and finding the intrinsic drive to dig deep, even in your darkest moments.

you've just listened to our chapter to do hard things by steve magnus.

final summary#

Conclusion

the most important thing to remember slash take away from all this is acting tough and being tough are two different things.

moving away from flawed notions of toughness and instead listening to your body and your emotions and your inner voice will allow you to develop the lasting resilience to overcome even the most daunting challenges.

and here's some more actionable advice.

take a time out.

if you're having trouble dealing with a negative stimulus, try and get some perspective.

ask yourself how you'll feel about this issue in six months or a year or ten years.

it's a really quick way to create space around the stimulus and reframe its significance.

Do Hard Things

Table of Contents

Book Summary

what’s in it for me? ditch outdated ideas about toughness, and cultivate true resilience.#

toughness isn’t about projecting confidence – it’s about uncovering authenticity.#

your body is smart. listen to it.#

learn to respond instead of simply reacting.#

the secret ingredient to real resilience is drive.#

final summary#

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