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

National Bestseller

“In Do Hard Things, Steve Magness beautifully and persuasively reimagines our understanding of toughness. This can be a will have to-read for parents and coaches and anyone else taking a look to prepare for life’s biggest challenges.” — Malcolm Gladwell, creator of Outliers and Talking to Strangers and host of the Revisionist History podcast

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 reach our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, if it is on the sports field, at a boardroom, or at the dining room table. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado, and hiding any sign of weakness. In other words, the old model of toughness has failed us.

Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the recent science and psychology. In Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we will work with our body – how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action may also be the true indications of cultivating inner strength. He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience:

• Pillar 1- Ditch the Façade, Embrace Reality
• Pillar 2- Listen to Your Body
• Pillar 3- Respond, Instead of React
• Pillar 4- Transcend Discomfort

Smart and wise all at once, Magness flips the script on what it means to be resilient. Drawing from mindfulness, military case studies, sports psychology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, he provides a roadmap for navigating life’s challenges and achieving high performance that makes us happier, more successful, and, in the end, better people.