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  • Do Hard Things

  • Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness
  • Written by: Steve Magness
  • Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
  • Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (104 ratings)

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Do Hard Things

Written by: Steve Magness
Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
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Publisher's Summary

National Bestseller

"In Do Hard Things, Steve Magness beautifully and persuasively reimagines our understanding of toughness. This is a must-read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life's biggest challenges." -- Malcolm Gladwell, author 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 achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, whether 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 latest science and psychology. In Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we can work with our body – how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action can 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, ultimately, better people.

©2022 Steve Magness (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about Do Hard Things

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Do Hard Things

*Buy the print version - There is a lot of content missing from the audible that could be remedied with a PDF.

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13 people found this helpful

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What a book!

The first chapter almost made me stop reading. However the rest of the book is one of the best books I’ve listened. Would recommend for anybody that is looking to understand themselves or to be strong

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3 people found this helpful

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I can’t write

I can’t write a book so I’m not in a position to judge someone who can

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2 people found this helpful

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Great book on resilience

Do yourself a favour and gift this to your (micro) manager. Overall a well written and dictated book that will help you see resilience in a better light than what it is constantly fed to us by a capitalist society.

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Good book, with the science to back it up

Best daily deal book that I picked up in a long time. Very good book.

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Thought provoking

Filled with lots of good points to think about .. my mindset was really questioned for sure .

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Fantastic.

As someone who deals with a lot of future, professional, and Olympic athletes, the approach laid out in this book is quite timely. The research has always been there to support a new way of coaching.

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Bien pensé, bien expliqué, bien démocratisé

Pour des théories enseignées en psychologie dans les grandes universités, des pensées complexes et fournies, de grandes théories prouvées, les explications sont merveilleusement bien détaillées, clarifiées et utiles. Excellent livre et excellente lecture

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Nothing too actionable

Some interesting parts to the story but lots of fluff without really any actionable tools.

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This book is amazing.

I’m a parent, coach and educator. This book puts language to the nuance and complexity of those jobs while also giving you the science that backs it up and sample exercises to put it in practice. So good!!!

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