As a kid, Steve Magness used to run until he puked. “That was my thing,” he says. This model of toughness—pushing through pain—worked well for him. So well, in fact, that he clocked a blazing 4:01 mile in high school. But several years later, when trying to break the four-minute barrier while running at the University of Houston, his strategy backfired. Trying to work through an uncomfortable sensation in his neck, Magness collapsed. He’d given himself a condition that caused his vocal cords to malfunction by reflexively closing (and making it hard to breathe) at the first sign of stress. He could no longer just will his way through pain.
“I had to relax, to keep my breathing, neck, and mind steady and under control, all at the exact moment when discomfort and doubts were at their highest,” he writes in his new book, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness. “In many ways, this book started the moment I collapsed. A search for what it means to be tough, for understanding how to control an inner world that often goes haywire.”
That was almost 15 years ago, and in the time since, Magness has become not just a successful running coach but an expert on human performance, working with everyone from NASA to Nike, and co-authoring the 2017 book Peak Performance with Brad Stulberg. What makes his new book unique—and especially useful—is that it threads the needle between the outdated outlook of “no pain, no gain” and the more contemporary model of self-care, which can easily tip into lazy self-indulgence. He’s exploring a different, more productive way to navigate our pain that neither advocates ramming straight through it nor tries to escape it entirely. That might be the discomfort of trying to run your fastest mile, or will yourself through another hour of work, or simply use your phone less.
Whatever pain you’re trying to endure, here Magness lays out the lessons he’s learned on persevering in a more productive manner.
GQ: What was your childhood model of toughness?
Magness: My model came entirely from sports. I tried and played practically every sport possible: baseball, football, basketball, even street hockey somehow down in the middle of the South. When you go through that, especially in Texas in the ’80s and ’90s, you get a particular style of toughness placed on you. Put your head down and do everything you can to get on the other side of the pain. I remember coaches telling me not to show emotion. You didn’t give the competitor any hints that anything could ever be wrong. No matter the chaos inside, you didn’t give away that you had doubts or insecurities. But eventually there are competitions where you dig deep, you reach down to find that extra oomph, and it’s just not there. It backfires. As I got better as a runner, I realized that if I wanted to be good, if I wanted to figure out how to navigate all this discomfort, I’d have to have more tools in my toolbox, because “dig down, go until you can’t,” that fails. I needed other strategies to get on the other side of the pain.
What are some of those other tools?
One is learning to sit with the pain, instead of pushing through it. That way you’re not giving it power. Because our brain is designed to protect us, it says, “Oh, you’re going to resist, that must mean we must actually be in danger, so I’m going to up the ante so that you actually listen to me.” Train your brain to sit with it, and respond instead of react. Another strategy is using your attention to create some space, so that you can deal with [whatever comes up]. World-class athletes are experts at this, they can zoom into a problem or zoom all the way out. They can flip the switch, put their head down and turn into Michael Jordan in the clutch. At the same time, world-class marathoners have to run for two hours so they zone out for a while until it actually matters, then they flip the switch.
Is there an athlete you work with, or someone you’ve just observed from afar, who you think is really good at this?
Sarah Hall, who set the half marathon American record not too long ago is an absolute pro at this. In the marathon, you go through rough patches. Once you get in the rough patch, your brain tries to convince you that this is the end and there’s no hope. Sarah is really good at shifting her perspective and getting herself out of that spiral. For instance, when she set the record in the half marathon, that was her goal, but she realized that because she was so focused on that time, it was starting to become a negative thing. What does she do to flip the script? Instead of being focused on the time, she says, “All right, forget the watch, forget the time, forget the splits, I’m not going to pay attention to that. I’m going to focus on the feeling of what I want it to feel like right now in this run. What are my arms supposed to do? What’re my legs supposed to feel like? What’s it feel like competing against these other women?” It’s a simple tactic, but it changes your focus to get your brain free of this thing that was a motivator but now has become a burden.
What is a better conception of toughness than “push through the pan to get on the other side of it?”
It’s creating space so that you can navigate. When we go through challenging things, it’s almost like the wind compresses and we feel like we have to react. We feel some anxiety and then our immediate reaction is, “Get me out of this situation. Escape, escape, escape.” Toughness is creating the space so that you don’t default to that easy decision, but instead can figure out, okay, how do I work through this in a productive manner?
This brings us up against what I think is a tension in your re-understanding of toughness. So the old model of toughness would say, “Just push through,” and the new model might say push through, but it might also say, “Hey, my body’s not there, I’m not going to finish the workout,” or “I’m not going to do another an hour of emails,” and you choose to let it go. How do we figure out how to make that decision?
You’re not going to know whether it’s the right decision or not. In that moment, you want to make sure it’s a wise decision, meaning it’s not something that you just default to. It’s something that you’re consciously choosing. For example, if you talk to world-class climbers who climb Mount Everest, they’ll tell you the tough decision isn’t to decide to push to the peak. That’s easy. That’s what every single part of your body is compelling you to do. The tough decision is knowing, hey, I’m almost at the top, but I have to stop, pause, and think, do I have enough energy to make it not only to the top, but also all the way back down the mountain? That is what we’re after.
What are some of the techniques that you use, or that people you coach use, that you think are effective in training this muscle? Because it really is a muscle, understanding, as you put it in the book, that our emotions are messengers, not dictators.
It’s anything that puts you in a space where you feel some sort of anxiety or discomfort, or have that inner battle. In our modern world, [a good practice] is anything dealing with the phone. We all have those moments where it’s like, “Oh, I have this urge to check my phone.” That urge is an opportunity to train that mental muscle, instead of giving into it. Learn how to sit with that urge for a while. You can develop these skills at almost any time. Some clients I have that don’t like meditation, I’ll ask them, can you be mindfully focused on whatever task you’re doing? Can you go for a walk without listening to a podcast or music or what have you? Can you be alone with your thoughts?
I’ll also ask clients I work with, “What makes you uncomfortable? What gives you a little bit of anxiety?” For some, that’s getting up and speaking in front of others. For others, it can be going in and talking to people at the coffee shop, instead of going through the drive through. People have anxiety over all sorts of things. Any time you see that mild anxiety in your life, that’s an opportunity to train that mental muscle.
How do you coach your clients to take feedback?
We suck at it, because it’s painful. It hurts. Our brain interprets it as a physical threat, whenever we get critiqued or criticized or what have you. There’s two sides to this. If you’re in a position of leadership, how are you creating an environment where people feel secure and safe in that they can take criticism? I don’t mean safe as in, “Everything’s okay.” I mean safe in the sense that you can be in an uncomfortable place and know that it’s not going to be the end of the world. Then the other part, for employees—and leaders as well—is how do you get used to it? It’s no different than physical pain or discomfort. If you haven’t worked out for a really long time, when you do your first workout that alarm bell rings 10 times earlier. We live in a culture and society where we often don’t experience that very often. We need to decrease the alarm. You want small moments of criticism to build up tolerance to it. Athletes do this really well. It’s part of the culture. After a game, you review the film. It’s in a safe environment. It still stings and hurts, but it’s done in a way that is like, “Hey, this is just part of it. I’m trying to learn from this, so that next time this doesn’t occur and we can hopefully win.” It becomes part of the expectation.
In the book, you talk about learning to see threats as challenges. This seems to be one of those things that comes up again and again as an important reframing tool, but I struggle to see how it works. What are some ways to be able to do that?
First, we often think of threats and challenges as opposites on the spectrum. The reality is we can experience both at the same time. It can be both a threat and a challenge. The goal is just to have it be 51 percent challenge. People think, “I have to eliminate the threat and see it as this big, positive challenge.” That’s not the case. A lot of the literature shows that it’s the balance of opportunity for growth, versus the fear of loss. The more we can give our brain evidence that this is an opportunity for growth, the more likely we are to see it as a challenge. Even if we lose or we fail, what growth can come out of this?
At the beginning of the book, you invoke Bobby Knight, who represents a very outdated mode of toughness. At the same time, it worked—his 1975 Indiana basketball team went undefeated. It reminded me of watching The Last Dance with Michael Jordan. MJ had a lot of psychotically competitive tendencies that kept him from being healthy and balanced in other parts of his life. Which makes me wonder: Is it possible to model your healthier paradigm of toughness and still be the best in the world?
The first thing I’d say to that is that performance is really complex. Bobby Knight and Michael Jordan both won championships, but that doesn’t mean that every single thing that they do is good and contributes to their winning. I’m just pulling these numbers out my butt, but what it means is that maybe 80 percent of what they do really freaking works. But there’s still a lot of crap that they do that probably gets in the way, or limits them from being maybe even better. You can be the best in the world in a number of ways, and maybe you might not want to be the best in the world if it takes the Jordan-esque, all-consuming competitiveness. That’s okay. You get to make that decision.
But there’s also a number of athletes, coaches, executives, who have done it the other way and been decent human beings—like John Wooden. Often what we do is we look at Jordan, we look at Bobby Knight, we look at Steve Jobs, and we tend to think this is the way, because they were hyper-successful. What history and science shows is that that isn’t the only way. You can still be a decent human being and be the best in the world in whatever field. I would argue that often being a decent human being allows you to not only maybe conquer whatever little aspect of the world you have, but also do so in a way that you bring others and lift others up along with you.
A lot of the book is also about being real with ourselves. But a lot of people have delusional goals and then they go out and make them happen. How do we balance our grandest, craziest ambitions with knowing where our limits are and what we’re actually capable of?
Here, the best example in history is Abraham Lincoln. He was a hyper realist, almost tragic in the here and now. He was always worried about what was going on in the war and if you had the right general, and thought it was doom and gloom in the here and now. But he was incredibly hopeful for the future. In the mid-1800s, he’s sitting here thinking there could be a world without slavery, which is just an incredibly hopeful thought. All along the way, he’s giving speeches saying that once we get through this scourge of war, it’ll be okay, essentially. There’s this incredible hope, and almost, some might argue, delusion for the future. I’m not telling people not to have big dreams and goals. Hold them in the distance as motivators and north stars that point you towards, hey, this is possible, this is what I’m shooting for. But in the here and now, in the present, you have to be realistic. What am I capable of? Where am I at in my company? That combination or balance is probably the best when we’re looking at performance.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
