Steve Magness > Quotes

“True Confidence Is Quiet; Insecurity Is Loud”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“We tell our children to believe in themselves, without explaining how to develop that belief. We’ve fallen for the Instagram version of confidence, emphasizing the projection of belief, instead of working on the substance underneath. We need a new approach to building confidence, one focused on the inside.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s maintaining a clear head to be able to make the appropriate decision. Toughness is navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can. And research shows that this model of toughness is more effective at getting results than the old one.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“We believe that failure of any kind should be avoided instead of embraced, because it shatters our confidence. We’re making the same mistakes, setting ourselves up for a confidence based on the external, not internal.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“In an increasingly distractible world, we’re slowly losing the ability to sit with our thoughts and experiences. When our inner self becomes foreign, we become hyperreactive to anything it says.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Research consistently shows that tougher individuals are able to perceive stressful situations as challenges instead of threats. A challenge is something that’s difficult, but manageable. On the other hand, a threat is something we’re just trying to survive, to get through. This difference in appraisals isn’t because of an unshakable confidence or because tougher individuals downplay the difficulty. Rather, those who can see situations as a challenge developed the ability to quickly and accurately assess the situation and their ability to cope with it.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Growth comes at the point of resistance. Skills come from struggle.”
― Steve Magness, Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive With the New Science of Success

“Research and practice are clear. Stress inoculation doesn’t work unless you have acquired the skills to navigate the environment you will encounter. As sports psychologist Brian Zuleger told me, “Telling people to relax doesn’t work unless you’ve taught people how to actually relax. The same goes for mental strength. The historical way to develop toughness was to do something physically challenging, and you’d have a fifty-fifty shot if they thrived. You have to teach the skill before it can be applied.” Throwing people in the deep end doesn’t work unless they’ve been taught the basics of how to swim.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“An honest appraisal is all about giving your mind better data to predict with.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Pretending to be confident can be effective to some degree . . . however, like any façade we create, it won’t last.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“When our self-worth is dependent on outside factors, we have what researchers call a contingent self-worth. We derive our sense of self from what people think and how we are judged. We give over control to external factors. When we utilize idle praise and combine that with undeserved rewards, we create an environment ripe for developing contingent self-worth.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“We create fake confidence for the same reason we build fake self-esteem: to protect the sensitive parts of our ego and to hide our weaknesses and insecurities from the world for fear of being exposed as a fraud or as not good enough.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Clutch required choosing; flow required experiencing. Two different states. Both bringing about top performance. One requires grit, the other grace. One accepting, the other a conscious decision. In many ways, the clutch-versus-flow paradigm reflects toughness. We tend to think of it as a singular method: push through, persist. But as we’ve come to realize, that’s a false constriction. Being tough means being able to choose the right strategy, given your abilities and the situation.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“The old model of toughness, in essence, throws people into the deep end of the pool but forgets that we need to first teach people how to swim.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“TOUGHNESS MAXIM The best performers tend to have a flexible and adaptive coping ability. They can bounce between different strategies, depending on the demands of the situation.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“When it’s based on external rewards or praise, it’s dependent on something over which we have little control.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“And that’s the key to true confidence. Acknowledging the good and bad, our weaknesses and strengths. Living with and dealing with reality instead of putting on a front. Setting our own standards. And realizing that, as Alain de Botton said in his book On Confidence, “The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“When I went back and compared motivation styles to performance improvement over each athlete’s career, one factor stood out. Those who scored high in a particular type of extrinsic motivation called external regulation had lower improvement rates. External regulation is defined as when “the sport is performed not for fun but to obtain rewards (e.g., praise) or to avoid negative consequences (e.g., criticisms from parents).” The five highest-ranked athletes in external regulation were five athletes who showed the least amount of improvement.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“You can’t force cohesion or unity. It doesn’t come from trust falls, gimmicky bonding activities, or forced interaction. It comes from being real. From allowing people to lower their defenses and feel comfortable enough to be who they are. You can’t force it. All you can do is create the space for it to happen. The magic wasn’t in Popovich’s team dinners. It was in his creating space for genuine interaction.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Confidence doesn’t come from doing the work out of fear or neuroticism—to practice because you are afraid to lose or fail. When fear drives the motivational ship, then insecurity pervades. When the work is done in the name of getting better, of enjoying the process, of searching for mastery of the craft, then confidence gradually grows.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“The best performers tend to have a flexible and adaptive coping ability. They can bounce between different strategies, depending on the demands of the situation.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Instead, real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s maintaining a clear head to be able to make the appropriate decision. Toughness is navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can. And research shows that this model of toughness is more effective at getting results than the old one.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Performance = Mismatch (Expected Effort/Actual Sense of Effort) Where: Expected Effort= Previous Experience+ Psychological drive (importance) Actual Sense of Effort= (Internal + External feedback)* Hazard + current Psychological Drive”
― Steve Magness, The Science of Running: How to find your limit and train to maximize your performance

“The broaden-and-build theory of emotions states that positive emotions expand our cognition and our opportunities for action. According to Fredrickson, when we experience positive emotions, we’re more likely to have novel thoughts, take on new challenges, and embrace new experiences. On the other hand, negative emotions tend to make us narrow our possibilities. Negative emotions constrain our thoughts and behavior. Our options become limited when we’re swamped by anger. Whether it’s attention, cognition, or emotion, the pattern is clear. Broad is the way to go; narrow is to be avoided.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on, and interested in helping us deal with our problems.” It’s not whether our inner voice is an optimist or a pessimist. It’s whether it’s fair. If we find our internal negativity holding us back, or our eternally optimistic “You can do it!” voice getting in the way of our seeing reality, we need to broaden our experience.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“In an autonomy-supportive environment, the leader acts as a guide, a person who is on the journey with the individual. The leader pokes, prods, nudges, and maybe even pushes individuals in certain directions, but the leader understands that they are there to help others reach their potential. That while they can direct and guide, it ultimately is up to the individual to take ownership of their actions.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“When we name something, we take back control—converting the ambiguous to something tangible that we can understand, manipulate, and come to terms with. Even how we talk about feelings and emotions matters. Take the example of depression. It’s common to say, “I’m sad.” But that doesn’t make sense when you think about it. That implies that sadness is concrete, a trait that you can’t change. If instead you say, “I’m experiencing a wave of sadness,” it implies that it’s a trait that will pass. It might seem trivial, but the language we use to describe what we are experiencing goes a long way in determining whether we have power over our emotions or they control us.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“According to the process model of emotions, emotions gain steam as they go through cycles of attention, appraisal, and response. We start with a small, simple feeling, but as it stirs around in our mind, as we divert more and more of our attentional resources, as we try to react to the discomfort, it grows in power. We’ve pushed the snowball down a hill. This cycle repeats until the emotion has been extinguished, been redirected, or taken over.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Self-determination theory (SDT) was born. It includes the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Or stated another way, to feel in control, like you can make progress, and to belong.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

“Creativity is key to zooming out because it is the cornerstone of problem-solving, which is essential to our rethinking of toughness. Creativity broadens our world, opening up potential paths and preventing us from defaulting to the well-worn route that may be easy to follow, but ultimately leads us to more frustration. Whether you are facing your twentieth rejection letter for that book that deserves publication or trying to keep your sanity while wrangling twenty five-year-olds in a classroom, a little imagination can be the difference between giving up and finding a way forward.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness