We turned doing hard things into posting hard things.

Why performative suffering doesn't build toughness, and what actually does.



Do Hard (Meaningful) Things

We need to do hard things. In a world that lets us shortcut almost everything—from taking performance-enhancing drugs to outsourcing our writing to AI—there’s something magical, and much needed, about the thing that forces you out of your comfort zone. It makes us feel something in a world where we increasingly numb and distract our way out of our own internal experience. Doing hard things reminds us we’re alive.

As the person who literally ​wrote the book ​on the subject, I love watching the idea take hold. But like almost anything, we can miss the mark. And somewhere along the way, “Do Hard Things” reached its performative meme stage. We turned doing hard things into posting hard things.

Look around social media and you’ll see people glorifying their time in an ice bath, puking on the side of the track after a workout, or flashing a 4 a.m. watch to prove the morning grind is real. None of these things are inherently bad. Many can be genuinely useful. But in turning a helpful idea into a meme, we dropped the most important word in it. The point was never to do hard things. It was to do hard, meaningful things.

Think back to gym class, or junior high football. Chances are you had a coach who decided that running bleachers, laps, or “suicides” would toughen you up. Maybe you kept going until you puked or could barely stand. The coach walked away certain he’d built you into something tougher. You walked away having learned that exercise was punishment, and that the only reason to keep going was to satisfy the man with the whistle.

You didn’t get tougher. You got better at surviving while someone controlled and judged you. And those are not the same thing. Real toughness is about decision-making. It’s navigating discomfort and learning to choose the wise action for the situation in front of you. Survival teaches none of that. Worse, the moment you remove the thing driving it (e.g., the controlling coach) the motivation to keep going collapses. It’s the same pattern ​researchers​ find with authoritarian, controlling teachers: the kids look productive while being watched, then their effort falls off a cliff the second the teacher leaves the room.

In many ways, we’ve simply swapped the junior high coach for the social media audience. We take the ice bath to feed the feed, and we tell ourselves the exact same story the coach did: this is making me tougher. But the whole point of doing something hard was to reconnect you with your body, not to perform it for everyone else.

When we choose something difficult—when we actually have agency in it—a few things happen. First, it forces us into feelings we usually avoid. We have to sit with the anxiety, the stress, the pain, the discomfort, instead of ignoring it, pushing it away, or gritting through it. Those feelings kick off an internal battle, an angel and a devil on each shoulder, one pushing you to keep going and one hunting for the exit.

And part of that battle comes down to why. If the reason is big enough and means enough, we tend to stay. Sure, fear can keep you moving. But all fear teaches you is how to survive a threat, which turns out to be useful for almost nothing else. You run the laps to avoid the coach’s punishment. You write the book because you believe it might change a life. You run the marathon because it carries a meaning only you understand. Same discomfort. Completely different reason. And the reason is the whole thing.

Those meaningful hard things rarely change your life in the moment you finish them. What they change is harder to see. The act of committing—to write, to run, to learn—becomes a venue for discovering who you are. You don’t just feel alive. You shift your sense of what you’re capable of, and you grow into someone who can handle the next hard thing.

Can an ice bath or a training program do that? Maybe. But there has to be something underneath it more than this kind of sucks and now I get to post about it. Performative hard can move the needle a little. It just rarely delivers the growth that choosing a worthy goal does.

Everyone’s worthy goal looks different. But it almost certainly doesn’t look like running bleachers as punishment. It looks like a just-manageable challenge, in something you actually chose, that carries a meaning deeper than the post.

Do hard things. Just make sure they’re yours.aut

-- Steve

Reflect: Responding Instead of Reacting is a Skill You Can Develop.

“True toughness is about expansion, instead of constriction... Not to push against the experience, but to create space between the stimulus and response so that we can better navigate what’s going on. It’s the child who learns that the frustration from making a mistake doesn’t require a tantrum. The husband who can sit with his frustration, instead of lashing out at his loved ones. The athlete who can separate the jittery sensations of nervousness from the emotional response of anxiety or dread. How we respond is malleable.”

—​Do Hard Things​

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