Books Like
Chop Wood Carry Water

If you liked Chop Wood Carry Water, the closest books are Legacy by James Kerr, The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon, Mind Gym by Gary Mack, You Are Capable of More by Chris Sund, The Champion’s Mind by Jim Afremow, and Do Hard Things by Steve Magness. Kerr is the one most coaches hand out next, and for good reason.

Why the parable works and where it stops

Medcalf built the book around John, a young man who wants to become a samurai archer and spends years doing everything except shooting arrows. It is a Zen saying underneath, about the ordinary work that continues before enlightenment and after it, and the point is that no result ever excuses you from tomorrow.

The parable is why the book has spread through locker rooms the way it has. Chapters run two or three pages, a team can read one before practice, and a story lets a coach make a point without appearing to aim it at anybody in the room. That last part is worth more than it sounds.

What the parable costs you is mechanism. John’s story tells you that process beats outcome and it does not tell a coach what to change on Monday, and the book is one idea repeated across many short chapters, which readers either find reinforcing or find thin. So the useful next reading either supplies the practices, supplies the mental skills, or takes the same approach into a workplace.

One

Legacy by James Kerr

The strongest book on this list. Kerr spent time inside the New Zealand All Blacks and came out with fifteen short chapters on how the most successful team in professional sport actually maintains its standard, and the famous one is about the players sweeping their own dressing room after a test match.

It is the same philosophy as Medcalf with real practices attached, and it is short enough to hand a whole roster. If you run a program and you are choosing one book after Chop Wood Carry Water, choose this.

Two

The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon

The same parable format aimed at workplaces and teams rather than athletes, following a man whose life is falling apart and the bus driver who talks him through ten rules for it.

Gordon is polarizing. Some readers find it corny, and the coaches and managers who use it will tell you the corniness is why it works with a group, because nobody feels lectured. Read it if you liked the format more than the sport.

Three

Mind Gym by Gary Mack

This is the mechanism book. Mack was a sport psychologist who worked with professional athletes, and the book is forty short chapters of actual mental skills, visualization, self-talk, routines before performance, recovering after a mistake.

Where Medcalf gives an athlete a philosophy, Mack gives them something to practice. The two pair better together than either does alone, and this is the one I would give the player who says he believes in the process and still falls apart after an error.

Five

The Champion’s Mind by Jim Afremow

Afremow is a sport psychologist and this is the more structured cousin of Mind Gym, moving through preparation, competition, and recovery with drills at each stage.

More clinical and slightly drier. Better for an individual athlete working on their own than for a team reading together, and very good on the specific problem of performing when it counts after a week of good practice.

Six

Do Hard Things by Steve Magness

The book every coach should read even if the team never does. Magness takes apart the version of toughness built on fear and force, the one that runs through a lot of American athletics, and shows it produces worse performance than the alternative.

His replacement, staying clear-headed and deciding well under difficulty, is what Chop Wood Carry Water is gesturing at without the research to back it. Read it as the adult version of the same message.

Seven

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The obvious comparison in form, a short parable about a shepherd whose journey teaches him that the treasure was in the traveling. Much more famous, much less practical, and included because readers who loved Medcalf’s storytelling often want another story rather than another framework.

Nothing here for a coach to install. Everything here for an athlete on a long bus ride.

Which one to pick

If you want one, read Legacy. It is the same message with the receipts of a team that won eighty percent of its matches for a century, and it gives a coach specific things to install rather than a moral.

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