Books Like
Do Hard Things

If you liked Do Hard Things, the closest books are The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, Endure by Alex Hutchinson, You Are Capable of More by Chris Sund, Grit by Angela Duckworth, and The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulberg.

The correction Magness is making

The version of toughness most of us absorbed came from coaches and drill sergeants and it runs on fear, on the idea that you get strong by being broken down and then rebuilt, and that the signals your body sends are weakness to be overridden. Magness spent years inside elite distance running and came out arguing that almost none of that holds up, and that the people who last are not the ones who ignore the signals but the ones who read them accurately.

Real toughness, in his telling, looks a lot less dramatic than the movie version. It is staying clear enough under strain to keep making decent decisions, which is unglamorous and considerably harder than gritting your teeth.

One

The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter

The natural companion, and they cover each other’s gaps almost perfectly. Easter is a journalist who reports on what modern comfort has cost us in resilience and attention, structured around a month in the Alaskan backcountry, and he makes the case for going and finding difficulty on purpose.

Easter tells you to seek it. Magness tells you what to do once you are in it. Read Easter next.

Two

Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness

Magness’s own earlier book with Stulberg, and the most directly practical thing on this list. The whole model comes down to one equation, that stress plus rest equals growth, and their observation is that people chasing more from themselves reliably add the stress and never add the rest.

It draws on both athletes and scientists, which keeps it from being a sports book. If you want the training version of what Do Hard Things argues, this is it.

Three

Endure by Alex Hutchinson

A science journalist and former competitive runner investigating where physical limits actually sit, and finding repeatedly that the brain calls time long before the body has run out of anything.

It is the best available evidence for the thing Magness keeps circling, which is that the sensation of being done and the fact of being done are two different events, usually separated by quite a lot.

Five

Grit by Angela Duckworth

The research anchor for this whole shelf. Duckworth studied West Point cadets and spelling bee finalists and found that sustained interest combined with plain persistence predicts outcomes better than measured ability does.

Worth reading alongside Magness because they are in mild tension. Duckworth is making the case for persistence, and Magness is careful to distinguish persistence from stubbornness. Both are right about something.

Six

The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulberg

Stulberg on his own, and the most countercultural book here. His argument is that the relentless drive for more is itself a kind of instability, and that lasting performance comes from being grounded rather than from being hungry.

If Do Hard Things made you rethink toughness, this will make you rethink ambition. It sits oddly on a list like this, which is exactly why it belongs.

Seven

Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins

Included as the counterargument. Goggins is the clearest living example of the old model Magness spent a book taking apart, and the forty percent rule, that when your mind says stop you are at roughly forty percent, is the single most quoted idea in this space.

Read them together and notice they disagree about the mechanism. Goggins says override the signal. Magness says learn to read it. Most people do better with Magness and find Goggins more immediately motivating, which is worth knowing about yourself.

Which one to pick

If you want one, read Peak Performance. It is Magness applying the same thinking as a system rather than an argument, and the stress and rest equation is the piece most people are missing.

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