Another smart comment, and thanks again for reading.

I’m not suggesting at all that people shouldn’t do hard things. In fact, I wrote an entire book about how society is too comfortable and how by rediscovering a handful of key discomforts we can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilled.

I think a shortcoming of mental toughness as it’s currently positioned is that it claims that a flagellating workout, etc, is going to help you do X, Y, Z. Like, is picking up heavy stuff in a temperature-controlled building next to a Wendy’s really going to make us better at everything?

I definitely wasn’t trying to communicate “don’t do physically hard things.” Rather, I was pointing out that the supposed carryover isn’t always there. We tell ourselves a story that it is—sometimes this may work, other times it doesn’t. For example, a friend of mine acts as hunting guide in the Chugach mountains of Alaska. Hunting them requires that people strap 80 to 100 pounds of gear to their back and hike up grossly steep, slippery, treacherous mountain faces for weeks on end. His company’s tagline is, “specializing in wet, cold, and miserable.” (I’ve hunted with him. The tagline is no joke.)

He recently told me, “I’ll have clients text me leading up to a hunt to tell me they’re training their ass off doing crazy mental toughness workouts in the gym to prepare,” my friend told me. “Then they’ll get out here and quit after a day or two.” Doing a bunch of squats in a gym or running really fast in a suburb will improve a person’s fitness. But it won’t get her or him ready for the tens of other factors that make a big mountain hunt stressful (cold, weather, lack of food, treacherous terrain, the looming fear of grizzly bears, missing family, etc, etc, etc.).

So, really, I was trying to provide tactics that actually move the dial and allow us to conquer goals, push through, etc.

I may disagree about your pushback on soldiers. I’ve covered the military, especially the Special Forces, for a long time. There are a handful of SF guys who have leveraged their military careers to really blossom in the civilian world, but there are scores of others that come back home and face a ton of issues reintegrating. E.g., soldiers have the highest rates of binge drinking compared to any other profession. The military trains SF guys—i.e., the goal—to execute quite literally violent tasks. The tools this skill requires often carries over poorly to a civilian setting (back to the problem with carryover). And the SF idea that everything must be “toughed out,” according to various SF soldiers I’ve spoken to, is actually breaking SF groups physically and mentally. I wrote about this for Men’s Health a couple years ago. Happy to send you the article!

Thanks again for the smart comments. I hope I answered your questions.