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Productive Stress

The Science of Freaking Out

This post is based on our new book, Do Hard Things. Check it out! Acute stress can be debilitating. It can cause professional baseball players to lose the ability to throw a ball 30 feet, something they’ve been doing since elementary school. In theater, it can cause stage fright, freezing, and forgetting lines that you’ve…

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Growth Comes From Struggle

When it comes to getting better in sport, many of us walk around with the idea that we need to push until failure. To grow our muscles, we lift until they are Jell-O; to improve endurance, we run until we’re sprawled on the track gasping for air. Go until you have nothing left is appealing.…

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A New And More Accurate Way To Think About Change and Homeostasis

Homeostasis is often conceptualized as the desire of an organism or system to stay the same. This is thought to be true whether one is talking about the body, the mind, a single individual, or an entire species. One of my favorite writers, George Leonard, puts it like this in his book Mastery: “Every one…

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