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“Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it by use.”
Ruth Gordon
You can run a marathon and still dodge a hard talk with your wife.
I heard Alex Hormozi make that point on the Modern Wisdom podcast:
“I think that there’s been a big misconception around hard stuff, which is just that like running a marathon necessarily means that you can have a hard conversation with your wife by saying, like, I do hard things, but those hard things don’t necessarily generalize.”
Sure, I thought. Of course.
A marathon and a hard talk with your wife ask for different kinds of courage. There are three:
- Mental: you face something uncomfortable, like an inbox you’ve been dreading or putting your phone away at 5 p.m.
- Social: you risk rejection, like asking a stranger for a favor.
- Physical: you push your body, like running longer than you ever have.
One of my mental courage challenges was a financial statement I kept avoiding.
Economists call that avoidance the ostrich effect. A 2015 study tracked 1.1 million investors over two years and found logins to their accounts dropped 9.5% the day after the market fell.
We check least when the news is likely to be bad.
One of my social courage challenges was going to a chess meetup.
Jia Jiang turned social courage challenges into a daily practice. In 2012 an investor backed out of Hooplus, the to-do list app he built.
The rejection crushed him.
He decided the fear of hearing no was a bigger problem than the no itself. He spent the next 100 days asking strangers for things he expected them to refuse.
Day 1 he asked a stranger to lend him $100. Day 3 he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts shaped like the Olympic rings. An employee named Jackie made them.
A marathon can be a physical courage challenge.
I tried to run for two and a half hours and made it 90 minutes.
The marathoner who dreads the talk with his wife has trained one kind of courage out of three.
🦁
What kind of courage challenge (mental, social or physical) do you find hardest?
