Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness

By Ben Connelly

In so many ways, our lives are easier than ever. We're sheltered from the elements our ancestors braved daily. We don't need to grow, hunt, or gather our food, nor do we ever need to feel hungry for more than a few hours. We can immerse ourselves in digital entertainment that stimulates us in ways our great grandparents never could have imagined.

                And yet we're unhappy. There were over 45,000 suicides and over 100,000 drug overdoses in America in 2021, and surveys have been consistently showing that we're the unhappiest we've been in decades since before the pandemic.

                This is the problem of ease. We're drowning in pleasure, and yet so many of us seem unable to bear one minute without it. We're more comfortable than ever, and less able to handle discomforts our ancestors would have found trivial. Grit is an antidote to this problem, an exploration of the value of chosen suffering.

                In a time when we're so comfortable some people wonder whether we even need grit anymore, this book is a meditation on the virtue of it.

                Grit is a roadmap for anyone looking to escape the suffocation of ease. It's a blueprint for tapping into the natural antifragility of the human mind and body. Along the way, you'll learn about the power of habit, the role of external environment, risk, fear, courage, and more. Grit will teach you new ways to challenge yourself physically and mentally, from fasting, to exercise, to cold exposure, to memorizing poetry.

                Drawing on philosophy, psychology, and experience, Ben Connelly will show you not only why a good life requires chosen suffering, but how and what to choose. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ben Connelly
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201217648

Ben Connelly

Ben Connelly is a Soto Zen teacher and Dharma heir in the Katagiri lineage. He also teaches mindfulness in a wide variety of secular contexts, including police and corporate training, correctional facilities, and addiction-recovery and wellness groups. Ben is based at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center and travels to teach across the United States. He’s the author of Inside the Grass Hut: Living Shitou’s Classic Zen Poem, Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A Practitioner’s Guide, and Mindfulness and Intimacy.

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Grit e-book epub

A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness

Ben Connelly

Hardihood Books

Copyright © [2022] by [Ben Connelly]

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Contents

Introduction

Foreword: How to Read This Book

1. Why Grit?

2. Principles

3. Physical Exercise

4. Progression: Avoiding Overextending Yourself

5. Willpower

6. Habit

7. Starting

8. Momentum

9. Fine-Tuning

10. Techniques and Tricks

11. Not Going It Alone

12. Facing Your Fears

13. Courage

14. External Environment

15. Undermining

16. Failure

17. Rewards, Environmental Cues, and Habit Formation

18. Risk

19. Continuous Improvement

20. Practical Applications of Physical Toughness

21. What Not to Do

22. The Secret

23. Social Pressure to be Weak

24. Antifragile

25. Why Does Grit Matter?

26. Putting It All Together

27. Comfort Zone

28. Challenges

29. Conclusion

30. Resources

Appendix: Rules for Life

Afterword: Why I Wrote This Book

Bibliography

My Website: Hardihood Books

Introduction

Why You Should Read This Book:

If you feel overwhelmed in life, or if you find routine tasks and chores beyond you, or if you imagine other people have everything together, but you could never do the same for you own life, then this book is for you. I wrote it for people who feel vulnerable or incapable.

I also wrote this book for people who do have their lives generally together, but wish they had more willpower. Whether you have trouble sticking to diets, or you want to become physically active but feel a little intimidated, this book is for you.

It’s also for anyone who wants self-improvement, but lacks the energy. It’s for anyone who wants to develop discipline, but is unsure of how to do so. It is for athletes who want to improve their performance. And it’s for anyone else who wants to become tougher, both in mind and body. Or even anyone who’s simply curious about grit and hopes to learn something.

This is not a book filled with meaningless mantras or hacks and tricks. I offer actionable advice, which you can use today to make a positive difference in your own life. At the end of each chapter, you will find examples of challenges that will both test you and increase your willpower. Throughout the book, you will find examples from my life, and from the lives of others, which illustrate various lessons and techniques with the goal of showing you how you might apply those lessons in your life.

You may not benefit from every chapter of this book. Everyone will find that some sections prove more useful to them than others. Take it as you will.

Finally, I wrote this book for adults. I assume that every reader has reached the age of majority and can legally make decisions for himself or herself. Some of the suggestions contained within this book involve physical and mental risk. Please use your own judgment to determine your readiness to take these risks. If you think it prudent, please consult with a friend, family member, or physician before undertaking any of the physical challenges. I am not liable for any action you take based on reading this book.

Why Should You Listen to Me?

By now, you may wonder who I am. Why should you listen to anything I have to say about physical and mental toughness? I am not special. I am not a Navy SEAL, nor a Green Beret. Neither am I a professional athlete, nor a successful CEO. I am not even a researcher who has studied the science of willpower. I’m just an average person.

Most books about grit are written by former SEALs, former football players or coaches, or Fortune 500 executives. These books can feel inaccessible or inapplicable to many people outside of sports, the military, or the C-suite. Some of these books are highly specific: focused entirely on professional sports or C-level business.

While most people can certainly learn something valuable from these books, not all of what they teach will be directly useful in everyday life.

My goal with this book is to give you real techniques, action steps, and challenges that you can begin implementing today. Crucially, I’ve tried to include a wide variety that will be applicable to people from all walks of life. You can evaluate for yourself each of the techniques and strategies I provide and test them out starting today. Instead of motivational mantras, I will focus on concrete methods that will be easy to understand, easy to implement, and easy to evaluate.

This book is a practical guidebook to developing grit rather than a theoretical or psychological treatise on the subject. But I will draw on psychology. And I will discuss the theory behind practical concepts. At times, I will even draw on philosophy and literature.

But back to the question of why you should listen to me. You should listen to me because I hope to use my life as an example of what is possible for you.

I will use personal anecdotes, in addition to other relevant examples, to illustrate key concepts. I hope you will find these useful. In using examples from my own life, I’m not trying to celebrate my accomplishments. Like most of you, I find self-indulgent authors irritating. I will try to avoid focusing too much on myself. I will only use examples from my life when I believe they will be relevant and useful to you. I will use my personal experience both to show you what I have found that has worked and to help you avoid mistakes I have made in the past.

Who I Am:

Of course, immediately after I say I will avoid focusing on myself, I find it necessary to talk about myself to prove to you that what I have to say is worth your while. I will try to keep this short.

I was not born with discipline, determination, and grit. Over time, I have developed all three through trial and error and by learning from those who have gone before. Like many people, I have experienced my share of situations in which I felt weak and inadequate. If you currently feel that way, I will attempt to show you that you can overcome those feelings.

I was a nerd as a kid (before it was cool). In elementary school, I wasn’t athletic or popular. In middle school, I was awkward, undisciplined, and even cowardly. One year, all of the fourth-graders had to run the mile as part of a fitness test. I was one of the slowest students in the grade. If I remember correctly, only one or two kids ran slower than me. And they walked most of it. Today I am a serious distance runner with two sub-three-hour marathons, hundreds of shorter races, and tens of thousands of miles under my belt.

When I was in seventh grade, my boy scout troop went on a wilderness survival camping trip in November. We backpacked a short distance to a campsite where we built shelters out of sticks and leaves to sleep in and cooked our meals in a campfire.¹ That night, I was the only kid to back out. I was too scared to sleep in the shelter. I made the scoutmaster call my parents and walk me out to where they waited to pick me up and take me home to sleep in my own bed.

Since then, I have not only slept in a shelter I built myself (on another cold, November night), I have gone on a number of solo backpacking trips along the Appalachian Trail. Sometimes I shared a campfire or a campsite with people I met along the way. Other times I slept alone in the middle of the woods. I’ve spent more hours alone in the snow or the rain or the heat or the sleet than I can count.

If you need more convincing: I take cold showers every day, routinely fast for close to twenty-four hours (while continuing to run and lift weights), and run in all weather (sleet, subzero temperatures, extreme heat, etc.).

The point of these examples is not to talk myself up, but rather to demonstrate that not only can grit be developed, but that anybody can do it. If I can develop grit, you can. All it takes is the desire to develop it and a willingness to work at it. Genuine desire to develop grit will give you the motivation to pick yourself up when you fail, and to continue seeking self-improvement until you actually achieve it.

In Summary:

This book will not teach you how to be extraordinary. You will not see herculean results overnight. This book is not written for the top one percent of performers. It is a book written by an ordinary man for ordinary men and women. Elite goals require elite training and elite living. For the vast majority of individuals, the principles and non-elite strategies included in this book will prove far more achievable in daily life.

Definition of Terms:

The title of this book is Grit. I use that term to refer to the overall, intangible quality that contains within it such traits as tenacity, toughness, willpower, discipline, and resilience. I will also refer to grit as hardiness.

Toughness specifically refers to the ability to withstand hardship, whether physical, mental, or emotional. Physical toughness is the body’s ability to withstand or adapt to harsh physical environs. Examples include calluses, the ability to control body temperature with adipose tissue and sweating, pain threshold (the point at which one perceives pain), tanned skin, and reduced sensitivity to (and increased tolerance for) poison or spicy foods.

Mental toughness includes the ability to withstand emotional and physical pain and hardship. This could mean anything from ignoring hunger and fatigue to negotiating a stressful business deal to conquering your fear of public speaking.

Pain tolerance is a type of mental toughness. It refers to the ability to withstand perceived pain. Pain threshold is a type of physical toughness. An increase in your pain tolerance decreases your body’s perception of pain (or effort) such that you physically feel less pain from the same stimulus (or less exertion at the same level of exercise).

Other qualities, such as tenacity, discipline, and resilience, fall under the category of mental toughness. However, they deserve their own definition, which I will provide here. Tenacity and discipline refer to different aspects of the same quality: the self-control required to govern oneself. Tenacity connotes perseverance. Discipline connotes rigidity, planning, and systems. Together they create the ability to keep doing what feels uncomfortable and to get up every day and do the difficult and unglamorous things that need to be done. Together they help you achieve self-mastery. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from setback. It is similar to tenacity. Think of getting back up whenever something knocks you down. Resilience is a more intangible and difficult quality to attain. A tenacious person can keep sending out job applications until they receive an offer, but it takes a resilient person to recover after being unexpectedly laid off.

Finally, there is willpower. Willpower is the mechanism that turns intention into action. It is similar to a muscle. If a physical muscle enables the quality of strength, willpower is that which enables the quality of toughness. Will fills in the gap between intention and action. Oftentimes, we fail to achieve something not through lack of desire, but through a failure of will. Willpower plays an important role in enabling us to master ourselves, withstand discomfort, and achieve that which we desire.

***

1. 1. Notice that I did not say, over a campfire.

Foreword: How to Read This Book

Any way you like.

In all seriousness, while I designed Grit to be read cover to cover, feel free to skip over chapters you find irrelevant. The first chapter is a discussion of why I think Grit is important and why I think my book is timely. If you need no convincing, skip to chapter two.

Each chapter discusses a particular topic and ends with a set of suggested challenges that you can implement right away. You will only benefit from this book if you put what you learn into action. Each challenge is an action you can take, right now, to make the lessons real. I cannot make you do anything. Only you can. That said, every challenge is merely a suggestion. I encourage you to come up with new challenges or new versions of the ones that I’ve suggested.

I devoted much of the book to certain principles I believe you need to understand in order to develop grit. While some chapters may seem less practical, they will help you better understand and implement the later practical applications. At times, I find that in order to fully convey a concept, I need to give more than a quick explanation of it, which means I sometimes devote more words to illustrating a principle than to explaining how to put it into action. It’s fairly easy to say, take a cold shower, and much harder to explain how the discipline that comes from taking cold showers will translate into other areas of your life.

Finally, I have also included a Resources section at the end of this book. Here you will find out where you can go to learn more about particular topics, especially about how to perform various challenges.

How Do You Get the Most Out of This Book?

Simple: take action. Apply what you learn. The challenges, both in the Challenges chapter, and at the end of other chapters, are intended to spark ideas for you to try in your own life. I included levels for them to provide examples for how you can adapt challenges to your own situation. I did not organize levels around any coherent system, but rather just tried to show gradation in difficulty. Levels sometimes illustrate gradations within the same type of challenge, or sometimes offer different challenges altogether. You can look at them, decide what level is appropriate for you (or devise your own variation), and then take action.

Chapter one

Why Grit?

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the highest point of reality. (C.S. Lewis, 1942)

It is a simple fact that life for the majority of middle- and upper-class Americans (and citizens of other developed countries) is materially easier than ever before in the history of the world . . . the very real problems that exist in our society notwithstanding. We shelter in climate-controlled houses and eat food ordered from our phones and delivered to our doors. We work, commute, run errands, and procreate all without ever having to expend more physical energy than it takes to walk from our door to our car. In many ways, our lives are easier than those of our grandparents and great-grandparents, and certainly easier than those of all the generations before them. While serious problems still exist in our society, most of us live in a world of incredible material abundance.

Difficult chores and tasks that once were routine are now anomalous. Technological improvement has alleviated physical tasks and burdens. Washing machines made laundry far less onerous. Indoor plumbing eliminated the experience of sitting in a freezing outhouse on a winter morning. Life is physically easier today for the majority of people. This creates the problem of ease.

Because life is easier for so many, it requires less natural hardiness than it once did. You can now drift through life without ever having to lift a finger in manual labor to support yourself. Most of us primarily spend life indoors. The effects of weather, climate, and season are mitigated to the point of mere nuisance. We walk from heated buildings to heated cars with heated seats, and from there to heated offices, yet we complain about how cold it is in the five total minutes we spend outside each day.

Life requires a great deal less physical toughness than it once did. Our forefathers had to brave all weather and seasons, work with their hands, bear physical pain and discomfort, and exert their bodies daily. Today it would seem that grit is becoming increasingly obsolete.

However, even if life seems easy now, everyone will endure hard times in their lives. That includes you. For many Americans, the novel coronavirus has proved this point.

Furthermore, although modern life is demonstrably less onerous than ever before, more people than ever seem to have trouble dealing with it. This is not paradox, but backwards cause and effect. Material abundance and incredible convenience have contributed to generational failure to grow up, collective and individual weakening, and the rise of fear, anxiety, and anomie.

As I will explain throughout this book, human beings need challenge in order to survive. We need physical challenges for our physical health. We also need some discomfort for our mental health. There is value in suffering. Life is better and richer when it includes uncomfortable moments. (I’m not talking about trauma. I’m talking about discomfort you choose.)

Finally, even the most sheltered people should be equipped to handle trouble. Natural disaster can rip away the façade we hide behind and expose us to nature in its rawest form. Every year, hurricanes and wildfires cause massive destruction. It is not foolish to prepare for disasters that occur more commonly than we sometimes wish to believe.

It’s not so much that life requires less hardiness than it did in the past, but rather that modern life no longer forces us to develop hardiness. Life in the past not only required a great deal of physical and mental toughness, but also naturally forced our forefathers to develop it. They had to brave the heat and the cold, work outdoors, walk great distances, carry heavy burdens, do all of their chores manually, live without any of the modern conveniences we have come to rely upon, and deal with pains and hardships and ills and diseases that have been alleviated or eliminated by modern medicines we take for granted.

While life today still calls for hardiness, that call manifests itself in less obvious ways than it once did, and we seem less capable of answering it. At least, the way we live our lives is less conducive to developing grit. That is what this book seeks to address.

A Coming-of-Age Crisis:

Today we also face a coming-of-age crisis. Senator Ben Sasse, in his book The Vanishing American Adult, diagnosed the growing phenomenon in which many Millennials and members of Gen Z failed to grow up. Sasse’s book takes a hard look at the coming-of-age crisis, and identifies various potential solutions, including national volunteer or military service, and an increased societal emphasis on work and lifelong learning – along with a de-emphasis on consumption.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focused specifically on Gen Z in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. But the cultural trends they diagnose apply more broadly.

This book is my answer to that coming-of-age crisis. It is one small answer to a much larger societal phenomenon. But I believe that multifaceted problems require a variety of grassroots solutions, and this is one solution. My book addresses individual self-improvement. Not broad solutions to a societal problem, like the aforementioned books. But those authors and I share a similar goal: Improving self-reliance among young Americans.

I wrote the book for people of all ages, but most often, I feel I am speaking to young people. My experience will likely be most relevant, and most useful, to Millennials and members of Gen Z. After all, I am a late Millennial (separated by one year from Gen Z). I know the challenges young adults face.

So, if you are reading this and you are in your twenties, I have something I want to say directly to you: If you find you feel like a child in a grown-up’s body, you need to read this book.¹

Other Reasons for Grit:

No matter where you find yourself in life, attaining your goals will always require hard work and discipline. Success in business, in athletics, in your personal life, in your financial outlook, and in self-mastery, will require the determination and discipline to do what it takes to achieve your goals.

Easy goals that do not require any hard work are not worthwhile. Anything worth having in life requires effort. Everything worthwhile in life is hard. And some things are worthwhile because they are hard.

Also, life is easier when you are tougher. I personally can attest to this. The times that I have felt strong and could shake off bitterly cold showers, hunger, fatigue, difficult workouts, and high running mileage have typically been some of the happiest times in my life. In fairness, when you feel happy, you find it easier to deal with hardship. But the fact that I was able to handle tough things every day meant that it was easier to take pleasure in the things that I enjoyed, and in the things that felt uncomfortable. There is nothing like the sweet soreness that follows a difficult but successful workout.

Those times that I felt weak and could not deal so easily with the cold and the long runs and the workouts and the fatigue were often unhappy. The stress of those things was bad, but the worst part was feeling unable to deal with them.

Life is easier when I don’t worry about running in the cold, not because I don’ do it, but because I can handle running in the cold. When you are tougher, you can more easily deal with the issues life throws at you.²

In Conclusion:

Grit will give you the ability to handle life. It will help you to become an adult. It will help you work towards your goals. And it will free you from becoming overwhelmed when you feel overwhelmed. It will help you every day, and it will help you when disaster strikes. It will ensure that you are physically and mentally prepared for life’s exigencies. Everyone faces difficult times and you will too. Having grit will help you will handle them.

To bring it back to a societal level: A weakened populace is not only less capable of handling extraordinary disaster, but invites disaster. The world still needs tough individuals. And contrary to popular belief, people do not usually rise to the occasion. You may have heard some version of the famous quotation, you do not rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of the training.³ You need to prepare in order to prevail. In order to prepare, you must practice acts of restraint and discipline daily, work to increase your willpower, and purposefully seek out challenges that frighten you. If you cannot be tough when life is easy, how can you be tough when life is hard? If you cannot do the things that it takes to prepare for catastrophes, how can you expect to handle those situations when they happen?

Since our lives are materially and physically easier than ever, we must actively seek out difficult challenges in order to develop the grit that our forefathers had no choice but to learn. This does not mean returning to the good old days, nor does it mean romanticizing the past, but rather it means recognizing a difference between our lives and the lives of our forefathers, and seeking to learn from their lives and emulate their virtues. In the end, we are no different than our