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You can run a marathon and still dodge a hard talk with your wife. Courage comes in three kinds: mental, social and physical. Bravery in one kind stays in that kind.
Show Notes
You can run a marathon and still dodge a hard talk with your wife. Courage comes in three kinds: mental, social and physical. Bravery in one kind stays in that kind.
Featuring: Alex Hormozi, Jia Jiang
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Chapters:
(00:00) A marathon vs a hard talk with your wife
(00:27) The three kinds of courage
(00:52) The financial statement I kept avoiding
(01:12) Jia Jiang's 100 days of rejection
(01:47) The run I couldn't finish
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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?