March 29, 2026 / 4 Minute Read

notes on mental toughness

Listed below are my notes from On Mental Toughness by Harvard Business Review.

For those who’ve been scarred by life, yet still perservere!

  • Extraordinary leaders find meaning and learn from the most negative events.

  • Happiness is not a function of your circumstances, but of your outlook on life.
  • Mentally tough people have a love for learning and a strong sense of values.
  • Often, negative emotions are out of proportion to the reality of the threat they face.
  • Post-traumatic growth is a measure of resilience and a person’s ability to come back from failure stronger than ever. A few elements known to contribute to post-traumatic growth include:
    • Understanding your response to trauma
    • Reducing anxiety through techniques for controlling intrusive thoughts and images
    • Engaging in constructive self-disclosure
    • Creating a narrative in which trauma is a fork in the road, or a destiny-defining moment
    • Articulating and adhering to spiritual principles
  • You can make physical changes to your brain by learning new skills.
  • As you go about the hard work of your career, it is critical to remember to play.
  • Play improves your ability to reason and understand the world.
  • To be mentally tough, you must make a consistent, ongoing commitment to immerse yourself in new systems and ways of thinking. It cannot be occasional.
  • A few good ways to exercise your brain and partake in cognitive fitness include:
    • Reading
    • Playing games (Video and Board)
    • Taking trips
    • Trying new technologies
    • Learning a new language or instrument
    • Physical exercise
  • The more new things you learn. The better you become at learning.
  • Your critical task as a leader is to promote the highest levels of organizational performance by creating environments where people can achieve the brain’s full potential.
  • If there is one quality that executives seek for themselves and their employees, it is sustained high performance in the face of ever-increasing pressure and rapid change.
  • The best long-term performers tap into positive energy.
  • Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance. Learn to take a break!
  • A few basic strategies for renewing energy at the physical level include:
    • Actually doing all the healthy things you want to do (clean eating, meditation, journaling, etc)
    • Maintaining a consistent bedtime and wake-up time
    • Seeking recovery every 90-120 minutes
    • Doing at least two weight training exercises per week
  • Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit.
  • Noticing our emotional reactions releases us from their grip and helps shift our focus to pursuing more productive responses.
  • The things that are important shouldn’t always come easy.
  • Living a life of impact is not easy.

  • Although the stress response can be detrimental, in many cases, stress hormones actually induce growth and release chemicals into the body that rebuild cells, synthesize proteins, and enhance immunity, leaving the body even stronger and healthier than it was before!
  • Many people lack resilience simply because they have a long history of wins.
  • Failures can become springboards to success if you determine why you lost, identify new paths forward, and seize the right opportunity when it’s within your reach.
  • Life-changing experiences are not something you can plan for.
  • Accepting adversity and moving on isn’t easy. You don’t have to like or somehow justify what’s happened. You just have to decide you can live with it.
  • People will care about you if you authentically care about them.
  • There are always people who are worse off.
  • Adversity alters relationships and may even ruin them. It destroys some dreams and renders others unlikely. Certain things will be irrevocably lost, and pretending otherwise is foolish.
  • You can’t control what happens, just how you respond.
  • Adversity distorts reality but crystallizes the truth.
  • Loss amplifies the value of what remains.
  • It’s easier to create new dreams than to cling to broken ones.
  • Don’t reward behaviors that you don’t respect.
  • Where one feels the most pressure to act fast and stake out an unwavering position, it is best to do neither.