Ask HN: How do you guys develop mental toughness?

I recently got done reading David Goggins book Can't Hurt Me where he advocates being uncomfortable as one of the key factors in developing mental toughness but his book was rather focused on how to do this via physical means, what are some tactics you guys use to develop intellectual mental toughness?

i must say i am a advocate of physical suffering for developing "toughness" but, not because i'm a masochist, loving the pain of walking or suffering through cold.

the mental toughness comes from a need to ignore physical pain and drive through to the end, as you have no other choice.

in simple terms it's "drive or die".

i'm also a follower of stoic ideology, if you look into that, you can read the thoughts of many great men, but they all suffered.

i'm not sure if i can help with intellectual mental toughness, but i assume this means mental toughness without physical suffering?

different things work for different people, but personally I do hard drugs

Sorry for the bit unedited/rough comment but I don't have too much time so I'm typing pretty fast.

(1) Learning how to program

(2) Hacking hardware

(3) Learning Andy McKee Rylynn on guitar while only knowing Wonderwall (there's a YouTube tutorial).

(4) Breathing/anapana/'basic'/the-first-meditation-beginners learn meditation and Tonglen (see the book search inside yourself for instructions) meditation [1].

(5) In general: by bootcamping yourself. Also known as being woefully underprepared and then just do it for 8 to 16 hours per day (the hours depend on how the rest of your life balance is, your health must be ok).

I wasn't talented at hardware hacking and hated programming when I started with it. It was my curiosity that said: can't you learn to like it? You can create awesome things with it!

Curiosity + the promise of creating awesome things + observing myself and being rational on how to influence myself = learning how to program despite hating it initially.

But in general: focus a lot on what you're doing and focus as deep as you possibly can and do that for as long as possible. This state is in some was easier to get into if you're doing a topic that seems super hard for you to learn and that you don't know a lot about.

For physical toughness: learn the Wim Hof Method -- adrenaline whenever you want it. I'm pretty sure that will help for developing physical toughness.

[1] In my experiene the following meditations don't develop mental toughness, they only develop empathy or a form of emotional intelligence: Vipassana/body scan/mindfulness, loving kindness keditation/metta (yes the same metta as my username implies).

For what purpose? If you want to learn how to cope with having your work rejected, become an author.