Do Hard Things Book Review

I just read Do Hard Things, A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations by Alex and Brett Harris, and it’s a very impressive book for anyone of any age to write. These twins were 17 when they undertook this particular hard thing, which makes it both a testament to what God is growing in this generation, and a huge challenge to adults everywhere.
As a fifty-year-old mother of teens (and a grandmother) who comes up against the warm, dangerous sleep of complacency every day, I finished this book asking myself some very hard questions about how I arrived in my own personal mess and how we all got here as a country.
Do Hard Things is both the explanation and solution to these hard questions.
If we are to change how we do business in this country, we will have to do hard things. I am looking forward to it. One of the best points the twins make is that we often claim we do hard things, but we either do it for selfish reasons or it just looks hard to others, but is easy for us.
We are not unlike the Israelites coming out of 200 years of slavery. They didn’t wander in the wilderness because God was mad at them. They had to learn to do hard things before they could inhabit and effectively govern themselves in their new land. God loved them, so he allowed them to do hard things for about forty years.
Our slavery to money has taken two hundred years to take root, creating a sweepingly depressed and medicated society where no one has either the energy or hope to change course. And here’s the important point. We’re no more stuck that the elephant with the thin rope around his leg, an illustration the Harris twins use to describe how low expectations trap us.
When we remove the thin rope of media driven exploitation that requires us to be patriotic consumers, we find that it takes much less to satisfy us. In fact, when we are not driven by fear as consumers, it’s possible to discover that a truly satisfying life requires us to discover our purpose and pursue it productively without thoughts of usury or profiteering.
For instance, my 16-year-old daughter is a photographer, and hopes someday to be a psychiatrist helping the vast number of mentally ill homeless. She says, “I never want to make money for my photography, because I think pricing it will make if feel like work, while now it’s an art.” Art for it’s own sake? Imagine that!
The Rebelution—the heart of the Harris twins’ countercultural message—is a call to teens for sober discipline, compassion and stamina. The stories told in this book remind me of the youth of Israel, raised (counter-culturally) faithful during seventy years of slavery in Babylon. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego stand out. It will take their kind of faith and guts, and doing some really hard things to repopulate our land with hope. As adults, we can support our kids to do hard, character-building things, and we can model character, competence and collaboration every day. Who knows, maybe we’ll even remember how to do hard things.
“And now these three remain: Faith, hope and charity (love). But the greatest of these is charity (love).”—1 Corinthians 13:13.
Read the book. Change the world.

Hats off to my young nephew, Ryan, a Great Lion of God, who passed this book on to my daughter.