by Alex and Brett Harris
2008/ 241 pages
Rating: Good/GREAT/Give

Did you know that the term “teenager” has been around less than 100 years? It’s only a recent development that our culture has come to expect the teen years to be a mystical period of life completely disassociated from adulthood. We’ve come to expect so little of these years. Do you have this same view of the teenage years?

Alex and Brett Harris – just teenagers when they authored Do Hard Things – want to change this perception. Instead of a time of relaxation, they present the teenage years as an opportunity for strict training in order to set the direction of young people’s lives and build towards a rewarding future. The best way to train for adulthood, they maintain, is to do hard things during the teenage years. The brothers emphasize that in order to do truly hard things we must lean on God for strength and reject the Devil’s lie that God is not powerful enough to help us do what is outside our comfort zone. 

I’d strongly encourage any teenager or young adult to give this book a shot. If it leaves you wanting more, take a look at Start Here, where Alex and Brett answer some frequently asked questions that can arise during the process of doing hard things.

Read an excerpt of the first 25 pages here. You can also download a free 15-page study guide. And you can read the first two chapters of “Start Here.”