JJ Virgin4x NYTimes Best Selling Author, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer

The benefits of doing hard things!

5 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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1:01

In this interview excerpt, JJ Virgin recounts growing up as the tallest girl in her class, which forced her onto boys' sports teams because there were no girls' teams or facilities. She describes how this early exposure to physically demanding, male‑dominated environments taught her to tackle hard tasks. Virgin connects this experience to a broader belief: the way you handle one challenge reflects how you handle all challenges, and repeatedly doing hard things rewires the brain—creating new neural pathways that reinforce a "I can do hard things" mindset. The segment emphasizes resilience, habit formation, and neuroplastic change as outcomes of confronting difficulty.

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But I realized there was a common theme to all of it that I just figured out from 12 lifetimes ago. But I was always the tallest kid in class. Shocking. Yeah. And as a, as a young girl, that sucks, right? Because I was the young, the tallest girl, I had to be on the boys' teams because we didn't have enough boys. So I was always on the boys' teams growing up. And then when I went to high school, they had a really great gym for the boys. We did not have that in girls, no girls' gym. Right. And so I was like, I want to go over there with the high school football players and play because that's what I was used to. You were used to playing with the boys. Yeah. But what I realized is doing all of that, being on the boys teams and being in the boys, you know, weight room, I learned how to do hard things. And if you believe that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and you know that if you are doing hard things, you're training your, you know, you're making new neurons say, I can do hard things. It changes everything.