The key ideas

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do

Amy Morin, 2014

Within three years Amy Morin lost her mother and her husband, and when another person close to her fell terminally ill, she wrote herself a list of thirteen things mentally strong people don't do. Millions of people read that list, and a book grew out of it. The stories of her clients and of athletes, writers and inventors show how to give up the habits that quietly drain your strength.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of feeling sorry for themselves, worrying about what others think and giving up after the first failure. And for anyone who wants to understand what mental strength is really made of.

Just because one person thinks something, it doesn't make it true. Don't give one person's opinion of you the power to determine who you are.

A list written for herself

Amy Morin was twenty-three when her mother died suddenly: an aneurysm, a dangerously swollen section of a blood vessel, burst in her brain. Exactly three years later, to the day, her husband Lincoln died. He was twenty-six, and the cause was a heart attack. By then Morin was already working as a psychotherapist, helping other people through loss. Now she had to go through it herself.

Several years passed. She married again, and life began to settle. Then it turned out that her new husband's father was terminally ill with cancer. Morin noticed self-pity pulling her in: why me again? Instead of drowning in that feeling, she sat down and wrote a letter to herself. It was a list of thirteen things mentally strong people don't do.

She posted the list online, the Forbes website republished it, and it spread around the world. That is how this book came about. Its main idea is simple. Mental strength is like physical strength: you can go to the gym as often as you like, but if you eat nothing but junk food, you will not see results. Building good habits is not enough; you also have to give up the bad ones. Morin understands mental strength as the ability to manage three things: your thoughts, your feelings and your actions.

Ahead of you are thirteen chapters, one for each habit on the list. Each has a story: of one of Morin's clients, an athlete, a writer, an inventor. And each has something you can do instead of the old habit.

The boy who beat the school bus

One of the first stories in the book is about a boy named Jack. He was hit by a school bus and badly injured. Jack survived and began to recover, but the adults around him kept feeling sorry for him. They talked about him as a poor child to whom something terrible had happened.

The pity came from love, but it worked against him. The boy began to see himself as a victim too. Everything changed when the adults started telling the story differently: Jack was not a poor child but the boy who beat the school bus. With that story about himself, he went back to school confident in his own strength.

Morin explains why self-pity pulls you in so hard. It brings relief and seems to give you the right not to change anything. Morin quotes the American public figure John Gardner, who compared self-pity to a drug. As long as you feel sorry for yourself, you train your mind to notice only the bad, and everything good passes you by.

Morin sees the antidote in gratitude. She tells the story of the runner Marla Runyan, who has barely been able to see since she was nine. Runyan does not see her condition as a limitation, and she talks not about what it has taken from her but about what it has given her. In 2000 she competed at the Olympic Games in Sydney and finished eighth in the 1,500 metres.

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About the author

Amy Morin is an American psychotherapist and college psychology instructor. Her books on mental strength have been translated into more than forty languages.

All books by this author: Amy Morin

Terms from the book

  • Mindfulness
  • Lincoln
  • McDonald
  • James
  • Lauren
  • Edison
  • Dan
  • Robinson
  • Dyson
  • Gardner
  • Fox
  • Jack
  • aneurysm
  • Richard
  • Peter Pan
  • diabetes
  • Ware
  • Forbes: An American business magazine. Its website republished Morin's list, after which the list spread around the world.
  • Runyan: Marla Runyan, an American runner. Since the age of nine she has barely been able to see because of a retinal disease; she competed at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.
  • Stages of change model: A model proposed by the American psychologists James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente. It describes a person's path from not seeing a problem at all to making a new habit stick.
  • Carmen: The ex-wife of James, Morin's client.
  • Megan: A client of Morin's from the chapter on wanting to please everyone. She could not say no and was worn out by it.
  • Dale: A client of Morin's from the chapter on risk. He taught woodworking for almost thirty years and dreamed of making furniture.
  • Ammann: Othmar Ammann, a Swiss-born American engineer who designed many of New York's famous bridges.
  • Verrazzano-Narrows: A suspension bridge in New York, opened in 1964. At the time it had the longest span of any suspension bridge in the world.
  • Barrie: J. M. Barrie, a Scottish novelist and playwright, author of the story of Peter Pan.
  • Gloria: A client of Morin's from the chapter on the past. For many years she blamed herself for mistakes she made in raising her daughter.
  • Macy: Rowland Macy, a nineteenth-century American businessman, founder of the New York department store Macy's.
  • Hershey: Milton Hershey, an American businessman, founder of the Hershey chocolate company.
  • Reese: Harry Burnett Reese, an American confectioner, creator of Reese's peanut butter cups. He once worked for Milton Hershey.
  • Seuss: Dr Seuss, the pen name of the American children's author and illustrator Theodor Geisel, author of The Cat in the Hat and many other books.
  • Vanessa: A client of Morin's from the chapter on time alone. She worked as an estate agent and slept badly.

All terms

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