Free Study Guides for The Tug

Book Club Guide

A Book Club Discussion Guide for The Tug

For book clubs, reading circles, and anyone who wants to go deeper. This guide works for groups of any background, faith-based or not, because the questions are about your life, not your theology.

A note for the host. You do not need to be an expert, and you do not need to get through every question. Pick the ones that spark your group. The best discussions happen when people tell their own stories, which is, after all, exactly how John wrote the book. Consider opening each meeting by asking whether anyone felt their own “tug” while reading that week.

One more thing, and it matters. The Tug does not end with a feeling. It ends with an assignment: name the thing you have been putting off, say it out loud to another person, and take one small step, one inch, within the week. The closing exercise is built to send your group home with exactly that.

Opening Questions

1. Before reading, had you ever thought of that inner voice — your gut, your conscience, your intuition — as something you should actively listen to? Has the book changed that?
2. John tells his life through stories and quotes rather than straight advice. Did that work for you? Which story has stayed with you?

On the Stories

3. In the Author's Note, John admits, “I have never made a story up. I have just never been able to leave one the size I found it.” Is there a real difference between stretching a story and inventing one? Did his confessing it up front make you trust him more, or less?
4. Kirk's death at sixteen sits at the center of the book. How did the chapter about him (“Sixteen Years”) affect you? Has a loss ever changed the way you live?
5. Mrs. Castner saw something in John that he could not see in himself. Who has done that for you, and have you ever done it for someone else?
6. The diamond sat forgotten in a closet for years before becoming an engagement ring. What “good things” in your life arrived through doors you would not have chosen?
7. Abigail the dog fled her shelter to sit out in the storm. Where do people you know — or you yourself — run from the very things that could keep them safe?
8. As a small boy, John sat at the top of the stairs in the dark because he had decided he was guarding the house. What did you appoint yourself to before anyone asked you to? Do you still do it?

On the Big Ideas

9. John does not regret a single decision, because every road led to people and lessons he would never give up. Do you agree that regret is “the fantasy that you could keep the good while subtracting the pain”? Is there anything you regret that this reframes?
10. “God almost never arrives in the limousine. God arrives on the donkey.” What donkey have you walked right past while watching the road for a limousine?
11. The book wrestles honestly with fate versus free will. Where do you land, and did the book move you at all?
12. John distinguishes success (what you accumulate) from significance (what you leave behind). Which have you been chasing? Has that balance shifted over your life?
13. He argues that nothing in his past was wasted. Looking at your own life, can you see a “curriculum” in things that once felt random?

Looking Inward

14. What is the one thing you have been putting off — the call, the leap, the apology, the dream — that the book made you think about?
15. If you wrote a one-sentence personal mission statement, like John's “I am a learner, a teacher, and a healer,” what might yours be?
16. John calls 9/11 the morning he truly came to believe. Has a single morning ever divided your life into a “before” and an “after”?
17. In “Touch,” John holds his newborn daughter and, years later, helps release his dying father. He says holding on and letting go “are both just love, doing what the season requires.” Have you had to do both?
18. John tells of thanking a teacher decades later, and thanking a principal too late. Is there someone you need to thank while you still can?

On the Ending

19. The book refuses to ask you to leap. Instead it asks for an inch. Is asking for an inch instead of a leap a lowering of the bar, or the only thing that has ever actually worked?
20. In the Afterword, John admits the book had no professional editor, because he was not willing to risk it coming back as someone else's. Was that the right trade? Would you have made it?
21. He suspects your own life has a shape you have simply never sat down and looked at. When did you last look at yours?
22. The book ends with a single word: Go. What, specifically, is yours to go and do?

A Closing Exercise

Go around the circle, and have each person finish these two sentences out loud:

“The tug I have been ignoring is…”
“The inch I will take before we meet again is…”

You need not solve anything. Naming it, together, is the whole exercise, and the inch is the whole point. Have someone write them down. Then, when your group next gathers, before you talk about anything else, ask the only question that finally matters: did you take it?

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