The Spartan Way: Eat Better. Train Better. Think Better. Be Better.

by Joe De Sena

It wasn’t just about building up his physical strength. He was also building up his mental endurance. Tell someone to do thirty reps of push-ups or run five miles and they’re already anticipating the finish line. It’s well defined. You know what to expect. It’s much harder when the endpoint is unknown—it changes the game. When you tell someone to chop wood without stopping or hike up and down a mountain—a distance he can only guess at—he’s either going to crash and burn or find the psychological fortitude to endure. The trick is to bring him as close to breaking as you can in order to help him see the power in that psychological grit. We even made Chris write his own obituary. It’s sort of a mind game to force him to articulate what he hopes his legacy will be. You’ll have a chance to try that exercise at the end of chapter 1.

I love that line: “If you can compromise once, you can compromise again.” Giving in once makes it easier to give in a second and third time and a fourth.

Extraordinary quo

Your True North is always inside of you. You just need to find it. It’s a fixed point set by your deeply held beliefs and values. And it’s drawing you toward one direction. If you fight it, you’ll quickly lose your bearings and become lost. Align with it and your True North will act like a high-speed train pulling you through life.

The second is what neuroscientists call your default mode network (DMN), because it engages when not much is going on in the real world and you have the time and space to think about yourself, ruminate about that sales presentation, worry about what your teenagers are doing, or daydream about a vacation.

They made a startling discovery: People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing. In other words: mind-wandering. Imagine that. Half of our lives are spent spacing out. That is the human brain’s default mode of operation. The problem is, Killingsworth and Gilbert say, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

Mind-wandering throughout the day

Next step: With a clear head, actively identify your guiding values. I like to think of my core values as the bull’s-eyes of life and my beliefs as the arrows that either hit or miss those targets. For example, if you value being healthy but you believe it’s okay to smoke a few cigarettes every day, then you are not going to hit your target, and you’re not going to be healthy. If you value family, like I do, but you believe you have to work eighty-hour weeks, including weekends, regularly missing events in your kids’ lives, then you’re not going to hit that target. If you value becoming your company’s top-producing salesperson, but you allow your wandering mind to ruminate on past failures and rejection, it’ll be hard to get out of your head and into your next sales call. To have a clear sight of your True North, you have to be shooting at the right targets with the right arrows at all times. That means aligning your values and beliefs with your daily activities. If you value exercise, you build exercise into your day. If you value community, you find a way to spend time with friends, neighbors, and civic organizations

Understand youre guiding values

Life is not a destination, it’s just a journey, so in everything you do, do it one step at a time and do it better than anybody else. There’s no reason to do anything half-ass. If you’re driven you can succeed. Passion is probably the most important thing in the world. If it doesn’t make your heart pump Kool-Aid, it’s probably not worth doing.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED Elizabeth Weil, Managing Director, 137 Ventures, and marathoner Everyone should have a small personal advisory board. Those people should be peppered from weird spots in your life. So it might be an old professor or an old colleague, someone who knows you very, very well. Check in with those people and have them be your gut check as you go through life.

importance I place on commitment, the second Spartan success principle. I see very few gray areas here. Commitment is critical to success,

Do you know what commitment is? It’s a compelling personal promise you make that determines how you will lead your life day to day, moment to moment. The beauty of committing yourself is that it makes the rest of life’s decisions easy for you. If you look to your True North for direction, it’s easy to say “no” to a cocktail offer, a third slice of pizza, or a meeting that will take you away from a scheduled workout. You can tell the boss “no” to working the weekend without regret because your commitment to family comes first. Do you see now how important identifying your True North is to this second virtue? How completely you commit to your path will determine if you reach your destination or metaphorically disembowel yourself along the way.

I signed my boys up for a wrestling camp in Upstate New York. An intensive fourteen-and-under wrestling camp is about as close as a kid can get to experiencing a Spartan agoge. Wrestling is just a tough fucking sport. It’s no wonder the Special Forces recruit from college wrestling programs.

Turning Pro, his follow-up to The War of Art, he explains that the main difference between an amateur and a pro is their “depth of commitment. The amateur’s commitment is shallow. The professional’s is deep.”

Depth of commitment

Commitment requires complete honesty. It means that you will do what you said you were going to do, even when you don’t feel like doing it. Anything less is pointless. There’s no “maybe” in commitment.

Pride. Use it to your advantage. You can make public accountability even more effective by posting your commitment goals on social media and frequently updating your progress. Here’s an example: In an experiment, researchers at Dominican University of California recruited 267 people from businesses, organizations, and networking groups for a study on goal achievement and accountability. The participants were randomly assigned to five groups: Group 1 was asked to only think about business goals they wanted to accomplish in a four-week period and rank them by importance, and difficulty. Groups 2 to 5 were given the same task but were instructed to actually write down their goals and rate them on paper. Group 3 was also asked to write an action plan for each goal. Group 4 also wrote an action plan but was asked to share their goals and action commitments with a friend. Group 5 went the farthest by doing all of the above, but each also sent a detailed weekly progress report to a friend. At the end of the study, the people who used more commitment tools achieved significantly more of their goals. Lead researcher Gail Matthews, PhD, reported that in Group 5, which publicly committed to their goals and shared weekly progress updates, 76 percent of participants either completed or nearly completed their goals. Compare that to just 43 percent of participants in Group 1, who only thought about their goals.

commitment by President John F. Kennedy transformed

You can simply look around and see who in your life is counting on you to commit to getting healthy, finding a job, building your business, freeing up your time, or doing whatever takes you toward your True North. Look around and see who will inspire you, believe in you, and root for you. They are the first people to share your commitment with.

commit to … cutting processed foods out of my diet. I commit to … saving an extra $100 a week for retirement. I commit to … avoiding alcohol for thirty days. I commit to … calling an old friend once a week and reestablishing long-dormant relationships. I commit to … going to bed by 10 p.m. every night so I can be well rested for the next day. I commit to … losing twenty-five pounds in the next thirty days. I commit to … taking a continuing education course at a local college every semester to learn a new skill or broaden my base of knowledge. I commit to … exercising for 30 minutes every

Ex. Of commitment

Step 2. CREATE A SOLID PLAN for active engagement that moves you toward your goal every day. See, talk is cheap, but that’s what we humans do very well. Execution is hard. Always has been. Human beings procrastinate. They lack follow-through and self-control. The ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle knew this

whom you respect who has mastered commitment. A series of studies at the University of Georgia conducted a few years back suggests that self-control is contagious and hanging out with people who exhibit good self-control behavior—or even thinking about someone with strong self-control—can help you improve your own self-control.

That’s why passion is so friggin’ valuable.

When people ask me how’s my day, I say, “Awesome. How could my day be anything less? I’m alive, right? The sun’s shining. The mountains are beautiful.” You’ve got to love life. Don’t be a fucking Grinch. Enthusiastic is much more appealing than miserable, isn’t it?

“What if I pulled back a bit?” Changed the race from a week in the wilderness to a three- or five-hour event? Made it more accessible to all types of people whose lives needed the kind of testing conditions of an extreme physical challenge? I realized then that the brutal terrain of Peak.com was a pathway leading me to Spartan. Of course, building this new company was not going to be easy.

Activation is the decision to start. You activated your new journey when you committed to pursuing your True North. Persistence is the continued effort toward a goal even though obstacles may exist. I have a goal of doing three hundred burpees every morning. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing them, so I make a decision to start and then ten turns into twenty. Twenty turns into fifty, and so on. As long as I persist, I will finally reach my goal. Intensity is the focus and energy that goes into pursuing a goal.

After analyzing data from more than 5,800 Americans, exercise scientists at BYU figured out that people who are highly physically active are actually biologically younger than their chronological age by almost ten years.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, keeps the fire stoked. Here’s scientific proof: Back in the early 1970s, a group of psychologists conducted an experiment with preschool kids who loved to draw. Some of the children were given crayons and paper and told to have fun. A second group was told that if they drew a picture, they would receive a cool “good player” certificate, complete with silky ribbon. A couple of weeks later, the same activity was introduced back into the class. This time the scientists found that the kids who drew in order to win the ribbon (the extrinsic reward) showed much less intrinsic interest in drawing than those who had taken part purely for the enjoyment of drawing.

Patience eventually becomes power. When you are a master of your choices, you are not a slave to impulses, bad habits, and the whims of other people. When you couple delayed gratification with perseverance, you have a commanding weapon in your utility belt, which is why it’s a core Spartan virtue.

One requirement of achieving the Spartan way of life is changing eating habits from calorie-dense to nutrient-rich. This means eating lots of whole foods—food that is as close to its natural form as possible, like fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes, nuts, grass-fed meats, seafood, and eggs. However, if you’ve been filling your fridge—and your body—with processed snack foods and fast-food meals for the last few decades, going cold turkey on Kentucky Fried Chicken may be hard to do.

On increasing discipline part 1

WHAT I’VE LEARNED When (money) becomes the sole goal, there are sacrifices. I still drive the broken-down 2004 used Volkswagen Golf I always have. I’ve found that the low-burn lifestyle as opposed to ever more money gives you an incredible amount of leverage because, in the worst-case scenario, you’re covered. —Tim Ferriss, author, entrepreneur

Hmm

The reason sugar is such a troublemaker is how it messes with our bodies and makes it harder to say “no” to more sugar in the future. Like a drug, it tickles the pleasure center in our brains and causes us to want more and more. Eating sugar retrains your taste buds, causing you to require more and more sugar to enjoy the same sweetness. And when you’re eating more sugar, you’re eating less healthy food the rest of the day.

When your brain runs low on glucose (sugar), you become foggy, less attentive, more irrational, making you less likely to be able to control your impulses. And you go hunting urgently for another quick sugar dose. The vicious cycle continues over and over. That’s how sugar can destroy your best dietary intentions. It blows the willpower out of your brain.

This guy goes around collecting practical advice for better living from people who’ve earned the knowledge—America’s elderly folks. In one segment of the project, Pillemer asked more than twelve hundred people over the age of sixty-five what they regretted most when they looked back on their lives. The most common answer? “Worrying too much.” They realized too late that they wasted so much of life fretting over events they couldn’t control.

Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately). 2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later). 3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else). 4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate). Here’s what the Eisenhower box looks like:

Hmm

you’re building your own business, creating strong habits can steady your path to success. In a conversation with entrepreneur and author Tim Ferriss, he told me that he has a number of daily habits that enable him to prioritize what is important for him to achieve that day. For starters, he narrows his daily “to-do” list down to one or two items. He also blocks out his morning to do active tasks such as writing, planning, and creating. Then in the afternoon, he concentrates more on management-related, reactive tasks such as telephone calls, sending emails, and meetings. Tim also has a habit of doing two or three quick, fun tasks first thing before he rolls up his sleeves to tackle the more challenging assignments. He calls these Scooby Snacks and they act as cues to help him launch into his day with greater enthusiasm.

Thats an interesting philosophy

So how do you build the Spartan virtue of grit? How do you remain committed to your True North when you’re being pounded by adversity and receiving body blow after body blow of bad luck? Duckworth has a recipe. She says the four ingredients for grit are passion, practice, purpose, and hope. As you’ve already learned in this book, identifying your passion and following your True North are vital to success. Sometimes you have a lot of passions, as I did: The pool business, Wall Street, and endurance racing. That’s okay. Looking back, I see a through line that links all these interests in my life, a line that also empowered me to develop grit along the way.

Most of us have things way too easy. We face very little adversity in our lives. And that’s a shame because adversity builds character. That’s why I like to manufacture adversity. A Spartan Race is manufactured adversity. The obstacles are designed to be really tough to show people that they can overcome adversity and find growth in the accomplishment.

Embracing adversity

years later, he would make his first million, and by the time he was thirty-five years old he employed 1,265 people.

Franklin Roosevelt became partially paralyzed at age thirty-nine after developing polio. His confinement to a wheelchair didn’t prevent him from going on to lead the country as one of the most popular presidents of all time. Surfer Bethany Hamilton survived a shark attack at age thirteen and lost her left arm in the accident. This didn’t stop her from becoming a professional surfer and an inspiration to millions. “I don’t need easy,” Bethany has said. “I just need possible.” These are just some stories of well-known people who have overcome adversity to build hugely successful lives.

Very true

As it turned out, about a third of the kids they followed had been born into extremely adverse situations: families struggling with abject poverty, alcoholism, and mental illness. Many of these kids had developed serious learning and behavior problems by the age of ten. But here’s the surprise: When Werner and Smith published their findings five decades later, they were able to show that not all of the kids growing up at risk reacted to their stressors in the same way. In fact, one-third of the kids that the two psychologists ended up calling “vulnerable, but invincible,” displayed all the hallmarks of successful living. They didn’t just excel in school, they often exceeded those children who had grown up in more economically secure and stable homes. They grew into adults with good lives. None of them ever relied on social services or got into trouble with the law. They even had much lower rates of divorce and fewer chronic health problems by age forty than the more fortunate kids turned out to have. Werner and Smith wrote, “Their very existence challenges the myth that a child who is a member of a so-called ‘high-risk’ group is fated to become one of life’s losers.”

Werner and Smith identified three key elements that buffered the kids against life’s cruel blows. The first was an internal one: The kids were nice. Even as babies they were friendly and good-natured. They were good at figuring things out on their own. As they grew, these traits developed into helpfulness and confidence. The second factor: These kids forged a strong bond with at least one functioning family member. This could be a parent or someone from their extended family like a grandparent. The psychologists said that the resilient children seemed good at recruiting surrogate parents. That was true of Karim Jaude. When his father died, Karim turned to his uncles. The third protective factor that made a difference was community support, usually a coach or favorite teacher. What’s interesting is that when these kids became successful adults, they continued to seek out community mentors when they needed help.

I like what Dennis Charney has to say in his book Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.

Future read

As I mentioned before, one of the reasons my wife and I move our family to live in other countries is to embrace adversity by forcing ourselves out of our comfort zone.

And take note of how the real pros do it. The biathlon event in the Winter Olympics combines cross-country skiing and target shooting with a 22-caliber rifle. Churning his legs and arms to get swiftly across rugged alpine terrain, a biathlete’s heart rate hits two hundred beats per minute. Then he must stop, un-sling his rifle, and bring his heart rate down enough to steady his hands and mind to take aim at a target fifty meters away. A top biathlete can lower his heart rate to 140 beats per minute in just twenty seconds in order to be calm and steady enough to aim accurately. How? By training his body through deep breathing techniques and by exhaling extra CO2 to counteract the lactic acid buildup in his muscles. You can use the same technique when in the throes of panic and faced with a trauma or anxiety-producing adversity. Try it now: Do fifteen burpees to simulate the rapid, shallow breathing of a panic attack. Next, blow out with a strong, deliberate abdominal contraction by pulling your belly button back toward your spine. This forces a higher volume-in breath. Now, relax your belly and breathe in deeply, allowing your belly to rise before your chest to ensure that you fill your entire lung space. Bringing a higher volume of oxygen into your lungs will relax you by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. Do it again and again as you feel your heart rate start to return to normal. When you’re relaxed with a head full of oxygenated blood in your brain, you are...

Ive got to try this out

minor glitch in Japan. Many people have faced much, much worse. If you’re ever feeling defeated and want to change your frame of reference, visit Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. That’s where you’ll witness real adversity and grit in the veterans rehabbing from terrible injuries.

Visit this place

In other words, their idea of tough work came from an entirely different frame of reference than mine. The Greek philosophers known as the Stoics knew the value of changing the frame of reference. The Stoics embraced hardship and poverty. One of the best-known Stoics, Seneca the Younger, was very wealthy but he would “practice poverty.” He believed the wealthy should experience being poor by wearing shabby clothes and scavenging for food. He wrote, “A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.” By regularly rehearsing being poor, he rationalized, your perception of your current situation would radically change so that you’d come to appreciate what you already had.

Step 1. RECOGNIZE YOUR PESSIMISM. Your frame of reference is the context in which you view a situation. To change it, you first need to see it clearly for what it is. Identify your negativity. Explore your pessimism. Write down your negative thoughts and assumptions in a column on the left side of a sheet of lined paper.

life to force yourself out of your comfort zone. Here’s some deliberate adversity to try: Delayed Gratification Challenge: • Skip dinner one day. • Avoid alcohol for two weeks. • Only buy food from farm stands this week. • Eat meatless meals for one week. • Fast for sixteen hours. Technology Challenge: ○ Turn off your cell phone for one week. ○ Do not use any form of social media for a week. ○ Unplug the television. ○ Mow the lawn with a push mower. ○ Build a fire without matches (using a flint and steel). ○ Ride your bicycle to work or to the grocery store. Exercise Challenge: ○ Wake up at 5 a.m. to exercise. ○ Do thirty burpees every day. ○ Go for a hike wearing a backpack loaded with forty pounds of gear or several sandbags. ○ Work out once in the morning and once in the evening daily for one week. ○ Train for a classic one hundred–mile “century” bike ride. ○ If you can’t do a single pull-up, start by practicing a dead hang. Just grab a pull-up bar and hang as long as you can to build grip and arm strength. Then work up to doing one pull-up and then ten. Next build up to fifteen and so on. Relationships Challenge: ○ Take a day off in the middle of the week and do not check in with work. ○ Never miss dinner with the family because of work. ○ Take your wife on a date once a week. ○ Call or hand-write a note to a different friend each week. ○ Apologize to someone you have hurt or wronged. ○ Join an enthusiast club or service organization. ○ Volunteer at a soup kitchen or a...

Deliberate adversity challenges

met with these buyers. They had done their research. They determined that there were five or six guys at my firm who were responsible for 80 percent of our revenue. Instead of buying me out, they poached my staff. They offered these guys each $1 million a year. I didn’t have a contract with these employees because they were my guys, friends from the old neighborhood who came to work for me.

these people. And you can, too. If you want to practice being honorable and building the skills to live a life of integrity, try this exercise: 1. Think about the people you most admire. Make a list of these people. They may be people you know personally, family, friends, people at work, or in your community. Also, consider people you don’t personally know: Sports heroes, politicians, entertainers, business people, authors, educators, spiritual leaders, and historical figures. Your list can be as long or as short as you’d like. 2. Now next to each name, write down the traits and qualities that you admire in that person. Some might include courage, reliability, compassion, conscience, fearlessness, conviction, responsibility, frugality, fairness, respect, commitment, loyalty, tolerance—the list goes on and on. 3. Finally, identify the three to five people whose character traits you would like to have. Write those character traits on an index card and refer to it whenever you have to make a choice that impacts your integrity.

Box jellyfish are considered the most toxic animal on the planet. Their venom is so painful a swimmer who is

she wrote a fascinating book called The Energy of Money: A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Personal Fulfillment.

Future read