It Takes a Tribe Quotes

“We don’t do superstars in our Tough Mudder world—but if we were to, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Amelia Boone, an athlete who now features regularly on the cover of Runner’s World and who has been the women’s champion at World’s Toughest three times. An in-house lawyer for Apple in Silicon Valley, Amelia is among the only competitors to keep running for twenty-four hours in the desert without a rest. She keeps coming back not for the glory of “winning” but because, she says, “you will never find a race like World’s Toughest Mudder—where you are technically running against other people but where you will still see the leader out there stopping to help people up over walls or out of the water. It is just this unwritten rule; no one questions it, that is how it is.” Amelia studied social anthropology before she became a lawyer, with an interest in the way that social norms and gossip were used by indigenous tribes to create and maintain healthy and coherent cultures. Tough Mudder, she suggests, is the closest she has come to seeing that tribal spirit in action in the contemporary world. “If I am out for a run and I see someone wearing a Tough Mudder headband or T-Shirt, there is always a big smile and a nod of recognition between us,” she says, as if she is speaking of a pair of Yanomami natives coming across each other on a forest trail. It’s a nod, she suggests, that communicates a great many things—not only shared philosophies and kinship but also the recognition that “I may well have pushed your wet ass over a wall at some point last year.”
― Will Dean, It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement

“If that sounds cultish, I’m unapologetic. When organizations talk about creating an innovative business culture, a lot of people focus on the external symbols. The ping-pong and foosball tables in the office, the team-building Thursday beers after work, the company ski weekends, and the anything-goes dress code. At TMHQ we have all those things. But they are marginal to what we are really about. A culture is built up over months and years of good practice, questioning, and improvement. Of doing things the right way and having anyone who comes into the group or participates in an event recognize what that means. Culture is all the things that happen in an organization when the boss isn’t looking. Tony Hsieh describes, in his book Delivering Happiness, how he built his online shoe business Zappos by concentrating on service and integrity above all else. “Your personal core values define who you are,” he argued, “and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” I think that’s true, and doubly so when you are “delivering happiness” as an experience that asks people to take on and display some of the virtues of that culture themselves. In this sense, we believed, in our initial phase of recruiting, that a candidate’s previous career path and qualifications were less important than his or her willingness to embrace our credo. Though we had no experience in event management, the plan was never to go out and hire people from the event industry. We had obstacles where participants jump through flames and we feared the first thing an outside event person might instinctively do was pull out a fire extinguisher.”
― Will Dean, It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement

“I tell this story here to begin to offer an answer to the question posed by the title of this chapter: What Makes a Tough Mudder? It’s my belief that ideas for new businesses that capture people’s imagination don’t ever arise by accident. There is a kind of inevitability about them. They form as answers to questions that have existed in their founders’ minds for years before finding the right expression. To a degree these things are subconscious. But I’m sure it wasn’t entirely by chance that having grown up in a place that had dramatically lost its identity and purpose, I was drawn to try to create a business and a culture that might offer a version of those values in a different way and to a new generation. Did I already carry some of that nostalgia for grit and camaraderie with me from Worksop when my parents made a huge financial sacrifice and sent me away to an exclusive boarding school at age thirteen? I’d like to think so. The result of that sacrifice was not necessarily the one my parents thought they were paying for, though. I felt that I didn’t quite belong in the rough-edged town of my birth, but I also wasn’t convinced I belonged in the more privileged world of the English shires a hundred miles south. A place where nobody but me seemed to come from an industrial town at all. I went from one community that I didn’t fit into to another—but again, as something of an outsider, there were aspects of that new culture that intrigued me, that got me thinking about how shared values might be created, how I might feel like I belonged.”
― Will Dean, It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement

“In her book Grit, social psychologist Angela Duckworth identifies the single quality that most marks those who succeed in life, those who feel fulfilled, from those who find life one long series of frustrations. The quality boils down to this: the understanding that your personality and character are not fixed but can be shaped and strengthened by overcoming difficult experiences. There are voices in everyone’s head that resist that fact, that tell us we will never achieve this or that, so there is no point in even trying. Again, our business was designed to help silence a few of those voices. One of the questions we asked ourselves when we created Tough Mudder was this: How do you create a culture and an authentic experience that will reliably deliver grit, a quality that people seem to crave but don’t know how to find? This craving, our grit-shaped hole, feels like a recent phenomenon. It is a by-product perhaps of our fortune in living, in the Western world at least, in largely peaceful times, when work is more likely to involve generating a PowerPoint presentation than any kind of hard labor. When—to put it in blunt evolutionary terms—millennia of hunting and gathering have been replaced by a trip to the supermarket. Ease and convenience are great in their way, but for many of us life no longer routinely presents the kind of challenges that once developed resilience—and genetically, psychologically, I believe we miss those challenges. In most other times and places those trials came hard and fast, and though we might not always have welcomed them, they allowed us to show what we were capable of, gave us a sense of purpose in ourselves, and a sense of belonging in our community.”
― Will Dean, It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement