by Will Dean
The Olympic Games are an interesting case study. The games are, of course, a celebration of extreme personal achievement, measured in fractions of millimeters and hundredths of seconds. But in all of this triumph and defeat there are memorable expressions of a communal spirit too.
In Rio 2016, the most celebrated example of this spirit came in the semifinal of the women’s 5,000 meters. With one lap to go, New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin and Abbey D’Agostino of the United States tripped over each other and fell heavily onto the track. Their genuine hopes of making the final—to which they had dedicated years of effort and sacrifice—went down with them. They could have been forgiven for cursing their luck or cursing each other. Instead, Hamblin, first to her feet, did not try to catch up with the race; she stopped to check on her injured rival. She then helped D’Agostino up—the American had torn her cruciate ligament—and supported her to the finish line.
That moment affected everyone who saw it. It was shared on social media just as often as Usain Bolt’s victory grin or Mo Farah’s eye-bulging sprint finish. It affected us in part because it was a moment of true sportsmanship in all the “race-face” focus of an Olympic semifinal. But more important was that it was done spontaneously. Hamblin and D’Agostino didn’t think twice about where their priorities lay. They weren’t denying the thrill of pushing themselves as hard as they could—they had devoted their lives to that—but they also were courageous enough to know that sometimes other values, and other people, were just as important. Sport matters because, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
I’ve mentioned how one of the light-bulb moments for the creation of Tough Mudder was the experience during a triathlon when I couldn’t free a stuck zipper on my wetsuit, and—comically—no one was prepared to give up the couple of seconds it would have required to help me. Set against this was another experience. When I lived in London and was working for the FCO, I used to go kite surfing as often as I could at a place called Hayling Island on the south coast. The sport was quite new in the United Kingdom, and I loved the physicality and adrenaline rush of it. All that was made possible, though, by the camaraderie of the early adopters.
Kite-surfing equipment has evolved a lot since then, but in those days it was almost impossible to launch a kite on your own. You had to ask someone to hold your kite into the wind while you clipped yourself into the harness to get started. This was a relatively small thing to ask, but you felt like you were being a real pal to someone by doing it—and they were being a real pal to you for doing the same. Out of these small acts of generosity and kindness a very strong community was quickly created. Beginner or veteran, the kite surfers of Hayling Island were all looking for some personal thrills but were also all in it together.
When I started Tough Mudder I found a lot of other people who had come to this idea by different routes, both among early participants and in the team in the office. Tough Mudder attracted surfers and climbers in disproportionate numbers because they understood the value of mutual cooperation to achieve a tough physical challenge. Alex Patterson, our original in-house lawyer—and do-or-die obstacle-tester—loved it because it reminded him of his years as a lifeguard on a beach on Long Island.
“Lifeguarding is in a lot of ways like Tough Mudder,” Alex suggests now. “It’s athletic but it’s not a competition. You work hard and play hard, and no one’s above having a beer or two after getting off the stand at night. But most important no lifeguard swims out to a victim and says, ‘I’m going to race you back in.’ In Tough Mudder, it’s a bit the same. Stronger Mudders might sit up there on one of the walls and spend twenty minutes helping people over, and you have this same feeling of satisfaction and connection, of literally offering a hand.”
There are, of course, wider lessons in this fact. It probably explains why the event has resonated among groups that prize high-performance teamwork: military servicemen and -women, firefighters, police officers, teachers, and nurses, people who know all about the satisfaction of relying on each other to help others. But it also explains the appeal to people whose day jobs don’t offer that camaraderie but who crave some of it in their lives.
My early research suggested that one response to the financial crash of 2008, and the austerity politics that followed, was a sharply increased focus on health and fitness. Having lost some control in one important aspect of their lives—jobs and money—people tried to exert a bit more control over another aspect: their bodies.
This trend had been strengthening for a while, of course, with the growth of marathons and 10Ks and Pilates and spin classes and all the rest. But at the same time, it seemed to me that not all that exercise was doing what it was designed to do. Rather than being an escape from the pressures and stresses of work, at its extreme it looked like another expression of them.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for being in good shape and living healthily. I exercise pretty much every day, try to eat a balanced diet, and I couldn’t be without the sense of well-being that lifestyle provides. I love the idea of pushing yourself to find your limits and then going beyond them. But it sometimes felt like many of the workaholics I knew (and I was sometimes guilty of this myself) were in danger of taking all their obsessive habits to the treadmill. Joe De Sena at Spartan Race sometimes talks about a few percent of excess body fat in terms of good and evil. That seemed to me a little extreme. Some gym regimes seemed to encourage a “subway mentality.” Everyone was plugged into a headset or watching TV while they trained staring into a mirror. They sweated next to other people sweating without once making eye contact. And where was the fun in that?
We wanted Tough Mudder to offer another way of doing things, for a few reasons. An overriding one was a belief that total self-reliance, while a great thing in many ways, will never make us happy on its own. Sometimes we have to risk pitching in with everybody else, just for the hell of it, and see where we end up. Contemporary life, with its gated living and insistence on virtual rather than actual communities, often seemed to resist that idea. Adam Grant, the author of Give and Take, whose ideas have been an inspiration to our business, suggests that “Americans see independence as a symbol of strength, viewing interdependence as a sign of weakness.” At Tough Mudder we wondered if that balance might just shift a little.
I’d developed an understanding of the benefits of greater balance between those forces, as I’ve tried to set out in this book, from various experiences growing up, and in the Foreign Office and at Harvard. There was plenty of research to back up this understanding. Grant, a professor at the Wharton School, broadly divides people into three groups by their dominant behavior: There are “takers” (we all know a few) who make it their life’s work to receive more from others than they give in return. Then, second, there are people who display “matching behavior” who live by a principle of fairness and who believe that one good turn deserves another (“Matchers” understand that cooperation makes the world go around: you help me and I’ll help you). And then there are the “Givers.” These are people who routinely go out of their way to do more than is demanded of them, even when there is no prospect of personal gain. They don’t do cost-benefit analysis of their actions. They give because they believe in, and thrive on, giving.
Grant has done long-term studies of how these philosophies play out in the real—commercial—world. The conclusions are fascinating. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most people display a version of matching behavior that puts them in the center of the graph of success, measured in terms of financial reward. Takers, meanwhile, often do well in the short term, but over a longer period their philosophy is less successful as Matchers work out that they are being ripped off.
The outlier group in this study, though, are the Givers. No one will be surprised that Givers tend to occupy the lowest percentiles of the success graph—after all, they give more effort, more time, more commitment than the others without expectation of anything in return—and that is often how it turns ou
t.
But there is a counterintuitive fact. Those who end up consistently at the very top of the graph, who achieve the greatest rewards, are Givers too. They are people for whom nothing is too much trouble. As the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” Grant shows these benefits are likely to be material as well as leading to greater contentment.
We all know a few Givers in our lives, people who willingly do so much that they make us feel a bit hopeless for what we offer. One of my own examples is Sarah Robb O’Hagan, who until recently was president of the Equinox fitness group, whose brands include Pure Yoga and SoulCycle. Sarah is one of those people who, when you ask her for a bit of help with something in a one-line e-mail, will send seven thoughtful and encouraging paragraphs of advice within minutes and then subsequently hooks you up with all sorts of ideas and people who might help with your problem. She doesn’t sometimes go the extra mile; she always does. We invited Sarah, a multiple Tough Mudder, to talk about her philosophy at our last annual company weekend retreat in Upstate New York. She stole the show.
Sarah left Equinox last year to set up Extreme You. The project aims to inspire and mentor millennials and twentysomethings who are looking for more meaning and direction in their lives. Sarah’s research suggests that this group is less inclined than earlier generations to put itself on the line or make itself vulnerable. “It’s tough for this generation who have been helicopter-parented through school and then on graduating are told ‘go and find your passion,’” she says. “In my experience, people who are very passionate in their work originally just got stuck in at something to start with and worked for hours and hours at it. The effort itself generated the passion. And they found that worked in all areas of their lives. They give things a go. That’s the reason it makes me really happy that something like Tough Mudder is doing well in the world. It finds the people who have it in them to challenge themselves, and gives them the role models and opportunity to go for it.”
Sarah’s passion for Extreme You is infectious. I think the project reveals a lot about the relationship between personal ambition and the barriers to success. Some of this has had to do with the evolution in how we communicate. The generation that has grown up with digital media has become used to relatively one-sided risk-free interactions. Texting “sorry” is not as hard as saying “sorry.” It is one thing to have the courage to ask someone on a date face-to-face (with or without a tinfoil sword and pirate outfit). It’s another to let Tinder do the background checks. Clicking a box to support a cause online is not the same thing as getting up early in the rain to go on a march. What is lost in these online actions is the vulnerability and risk of putting ourselves out there; if there is no effort or cost in what we do, then there is also no reward when we succeed, and no lesson when we fail.
Social media lets us present our edited and perfect selves to the world, and that often means that we are less fully engaged in the here and now. In this one-sided interaction, something often gets lost. In a recent survey, 89 percent of Americans admitted they took out a phone at their last social encounter, and 82 percent said that they felt the conversation deteriorated after they did so. We are not going to get rid of our miraculous phones anytime soon, nor would most of us want to. Tough Mudder communities couldn’t begin to exist without social media connections, but it’s the event itself that makes those bonds meaningful. It serves as a reminder that Instagramming friends is not generally as enjoyable as seeing them—or rolling around in the mud with them—and that social people (which is all of us) sometimes forget how to be social.
New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks set out the consequences of some of our digital habits very clearly in his 2011 book The Social Animal. “Decades ago, people typically told pollsters that they had four or five close friends, people to whom they could tell everything,” Brooks observed. “Now the common answer is two or three. . . . At the same time, social trust has declined. Surveys ask, ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?’ In the early 1960s, significant majorities said that people can generally be trusted. But in the 1990s the distrusters had a 20-percentage-point margin over the trusters, and those margins have increased in the years since.” If we take the extra risk of interacting with people in the real world, as opposed to online, we rebuild that trust.
If Homo sapiens were in a zoo, the crate would be marked in big bold letters: DO NOT HOUSE IN ISOLATION. But the way we live and work often seems to run counter to that instruction. I was recently approached by some researchers from Harvard Divinity School working on a project called How We Gather, which was looking at the decline in communal activity in relation to the decline of religion (and also such social constructs as clubs, societies, and trades unions). They wanted me to talk about the tribal aspects of Tough Mudder, the ways it brought people of different ages and backgrounds together. How We Gather was looking at a new type of business that was emerging to fill the part of people’s lives that religion once satisfied. It suggests that while young people are often not looking for traditional faith communities, they are still very much looking for some of the benefits—togetherness, belonging, meaning—those communities once provided.
Groups centered on health and fitness are a big part of that new sense of How We Gather. Companies like CrossFit and SoulCycle inspire togetherness and offer a philosophy to their users, one of mutual emotional support and shared fitness goals.
The How We Gather researchers saw Tough Mudder as a wayward cousin to those groups. I like to think of us in that way too: different branches of the same family. Like us, CrossFit and SoulCycle are in the business of changing lives through physical challenges. And the comparison with faith is not completely fanciful—as anyone who wanders for the first time into a SoulCycle session will know. This is no ordinary spin class. It’s a journey, mostly for women, led by inspirational instructors by candlelight. As the How We Gather researchers note, “Every week, fifty thousand riders are rejuvenated by inspiring words and liturgy-like music playlists that give meaning to their workout. . . .”
It would be fair to say Tough Mudder aims to offer a much more down-to-earth kind of inspiration—our playlists run from Oasis to the White Stripes to Drake and all beats in between—but, I think, the effects can be no less transformational. And they are catching.
Back in 2012 I received a job application from Marc Ackerman for the position of junior lawyer. Marc was clearly overqualified. He had spent twenty years working for prestigious New York law firms, of late as a senior partner. He had been a litigator focusing on sports—his clients included the National Football League, the National Hockey League, ESPN, and the International Olympic Committee. Guy and I met him to ask a single question. Why on earth was he applying for a junior legal role with Tough Mudder?
Marc’s answer was interesting. He said that despite his success as a lawyer, in recent years and particularly since the financial crash, he’d lost a bit of faith in what he did. A squeeze on costs had proved to him how the partnership ethos he had enjoyed was quite fragile, and some self-serving behavior of colleagues when the going got tough made him feel disillusioned. He had been looking around, he said, for something more fulfilling to do with his working life. At around this point, Marc told us, a friend mentioned something about Tough Mudder, how it was like a whole new type of sport. And so he had looked up our Web site and liked what he saw and applied for the only lawyer job going. If there wasn’t a fit, he thought, at least he gave himself a chance to meet a potential new (and different) client.
We told Marc that obviously we couldn’t begin to match his previous salary. That we were not about to be the NFL or ESPN of fitness—at least not anytime soon. He said that didn’t matter, so we worked out a deal and a role, and Marc remains with us
as our general counsel and all-around voice of reason.
He says now—and not just to me—that he has never regretted the change for an instant. That deal was sealed for him at one of the first Tough Mudder events he went to. He wanted to test his faith, he recalls, so he came along in civilian clothes and walked the course without announcing he worked for the company. At one point, Marc came across a huddle of Mudders in between obstacles. It was a very cold day, and they were wet through, covered in mud, shivering and waiting for a friend who was taking a breather. “I went up to this group,” Marc recalls, “and asked them, ‘How’s it going?’ They looked like some of the wettest and coldest people I’d ever seen. One of them looked at me, and I’ll never forget it, and said with a big grin, ‘This is honestly the greatest experience of my life—it is so different from anything I’ve ever done.’ The others all agreed and when their friend recovered they set off sliding up the hill.”
I don’t think the experience that Marc describes is at all unusual at our events. People take up the challenge for a thousand different reasons—because a friend has convinced them or for charity. To set themselves a fitness goal, or perhaps to overcome some life change, a breakup or a bereavement or a divorce. To prove to themselves that they can still do it, at twenty-five or fifty-five, or to show for the first time what they are capable of. But whatever the motivations, almost everyone I would say becomes at least a little bit infected with the spirit that Marc remembers.
Some of that has to do with the overcoming of obstacles. A lot more of it is probably because, as Marc’s exhausted participant pointed out, this is something very different from the general run or rat race of their lives. The stories of the Mudder legends in this book back up that idea—but I believe almost all our two million headband-wearing tribe have similar stories to share. Many of them take the opportunities provided by Facebook and other social media to do just that.
