Joe De Sena, the CEO and founder of Spartan and the Death Race, believes that living the hard way is key to success in every aspect of your life.
In an interview on the AB Majlis podcast, De Sena told host, and Arabian Business Editor-in-Chief, Matthew Amlot, that in today’s world of excess comfort, we need to embrace physical and mental challenges to stay motivated, healthy and productive.
De Sena’s philosophy is that embracing physical and mental difficulty, rather than complacency, is key to unlocking healthy, happy and successful living in today’s excessively comfortable world.
“We, the developed world, need more hard,” De Sena said. His events promote living the hard way through extreme obstacle course races because “if you and I wanted to change the world and get people healthy, we couldn’t just snap our fingers are say go to the gym. People don’t go to the gym. Our brains are wired to work against us and not do hard things, it’s a threat.”
According to De Sena, thousands of years of evolution have programmed our brains to choose the easy path for survival, but now we need to overcome that for well-being.
Beyond physical fitness, De Sena believes living the hard way translates to success in all areas of life.
“You’re not going to be successful in your relationship at home, with your kids, your job, or your business or anything if you’re not healthy,” he said. And while people know they need to be healthy, they often lack motivation.
Motivation through calendar dates
Facing challenges head-on through dates on the calendar and an obsessive mindset, he says, is the path to maximising potential in every domain.
“Unfortunately for us, we need to have dates on the calendar to actually do the work. The students at Oxford will not do the paper, they will prepare for the test if there’s not a date on the calendar where it’s due. It just doesn’t work.”
For De Sena, the greatest motivation comes from changing lives.
“The thing that keeps me going is I want to change lives,” he said.
“I wish everyday, every month or quarter we could look at our income statement and say, rather than dollars, how many lives did we change?” He advocates living the hard way through challenge and discipline because “if you want to be successful at something, whatever that is… it requires obsession.”
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