The Hard Way With Joe De Sena

Reno Rolle, to paraphrase Hippocrates, let food be his medicine when seeking ways to ameliorate his son’s ADD. It worked so well Rolle pivoted his successes into a company, Boku Superfoods. He harnessed the power of nutritionally dense foods, popularly known as “superfoods,” to create a line of foods. In his years long effort to develop a superior product, Rolle not only fulfilled his mission of h...

If Ned Spieker is a typical billionaire real estate mogul, then the path to success isn’t what you might expect. According to Spieker, it’s not about being an autocrat, but being a servant, not creating a hierarchy, but sharing responsibility, and not about wanting it all, but starting small and working very hard. Serendipity, Spieker admits, plays a big part, but that’s out of our hands regardles...

Aiden Chase, a spiritual healer for Hollywood types, entrepreneurs and regular folks, takes a holistic approach to success in life: we approach our highest selves through a balance of mind, body and spirit. Fanciful as it sounds, there's common sense behind it.  The mind functions optimally when allowed to reflect clearly and honestly in the quiet places that are growing scarce. Importantly, he gu...

Zhong Lou’s path to MMA prominence was never in doubt. He started practicing karate not long after he learned to walk and talk and has mastered a strikingly diverse number of disciplines, from Chinese acrobatics to Mongolian wrestling, since. Forty years later Lou is determined to leave a legacy with his San Francisco gym, Dragon House MMA. The money to keep it up and running is not easy to come b...

Human guinea pig and journalist A.J. Jacobs has lived according Old Testament rules, outsourced his entire life, and subjected himself to every diet and fitness program he could find to he could to see what he could learn.  Besides the more obvious lessons, like sheep don’t do well in New York apartments and long beards are itchy, he gained valuable takeaways that he shares in his books which incl...

Col. Nye spent the weekend at the very first Spartan Winter Agoge to to get a taste of the lessons shared by instructors there.  We’ve also included a special message about Agoge’s meaning from Joe De Sena.  The Spartan Agoge is a 48 or 60 Hour test of mental and physical endurance. The goal is not just to break you down but to build you back up with greater purpose, resilience, commitment and kno...

Hoby Darling, CEO of Skullcandy, in pursuit of his success, got out over his skis and accelerated through the turns, got up early every day, set the bar high for his community, and built up obstacle resistance by challenging himself on a regular basis. Darling demonstrates the wisdom of leading by example, not by decree. He shows that one of the most crucial aspects of motivation is redefining wha...

Synopsis: Which diet will optimize your obstacle resistance-- Paleo, raw foods, clean eating or some emerging trend? According to Cornell head nutritionist Clint Wattenberg, there is a time and a place for almost any kind of food as long as you eat it in moderation and your grandma would recognize it. Trying to be “perfect” with your diet will often drive you to the other extreme or, worse, to an...

Bart Yasso earned the title of Chief Running Officer at Runner's World magazine through a rugged initiation that involved life altering missteps in his adolescence. It took a stark confrontation with his own mortality via the loss of a close friend to jolt him onto his path of pursuing his passion. This experience upheaved his frame of reference from a toxic one to one of redemption. It's a runnin...

Thom Beers,  successful producer of shows including Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers & Monster Garage has taken a treacherous path to achieve his success himself.  Starting at the bottom he worked his way up through grit, persistence and staying one step ahead of everyone else. His passion, apparently very much alive, propelled him through the rough patches. He has some valuable tips on how to n...

What could Dandapani, a Hindu monk turned adviser to entrepreneurs, have to offer to a world seemingly far removed from the monastic life? Plenty it turns out. Through his practice he has come to personify the calm in the midst of the storm, and if there is one way of being that would be a boon in the tumultuous climate of the business world, this would have to be it. Calm reflection is the key to...

Entrepreneur and athlete Sami Inkinen, along with his wife, rowed 2,750 miles over 45 days without using any of the traditional “athlete foods” conventional knowledge says are essential: sugars and carbs. They didn’t starve, far from it. They came out of it healthier than can be expected from such an endeavor. Why? As fit as Inkinen is, he developed prediabetes by following the standard diet and s...

As Outside Magazine Editor, Mike Roberts has access to the stories of the top outdoor athletes in the world and to their wisdom as well. He's seen Kelly Slater, "the Michael Jordan of surfing," heal his life through the zen of the water, and age gracefully through his sport. He has also seen top climbers act boldly, but with a skill honed through the culmination of years of dedicated practice. Thr...

Spartan pro Isaiah Vidal, through the rough circumstances of his life, took the road less traveled to success: He saw the troubled path of his father and didn’t take it. Sons often repeat the mistakes of their fathers, how did Vidal manage to turn things around? In a nutshell, it was a combination of will, determination, and an orientation towards positivity as well as turning towards other strong...

No one should ever wish tragedy into their own or other’s lives, but it has the potential to lead to some incredibly beneficial life changes. Chris Kresser transformed a decade long struggle with a rare chronic disease into something that benefits society. He was able to restore himself to health and is now doing the same for others. His main piece of advice, “eat real food,” is deceptively simple...

Jay Jackson is the subject of Joe’s ultimate wrestling story, but you’ll have to wait to the very end of the episode to hear it. Jackson,assistant principal and wrestler, recognizes a need to nudge students into uncomfortable situations that will develop their grit, but that are often absent in an increasingly bubble wrapped society. He got his grit from his parents. His father, as a wrestling coa...

In world renowned ultra runner Dean Karnazes, Joe tracked down a real Spartan by both disposition and bloodline. Does he eat gruel for breakfast, take cold showers, and run wearing a hundred pounds of armor? Maybe. He’s run marathons in every state and is now setting out to do the same in every country. Certainly that falls within the same spirit. So you might be taken aback to hear that Karnazes...

According to writer Andrew Marantz, if you want to have a fulfilling life, take the largely accepted wisdom “live each day as if it were your last” with a large grain of salt. On the road to success, merely satisfying every desire as it appears will get you nowhere. In a philosophical conversation on the Spartan Cruise Joe and Andrew discuss the the crossover between perseverance and success in ar...

Growing up as the child of holocaust survivors, Broadway director Jerry Zaks, often found himself overprotected with his family wanting him to enter a “real” profession. At the moment he found his true passion and was happiest his family felt sorriest for him and that he had thrown his life away. But he had inherited from them a ferocious will to live that enabled him to take nothing for granted a...

Xand Van Tulleken, a doctor who practices in hostile regions, had a taste of the easy life growing up, but it did not sate his appetite for adventure. He has worked in such places as Sudan, Uganda and Peru and the excitement of the challenge has made it difficult to go back to a conventional existence. He and his brother have even started a TV show in which they immerse themselves in traditional i...

To say the least, Lewis Howes had a focused vision. He wanted to make the Olympics and figured that the best way in was by joining the national handball team. There was a slight problem, he never played the game. He brought his athleticism and Arena Football experience to New York City, practiced intensely and now finds himself tantalizingly close to his daunting goal after an incredibly brief que...

Tucker Max is an author who pioneered the genre known as “fratire,” an irreverent,  tongue in cheek description of his testosterone and beer fueled exploits that gained a decent following about a decade ago. Now CEO of Bookinabox.com, his life appears to have taken on a decidedly different tack as he stands head to head with Joe in the MMA octagon. By his own admission, he’s only achieved modest s...

Unwittingly paddling into hippo infested waters on the Zambezi was the perfect, if unintentional, predictor of later success for Juliet Starrett who co-owns the San Francisco Crossfit with her husband Kelly. After the most lethal mammal to man upended her canoe, she was already strategizing her plan to survive midair. This is the perfect metaphor for making it in business: peril will gauge a sneak...

“Chefrepreneur” Jeffrey Zurofsky, co-founder of Wichcraft sandwich shop and judge on Bravo’s “Best New Restaurant,” suggests the obstacles of running an efficient kitchen and a successful restaurant should be a model for entrepreneurship. A high quality restaurant is like a virtuoso pianist playing a finely tuned piano: a great deal of talent, coordination and practice goes into an end result that...

John Durant, author of the Paleo Manifesto, dispels the myth that Paleo is a meat intense, monolithic diet. There are many indigenous cultures, he explains, with different levels of meat consumption, and therefore many models to choose from. What he doesn’t accept, however, is that vegetarianism exists in our nature. In his research, Durant could not identify even one xexample. He does agree that...