Will Dean > Quotes

“The only private spaces we have are inside our own minds. The thoughts we conceal from one another. From ourselves.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“Humans can survive three weeks with no food, three days with no water, three hours with no shelter if it’s cold, three minutes with no hope.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“This is a moment for myself. A moment I own.”
― Will Dean, The Last Thing to Burn

“The sea does not care for your lost loves or your heartache. It is ambivalent to your fears, your trauma, your mortal desires. The sea knows only itself; sprawled across the world, smothering the depths, concealing both truths and horrors.”
― Will Dean, The Chamber

“All actions have consequences,”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“Don’t let perfect get in the way of good.”
― Will Dean, The Chamber

“My skin is ten times thicker than before and I’m hiding inside my own skeleton.”
― Will Dean, The Last Thing to Burn

“I begin my descent. Part of me, the part that’s tempted to jump off a cliff or crash a car, that tiny fragment of insanity buried deep within all our brains, is ready to loosen my grip and slide all the way down. I grin manically at the thought of it.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“What saves me is people. Strangers. Old women. Shopkeepers. Young lovers and milkmen doing their rounds and window cleaners with ladders fixed on top of their vans. Individuals oblivious to one another and yet, in a way, they act like insurance. An invisible web. Nothing too bad will happen on the street of a small town like this because people are everywhere. If something heinous occurs, then it's likely to be short-lived. Terrible acts are more difficult to conceal in a place like this. Someone will eventually step in or call the police. Horrors can still take place, but people look after people even though they might never think of it that way.”
― Will Dean, The Last Thing to Burn

“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

“There are some moments in life when you realize, deep inside yourself, that nothing will ever be quite the same again.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“The only rational explanation to me is that a thousand passengers woke up in the middle of the night and quietly, solemnly, threw themselves overboard.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“I sip from my mug. “He should talk nicer, though,” I whisper. “I feel like hitting him sometimes.” She rubs her eye. “Well, don’t. Nothing good comes of that. Your dad’s harsh on you because he wants you to grow into a fine man, that’s all.” “I was talking about how he speaks to you, Mom.”
― Will Dean, Adrift

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. —MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“will overtake my ankle pain. Will the two run concurrently or will one eclipse the other?”
― Will Dean, The Last Thing to Burn

“I have hated this time but perhaps I needed it to think straight. Years of hostility and being worn down by another person can corrupt your mind.”
― Will Dean, Adrift

“To stay loose and relaxed is to survive. That way you don’t crack and make a dangerous mistake.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“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

“He wanted to focus on work when he was working.”
― Will Dean, The Chamber

“Grief isn’t a competition”
― Will Dean, First Born

“Too much Cajun in you, Brooke. Too much Louisiana.”
― Will Dean, The Chamber

“Mothers profess how they would kill for their offspring, but I know I would go further still.”
― Will Dean, Adrift: A Novel

“Where there are gaps in our knowledge, we fill those gaps with best-guess theories and philosophies of convenience.”
― Will Dean, The Last Passenger

“What nobody here in this country understands is that it could happen here. You all think it couldn’t, that you’re a superior people, a more civilised population. But this country is five bad decisions and one charismatic leader away from it.”
― Will Dean, Bad Apples

“He was a nice old fella.” “He was the only one looking out for us,” I say again, quietly, as much to myself as to her. “He was the last one.”
― Will Dean, Adrift

“Before you lose someone, you cannot predict the shape or depth of the hole their absence will leave in your life.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I’ve lost the option of dying. The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I had to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek.”
― Will Dean, The Last Thing to Burn

“I’m reminded of how Einstein is said to have remarked how World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Will Dean, The Last Passenger

“Where there are gaps in our knowledge, we fill them with best-guess theories and philosophies of convenience.”
― Will Dean, The Last One

“I feel adrift and sick with worry.”
― Will Dean, Adrift