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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“He wanted to focus on work when he was working.”
― 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

“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

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

“The truth is, we can’t all be overachieving academics destined for the UN or a top law firm; some of us are meant to be normal, and there is no shame in that whatsoever.”
― Will Dean, First Born

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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

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

“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