I tell this story here to begin to offer an answer to the…

““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