“The headlines about kids struggling with everything from obesity to mental illness to addictions angers me. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five American kids is obese. Fifteen percent of college students are taking antidepressants. The kids are not alright. But the kids are not the root of the problem; they’re the victims of indulgent, spoiled, mindless, soft parenting and a society that would rather spend money selling them vaping tools and video games than making PE a priority in schools. And it’s the kids who suffer the consequences. Parents have been complicit with our society’s corporatized, commodified laziness (gaming chairs, baby iPad cases ... it’s all BS).
We can—and must—create a tougher generation, starting with our own kids, starting with ourselves. We have to stop discussing issues, writing blogs, and joining more PTA subgroups, and we have to start taking real action. And that action begins with us—the parents. We can’t expect our children to be healthy and resilient humans if we aren’t. The incredible, important, and unrelenting job of being a parent isn’t best accomplished by following a checklist of how-tos. It’s by living and breathing the kind of human that you want your child to be, and then parenting and leading from that same position. …
As we have witnessed through the pandemic, courage and healthy conditioning are about all that we can count on. But I promise you, with some hard-won lessons, inviting some healthy failure and turning losses into life lessons, you can prepare yourself and your kids for anything. You can transform yourself from child to warrior, and you can help the people around you do the same. You can start by making your bed and throwing down some burpees. Stop blaming the screens and start showing up and choosing the hard thing. Don’t know how? Well, that’s the point of this book.”
~ Joe De Sena from 10 Rules for Resilience
Joe De Sena is the founder of Spartan and one of my favorite human beings on the planet.
This is the fourth note we’ve created on one of his great books. We started with Spartan Up! That book got me into Spartan Races. It *also* got me into burpees! I’ve done a hundred burpees basically every.single.day since shortly after reading that book. And... Now that I think about it, that means I must be approaching around 250,000 burpees.
(Oh, how I wish we had the Heroic app back then so I could have kept track!! I’ve hit my set of “11 burpees” Target over 1.5 thousand times over the last 115 days. We’ve gotta have a burpee leader board when we launch Heroic Social. :)
After Spartan Up!, we featured Spartan Fit then we featured The Spartan Way. When Joe told me he was creating a book on mental toughness for FAMILIES, I knew it would be awesome.
If you love Joe’s unapologetically intense, no nonsense style and are looking for ways to cultivate more resilience within YOUR family, I think you’ll love this book as much as I did. (Get a copy of the book here.)
It’s packed with Big Ideas and I’m excited to share some of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!
Before we jump in... I’ve gotta say that the lines about PE in schools and creating a tougher generation makes me think of a video Joe recently texted me about John F. Kennedy’s vision for a healthy America. Check it out and imagine a nation of kids looking and showing up like THAT!
(Seriously. Take 5 minutes and watch that video. It’s incredibly inspiring.)
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