From Reality TV to Two NYC Gyms & the Case for Doing Hard Things on Purpose

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Two newsletters in one week. Yesterday was the long piece on partnership. This one is about hard things, and how much of your confidence is just a record of the ones you finished.

Worth Watching is my conversation with Kenny Santucci. Nine seasons on MTV, a gym partnership that ended in a two-year lawsuit, then a few kettlebells in a public park when New York shut down. He owns two gyms now and runs one of the biggest fitness events in the country.

Then in the Practical Edge, the thing I realized I don't have on my own calendar right now, and the research on why booking it beats intending to. Let's get into it.

Every Hard Thing Makes the Next One Easier

The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Kenny Santucci · ~47 min

This week's Worth Watching is episode four of The Advantage with Kenny Santucci. Kenny was an influencer before that was a job title, competing on nine seasons of MTV's The Challenge from roughly 2005 to 2012. He owns The Strength Club in Flatiron and in Caldwell, New Jersey, and he founded Strong New York, the event he grew out of a Solace basement into one Forbes named a top fitness festival. It takes over the Glasshouse on September 26.

Full disclosure, I'm a customer. I took Kenny's early morning class at Solace for years, and he's the reason I kept showing up at 5am. I think he's one of the best trainers in New York.

Kenny joined his first gym at 13, in 1995, because he was standing in the mirror before an eighth-grade birthday party sharing belts and pants with his dad. There was no internet to learn from, so he stole muscle magazines off the rack and worked the splits out of them, and at 15 or 16 his parents gave him the Arnold encyclopedia, which he read cover to cover.

Then he spent thirty years choosing hard things on purpose. Wrestling. Ironmans. Marathons. CrossFit. Every one of them picked to prove something to himself. The payoff was never the medal. It was that each finish line made the next hard thing look smaller, so by the time he was signing a lease and getting sued and rebuilding a business out of a public park, he'd already trained for the feeling.

It runs the other direction too. If you live a very protected life, hard things stay terrifying, because you've got no evidence you can survive them. Courage isn't a personality trait you're issued at birth. It's a stack of receipts you build one hard thing at a time.

The other moment I keep thinking about is what he did when New York shut down. In January 2020 he'd signed with Under Armour and with HYROX, and within weeks both were gone. In March he carried a couple of kettlebells, a TRX and a jump rope to the park at 28th and 10th and started running workouts for whoever walked past. Later he upgraded to a heavy-duty push cart, and the wheel came off on the unpaved streets, so he carried the load back by hand for an hour. Two gyms came out of that park.

Put One Hard Thing on the Calendar

Confidence is evidence. If you want more of it, give yourself something hard to finish.

Kenny laid it out in this week's episode. Thirty years of choosing hard things, wrestling, Ironmans, marathons, and each finish line made the next hard thing look smaller. By the time he was signing leases, getting sued and rebuilding out of a park, he'd already trained for the feeling.

That's what I like about a physical goal. It gives you unusually clean evidence. The date is fixed. The finish line is objective. Nobody negotiates it with you. You crossed it or you didn't.

A big part of confidence is just a running record of promises you made to yourself and kept. A race gives you a very visible entry in that record.

And the lesson travels. You learn that discomfort doesn't mean stop. That a bad training day doesn't mean the plan is broken. That something that looked impossible three months ago can become normal through reps. Those are useful a long way from a starting line.

Albert Bandura, the Stanford psychologist who developed self-efficacy theory, identified four main sources of belief in your own capability. The strongest is mastery experience: succeeding at something difficult enough to count. Not being told you can do it. Not watching somebody else do it. Doing it yourself.

The broader research points the same way. In 1997, John Hattie, Herbert Marsh, James Neill and Garry Richards analyzed 96 studies of adventure and Outward Bound-style programs. Across 1,728 effect sizes, participants improved on outcomes including self-concept, locus of control and leadership. The average effect at the end of the programs was 0.34, and the researchers found additional gains of 0.17 at follow-up rather than the usual fade.

Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch found that self-imposed deadlines beat having no deadline, but externally imposed deadlines worked better still. A race gives you exactly that: a date you don't control, a start time that will not move, and usually enough money on the line that skipping it stings.

I've signed up for a lot of these over the years. El Tour de Tucson, the 102-mile ride through the Sonoran Desert. Olympic distance triathlons. Sprints. Half marathons.

Talking to Kenny, I realized I don't have a single one on the calendar right now. Not one.

He spent an hour describing a life organized around choosing hard things on purpose, and I sat there doing the math on how long it had been since I'd chosen one myself.

So this one is as much for me as it is for you.

If you're starting from zero, I like a sprint triathlon or a half marathon. A sprint is short enough to feel possible but complicated enough to require training, and triathlon has a built-in ladder: sprint, Olympic, half. You're never staring at the whole mountain. You're looking at the next rung.

My own calendar is empty right now. I'm fixing it this month.

Thanks for reading.

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