Ken Rideout On Why Everything You Want Is On The Other Side Of Hard
3/9/20261 hr 52 min
Ken Rideout is a masters world champion marathon runner, recovering opioid addict, and the author of the new memoir, “Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Hard.”
This conversation explores the childhood trauma Ken spent decades outpacing, the addiction that nearly destroyed him, his wife Shelby's cancer battle, and the paradox that the very things that propelled him to extraordinary heights became Achilles heels. We discuss his relentless mindset, the role of pain and suffering in igniting willingness, and why the real obstacle was never the competition.
Along the way, we arrive at a tr...
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First 90 secondsKen Rideout· Guest0:01
Extreme discipline has given me the life I wanted, but my kids are like, "My dad is crazy," because I'm constantly on them.
Rich Roll· Host0:07
Can't be easy to be your kid.
Ken Rideout· Guest0:09
No, it's not, and what they see is intensity and aggressiveness, and I don't want to put this burden on them. We have Ken Rideout.
Rich Roll· Host0:18
One of the world's preeminent masters athletes.
Ken Rideout· Guest0:21
A former prison guard, Wall Street trader. He has overcome addiction. He's been put in that fight or flight situation, and he's always picked fight. There's an element of me that's tortured, and my protective mechanism is to have a hard exterior. All of the hard-charging, driving, and trying to win and be the best is just an extension of wanting validation. There's something missing in my life that I have to do, which is...
Rich Roll· Host0:47
Ken Rideout, you made it here. You're back in the studio. Round three, uh, this is gonna be a targeted conversation. We're here to celebrate, uh, Ken's brand-new book called The Other Side of Hard. Uh, you did an incredible job on this book. It's memoir, essentially, but it's also interlaced with all of these kind of, you know, uh, like, life learnings and wisdom about, like, how to approach obstacles and how to get unstuck, and we're gonna parse all of that. Um, but before we even go into it, I want to kind of land on the obsession piece right now.
Ken Rideout· Guest1:26
Mm-hmm.
Rich Roll· Host1:26
'Cause so much of the book is about your obsession,