In Search Of Excellence - Joe De Sena: Life Lessons That A Mafia Boss Taught Him About Business | E101

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

My guest today is Joe de Sena, a serial entrepreneur, ultra-marathoner, endurance athlete, motivational speaker, and self-described maniac. For the past 17 years, Joe has been the CEO of the global fitness and wellness brand Spartan, which has a community of more than 10 million athletes around the world.Joe is the host of the CNBC primetime show, No Retreat business boot camp, and a New York Times bestselling author of four books, Spartan Up, Spartan Fit, The Spartan Way, and his latest, 10 Rules for Resilience.Time stamps:01:46 Joe De Sena’s background and childhoodHe grew up in Howard Beach, the organized crime capital of the worldMom was a long-distance runner, vegan, and yoga practitionerDad was a workaholic entrepreneurThe story about his dad and the missing package in the warehouseThe story about moving bricks all nightAn unbelievable BMX ride to Greene, New York11:33 Working for Joe Bananno as a kidLessons from the head of the organized crime familyBecame a trusting kid and gained a lot of customersThe attractiveness of the mafia lifestyle and his dad’s adviceJoe Bananno as Joe’s friend and mentorThe best thing we can do in life is help people 18:15 What’s wrong with the mentality of today’s internsHuman beings are naturally lazy and wired for comfortThe story about Shaun and moving artworksMake yourself invaluable and irreplaceable26:48 Never ask for moneyA story about a car dealer from VermontA risk worth getting numerous customersGet your foot in the door first and provide value29:23 How rejections can fuel youApplied to Cornell and was rejectedLearned hard to prove worthy of Cornell but kept being rejectedFinally, enrolled in The Textile Department of Human EcologyIf you just keep doing it, you eventually break through35:05 The ability to hang in there and finish is changing your biologyIf the obstacle you face is not fatal, it’s just a lessonFailure can be our greatest asset if we use it rightFinishing hard things creates tracks in the brainQuitting creates gaps and more quittingSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

When you take on something hard, starting a business, running a marathon, starting a family, and you face those challenges, which we're all going to face, but you continue on anyway, your brain lays tracks. When you quit, most people quit, it leaves a gap. Quitting that gap creates a likelihood of more quitting. Finishing creates a likelihood of more finishing. So just know that the ability to hang in there and finish is changing your biology for the better or for the worse. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial

entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in our lives. My guest today is Joe DeSena. Joe is a serial entrepreneur, ultra marathoner, endurance athlete, motivational speaker, and self-described maniac. For the past 17 years, Joe has been the CEO of the global fitness and wellness brand Spartan, which has a community of more than 10 million athletes around the world. He is a host of the CNBC primetime show, No Retreat Business Bootcamp, and is a New York Times bestselling author of four books, Spartan Up, Spartan Fit, The Spartan Way, and his latest book, 10 Rules of Resilience, Mental Toughness for Families. Joe, it's a true pleasure to have you on my show.

Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thanks for having me. I needed a little pump up today, so listening to you describe me, I feel bigger than I actually am. Well, we're going to get into some of the amazing things that you've done. I'm super psyched to have you. I'm a fitness nut myself. So we have a tremendous show coming up. But let's start with your family. You grew up in the working class neighborhood Howard Beach in Queens near Kennedy Airport

in an area that was known at the time as the organized crime capital of the world. Your mom, Jean Marie, was a long distance runner who became a vegan yogi and traveled in an area that was known at the time as the organized crime capital of the world. Your mom, Jean Marie, was a long-distance runner who became a vegan yogi and traveled to India, where she learned to teach meditation. Your dad, Ralph, was an aggressive workaholic entrepreneur who owned taxi cabs, a trucking company, real estate properties, among other businesses. Starting with your mom, what were your parents like and what kind of influence did they have in you growing up? And as part of that, can you tell us about the day you surprised your dad at his trucking company and the lesson you learned that day? Yeah, you have so much information. I've been on a bunch of podcasts, a bunch of newspapers, but you have somehow,

probably with the CIA, figured out the right questions to ask that no one ever asked me. This is awesome. First of all, let's talk about Howard Beach and tie it to your business, Sandy. I guarantee you Howard Beach is the one beach not in your database. You're wrong. You're wrong because Howard Beach is in our database. Not only is it in the database, Joe, we have, I think, four pictures of Howard Beach in the database. When we're done, I want you to go on our website and try to stump me and send me an email if there's a beach you know about that we don't have. That's unbelievable because I don't think anybody goes to that beach ever. We used to ride dirt bikes in the weeds, we called it. And there was a beach over there that had a lot of oil spillage on it.

But anyway, mom and dad lived in Howard Beach. It was organized crime capital world. If you saw the movie Goodfellas, it was ground zero for that whole underworld for whatever reason, probably because it was so close to Kennedy Airport that it made it easy for these guys that were stealing trucks and doing bad things. They had access just a few miles away. My mom walked into a health food store in Queens, probably the only health food store on the East Coast in the 70s. And she met a yogi and that yogi turned her life around and ultimately impacted my life and really was the impetus for Spartan. She got into doing yoga. She got into meditation. She started eating a more vegan diet and she started long distance

running. This particular yogi believed in really long distance running. My dad, as you described, was a workaholic maniac. He did not optimize for health and wellness. He optimized for business, for revenue and profitability was his focus all day long, every day. And if that meant lots of donuts for energy or large, you know, Coca-Cola drinks or real junk food, uh, that's what he did. And he paid the price, but, but I did surprise him once at the, at the, uh, at the warehouse. And I think the story you're asking about, although there's a bunch of them, I'm glad you're bringing it up because it's been a long time since I thought about it, was I was very young. I was in the warehouse and none of the guys could find a package, each package in the warehouse. My dad had for a moment in time, my dad had the contract for IBM. All the freight, believe it or not,

that was going through Kennedy Airport would stop for a moment in my dad's warehouse. Those boxes would get labeled. They'd have numbers with letters on them. They'd get put away on different shelves, and you had to find them with a forklift, et cetera. And invariably, every day, there were boxes that went missing. They went missing for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons. And my dad suggested just to get me out of his hair, get me out of the office. He said, go find this box. They can't find this box. And I found it. And, and he, and he

pulled all, all the employees around. And, and I remember him yelling at everybody that, you know, here was this eight year old kid that found something that none of the employees could find. And it wasn't, it wasn't exciting that he embarrassed the guys, but it definitely pumped up my confidence level. Wait a minute, I could do something that adults couldn't do? So I try to pay attention. We have four children now. I try to pay attention because it's those little moments, like this question you asked me, that really change somebody's personality for better or for worse. Let's talk about another incident or lesson you learned when it was a Sunday morning, you were a teenager. I know the one. I know the one. So dad,

we were doing some landscaping work and dad said I need you to move this rock I think this is the one you're asking this is the one where he asked you to unload a bunch of material from one of his trucks oh the bricks you want that story so he had a truck full of bricks and we had to bring them into the backyard. I was exhausted. I was already working seven days a week for him. I was told we were off on Sunday. These bricks had to be moved. So I said to my cousin, it's Saturday night. Let's move the bricks tonight.

We'll get them done tonight so we can sleep in tomorrow. I had this instinct at a very young age to do stuff in advance, get stuff done early so that I'd have clear sailing later. I wasn't a person that would wait till the last minute on things. I always wanted to get ahead. And so I said to my cousin, let's get ahead. Let's move all these bricks. We'll sleep in tomorrow. It'll be awesome.

So we stayed up all night moving these bricks. And at the end of the night, I went into his kitchen and my cousin and I fell asleep in the kitchen. I fell asleep on the tile floor. And I remember at 6am, my dad, like nudging me with his foot in the kitchen and saying, Hey, I see you got the bricks done. That's great because now we could do the next job. So he was just relentless, annoyingly relentless. And I see, by the way, there's good and bad with that because I think if you had my children on the podcast, certainly my oldest boys, they would say, they would describe me that way, where I just don't, like, I remember my, one of my boys saying, dad, it doesn't matter. You're just going to ask us to do more anyway. So I picked up, for better or worse, I picked up my dad's traits. Is one of the lessons there, even when you're early, you're never really done? I don't think it, I mean, listen to what my son said, right? My son, my son said, dad, it doesn't matter. You're going to have more for us. Like it never ends.

It just doesn't end. I, I went into the gym at a young age. I lifted weights. I got a little pump. I felt strong. And I thought I'll do this for a week or two and I'll get muscles. And then somebody in the gym that was older and smarter than me said, hey, kid, you got to do this forever. It doesn't, you don't do it once or for a week or two, like, it's the rest of your life. And so the sooner, I think the sooner we accept that as you, like, the easier it becomes. If we think, if we think we're going to do something and then it's like, it never ends, never ends. And later in life, I just spoke to a friend of mine the other day, later in life, in your 70s, 80s, 90s, if you're lucky enough to get there, thank God there's still stuff to do because it's what keeps you alive. We're going to talk about your early entrepreneurial endeavors when you were

younger in a minute. But before we do, can you tell us what you were like as a kid? And part of that, can you tell us about the day your mom's friend found you sleeping on the side of the road when you were 15 years old? Was that when I was BMXing? You were BMXing. I was BMXing. So my mom wouldn't drive us to a race. We were in Ithaca, New York, and the race was in Green, New York. It was about 75 miles in each direction. And I convinced my friends through a lack of knowledge on my own part that we were going to bicycle from Ithaca to Green and race the race that day and then bike home it was 75 imagine imagine a single speed one gear bmx bike with your helmet no water bottles no money 75 miles oh we race no sidewalk either by the way

because i made the drive no no you've done the drive my daughter goes to cornell we're going to talk about cornell in a few minutes oh we're going to talk about cornell in a few minutes oh we're going to talk about cornell so you know the drive the drive bicycled bicycled up and down those little hills painful hills to green raced i ended up winning the race and then biked home on the way collapsed and my mom's friend found us on the side of the road sleeping on our bicycles what'd your mom say to you when she heard what happened you know you know my mom looking back i didn't get yelled at about stuff like that there was i would be so much different with our children now on the one hand proud i was written up in the newspaper about it, funny enough. Somebody recently sent me a newspaper clip.

But on the other hand, yeah, I'd say that was pretty stupid. That was pretty dangerous. You were born with the entrepreneur gene. You sold fireworks when you were eight years old. That black market business was shut down by elementary school administrators. Then you sold T-shirts, as did I in college. Then your parents got divorced and your mom really struggled. And at 12 years old, you started a very successful business that lasted for many years.

Tell us about your mom, Chevrolet, the head of the Bonanno crime family who lived next door and who befriended you, and how you got to know nearly every mafia guy in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and Staten Island. That's a good question. My mom didn't have a lot of money. My parents were divorced, and we were in Ithaca, and she was shopping for a new car.

It was a Chevrolet, but next door was a BMW dealership. I was staring out the window looking at the BMWs. And my mom said to me, you can get one of those. You just got to get a job. You got to work. You got to make money. And it really, it really was one of those sentences. You know, parents can give you 500 sentences, but one of them sinks in. And that was one that sunk in. So next thing I know, I'm with my dad in Queens in Queens and Howard beach. And my neighbor, who's the head of the banana organized crime family at the time, tells me to come over Saturday morning. He's going to teach me how to run a business. I'm going to clean his pool. He's going to pay me $35 a week. And so I went over there and he sat me down and he said, all right,

here's the deal. He said, um, on time is late. If, if you got to be here at 8, 8 AM, you got to be here at 745. Um, he said to, uh, you're going to go above and beyond. You're not just going to clean the pool, even though you're only getting paid to clean the pool, you're going to clean the windows, uh, straighten up the lawn furniture, straighten out the shed. And then number three, you're never going to ask for money. If you do a good job, you get paid. And that was bizarre because I thought, well, I'm working. I should get paid. But I stuck with that philosophy for my life, the rest of my life. And he was right. On time is late. You should go above and beyond. And when you do,

you get paid. And if you don't get paid, it's really no big deal. Those are far and few between instances where you have a bad customer or a bad, it's irrelevant in the scheme of things. So that was an amazing, amazing set of lessons I got from him. And then ultimately, because I followed that protocol, he introduced me to hundreds and hundreds of customers, many of them in organized crime. And I became this trusted kid that they could depend on to do brickwork, to do cement work, to, who knows, put a body under a swimming pool, whatever they needed done. I want to go back to something you said, and I want to go back, and I really want to spend more time. There's really three lessons he taught you, and then one theme. So I definitely want to come back to that. I think it's really important for people to hear it one by one. But did you

know that Joe Bonanno was the head of the biggest crime family in New York City? And did you even think about the danger you had getting involved with something like that? And your parents must have known who he was as well. Did they say, hey, man, Joe, don't do that. We don't even want any association with Joe. It was prevalent in the neighborhood, and it was not frowned upon

like we would be frowning upon it now. If everybody in the neighborhood was were marathon runners, you and I would probably get sucked up in that. We'd start running every day. If everybody in the neighborhood did yoga, we would get sucked up in that. Well, it turns out most people in the neighborhood were part of that life. So it was it permeated the whole neighborhood and it was not it was it was something that was that was exciting. It wasn't it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. And there were there were people, including my mom, that purposely left the neighborhood and brought my sister and I to Ithaca, New York, to get away from that. But it was to attract. I wanted to be back there.

It was it was too attractive. I wanted to be back there. It was, it was too attractive. Um, when you're young, you don't know that. I mean, they had Cadillacs, they had money, they had, they had respect, they had things that looked appealing. So, so no, it wasn't, um, you know, I had the balance and I think even my father was instilling it, which was, you know, Joe Joseph, he'd say to me, these guys make a lot of money, but they can't spend it. Right. Like it's not it's not legal money. Like you're better off with all the energy and all the time and all the things they're doing, he would try to instill in me, you'd be better off making it the right way. You could still get after it. You could still hustle. You could still do your thing. But if you make it the right way, you can spend it. And he said that to me hundreds and hundreds of times. And 99% of the time, it went in one ear and out the other, but it obviously stuck because I ended up doing it the right way. Let's go back to Joe Bonanno.

And this, I think is going to sound weird. And I think it sounded weird to me as I was doing my research on you. This guy, as I said, is the head of New York's biggest mafia family. He became your friend and a mentor to you and taught you a lot of things, not how to kill people, chop up their bodies, and bury them, but as you've already mentioned, incredibly important lessons that possibly change your life forever. I think these lessons, and this is why I really want to come back to it, apply to every person listening and watching this show.

And I want to take these one at a time. What was the first thing he told you? And then we'll go through the three lessons one by one. And the first one was about helping. Yeah, you know, he said, surprisingly, coming from a person like this, he said, the best thing we could do in life is help people. So these people, even though they killed folks for a living, they had a sense of themselves that they were doing the right thing, that they were living this life within a certain set of rules. And it was good. I got lucky in that I got the good lessons. I didn't get the bad ones.

So we talk about on time is late. I do a tremendous amount of coaching, have 36 interns every summer. We have this amazing intern 12-week program. It's very structured, eight to six. Don't show up one minute later. We're going to have a gnarly meeting and you're only going to get one more chance or you're going to leave the program. But so many people show up a minute before, two minutes before, they're out of breath, their hair isn't in place.

And a lot of people come two or three minutes late. We live in LA, Joe, and everyone knows the traffic is there. There's so many people who make excuses. There's, oh, there's traffic. Yeah, we know. And you show up 8.01 for a job interview or 10.01, it's over. Why don't people arrive early, an hour before? What's the difference for that insurance policy? What do you think is going on with all these

people? Well, I think human beings are naturally lazy. We're wired for comfort. We're not wired for discomfort. So it's a little more uncomfortable to wake up early to get the workout in to take that shower early to to start the car and get on the road early. That's, that's uncomfortable. And the brain is not wired for that the brain is two more minutes. Let's let's let's scan our phone and check social media just two two more minutes. Let's get a piece of toast out of the toaster before we get going. Let's stay in bed for three more minutes. So our brain is having us hold back and do the comfortable, but our minds know that we need to get on the road.

I have this battle in my house with my wife every single day. My wife is wired for five minutes late. I am wired for five minutes early. My wife and I have that same issue, by the way. It's one of the things that causes tension in our relationship. But we do have two young kids. And when we leave the house, sometimes they'll cry and they'll want mom. But let's talk about the second lesson, which I think is probably the most important thing you can do in a job, which is making yourself irreplaceable. And I'm going to give one example of someone who worked with me, an intern named Shane Bay years ago. I collect art. We have a vacation home in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

And we had moved into our house, and I have a bunch of art in storage. So we had to move. We had to rent a truck and bring it there. You can have art movers. There's special companies, and you buy art in New York at a lot of the art fairs or the galleries there. They put it on a truck, and they move it to Los Angeles and moving one painting could cost $1,500 and it takes a while. And so we had a bunch of art to move and you can't hire a truck from Los

Angeles to Coeur d'Alene because there's no route up there. That would have cost $30,000, $40,000, which obviously we weren't going to do. So I looked at renting a U-Haul and we rented and we looked into it and we figured, okay, this is not going to happen. And I was on the phone and Shane works right out the door there. And he was there and I come back from lunch. He said, I figured it out for you. And I said, what? He said, if we rent the U-Haul outside of a 75 mile radius from LA, unlimited mileage. And, you know, I, I, I thought that's amazing. That's, that's incredible. Um, that he had done that. And that's exactly what we did. We had to go and it's hard to move. I mean, the art is packed in a crate and some of these are very thick wood crates. And, uh, but you still need to strap them down to, to the U-Haul so they don't

move. And so we, we went to the U-Haul place. We went to the art storage facility where a lot of people keep their art. And by the way, that place is like Fort Knox. And we had to put metal and wood strips down and fix them to the side of the truck. And at that point, I love interns. And one of the things I know we share this and we'll talk about it is mentoring people, helping people and change lives. And similar to you, my goal is to positively influence the lives of 100 million people before I die. And Shane was looking for a job, didn't know what he wanted to do, and I set him up with one of our portfolio companies. And I said, this kid's amazing. I told the story, and that company hired Shane.

Then he pulls this, and I said, like, that's not happening anymore. I need you to call the CEO or I'm going to call him and I would say, Hey, sorry about that. But Shane's working here and he ended up working with me for four years. Why don't people I mean, you can't teach that stuff, right, Joe, it's It's one of these things where I don't understand why every employee doesn't have this mentality. They'll have job security forever. They'll get promoted faster. They'll make more money. And they'll be loved and appreciated wherever they go.

What's going on with this one? By the way, it's not just as an employee. It's as a player on some sports team. It's as a teammate. It's as a husband, wife, kid, and a family. Just go above and beyond. Don't have your hand out expecting a payout before you make yourself so damn invaluable that people can't live without you. It's that, it's so simple. It's simple. Right?

It's simple. Like we're not, you and I are not sitting here saying, okay, I need you to read this 15,000 page book. And then I need you to stand on your head for 14 days. And then I need you to not eat food. Like, no, just make yourself invaluable. What you just described Shane doing, I did in my first job after I sold that business I described. I was on Wall Street. I had a new boss and I overheard him talking to his wife and they were looking for a Porsche, a certain type of Porsche that they couldn't find.

And I really wasn't working yet because I hadn't learned the business. And I sat there for the day on my own trying to find this vehicle. I called 100 dealerships. I found them the car in Boston. Changed my whole life because the boss saw that I was the kind of guy that would stay late. I'd get in early. I'd go above and beyond. I'd listen to the nuances. I would just, it's so easy. It's so easy. Like that's really a class they should teach in every college, every high school. I speak about it all the time. It's something I tell my interns. I love the people who inherently do it and have the DNA. But in terms of my coaching, I do a ton of coaching. I do a lot of paid one-on-one coaching as well. And people are amazed at the advice, which is so simple. We have one thing that we

talk about accounting principles, and I have a new one, which is first in, last out. And I told my kids this is they're studying at a private school, studying too much, too much pressure. Didn't like it, but I'd go into the room at 1130 Joe, and they're studying and yeah, they want to get good grades and they're self motivated. I never put pressure on my kids with the grades. If they tried their best, they tried their best. And I said to them, it's, you know, several times, you know, go to bed, this isn't healthy for you. And if you do this in the real world, you're going to be CEO, whatever company you're working at before the age of 30. But it's one of these things, like you said, it's so simple. People don't do it. And they take orders. And they're not

proactive creating value when people don't ask them to do it. And I think that's so critical to our success in life. Thousand percent. Lesson number three, which is going to make absolutely no sense to 99% of the people listening to my show. I sort of get it and I sort of don't get it. Most of me doesn't really get it. Lesson number three, never ask for money. How can that be? Yeah, it doesn't make sense. And it didn't make sense to me at the time. But now that I've been

running businesses and building businesses for 40 plus years, I see what he meant. There are so many people, and you've probably run into these folks, that have their handout first, that ask you to sign the contract first, as opposed to the purse. And I'll give you a great example. I had never dealt with a car dealership in Vermont. I had just moved to Vermont. I needed a new vehicle. I went in, I met this incredible salesperson, but I didn't want to deal with all the friction and paperwork and sitting down with somebody that tries to sell me extra stuff. This guy read the room, quickly understood the kind of person I was, handed me the keys. I kid you not, handed me the keys to the car in the showroom and said, just take it. I'll come visit you over the weekend. We'll fill out the

paperwork. We'll deal with it then. That's what I mean by not, he didn't ask for the money. He didn't ask for the money. And he probably sold me eight cars since because of that. Right? So like remove all the friction for a potential customer and just say, I got it. We'll figure it out later. Because you just want to make the sale. And like I said earlier on, in the instance where you get that one bad customer, for me, it was a guy named Lenny Spodak. I don't know why that name just popped into my head.

Where because you don't have an agreement, because they didn't give you a deposit, they take advantage of you, they don't pay. Okay, so what? I had 700 customers. That guy didn't pay. I ultimately got my money. It required a chainsaw. But my point is, your buddy Joe gave you his chainsaw, which he had cleaned very well with a bunch of bleach.

My point is, it's a great tactic. Get your foot in the door. What's a worse outcome? Anybody listening that's still confused over it? What's a worse outcome? Anybody listening that's still confused over it, what's a worse outcome? Is a worse outcome you get a bunch of customers and a few of them don't pay? Or is a worse outcome you get very few customers? Right? Just get your foot in the door, get going, start providing value, and then ask.

Let's talk about Cornell. We'll talk about college. In high school, you didn't have good grades or board scores. SCAT scores weren't very good and you weren't even thinking about college until your senior year. Tell us about what your dad's friend said to you that senior year, your mom's yogi client, and the lessons you learned from failing before the fourth time became the charm. Yeah. So I was in Ithaca High School. I had my business in Queens. I was not planning on going to college. No one guided me that way. And a friend of mine said, why don't we go to Cornell? And I said, how the hell would we go to Cornell? We haven't applied. We're seniors. Well, and my grades aren't that

good. He said, well, my dad's a professor. He'll get us in. I said, okay, you got a guy. That makes sense because the neighborhood I was from, you had a guy that got things done. So we both got interviews at Cornell. My dad and my mom were so proud. Got a suit on, did my interview. Neither of us got accepted. And so that was the end of that. I was going to go back to the neighborhood and run my business. And my friend said, hang on, not so fast. My dad said, his father was the professor at Cornell, one of the professors at Cornell. His dad said, listen, you could take extramural classes. You could take three classes at Cornell. They don't count towards anything.

But if we can prove that we can handle the workload, if we can get three A's, we can go back, reapply in January, second semester, and get accepted. So I digested that for a second. I said, OK, I don't want to fall behind. All the regular, all the kids that are admitted regularly, they're going to do five classes. We're only going to do three this summer while I'm running my business in Queens, I'm going to go to St. John's university. I'll take two summer classes. I'll learn how to study. I'll get ahead. And then in January, when we get accepted based on what you just told me, I'll be, I'll be on par with the regular kids.

Again, because my brain, I always want to be ahead. I don't want to be behind, right? I don't want to be late. My friend said, that's ridiculous. Why would you do that? He goes, this summer, I'm going to go party all summer in Vegas because in September, we're going to settle down. Why would I buckle down during the summer? So I said, okay, whatever. I went to Queens. I took my classes at St. John's. I learned how to study. It was awesome. I learned some amazing things. And then my friend and I met back at Cornell in September. We hustled. I got two A's and a B. He got two A's and a B. I was the best I'd ever performed in school ever. We reapplied and neither of us got accepted.

And so here I was, I did all that work. I spent all that money, all that time. I told everybody I was going to Cornell. I was embarrassed and I didn't get in. And I said, well, I'm gonna do it again. I'll just do it again. And he said, he said, now I'm going to go out to Vegas. I had a lot of fun this summer. I'm going to go to UNLV. I'm going to, clearly Cornell's not for me. So we pivoted. He went to Vegas. I, I continued on and I did it. The second semester reapplied, didn't get accepted. Did a third semester reapplied, didn't get accepted.

And finally, everybody's got a breaking point. I said, well, maybe it's not for me. Maybe I'm wasting my time here. Maybe they'll never accept me. And my mom not wanting to lose her son, no mom would want to lose their son, right? When they finally leave the house and they're gone. She said, hang on. I have this woman I teach yoga to. I'd love for you to meet her for lunch. And I thought to myself, well, my mom's got no real connections. She teaches yoga. She

eats branch sandwiches. What the hell does she know? And I sat down with this professor, Anita Racine. I remember her name because she was significant and changed my life. And we sat down and she looked at my grades and she said, wow. She said, I see, you know, you've been here four semesters. You've done this and that. She said, do you like textiles? And I didn't really know what a textile was. She said, because I got 92 women in my department and no men and we're looking for some diversity. And I said, oh, I love textiles. And so boom, I was in the textile department of human ecology at Cornell under Professor Racine. I was the only man until my now buddy, John Fung, showed up from China, who also wanted to study textiles with 92 women. And I graduated Cornell on time. That last semester, my fourth year, my last semester, I made Dean's List.

And I thought, man, how a human being can change. I went into this thing. I wasn't a good student. I had a lot of Cs, and here I was. I nailed it. What was your reaction when you got rejected all those times? And why was failure such a pivoted moment in your life? I think it was fuel for me. When I got rejected, It somehow fueled me. I don't know. Maybe I learned it in a neighborhood,

probably with the pool bit. At some point, I learned that if you just keep doing it, you eventually break through. A lot of people don't learn that until later in life. I learned at an early age, probably with the business. So many people, this is a really important point as well that I really want to focus on, hone in on. So many people treat an initial failure as the end of the road and not a temporary roadblock and not as the beginning of a new road. What's that mindset about? What's your advice to people on how to change that mindset? Because without changing that mindset, we all experience failures. We're just not going to get ahead in our lives. Well, you just need to watch. There's a great Netflix story about the

building of a railroad in America. And you see what that was like to go out West and be attacked by snakes and animals and Indians and you name it, and somehow continue to push through and lay tracks and not get paid and have your friends die from diseases that like, if it's not fatal, if that wall you bump up against, if that obstacle you face is not fatal, it really is just a lesson. Takes a while in life for you to understand that you got to, you got to get through a few of them and realize that it's just part of the deal. We get to do this. You know, I watched people die at a young age. I watched people,

I watched people I was very close to go away for 25 years and like, those were bad outcomes. Not getting into Cornell that semester didn't seem nearly as bad as some of the stuff I saw happening around me. But how do we get people just to keep going? I mean, I know so many entrepreneurs, people who start companies and they fail their first two, three, four times and they keep going. And this again, something that I teach

and this is something that I coach. And I tell them, and I think you said it as well, that failure can be our greatest asset if we use it right to make forward progress. Yeah, you know, there's biology here. I didn't know this, but when you take on something hard, starting a business, running a marathon, starting a family, and you face those challenges, which we're all going to face, but you continue on anyway, your brain lays tracks that the neurosurgeon, the neuroscientist can see physically in the brain. They can see the line, the track where the person took on something hard,

finished something hard. When you quit, most people quit, it leaves a gap. These indentations, these signals are more prevalent in young kids that take on hard things, finish hard things, or quit. Quitting that gap creates a likelihood of more quitting. Finishing creates a likelihood of more finishing. So when you're going through the hard thing, whatever that thing is, just know that the, you know, the ability to hang in there and finish is changing your biology for the better or for the worse. And, you know, we're not talking about climbing Mount Everest and being a hundred meters from the summit and a bad storm rolls in and you're thinking about turning around. We're talking about stuff that doesn't have potentially fatal outcomes. It just requires a little more elbow grease. And so if it's not

going to kill you, nobody fucking cares. Work harder and get it done. You're listening to part one of my awesome conversation with Joe DeSena, the CEO of the global fitness and wellness brand Spartan, which has a community of more than 10,000 athletes around the world. you