The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 055: Joe Desena – Spartan Race CEO, Delayed Gratification, & Helping 1 Million People

Episode Date: September 17, 2015

Episode 055: Joe Desena – Spartan Race CEO, Delayed Gratification, & Helping 1 Million People Joe Desena is an incredibly intense person.  He truly understands the importance of an intense focus on pushing yourself beyond what you might have perceived your limits to be.  We are extremely fortunate to have Joe share his knowledge with us, the loyal listeners of The Learning Leader Show.  Joe Desena is the founder and creator of “Spartan Race.” Spartan Race drives competitors to their very limit to learn what they are capable of and sets a new frame of reference; one they can draw upon in the face of life’s harshest challenges. Competitors climb ropes, crawl under barbed wire, and jump over fire, as well as a host of other boot-camp-like maneuvers. Everyday disappointments and setbacks seem small when you’ve been to the other side of hell and made it back as a victor. Joe wrote "Spartan Up" which chronicles his journey while also eliciting the life-changing transformations that has occurred for over 1 million globally people thus far. The book reached number two on The New York Times bestseller list for Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous, and number six on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list and was named a USA Today bestseller. Episode 055: Joe Desena – Spartan Race CEO, Delayed Gratification, & Helping 1 Million People Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show “It is important that you’re able to delay gratification… Anything worth achieving takes dedication and an extreme amount of work.” Some Questions I Ask: What are the common characteristics of high achievers? What was it like growing up in a “Goodfellas” type environment? Discuss the importance of leaping outside your comfort zone… Why did you move your family to Asia? What is your morning routine? What advice do you give to young people who strive to accomplish big things? What does being a learning leader mean to you?  In This Episode, You Will Learn: What he’s learned from working in 700 different homes/families The mentality of Spartans The importance of having an extremely high level of optimism Delayed gratification and why it’s so important Why playing the long game is the correct method Morning routines for him and his kids The importance of finding great people to work with Being willing and able to adapt on a daily basis “Find a great leader… Offer to work for him for free.  It will be worth it in the long run.” Continue Learning: ·         Go To Joe’s website: SpartanUpTheBook.com   ·         Read: Spartan Up! ·         Follow Spartan Race on Twitter: @SpartanRace   You may also like these episodes: Episode 001: How To Become A Master Connector With Jayson Gaignard From MasterMind Talks Episode 034: Jimmy Hatch – Shot While Searching For Bowe Bergdahl And Sky Diving With Gabby Giffords Episode 004: How Todd Wagner (and Mark Cuban) Sold Broadcast.com To Yahoo! For $5.7 Billion Episode 010: Shane Snow – How To Accelerate Success Using Smart Cuts Did you enjoy the podcast? This was a jam packed episode full of great content.  Joe Desena is leader who is constantly learning in order to help us all live a better life. Who do you know that needs to hear this?  Send them to The Learning Leader Show! Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell   Bio From SpartanUpTheBook.com (Picture From Men’s Journal)   Joe Desena is the founder and creator of “Spartan Race.” Spartan Race drives competitors to their very limit to learn what they are capable of and sets a new frame of reference; one they can draw upon in the face of life’s harshest challenges. Competitors climb ropes, crawl under barbed wire, and jump over fire, as well as a host of other boot-camp-like maneuvers. Everyday disappointments and setbacks seem small when you’ve been to the other side of hell and made it back as a victor.   Joe wrote "Spartan Up" which chronicles his journey while also eliciting the life-changing transformations that has occurred for over 1 million globally people thus far. The book reached number two on The New York Times bestseller list for Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous, and number six on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list and was named a USA Today bestseller.

If you want to be around highly successful people, go volunteer, work for free. Find out where they are, what organization they're running. And there's very few successful people that when they meet a young person raising his or her hand saying, look, I'll come in, I'll work for food, and show how valuable you are that they won't take you under their way. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk.

Hey and welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Extremely excited about tonight's featured leader. He's such an interesting guy. It's Joe Descena. Joe grew up in Queens in an area that. was controlled by Mafia Don John Gotti. He was surrounded by daily scenes of things that were similar and portrayed in the movie Goodfellas. If you've seen that, that's the type of environment Joe grew up in.

In 2010, Joe created Spartan race, which has turned into a global phenomenon. And over 20 countries, over one million customers have ran one of Joe's races. He's, like I said before, incredibly intelligent, but also so interesting. I found myself captivated just listening to his stories. A couple of the things we got into. We discussed the importance of delayed gratification, taking a little pain now and playing the long game. I love talking about this aspect of success with Joe.

Also, getting out of your comfort zone. He actually moved his entire family to Asia, and that's where they're currently living for a number of reasons. One, for some business purposes, as well as to make sure his feelings. family feels a little bit of that pain in order to be successful long term. And then also specific advice that Joe gives to younger people, maybe a 25-year-old who's looking to have success in his life.

Joe has some really great specific advice for them. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's Joe Descena. Okay, Joe, I'm so excited to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show and to get us kicked off. I got a question around high achievers, people who have done big things in their lives, others that you've been fortunate to be around, you, yourself. I'm curious about common characteristics that high achievers all share that you've been around. I think the biggest ones, I was lucky.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Queens, Queens, New York, and I ran a construction at a swimming pool business at a very young age. So I didn't know how valuable that was until, you know, 25, 30 years later looking back. I had the ability to look into 700 of my customers' homes. Some people were successful, short-term, long-term, successful marriages, successful monetarily, unsuccessful, some people were religious. And I took the good and tried to discard the bad. And so when I look back and think about what made those people successful, no matter how they defined success, certainly was this level of optimism, right?

They were generally optimistic people. There were people that could find humor even in tough times. And I didn't realize how powerful that was. And I was recently reading about Sparta and their history. And the Spartans had that same ability. Like, can I curse on this show? Of course. Yeah.

Right. So if the Spartans were doomed, if they were going into a battle and they were fucked, their statement to each other would be, look, you know, we're fucked, but we're going to have a great day. And so it's that approach to life, I think, that helps you become successful. Obviously, you've got to have some leadership skills. You've got to have the ability to communicate well with others. you've got to generally just get along with people. I think successful people have an ability to sell

because I think in life we're always selling. But this general level of optimism and finding good, even in bad times, I think is generally a very important Ashwood to being successful. Joe, that's one of the best answers I've ever heard. I asked that question to a lot of people because I'm curious as to how people come up with their answer or where they pull,

that information from. And I'm fascinated by the fact that when you had this business, you consciously looked at, studied, learned from 700 different people. Talk me more about your history. I guess maybe give a little bit of a brief bio for the ones who don't know you about some of the things you've done in the past and what you're doing up to this day. Yeah, sure. So grew up in Queens. Anybody who's seen the movie Goodfellas, I grew up right at the, the, center of that insanity in Queens, New York, for whatever reason, all of organized crime found themselves, 80% of organized crime found themselves located in this little town called Howard Beach, Queens. And so the discussions at a very young age were, you know, could you do the time, right?

Everybody was going to jail or getting killed or killing somebody. And sounds ridiculous today at, you know, 40-something years old. Obviously values and morals were completely screwed up, but if you're a young kid growing up there, that's all you know, right? Your environment. And so my mother was very forward thinking. My mother gets into yoga, meditation, vegan foods in the center of this place where all they eat is sausage and peppers and cheesecake and talk about, like I said, food or robbing armored cars or whatever it is. And she realizes very quickly that my sister and I have to get out of there.

She introduces us to this idea of meditating for days on end, of fasting and not eating. She brings us to a 3,000-mile foot race that takes place in Queens around a one-mile loop. Obviously, my sister and I didn't participate in that, but at a young age, again, you're a product of your environment. You see somebody attempting 50, 60 days of running around a one-mile loop. You start to realize what the possibilities are in life. And she moves us to Ethica, New York. My father stays in Queens. I start to build a business when I go visit my dad during the summers.

In Queens, I build a business. my neighbor was the head of a banana organized crime family, and he saw that my family was falling apart. He took me under his wing. I didn't really know who he was or why he was so powerful. I just knew that on Fourth of July, a tractor of fireworks would show up for me. So he was awesome, and he got me started my first business.

And then he gave me another organized crime. Before you know it, like I said, I had all these customers and guys that cheated on their wives, wives that cheated on their husbands. Like I saw it all. And I quickly, I don't know why. I think about it often because I have four children now, why I was so fascinated with taking the good and discarding the bad,

but it was something that I was fascinated with. And I really, more than studying their swimming pools, pool heaters, or cement work that I had to do, I was really studying the way they lived their lives. And that was fascinating to me. So anyway, I'm graduating high school. That's probably 1986. I'm going back to Queens to run my business.

My friend says, why don't we go to Cornell? Because Cornell is located in Ethica, New York, where I'm living with my mom. I say, that sounds like a great idea, but how are we going to get into Cornell? My grades are terrible. I wasn't planning on going to college. I have this business. He said, well, my dad's a professor who would get us in. So I said, well, that would be a home run.

So we go on interviews. We crush the interviews, but neither of us get accepted. Our grades aren't good enough. And so I decided I'm going to go run my business back in. Queens, he says, well, hang on. My dad said we could take extramural classes. We could be non-matriculated students, take up to three classes. Everybody else will take five. If we prove ourselves, we could reapply in January and probably get accepted. So I said, okay, we could try that. I said, so what I'm going to do then this summer while I'm running my business, I'm going to take a few

classes at St. John's in Queens, and I'll learn how to study. So I take a few classes. He decides instead that he's going to go to Vegas, because if we're going to buckle down On September, he wants to go party for the summer. So we took two different tax, and that was a real inflection point in my life, because it's secured in my mind that to be successful, you're going to have to take a little bit of pain now. I don't know if it was a culmination of all the families I saw taking some pain, people, but whatever it was, maybe the movie Rocky back in the 80s, but I was going to take my medicine early and hope to get something successful out of it later.

He was not going to delay gratification. He was going to go party now. He was to say he never got into Cornell. I finally got accepted after fighting my land for four semesters. He stayed out in Vegas. He is now a medical marijuana distributor, so I don't know who did better. But, you know, that's not my ethos. and so anyway, I graduate school, continue to run my business.

Eventually, someone convinces me to sell my business in Queens and take a stab at working on Wall Street. I do it. I quickly see because I'm looking at Wall Street completely different than kids that are graduating from Yale, Harvard, et cetera, and going into the business, they are viewing it as if the business is run the way it should be run. I'm viewing it as, man, this is a screwed up business.

I don't, doesn't make sense to me. So I started my own firm on Wall Street, trading for institutions, got very lucky, did very well, and retired in 2005. During the 10 years on Wall Street, I was killing myself, as we all did, right? Living on trading desk, going out every night trying to entertain clients. I got out of shape. I didn't feel as good as I did when I was laying bricks and cleaning pools, which was very physical 20-hour days. and so I sought adventure races. I found Solis and running around the world

doing these incredible races, you know, 350 miles, 500 miles, getting to a place where all I wanted was water, food, and shelter. Did those, fell in love with them, retired in 2005, moved to Vermont, started a family, and I'd been tinkering around and putting on races just because it was a lot of fun for me to get people healthy. And in 2010, started Spartan race,

race and spent, I don't know, 50 times the amount of money I planned on investing in this thing. And now it's a global business. We're in 20 plus countries. We'll service one million customers this year. And it's extremely rewarding. I'm very passionate about it. And I can't think of a better thing to be doing every day other than the emails all day every day. That's incredible.

So what a story to get to this point. You said, and so in 2005, is it interesting, and I also love the inflection point when your friend decided to go to Vegas and you decided to, as you call it, delay gratification. Is that part of, this is your mindset with enjoying or creating these punishing type races that really delay gratification to maybe the completion of the event? Yeah, I mean, listen, I think anything that goes wrong. on this planet or in your own life, it almost always centers around this concept of delay in gratification. Whether you look at a macro level,

the things we do to each other as countries, it's all we want instant gratification. And if we can just take our medicine and be more patient and deal with the hard in front of us so that we could have long-term success, we'd all have better lives and the world be a better place.

It's just that people want what they want and they want it now. It reminds me of, so Joe, my history is in athletics and playing football, and it reminds me of some of the just brutal, terrible winter workouts and summer workouts leading up to the season finally getting started in the fall. And people, especially in high school and college, a little bit after college, people would think, you know, you kind of go through the motions and practice, and then you just show up and when the lights turn on for a game day. And it was just the hours upon hours and days upon days of really things that weren't that fun

as far as the punishment you put your body into to prepare to kind of take the beating of playing a high-level football. And I think of that too when you say the term delay gratification. I love that. I think if we took that mentality to a lot of different areas, we'd be so much better. of even like businesses. I've been fortunate to speak with some CEOs of other businesses, and the ones that seem to have the most success are always playing the long game. They're always thinking long term. They're doing the daily rituals and the things they need

to do on a daily basis, but they're thinking from a long term perspective. Do you work with other businesses or talk to other CEOs about that? Yeah, and I think that's a great term, the long game, and we talk about it often. look, when I was younger, I think about the mistakes I made in businesses and could I have done better. And again, it's any time I took my eye off that long game and started to play a short game. I'll give you a silly example. I moved my family to Asia six weeks ago because we want to create some discomfort in our own lives and turn our lives upside down for our kids and let them experience a different culture.

But we're doing some business over there as well for Spartan. and we hired a local creative digital agency, and they just can't handle the work within three weeks of us hiring them and paying them. It's just, it's not working. And so I had a meeting with them and said, look, why don't you just give us our money back? And we could build a long-term relationship. And this way, who knows what comes out of it in the future,

as opposed to us being frustrated, you're frustrated, you can't deliver. And, you know, they're being difficult. And they'd rather torture us because they want to keep a, a few dollars and it's like, what that's going to do is we'll never have a relationship, ever. And Spartan's a pretty powerful break, as opposed to the way I've always approached business, certainly around consumers, the customer is always right. And so I can't tell you how many thousand times in 30 years I have said, don't worry about it, don't pay me.

Because it comes back tenfold. Yeah. They recommend somebody five years from that. You just don't know. Right? Stuff falls in your lap because you've got this net. network of people out there that say, hey, you know what? He's a pretty good guy.

Yeah. And he always did the right thing. So I think the long game wins in the end, even though it's like football practice, right? You know, it hurts right now. Yeah, exactly right. Wait, so hang on a second. Where are you now? So I just landed in Boston last night.

But, yeah, we're living in Singapore for the year. I remember seeing that the emails from with, you know, the people you were worked with. So I didn't know exactly what was circumstances. So you guys are going to live in Singapore for a while? We're going to live in Singapore. We've been there five, six weeks. We love it so far. Wow. Talk about a country who takes their medicine now and they play a long game and they've crushed it as a result. It's a great, it's a great narrative there. And it fits, like I said, it fits our ethos anyway. It's an amazing country. Talk about, so one of the reasons you said you did that as a couple of reasons of business,

as well as getting you and your family outside of your comfort zone. That's comfort zone something I speak about a lot on the show and the importance of intentionally leaping outside of it and thinking about that every day. Talk about your thought process when it comes to comfort zone. And whenever I'm comfortable, I try to be uncomfortable. I have a fear of sharks as an example, but so I try to jump in the water and swim in the ocean. I just love to push my own limits. I don't feel like doing 300 in the burpees in the morning, so I do them. I know that the result of doing things, you don't, obviously, you don't want to be

ridiculous, but you want to do healthy things that you don't feel like doing. And invariably, you're always happy because you didn't. And so I said to my wife, you know, we have four children, and the kids are in a brand new school, and there's a bunch of people speaking a different language, and I've got to get on a bus and all the things they didn't have to do in Vermont, where we had the school right next door to it. It was just fantastic. I think it's such a great growth experience for the kids. They're playing rugby.

They didn't even know what rugby was, right? Yeah. And so I think it's just a great experience. I think when you hear about these generations of people that were lucky enough to have some success, but then the second or third generations, it all falls apart. I think the reason it falls apart is because if you create, these nice cushion lives for your kid you're actually doing them a disservice yeah and so um i feel it's my job it's my wife's job as crazy as this sounds to actually throw a lot of adversity

at our kids i think we should go live in a slum in india i think we have to just give them perspective that it's not normal to be able to walk in a bike shop and buy a bike like that's not what most people can do so i don't know if that makes sense i love the i just love the the approach especially towards the parenting. I think that's so important from a leadership perspective. That's the most important thing that we'll do is how we lead and guide our kids. And they follow action more than they follow word. So getting up, picking up and going and doing it is just, it's inspiring to me.

Man, as a dad, that's an inspiring thing. You mentioned getting up and doing 300 burpees in the morning. What is it, what does your first 90 minutes of your day look like? What time does that start? What do you do? 90 minutes. At the end of 90 minutes is lunchtime. I'm up.

I'm checking emails immediately. I'm brushing my teeth doing all the things to do. And then I'm hit. Can you hear me or no? Yeah, yeah, of course. Then I'm hitting the ground and do my burpees. Or I have another routine I've just added where I do 12 exercises, 50 reps of each, really centered around mobility and so forth.

Now, in Singapore, my game is changing a little bit because I've had to adjust based on the environment who I could bring over to train my kids. My kids, for the last three years, been waking up 5.45 a.m. Every day we do a training session for an hour. And typically we had a kung fu teacher living with us to teach some kung fu, which is really, modern kung fu is really a combination of acrobatics

and gymnastics and so forth with some fighting forms mixed in. So they've been doing some really cool things for three years. But now that we're living in an apartment in Singapore, we have 30 flights of stairs right out our door, we've added stairs. So the first thing we do when wake up is head up to stairs.

And it's great for those little legs. My kids to have to deal with 30 flights of stairs right out of the gate. They wake up. And then they're doing their wrestling and kung fu routine, which I'm doing with them, which is a lot of animal movements, bear crawls, duck walks, rabbit hops,

something we've created called a scorpion walk, which is just brutal. If you could visualize a back bend, like a bridge, so your hands are on the ground, your feet are on the ground, and your stomach is as high is the highest point on your body. And then try walking like that. So you're walking.

It's like a reverse bear crawl. And so anyway, those are my mornings. Kids are off to school. And then it's just emails until I collapse. How many? What are the ages of your kids? My kids are three, five, seven, and nine. Oh, wow.

So you got some young ones getting out there and getting after that. I love it. I know we're up against the clock. Joe, but I just have just two more questions. So one of them is around. So let's say a 24-year-old, an intelligent 24-year-old who is seeking advice from somebody who has achieved big things like you in their life. And they come up to you and say, hey, Joe, and this is very broad, but it's meant to be. Hey, Joe, I want to have a life like yours as I progress through this journey.

I want to maybe not have a, you know, start Spartan race, but they want to do something. They want to, they want to have a meaningful effect on the world as well as lead their own family like you're doing. What is, what are you telling that person when they ask you that question? Well, most people, a lot of people ask me that question and most people just don't follow through, right? So for me, for me, at 12, 13, 14 years old, it was when I wasn't at school, it was 20-hour days. and so you've got to be willing when you have the most energy at 21 years old, 15 years old, right, to put in enormous amounts of time working and saving money. And it's not that I'm saying money is this important thing.

It's just money is a tool that helps you do, if you want, great things. They can do bad things too, but if you can save some money, you're more likely to get some great things done. So there's no way around hard. work. And it's just two things, right? You've got to do an enormous amount of hard work. You've got to save money. And then you've got to be, this is so simple, but I don't know how people don't get it. If you want to be around highly successful people, go volunteer, work for free, find out where they are, what organization they're running. And there's very few successful people that when they

meet a young person raising his or her hand saying, look, I'll come in, I'll work for nothing. I work for food and show how valuable you are that they won't take you under their wing. That's what my neighbors saw in me. I was a workaholic. I was a maniac at a young age. So he gave me a job and he gave me customers. And that's happened my whole life. And it's not because I'm special.

I'm not exceptionally good looking. I'm not even good looking. But I work hard. And think of it. If you're a teacher, the student that you brag to everybody about is the one that works hard. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And successful people love to help young, hungry people. Yeah.

You've got to be young. You've got to be hungry. Yeah, they want to be a mentor. I think people enjoy. They appreciate giving back and they like mentoring others. One more question, Joe, before we get rolling, I know we're up against it. So it's all about this show, the learning leader show. And I know that's a duplicative term because great leaders are well read, constantly learning. But that's how, you know, I came up with a name because I strive to do that on a daily basis. I love the art and science of leadership. I believe it's a learned skill, learned trait, even for introverts like myself. And I love when you hear that phrase, love for you to describe to me, what is the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the phrase learning leader?

I think leaders have to be constantly learning. I think the environment's constantly changing. if you think back to 20, 30, 40 years ago, there was only three networks as far as television. The church was much bigger than it is today. So you had these big influences that guided our thinking. Today that's not the case, right? Today stuff is moving and changing on a daily basis.

And so if you think you're going to be a leader and be set in your ways, you're probably not going to be a leader very long. You've got to adapt to the environment, adapt to your people, and be constantly learning. Man, that's perfect. And Joe, I just want to thank you very much for being a part of this show and sharing knowledge. I'd love to keep talking. I'm literally fascinated by your story and what you're currently doing, getting out of your comfort zone, everything that you've done leading up to this point.

So thank you very much for sharing that with me here and the listener as a Learning Leader Show. Thanks for having me. All right. Talk to you, man. Thank you. See you. All right. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next. time. Head over to learningleadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite

entrepreneur, CEO, world class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again and we'll see you next time on the Learning Leader Show.