The Mindset Mentor - Do What Sucks w/ Jesse Itzler

Episode Date: August 16, 2017

Episode 311 - What happens when a billionaire feels stagnant? They hired a Navy Seal, who is considered the toughest man in the world, to come live with them for a month. That's what Jesse Itzler did, but he did not expect it to be the hardest month of his life. Listen to this episode to learn how the author of the book "Living with a Seal" made it through the toughest 30 days of his life. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Hey, real quick, before we start today, are you struggling with achieving your goals or have you ever set a goal or New Year's resolution and then not achieved it? Well, I have a free ebook for you called Hack Your Goals, The Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success that you can download like thousands and thousands of people already have. Just go to mwfmotivation.com and download it there. Okay, I'll get you to the podcast right now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, one of the top-rated motivational podcasts in the world. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I come out with a short, to-the-point, no-BS podcast designed to transform you from who you are today into who you want to be. There's no

fluff here, just life-changing content. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast starts now. Welcome to today's episode. I am excited to share this episode with you, which is an interview with Jesse Itzler, who is the owner of the basketball team, the Atlanta Hawks, and has started and sold many successful businesses and also married an extremely successful person as well, who is Sarah Blakely, who is the founder of Spanx. And he just wrote a book not too long ago called Living With a Seal. And the book is incredible.

It inspires the heck out of me. And I wanted to have this guy on to be interviewed. He lived with the toughest man in the world for 30 days and then wrote a book about it. And if you listen to the last episode I put out called Demand Greatness, it inspires the hell out of me. And I'm just so excited to bring you guys this interview to learn about the psychology of having the toughest man in the world live with

you and about pushing yourself past your boundaries to find out your true potential. So I'm so excited to bring this to you guys. And before we dive in, I've been getting some emails of people asking about one-on-one coaching and group coaching. If you are curious about taking the next step to your life and you really want to get into coaching and need a little bit extra help to get you there, send me an email, rob at mwfmotivation.com, and we'll talk about it. But without further ado, this is the interview with Jesse Itzler.

Welcome to today's episode. I am extremely excited to have Jesse Itzler on. And to give you an idea, Jesse, just so you know, I reached out to you all the way back in March and you were super busy. You had agreed to be on, but then your sister was like, you know, once things start to clear up, we'll get you in the schedule. And I reached out a couple more times and then finally got you. And we have a very interesting connection that I just found out about last week. So, you know, inside of your book, you talk about you used to live at, I think it was 15 West Central Park. Is that where the apartment was? Yeah.

So I saw that and I was like, I said that a couple of times. Let me Google this place. And I Googled it and I saw it and I was like, I've been in there before. And my cousin was actually, uh, the VP of a company who built gyms inside of New York city and they built that gym. And he said, he used to see you in there all the time. Um, he'd see your kids in there and he brought out mats for you a few times. He remembers seeing seal in there and then he, you could confirm or deny this, but he remembers seeing Tom Brady in there a couple of times too. Is that right? Confirmed. It's true.

He said, he said that you weren't supposed to bring guests in more than I think three times a month, but nobody was going to come up to Tom Brady and say, Hey, you have to leave. Definitely no one was going to seal. Yeah. Well, that's what he said. He remembers seeing him and he, hey, you have to leave. Definitely no one was going to call the SEAL. Yeah. Well, that's what he said. He remembers seeing him and he was like, yeah, I'm not going to go in there. I'll just let them do what they're doing. But the reason why I'm excited about it is because you have an extremely interesting story. And as I told you before we started, I love psychology. I'm obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with teaching it. And I think there's a lot of psychology in your personal story, but then also in the book that you have that just came out that's called Living with the Seal,

where you had 31 days where Seal lived with you. And to dive in, I want to talk about first your life, if that's cool, because you were a rapper, you've done jingles, you've owned a jet company, you've owned a water company, and now you own the Atlanta Hawks. So you've gone in crazy industries and gone all over the place. But one of my favorite books is all about psychology. It's called Think and Grow Rich. And I think that a lot of the principles you probably learned maybe just as a rapper and starting, we've been able to move into all of these businesses. So can you give me a rundown, talk about how you started off as a rapper first, I guess we can dive into? Yeah. I mean, it's been a pretty

unorthodox journey for me. I started out, I grew up in New York. I started out in the music business trying to get a record deal in the early, late 80s, early 90s. I had no experience being in a recording studio.'d never i don't play any instruments i don't i'm not a singer um so it was and i had no connections my dad owned the plumbing supply house so the way i had to make my demo in the late 80s in college was to take an instrumental and play it on the cd player and push record on my answering machine and do a little rap jingles. And that's what I did and caught the ear of a producer just literally through getting him to call my answering machine. And he ended up right when I graduated, he took a job as a engineer slash, I don't know,

utility guy at a studio in New York. And he had free time between two in the morning and six in the morning when they shut down in between sessions. So he told me if I came up, he would work with me in that studio in those hours when no one else was in. So I used to ride my bike about 20 miles to the studio on North Boulevard in New York.

And one day I was there and I saw a cassette on the mix board from a guy, a pioneer of rap named Dana Dane, one of my favorite artists. And I borrowed the cassette, long story short, on the way to California, two or three days later, I learned that the executive, the owner of a company called Delicious Vinyl, his favorite artist was Dana Dane. So I just cold called them when I landed. I said I had a cassette of Dana. He'd love to hear it. No one knew what I was talking about. I got up to the owner of the label's assistant and she was so confused, I guess, through my accent or whatever. She said, Dana, if you can be here at two o'clock, Mike would love to meet you.

So I buzzed myself in as Dana Dane and ended up playing in my demo and got a record deal. Man. So from the beginning, could you say that most of what you achieved at the very beginning was just pure hustle at that point? You know, hustle is a strong word. It was a lot of hustle, but it was a lot of persuasion, too. You know, I think people neglect the art of persuasion. And I don't mean that negatively like trickery. I mean, in selling, selling yourself, connecting emotionally. I mean, he when I signed my record deal, he bought the song on the demo, but he really was buying into me. We had a strong instant connection.

And I think that's a skill set. And that's been a lot of it. So hustle was getting in the door, but I would say it was more about the art of the sale. And I'm not a great salesman. I'm not saying that. I'm saying just being able to emotionally connect in the form of persuasion. It's an interesting way to put it now. So, so tell me about your, your first record, how that goes and how you got into, uh, into, to jingles after that. So the first record, um, you know, it, it didn't do what I thought it would, what I was hoping it would do. The problem was when I got signed, Delicious Vinyl had two huge acts. One was a guy named Young MC who won a Grammy for Bust a Move. And the other was a guy named Tone Loke who wrote two massive hits, Wild Thing and Funky Cold Medina.

I was so sure that I was third in line just because of the momentum of the record company that I literally made probably the biggest mistake someone can make, which was instead of stepping on the gas pedal and really going to work and really trying to make everything perfect, the product perfect, I took my foot off the gas pedal and celebrated the deal rather than what was ahead. so of course when that happens it's not going to be great so they didn't pick up the second option on the album and i moved back to new york and and then i got into jingles and that that was a lot more successful for me and led me down a different course so tell me tell me about that then did. Was that a big life lesson for you of you felt like you

finally hit it and then you took your foot off the gas and it turned out to be not what you wanted to be and less success than you really wanted in the first place? Was that a lesson that you took with you the rest of the time where you went into each business afterwards? Like when I get in, I have to go full speed and keep my foot on the gas and not take it off? Well, the problem is very often you use so much energy to get to the point of where you want to be. For example, you look at pro athletes that make it, let's just take a basketball player that starts playing basketball when he's six, five, maybe three, plays every day all the way through with his lifelong dream. When you ask kids, what do you want to be when you grow up and want to be a pro athlete? They say, I want to make it to the NBA, let's say. That was me as a kid. That's all

I wanted. You want to make it to the NBA. They don't say, I want to start. I want to average 10 points a game, four assists and three rebounds. I want to work hard and make the all-star game. I want to have a 10-year career. They say, I want to make the NBA. And their brain is, you know, you program your brain. And once that goal is hit and all that energy is used to hit your goal, it's easy to take the foot off the gas because you've hit the goal. But the real thing that happens there is you have to reset your brain and reset and reprogram

20 years of goal to your new goals. And that's a really hard thing to do. And that's why a lot of people make it to professional sports. And not everyone is first in first out of the gym like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James you know a lot of people that that's where the journey kind of ends in a weird way so not everybody but that's sort of what happened to me on a much less grand scale you know I hit my goal that was the goal that's what I program it's very similar to running a marathon you know you run you program your head to do 26.2 miles. And then when you're done, you're like, ah, I couldn't even, I can't go one foot more. Well, that's because you programmed your head,

your brain for 26.2 miles. But if you had programmed yourself for 30 miles, you would have been able to do it. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's, that a really intriguing way of thinking about it. So that's cool. So then you took a little bit of time in the music industry into jingles. And so tell me, I guess, was there a specific moment where you're sitting there and a light bulb went off? You're like, oh man, this is actually something that I could do. And if so, what was the next step of starting into jingles and building that business? Well, part of it was out of necessity. So when I went back to New York, I had two things that I could really put on my resume. I was a failed rapper. And prior to that, I was a kiddie pool

attendant. So I didn't have a choice but to figure something out if there was no plan. So I was a big sports fan. I wanted to stay in music. And one day I was just at a Knick game. And the light bulb did go off in the sense that I recognized that sports was evolving and changing less about the on-court performance, which is obviously very important, but you go to a basketball game, there's only 48 minutes of action. And very often, and you're a fan for those 48 minutes, but very often you're there at the arena for two, three hours. And when you take a seat, you're an audience. And all of a sudden they started

to address that with video play, music change, dancers, Nick city dancers, Laker girls, the whole presentation in this three hour window changed to entertainment. So I just said, God, you know, what if we just did a theme song for the next? And we did a video with all the celebrities that come to the game, Spike Lee, Woody Allen, whoever, you know, all the regulars at the Garden on Celebrity Row and some of the fans and made like a rally song. And then we'll take a shot at it if you want to do it. You know, so I did it. They paid me $4,000.

I think I lost probably close to $1,000 after I paid the engineer, the lawyer, the singer, the producer, the studio etc but what happened is every team that came into Madison Square Garden would say why don't we have this who did this and I was kind of the only kind of created this niche of sports music no one else was doing it and I said okay that's going to my lane. I'm not going to compete against the 50,000 song titles at Tower Records that are probably as good or better than everyone's mega talent. I'm the only one in this lane. So let me stay here. done in the past couple of months where it's like, I realized I have a, you know, quite a surplus of money that's coming in and versus taking and buying something new, like a new car, new watch or something that's fun. You actually took the money, which I heard you say in another podcast and reinvested, which is one of the hardest things you've ever done. And that was

a decision I also had to make where it's like, all right, I'm at this point where stuff's going really well. I need to reinvest all of this money versus do the, I think the normal American thing of going out and blowing a bunch of money. Tell me about that decision, why it was so hard for you and then what it actually did to your business. Because I know I have a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening and they listen to this podcast, but they might get a little bit extra money and think, oh, you know, now we can go out and buy a new car or whatever it might be. Talk about building your business and actually deciding to reinvest your money at such a young age when you first started this jingle business too. Well, we started the jingle business

and my partner and I did a song for the Knicks called Go New York Go in the early 90s and came up with this idea where we could sell the song but include all the songs that they play at Madison Square Garden and take great moments in team history and kind of make in between each song, make like a musical program. In any event, we sold 40,000 of these records in New York, which was great. It kept the lights on and this kind of thing. But when Michael Jordan came back, we sold half a million non-returnable records through Monk Reward in Chicago. And that was a multi-million dollar order. And the first, you know, when you're in a 600, maybe less, maybe it was 400

square foot apartment in New York, the first thing you want to do is get out and climbing up, I think I had 147 steps. I just wanted to get out of that apartment. I wanted to buy a car. I wanted to upgrade. I wanted to get a lot of things. I wanted to take a trip. And I remember very clearly having a little battle with my partner about use of proceeds. We decided to just take every single penny and reinvest it in exclusive deals with all the leagues so no one else could do this, put out these CDs, this sports music stuff we were doing. And it ended up paying off because we sold the company with all the rights that we bought.

We sold the company less than a year later for several millions of dollars. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. And then so you go from rapping to jingles to starting a jet company. And so give me a quick rundown of how that happened. Because that's, for me, just you think of the fact that you went from the music industry to jets. Like those are two completely different industries.

How did you go from that transition and acquire the knowledge that you needed to, I guess, to kind of do well there? Right. They're very different. And I think the common thread, though, between everything for me has been that I had no prior knowledge or training in music or aviation or beverages or anything that I've been in. And that really, for many people, that's a deterrent. Like, I don't want to I have this dream, but I don't want to chase it. I don't know if I know enough about this business. But for us and for me in particular, guaranteed that everything would be done differently.

You know, if no one told you how to do what you're doing, so you would do it different. So I was a guest on a private jet. We sold this music company to a felony Bob Sillerman. He had a timeshare on a private plane and he invited my partner and I on for a trip. And we walked in and it was like the whole world changed. We walked onto this airplane, like people fly like this. Outrageous. And by the time we landed kind of looked at each other and said you know what we're in the wrong business this is this is the new rock and roll right so we did a little research and decided that you know we wanted to create a platform basically that we could use and and not have to go and take our shoes off and get in the lanes and go through the long lines at the commercial airports and came up with this 25 hour prepaid jet card where you own, where you have all

the benefits of owning your own airplane. It's available on short notice, take you where you want to go, but with none of the responsibilities. So we would assume all the responsibilities. So you would just buy a 25 hour card for X amount of dollars. And if you flew an hour flight, you'd have 24 hours left. And that's what we did. That's it's, it's interesting. There's, there is, I guess, kind of one common theme that I'm noticing. So rapping, you liked music, jingles, you liked music, marquee jets, you wanted to be able to have a jet to use anytime that you wanted to. And then you went into, next thing that you went to was Zico Water. And it seems like, and I

know that you talk about how you love coconut water and everything. So was the one common theme that I guess strung these together, was it was either something that you liked or something that you wanted and that's how you got into these industries? I think the common thread here, less about the passion for the industry and more about the passion for the journey. So I guess I was never an aviation freak. I didn't love selling airplanes or time on airplanes, but I love the process. I love meeting people. I love the challenge. I love the process I love meeting people I love the challenge I love the unknown I love being creative around it and I

loved trying to you know part of the fun was just not knowing what was ahead and learning how to navigate these waters because you know we had no experience in this in any of these fields again it just solidified that we would have to do it we were guaranteed to do it different and we were guaranteed to get different results that's the part of it that i loved and then just watching kind of like having this movie in my head of how this was going to play out and then filling in the script was a lot of fun. You brought up two things that I think really scare people away from most things they want to do is you actually, some people would think, well, I don't like the unknown, number one,

which you said you enjoy. And the second thing was that you didn't have any experience. And I think that most people are afraid to go into certain things because of those two reasons. It would be cool to do that, but I don't have any experience in that industry. I don't have experience with that. Or and they're afraid of the unknown and not knowing what is eventually going to come up. And for you, it seems like those two things that probably shy most people away were actually the things that drove you most towards them. Does that sound about right? were actually the things that drove you most towards them. Does that sound about right?

It is. But if I was going to shrink that down, I would say that most people, some people use fear and say, it's fear that stopped me from doing this or fear that's preventing me. But I think it's really self-doubt. And I think when you could take a hammer and beat up self-doubt,

then I think you open yourself up to a world of possibilities. And I think the way that you break self-doubt, the way that you annihilate it and enter this space of willingness to try something and it's okay if I'm embarrassed or defeated is by doing things that make you uncomfortable consistently and not just work challenges i mean creating an environment in your head where you're constantly doing things that are uncomfortable that that are challenging by consistently doing that i think you you knock self-doubt on on its butt and you enter this world of, you know, where you can kind of like bang your chest and go after things.

Yeah, and that's the perfect segue into your book and living with SEAL because at this point in time, I guess you were – when I went back and read through the entire thing, you were still in the beginning stages of Zika water and going out with that business. And you said something which is destroying self-doubt and going through the unknown and pushing your boundaries. And what's interesting to me most about you is that to most people looking out and for people who don't know, you're also married to an extremely successful woman as well, the owner of Spanx. And so you've had a ton of success. You're married to a woman who has a ton of success as well. And most people think when you get to that area, they'd be like, well, I'd be perfect. I would just hang it up and I would be, you know, I live the life the rest of the time. We could just go out and travel anytime. But you had this point where you hit a level where you were like, you know what? I want more.

I want to break a routine. And I want more out of my life, even though to most people outside looking in would be like, this guy's literally almost at the top of the world. So tell me about that in your head, how that works, because I'm super intrigued by that. And then how you met Seal as well. So I'll start with how I met Seal because it'll lead into kind of where i was at my life but i was at a race in san diego that was a the the four it was a 24-hour race and the format of the race it was really a style so you run a mile i run a mile my friend runs a mile whatever team runs the most amount of miles in 24 hours wins the race. The fellow to the left of me when we were starting the race had no one to relay with.

So he was his own relay team. And because the race was self-supported, so yeah, they provided nothing. So you had to bring all your own supplies, water, food, you know, and we had massive amounts of, I think I overdid it a little bit for this race. And he had three supplies. He had a fold up chair, a bottle of water and a box of crackers. And for 24 hours, that's not going to work. He was a really big guy. And I'm watching this guy, no teammates. And sure enough at mile 70, because of his weight and his lack of nutrition during the race, he had broken all the small bones in both of his feet. And he got down in the chair. And I just remember saying to myself, like, man, we got to get this guy a medic and airlift him out of here like ASAP. And what did he do? He picked himself out of the chair,

somehow ran another 30 miles, and then ran one, which was his goal, 100 miles, and then ran one more mile for good luck. Now, really just to make sure that he got there in case they miscounted. So, you know, I was so flipped out over this just drive or whatever will to complete his task. So I Googled him and I learned that he was a Navy SEAL with this amazing backstory. I cold called him, flew out to meet him. And then just very briefly into our conversation, I realized that I wanted what he had. I didn't know what it was at the time. Whatever got him out of the chair, I wanted that because if that could rub off on me, if I could teach that to my employees, if I could bring that to my kids, if I could,

if just some of that rubbed off on me personally, then all the buckets in my life would be better. Work, personal, just self improvement, my relationship with my wife, everything. So I asked him if he would come live with me for a month. And he basically said, if you're crazy enough to ask a guy like me to live with you crazy enough to come and a couple of days later, he's sitting at our breakfast table. enough to come. And a couple of days later, he's sitting at our breakfast table. So to go back to your, your question. So at this point in my life, I'm in a really, you know, I'm in a good place. I'm married, still married, had a child and now four, sold some, sold a business or two. I was, I was doing fine. And, but I was in like so many of us. A routine, you know, my routine was get up, work out, go to work, dinner with my family, play with my kids, repeat, which is perfect and great, except it's super comfortable.

And so it was just became so repetitive that I felt like, God, man, you know, in the past, I felt like I checked the box, moved on, accomplished things and go to the next thing. And here I am in this routine that was becoming a rut. It was becoming so comfortable that I couldn't get out of it. And it was great. But I'm like, I'm almost 40 years old at the time, 40 something young. I have to have way more in my tank. There's got to be a lot more. And if I just keep doing this, before you know it, I'll be 60, 70. And I'm going to be like, I gave away my 40s, my 50s and my 60s. I don't want to do that. So that was sort of my mentality going in. And I said to him, you know, he said, I'll come live with you on the one condition. You have to do everything I say. And I said to him, I need you to break up my routine.

I want to look at things differently. When everyone sees a red pen, I want to see a blue pen. I want to start doing things differently and getting different results. That's it's it's I'm laughing because of the fact that when you read the book, it's like, there's no way this guy couldn't come in and break anybody's routine. And there's so many funny parts of it. This is one of two books I've read in my entire life where I remember sitting there and actually laughing out loud from some of the stuff that actually happens and the stuff that he says. So he agrees to come and three days later, I think he shows up at your house. What's the first day like or the first few moments of having this guy with you?

Well, immediately I recognized that he came in. I didn't give him any. I just gave him my address. He didn't ask me for car directions, this, that. He showed up and he had a small little like Huffman backpack. And I just remember thinking to myself, if I was going away for a month, I'd check like three or four bags. And he had, so I made a little note just in my brain, like, okay, simplicity. I'm going to sort through that later. And I told him to make himself at home,

that my house was his house. And he said, I don't have a house. And I explained to him that that was just an expression, you know, make yourself at home is an expression. And he came right up to my face and he said, I don't operate in expressions. So I knew right away that this was going to be a different kind of month. And we went down to the gym to do some pull-ups.

He wanted to see where I was at physically. I'm not that strong. So I got up on the pull-up bar. I did maybe like eight pull-ups. He said, all right, wait 30 seconds and do it again. I got maybe like five more pull-ups. He said, all right, drop down, wait 30 seconds, get up on the bar and do it again. And I got in maybe like three, something like that, two or three. I dropped down and my arms were just like, God, jacked up. I said, all right, well, what do you want to see next? He said, I want to see you do a hundred more. And I said, come on, that's impossible. Maybe in ABCL land that's doable, but here it's impossible.

And he put me through – so I ended up staying in the gym for about two hours and one by one until I got 100 pull-ups done. And he – it made me realize right away that, God, if I'm under-index by a hundred pull-ups, if I'm leaving that much on the table, where else in my life am I under indexing like that? Where else, if my goal at Marquee Jet was 20 cards sold a month, maybe it should be 40. What are my real limits and why am I imposing the limits on me? So he put me through these series of like wacky, unorthodox training drills, whatever, during the course of our 30 days. And it goes back to what I said earlier. A lot of it was about, for me, kind of knocking out this self-doubt and doing things that made me super uncomfortable.

So when things that are uncomfortable, because, you know, every day we get hit, even when you don't even realize it, with so many, I call them arrows, you know, that just come at us like constantly dodging them. And they could be little things like, you know, hey, can you take 15 minutes? This guy wants to pick your brain or has an idea or hey, can I have $20 or the electricians coming or this happened or someone's not happy at work. Someone needs to talk to you about something that happened. That's a prop, whatever. Well, it's every day. And then on top of that, we're getting a zillion emails that we have to respond to immediately or we feel we have to every day if we don't respond instantly we're like someone's gonna get mad at us or or this and that so the only way to really deal with that stuff

is to create this environment that like you know when things get hard or uncomfortable like you're not going to run away from it and And that was what he was all about. It was like this lesson for me was about dealing with stuff in a way that like, I've already done stuff that's made me uncomfortable already. I'm going to be able to attack this head on, not run from it, but attack it. And it was just preparation for,

even for an entrepreneur, you know, how many times you get the door slammed on your face. Are you going to quit or are you going to stick with it until you get to your goal? And it's so interesting because to tell you this, I have a talk that I've given multiple times to companies. And it's about unlocking your potential. multiple times to companies. And it's about unlocking your potential. And I actually legitimately start the talk, telling the story of David coming in and living with you and going through the fact that, you know, you did these 100 pull-ups and I think he's got like the world record for 4,000 pull-ups in a day or something like that. And so he's got 4,000 pull-ups in a day. And then I did more research and this guy, it like, it, it doesn't seem human. He's so on a different level of normal

people that it's scary to think that, that it seems unhuman for him to do the stuff that he does. Like you talk about in his book, uh, he signed up for, it was either a 24 or 48 hour race and at mile 20, he signed up for 48 hours and at mile 23, he tore his quad asked if they could clock him at 24 hours. They said no. So he said, Roger that. And then just wrapped up his quad and kept running for another 24 hours. Um, he lost 105 pounds in two and a half months. Um, I was watching a video online about him and he ran 110 miles in 24 hours, uh, at mile 90, he had pneumonia, um, and finished the race. And then the next year he came back and did 150 miles in 40 hours. Um, and it wasn't like, like he was running a track, like this is mountainous terrain where he has to pull himself

up with a rope. And, um, and he did 150 miles in 33 hours. And it's the, the fact that he does these things makes it seem so unhuman. And that's the scary part that to us, normal quote unquote, normal people, it seems unhuman when I guess everybody has that potential inside of them. Without question. Do you, did you kind of, is that what you, the main thing that you got from him was just like, Holy crap. I thought I was living at like level nine or 10 and I'm only, I'm at like level five. Did you feel that way? Well, what I, yes, he's a unique guy. I mean, not everyone can operate on that level, but he has mastered the mind, you know, he has mastered

the mind. And a lot of his, a lot of it comes from, he doesn't enjoy what he, what the mind. You know, he has mastered the mind. And a lot of his a lot of it comes from he doesn't enjoy what he what he does. He just he's just consistent with it. And as an I won't quit until not, you know, I don't quit when I'm tired. I quit when I'm done attitude on a very small level, on a small level, you know, I can relate to it just through my own personal journey because when I started running, I remember my goal was to run 20 minutes nonstop right out of college. 20 minutes. It's like I look back on it now, but that's what I wanted to do. Like 10 minutes, turn around and come home, and that was my day. Fast forward, I ran 100 miles in 22 hours and 30 minutes, uh, put me in

a wheelchair for four hours, but it taught me, it goes to what I'm talking about. Like, where are these limitations? So he has annihilated, he's searching for what his limitations are. And, you know, through, through my journey of, of 100-mile run, it was the same thing. I went from 20 minutes to 22 hours and 30 minutes. And through that process of going from this kid who could run 20 minutes barely to this man that could run, you know, 100 miles in 22 hours, in between those two things, it was self-doubt. That's the difference. Now, of course, you have to put the time in. You have to become an expert and read about it and believe it and train. You have to do all that stuff. But it starts with breaking down the doubt. You look

at Roger Bannister when he broke the four-minute mile. No one had ever broke, broken a four minute mile before he comes in and no one believed that it could even be done. He spent more time visualizing himself doing it than he did on the track. And since he's done it, I mean, don't quote me here, but I believe it's either a hundred or a thousand, but it's a big number every year run a sub four minute mile because they know, number every year yeah run a sub four minute mile because they know because it's already been done now it's like that doubt is gone and now it's just about doing it i know it could be done someone's done it so now i'm gonna go do it so he approaches everything with i can do it i'm gonna do it i don't care. I have pneumonia. Huh. I'm going to do it. Yeah, that's the thing that I love.

And I'm not going to lie to you. There's a few times where I got so hyped reading the book that I was like, I have to go to the gym right now. I already went this morning, but I have to go in my backyard and work out. I ordered a 40-pound weight vest because I was like, damn, I didn't even know that I could order one on Amazon. Let me go ahead and order one and work out in my backyard. But it's legitimately like that. Like there's the main thing that I got from it is the 40% rule. Like that really kind of changed my life of the way that I approach everything and the way that I think. And, you know, just if let's do this before we dive into it, what, what is the 40% rule and how did he teach that to you? And, you know, do you still use that in your life? And do you think about it in the back of your head constantly?

Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's, um, it's a principle. I think that, that, that he taught me that I believe resonates throughout the special, special ops, but it's basically that when your brain says you're done, you're only 40% done. So you still have, or you have 40% more, I should say. So you have all this reserve in your tank. So the way that it's a scientific fact, that the way that our brain is wired, the first time we experience pain or discomfort, our brain tells us, sends a signal to stop. It doesn't want us to get hurt. It's a defense mechanism. So when you ignore that tap on the shoulder saying to stop, you still have so much more left, 40% capability. So that's sort of the backbone of it. And, um, and it's

true. You know, it's true. I look at the pull-ups, I look at some of the stuff that we've done. I look at his personal experience. I look at some of the stuff in my history. I'm sure if you retrace things in your life, there are times where you wanted to quit. And for some reason, embarrassment, you wanted to finish whatever you were able to do it. Look at marathon runners in this country. There's 600,000 people that sign up for marathons every year, annually, here in the United States. And of which, you know, how many people finish a marathon? That's a crazy long distance of the 600,000. The answer is about 98%, 98, 99%. Now, almost all of them, I would bet, myself included, experience what's called hitting the wall, where you just want to stop and you get that signal from your brain like, it's mile 19, buddy.

What are you doing? It's freezing out here. I'm exhausted. I'm tired. And you're telling me I have seven more – I have an hour and 20 minutes left? I'm exhausted. I'm tired. And you're telling me I have seven more miles. I have an hour and 20 minutes left. I'm done. I hit the wall. Why do 98% of the people finish? It's the 40% rule. They ignore that, tap on the shoulder, and they dig into this extra reserve that they have. Yeah. I've never run a marathon, but I have run 10 miles before.

And I remember I got to about mile six and I was like, I can't do anymore. My legs hurt so much. And I was just like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Because I had already said, I'm going to do at least 10 miles. And there was a point where it just feels natural. Your body keeps moving itself. And I guess, well, actually, if that was mile six, I went to mile 10. I guess that is the extra 40% right there. And then I woke up the next morning. I was a little bit sore. And I thought to myself, I thought I was done at six. I went all the way up to 10. If you think you're going to stop that early, man, it drives me crazy that there's probably so much

human potential just left on the table with so many different people and the stuff that people could do if we went and kept going. So you see it in fight or flight. You see it in extreme situations. You hear stories of people that, you know, an airplane crashes, that walk 90 miles, you know, with an injured leg to back to town or survive in the wilderness or whatever it is, or at sea. You hear these stories. Now, how do you operate like that all the time? You can't, but can you tap into it when you need it? Can you tap into it before you quit on your journey in business? Can you tap into it during a race? Can you tap? Are you willing to tap into it in personal relationships when things get hard? You know, all these different

things apply to the same principle. And it all stems from, in my opinion, creating this environment in your head that I won't quit, you know, and it's, you can call it resilience, you can call it grit, you can call it mental toughness, you can call it whatever you want to call it. But I believe we all have it, it's a muscle. And the more we exercise that muscle, by, you know, doing things that are tough, challenging, the better off we'll be in all the buckets buckets of our life and that's sort of what you know that's sort of what the book you know why i wrote living with the seal because i wanted the takeaway for me wasn't about wow you can do you can go from doing 22 push-ups to a thousand a day well yeah you can't physically but a lot of that starts with the mental side of it yeah i think i think i told this to somebody last week.

I think the gym is probably the closest thing that you can get that parallels real life because once you start pushing through certain things and realizing what you can do in the gym, I feel like it just carries on into the rest of your life as well. Yeah. One of the questions I have for you, because there there's a lot of these, um, but on day three, I had put it down cause I wanted to, I literally started this and I wanted to talk to you about it. He said that, you know, you were checking in on him. You were going to see if everything was okay. You're going to bed. And he was pissed off. And he said, you're too pretty. You're too cute.

Find the most uncomfortable chair that you can. And he made you sleep in the most uncomfortable chair the entire night. What, what other things did he do that, that we haven't talked about so far that just completely disrupted your normal routine? I mean, everything he had me do something called a four, four 48, four, we had to run four miles every four hours. if you ran it we started at midnight and we finished at 12 45 then we would have three hours and 15 minutes until the next run for 48 hours so that disrupted my life because i could be in the middle of the meeting and he would tap me on the shoulder and say it's time right that was. We jumped in a frozen lake. He

cracked a hole on, on, in the lake and jumped in it. And like, he was basically bathing in it. Like it was no big deal. I jumped in like, you know, I was going to immediately need to go to the hospital. And, um, that was very challenging. So it was just a series of these kind of like really, he had me sit in the sauna till I basically passed out. Just taking me to these crazy limits. Now listen, I understand that people aren't going to go and hire a Navy SEAL to break up their routine. I totally get that. But I do believe that you don't have to do that. And there's a lot of things that you could do at home or every day that accomplish the same thing. So for me, I'm terrible at language. So I'm trying right now to learn. And for whatever reason, I just cannot retain foreign language in my head. It just gets scrambled. and i'm trying to learn the national anthem to 10 10 different countries and i'm really struggling with it but the process of it's like it's like an exercise for me no different than you going to the gym it's a mental exercise for me in you know sticking with something getting frustrated having a goal and trying to

accomplish it, all the obvious stuff. So that's one thing, taking a different route to work just to mix it up, look at things differently, listening to different music, returning every email, even though you want to, at the end of the day, even though you just want to go to bed. I mean, there's a lot of little things that you can do that, you know, kind of exercise this muscle. Yeah. And, and one of the things that you just said was, um, when you're talking about how he would break a routine, you're in the middle of a meeting. And so the crazy thing about this was, it wasn't like you had 31 days off of work. You were still working full time and traveling and

doing all of these things. And, uh And you still had this guy shadowing you everywhere that you went. And one thing I heard you talk about was how you broke your... After you were with him for a while, you kind of put your life into a pie chart and decided where you needed... There was so much extra time that you realized that you had when you had him with you, that you broke your life up into pie charts and you just kind of figured out, well, how do I need to spend time here? How do I need to spend time here? And then from that, you also got the non-negotiable of you spend three hours to yourself every single day doing whatever it is that you want to do. So I guess kind of give me an idea of that thought process and how you learned that from him that you had way more time than you originally expected.

Well, I realized that I was scheduling my day around other people and not things that were really important to me. So I was losing control of my time. It goes back to those arrows. I didn't want to say no to lunch appointments. I didn't want to say no to 15-minute meetings or calls or requests. And immediately I realized that if I wanted to put three or four more hours of stuff that he was giving me on my plate on top of being a dad, being a husband, having a business, that I had to eliminate all these non-essential things. Part of that was just watching TV and just dilly-dallying. I just took inventory. So I just, the way I would schedule my day in the past was I have meetings, I put it in my calendar and I would look and see what I have the

next day. Instead, I said, you know what? I'm going to take control of my own time. And I just drew a very simple pie chart. I said, all right, I sleep seven hours a day, sometimes six, sometimes eight, in general, seven. And then I said, I'm going to take three hours a day for me. And those three hours are cumulative. They don't have to be all from one to four in the afternoon. It could be 20 minutes here, 30 minutes here or whatever. And during that time, when I'm in that time, that's my time. It's my time. I'm not doing work. I'm not taking calls. I could do whatever I want. I could go for a run, take a sauna, sit on the couch, read a magazine, whatever. That's my time. Seven for sleep, three for me. And then the average American works eight hours a day, 40-hour week.

And again, for some people, that could be 45. For some, that could be 38. Let's just take the average, 40, a typical week, 40. So I'm working eight, I'm sleeping seven, three for me. Well, guess what? I still have six hours in the day to do what left. That could be for my, now, of course you have family, you have to, you have to have meals, you have commuting time. I get that. Point is You have to have meals. You have commuting time. I get that. The point is when you're efficient and you don't dilly-dally and you say no to all this stuff that like we're losing control of our own time because we're feeling pressured into saying yes to stuff we don't even really want to do in our own life, you have all this time.

And that's what I did. So I took the three hours. I mean it was amazing. It was amazing how my perspective and my relationship with time. Your relationship with time is a very critical thing. You can't waste time. We have limited amount of time. It's the only, it's always go, we're always running out of money comes, money goes, you make more money, you spend money, you have friends, you lose friends, but time it's always shrinking. So how do you stretch out your time? One way is, is this pie chart.

And then the other way is to create as many life memories as you can. And the most memorable stuff very often is stuff that's challenging. You hear the theme around challenge, you hear the theme around getting out of your comfort zone and pushing your limits. For me, that's what makes me feel the most alive. That to me creates memories. And that's what I want in my life photo book in my head when I go through the photo album of my life I don't remember a lot of things from you know 2006 fact I probably remember nothing that happened in 2006 but I remember with complete, the 100 mile run I did in 2006, almost every mile of it. That's amazing. Because for me, that's kind of the way that I've chosen

to live my life. Everyone that listens to my podcast knows I was raised, had pretty terrible childhood. Father passed away from being alcoholic at 15. And it was that moment that it clicked in my head of, holy crap, this is going to end one day. And I think from then my fears went from being judged, what people thought of me, all of these things to the fear of getting to the end when I know it's going to be coming now. Cause I feel like most people know they're going to die, when I know it's going to be coming now, because I feel like most people know they're going to die,

but they don't really act like they know they're going to die, to the only thing I want to make sure of is that I don't regret and wish I would have done something and pushed myself out of my boundaries. And it sounds like there's something inside of you that that's kind of the drive that keeps you going as well. Right. I agree. I agree. That's amazing. I love it. Well, I appreciate your time. I love this episode. The book is amazing. That's amazing. I love it. Well, I appreciate your time.

I love this episode. The book is amazing. It's funny. It's super quick read. It took me a couple days to go through. And I'm telling you, it'll push you to want to work out. So if you are trying to get that kick in the butt, you'll look at this guy and see that, man, if he's at a hundred percent human potential,

um, I want to, I want to try to get up at least a little bit more every single day. Um, so Jesse, I appreciate your time. This has been amazing. And, uh, and this, this last, last question I have for you actually had to put it down is this, um, tell me how excited you are in your thoughts around having Dwight Howard on your team now. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for the Hawks. I'm excited for Dwight. I'm excited for the city.

So far, he's been a 15 out of 10, just as far as getting in the community and doing everything that above and beyond. And I'm just really excited to see this, this next chapter for him and for us. Yep. Well, uh, growing up as a, uh, Orlando magic fan, as a kid, go born and raised in Orlando. I'll, uh, I'll tell you that, uh, I'm excited for you guys. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks so much. I'm glad we were able to finally do it. Yeah, for sure. Well, that's it for today's podcast. If you want the show notes for this episode,

they can be found at mwfmotivation.com. Also, if you liked this episode, please spread the love and share it with a friend because it's our mission to help as many people as we can. And to keep in touch, you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Both handles are at MWF motivation with no spaces. Now you know what time it is. So go out and make your dreams a reality. Outro Music