The Mindset Mentor - You Are Living at 40% Capacity w/ Jesse Itzler

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

Episode 553 - Jesse Itzler is worth over $1 billion dollars and he feels like he is stuck in a rut, like there is more that he is capable of doing. So what does he do? He hires a Navy SEAL to live with him for a month. This is his incredible story about those 30 days. Subscribe to Rob Channels: YouTube: https://bit.ly/2KLV1zk Facebook: http://bit.ly/2C8Rs2e Instagram: http://bit.ly/2BXKc8d Website: http://bit.ly/2EwmaW1 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

Welcome to the Mindset and Motivation Podcast, one of the top motivational podcasts in the world. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we come out with a short, to the point, no BS episode to help make massive changes in your mind and transform you from who you are now to who you want to be. 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, you 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, he 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 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. 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 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 come up to see him. 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. 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 and 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 a Seal, where you have 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, is all about psychology. And 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, you know, 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. I don't play any instruments. I'm not a singer. 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 to the studio on north boulevard in new york and um one day i was

there and i saw a cassette on the mix board from a guy a pioneer of 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 on my demo and got a record deal.

of 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. 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 there's that 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 or the, and I'm not a great salesman. I'm not saying that I'm saying just being able to, to emotionally connect in the form of persuasion. It's an interesting way to put it now. So tell me about your about your first record, how that goes, and how you got into jingles after that. So the first record, you know, 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 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 then I got into jingles. And that was a lot more successful for

me and led me down a different course. So tell me about that then. Was that a big life lesson for you? 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 it 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. What do you ask when you ask kids?

What do you want to be when you grow up? And if you 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 guess, the foot off the guess 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. A lot of people, 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 programmed. 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's really intriguing way of thinking about it. So, so that's cool. So then you took, 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. 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,