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Joe De Sena

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2014-07-01
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2014-07-01
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  1. “We have a website as spartanupthebook.com or just spartan.com will tell you about the races. But SpartanUpthebook.com will get them to the book. And yes, I'm excited today actually got launched today, the book, so love to get feedback from people and see what they think.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And a lot of them are just not going to come do the race. They're not going to get moving. And so if maybe the book is a way to reach a bunch of people and just get them to do something Because life is such a waste. That guy at Cornell that got me to move to New York, he changed my life. That professor changed my life. So if I could change just a few lives with the book, people that wouldn't go to the race, I win. I'm happy, right? What are you going to do in life? You can't just make money and worry about it. You've got to do some good things while you're here. And life is fast. It's going to be over soon. And so that was really, that was the impetus for this thing.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And I just like the question you asked, like what correlations you're seeing, it's literally intrigued me for thirty years. And I've been writing this book in my head. And why at a young age that I want to take cold showers and anything I didn't want to do forced myself to do, how do I pass that on to my kids? And so I've been writing this thing for a long time. And I mean, I retired in 2005. I was done. I was in Vermont building my family. Awesome wife, awesome kids. And we do this Spartan thing. I've got people saying we changed our life and it got them off the couch and they're losing weight and their relationship is better and they're off drinking and they're not doing drugs anymore. And I'm thinking, we're doing something really good here. But even if I reach a million, if we reach a million people this year, there's still 8 billion. There's a lot of people to reach.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So, for me, I've been writing this book for literally since I was able to drive that pool truck. And I would look over to my right and figure out who my employer partner was that day and where they're going to make it the whole day because we work until 11 o'clock at night. And it just intrigued me, and this is going to sound silly, but like Rocky Balboa, right? Rocky was a big movie back then. And it really intrigued me that in the movie, and granted this wasn't real life, that he was broken and fought to get ahead and he wins the fight and all of a sudden he's got money and then he gets soft. And I'd look over to the right in that pool truck and I'd think what makes this guy soft or hard? Why is it that when I finally found the Eastern Europeans they were tough?”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Great stuff. Shogun puts everything in the proper frame of reference for me. I mean, what that guy is going through, it's like puts your day in perspective. And then funny enough, I love the one-minute manager. That little book really helped me in business. And I'm not a giant reader, but those are big books for me.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, that's funny. This is a really interesting one for me because I would have never guessed this, and I don't think anybody listening would guess this. But downhill skiers. I see a high correlation. And then, because I'm a skier and because I have children that I take skiing now, I get it. And if you think about skiing, if you're a downhill skier, the moment you make the decision that day to go skiing, it's 50% miserable experience, right? The boots don't fit. You forgot your poles, the goggles, it's snowing, it's fleeting. And if you're a racer, and that's really what I meant to say, they're downhill ski racer. You're a racer and you've raced a large part of your life, you probably stood on top of the mountain for hours freezing, waiting for your slot to go. Right. And that builds grit. Because it's one thing, you and I, if we were hiking up the mountain, you take your jacket off, no matter how bad the weather is, you can deal with that, but standing still in the cold, getting pounded takes a certain skill set.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Well, I don't, I mean, I'm definitely no expert, again, they're much smarter MBAs on how to approach this in a methodical fashion. But for me, again, since I'm ten, eleven years old, it's really the passion, the fire in the belly that I'm looking for. And it was always, and it's going to sound terrible to Americans, but it was always the Eastern Europeans or like a third world country person, guy or girl, that just outworked anybody else, including myself. So I'm always looking, and that's what intrigued me so much. And that's really what the book is about, is how do I, first of all, why do they outdo us? And how do you not lose that edge if you're that kind of person? And then how do I find more of them? And then is that more important than exact skill sets for the job? And I believe it is. I believe you can teach that really.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So we've got about 40, 45-ish in Boston, and then about the same number overseas and a bunch of different countries. And then with every race we have, we bring in five hundred volunteers, which kind of act like employees for the weekend. So it's not a giant operation on a daily basis, but every week we have almost two and a half events. And so then 1,000 people come in for those events.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Definitely not a world-class athlete. I'm not fast. I was never a good athlete. I would say I'm just relentless. I just don't give up. I'm persistent as hell. And when I get on something, it's like a pit bull. I just don't let up. And it's definitely a sickness because I'm so focused on that thing. It's like I have blind design like a horse would in a race. I just don't see anything else. I just got to get this done. And so if the race was like forever, I would do really well. It just kept going until the last person was standing. I would do well. But if it's speed or athleticism, I'm not your guy.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And I never drank, and so I was like, I have a few beers, and I literally got drunk and finished that, and they filmed it. The Iron Man folks filmed that. But that's how I got through the run. And I stopped at mile 20 for two burgers. I was so hungry. And so I was drunk and full when I came across the finish line of the Iron Man.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “So much pain, I'm looking around for an aspirin or advil. I'm asking spectators. And I got somebody to give me a few aspirin and I ran a few more miles and the pain wasn't going away. And I saw a couple of kids with backpacks full of beer.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “100 miles through the hills in Vermont, finished in under 24 hours, which is your goal when you're running 100. Finish that, flew out to Vegas, drove however far the distances, I forget to the lowest elevation in the US is bad water, ran to the top of, well, not to the top, but to the finish line amount Whitney and then jumped on a private plane. My wife said the only way she was going to let me do it was if I hit a wedding that week, so I had to get to a wedding, which was the worst part and you can't tell her of the whole damn week because my feet wouldn't fit in the shoes. She wanted to dance. And then from the wedding made it to Lake Placid and did greatness women Lake Placid did great in the bike. And when I got on the run, I thought, you know, I'm going to kill it. I already ran 235 miles this week. And my legs just gave out about mile five. I was in so much pain. And I never drank and I never take any aspirin or anything.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “No, I did not realize that. And so I said, no, you know what? Let's try to do it and maybe we'll get some press. And so I figured, all right, I'll train hard for it. I didn't have much time and did a ton of bikram yoga, a ton of running in the three, four weeks leading up to it. I mean, a lot. And again, the stuff I read about you and your thoughts, you're very methodical in your trainer. I was more of a throw everything against the wall. The more training there is, it has to be better. And I definitely pushed the limits and went and did the Vermont 100. And then a few days after the finish, made my way out to Badwater, which is the 100 is 100.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, that was a mistake. What has happened was I got into this thing where I was doing all these races and so anybody would come out of the woodwork and say, hey, Joe, let's do this or hey, Joe, let's do that. My standard response was, yeah, let's do it because that was an easy way for me to commit. I wasn't going to turn down a challenge. And so one friend had said, hey, let's do the bad water. And yeah, whatever, let's do it. And so sign me up. Another guy said, hey, let's do the Lake Placid Iron Man. I said, yeah, no problem. Let's do it. And then somebody else said, hey, let's do Vermont 100. And that was like six or eight months before these events. Right. Just because of the way I am, I'm kind of a scatter brain about three or four weeks before these things. My assistant says, hey, you realize these are all in the same week.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Well, an easier way to explain it is if anybody knows the eco challenge, EcoCallenge had a bunch of competitor races that all had different names, whether it was the Discovery World Championship or the raid. And they were all over the globe. And so I ran around the world for a bunch of years just doing every race possible. I would just leave my office on Wall Street and go disappear in the woods or the snow somewhere and just kill myself. There were such intense races that when the race was over, I would sleep 24 to 30 hours straight, just literally collapse and you wake up and you don't even know what day it is. And you get addicted to it. You get such a proud, exhilarating feeling from pushing yourself that hard that then you want to do it again.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, so back to that stairwell with that mental health cover guy, when I started doing those races, again, I think what helped me, which has really helped me through life, is a lack of knowledge. I think sometimes people have so much knowledge in a particular area, study it so much that actually they talk themselves out of doing something. And because I didn't have any knowledge in this endurant area, I just signed up for things. So I signed up for that.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “All the things that are going to drive people crazy from when I did races or my partner did races in depth race, we know what almost broke us or did break us and those are the elements we add to death race to try people crazy.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So even today, even with the death race now has a lot of visibility thanks to Spartan race, even today the most you'll get on an annual basis will be 400 participants in death race, 15% of them each year will finish. That's our goal. So in other words, if 400 people started today, the race is over in our mind when we get down to 15%. So when 60 people are standing, if that takes two weeks, it takes two weeks. That creates an interesting element because it drives people crazy. We try to pick”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I'm not going to invest more than $50,000 in this. I'm kind of retired in Vermont, having phoned a death race. And I begged everybody I knew to run it or invest in it. And everybody said, who's going to crawl under barbed wire and jump over fire? And sounds ridiculous. Like, no one's going to do that. And that first race, you could see the look on people's faces. Like there was something there. They went primal. And all the things I felt when I did those adventure races, they were feeling. And now there was a social network where they could share that feeling that coincided with this Spartan race and it just exploded. And so now, you know, this year we'll have a million participants in Spartan who'll be in 131 events around the globe in 17 countries. And I went from trying to grow a family, being retired in a small town of Vermont to never being home and living on a computer.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “He drops it, and then we spend the next whatever years trying to get a TV deal in that timeframe, I started up something called Spartan Race. And while we thought we had a TV deal and Spartan race was an attempt to tone the death rate down a bit and make it for the masses to maybe find that fire in people's belly and get people off the couch and get them healthy. I thought maybe 50,000 people would compete in the Spartan race. I thought.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And then ultimately the top guy in reality outside of Mark Burnett has got Craig Palligian from Pilgrim Films called and flew in on his private jet to Vermont, and we met and shook hands and we sold a show to Discovery in six minutes. They bought thirteen shows. This was going to be unbelievable. We started a casting call. And that's when I started to learn everything about television because the new CEO came into Discovery, the CEO that bought the show from us got fired. And the new guy comes in and says, I'm not taking any of the old shows because I have no upside. You know, if it's bad, I'm going to get yelled at. And if it's good, I'm not going to get any credit.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “So at that moment, we knew we had a winner here. And Doug finishes. And so, yeah, and then it just took on a life of its own. Doug and two Vermont guys that eat like shredded steel for breakfast. These guys have been chopping wood their whole life. They were just hearty. The Ashley brothers between Doug and those two guys, we knew we had something. And then they started training other people for the next year. And then the New York Times picks it up all of a sudden, lights out. My home phone starts ringing from every TV producer in the US, whether it was Discovery Channel, NatGeo, BBC. My wife Steele been called for reality TV show, screaming at me, we're not doing a reality TV show. Well, let's just listen and see what people have to say.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Downhill skier is about whatever, 15, 18 hours into this thing, and he is cracking. I mean, he is broken. And he turns to me and says. I made the Olympics, you know, like I trained my whole life. I'm a pretty tough guy. He goes, this is fucking crazy starting from my language. I don't know what we're about to Christian. Oh, no, you're.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Well, I don't think they knew what they were getting into because we had never done it before. And one guy, I remember specifically, one guy started crying, and he was like, I'm a really good runner, I just don't know how to chop wood broken. Because no one knew. We didn't tell them. And so Doug Lewis, who's an Olympic level skier.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “We knew I'll answer those in this order. So we knew in the beginning we had something. We had eight participants show up and immediately five quit.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “And while I was there, that lasted like two days. I said, I want to create a race that helps me find those people with fire in their belly. That like Russell Crow and Gladiator or Mel Gibson and Braveheart or just these amazing people that just get it done when their backs against the wall. And what if I created with a buddy of mine this race that purposely broke people not the way the races I had done or a marathon does, but actually where I would actually drive the participants crazy, not tell them when it's starting, not tell them when it's ending, not giving them water, giving them buses during the middle of the race and saying, hey, you could quit here just getting the bus. This is not for you. You're too weak. And it worse than military. Just really just break people. And that was the beginning of my race business.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Tell you that they're no longer going to deal with you. It was very stressful business. So to get back to the core of life, just water, food, and shelter was very liberating. And so I kept seeking that. And it kind of connected with me because since I was very young building that first business, I was having a tough time finding people with fire in their belly. And here in these races, I was seeing people with fire in their belly, right? Anybody that was out there doing this crazy stuff had that thing. I was seeking my whole life. And so when I got to Vermont, which so fast forward, I sold that Wall Street business, met my wife at a race, got married, moved to Vermont to have a family and to remove myself from New York City because I was afraid if I was around the possibility of doing business.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Texas, and I was hooked. I was outside, I felt alive again, and I said, man, what's the next level? I got to do something bigger. And he said, well, you could do a 24-hour race, but you got to really have, sign me up. I got to do it. And whatever I did, I had to find the next level, whatever the, you know, give me the craziest race in the world. And we said, well, you know, you could die. There's this one, you know, the Iditarod in Alaska, they do it in the middle of the winter. It's by foot and it's 30 below, but you got to have it. Sign me up. I got to do it. And so the crazier it was, I had to get back to this place where you just want water, food, and shelter. And all the craziness of my life, this Wall Street life I had taken on would go away, would melt away, that stress all day long of, I mean, you make them lose 30, 40,000 dollars in minutes screwing up an order or having customers.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Or that discovery. So what happened was the pool and construction business got me an incredible physical shape because I worked 20 hour days physically. And when I went to Wall Street, that changed. I had weekends free. I didn't know what to do with myself. You sat on a desk all day. I had never done that before. And I started to gain some weight. And I just didn't feel as healthy as I had always felt. And so I was looking for some exercise or something and I stumbled upon a guy in the stairwell of my building that I lived in in Manhattan who was on a cover of men's health and just was the epitome of, I mean, this guy was ripped. And I met him in the stairwell. I just was inquiring and I wanted to work out. And he said, jump in the stairs with me every day. And we started doing stairs together. The first day I could do like five flights and then ten flights. And he started to get me motivated by telling me about these things called adventure races. And so he hooked me. He got me to go do a small three-hour adventure race.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “So death race, let's say, was 2004. The day I got that order when we were on the brink of literally closing the doors, I would say was 1998. Okay.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Just out of curiosity Yeah, so back then, and probably still in existence today, champion sweatshirts were the rage. They would take silk lettering and put Cornell University on the champion sweatshirt. And I believe back then they were selling them for about $50. And I thought to myself, it's kind of ridiculous that they're taking a champion sweatshirt made in the U.S., shipping it to some old women to sew the letters on. They're selling them for $50. First of all, I think I can make a better sweatshirt. I think I could import them because remember, I was studying textiles at this point. And there were problems with the sweatshirt. They used to blow out around the waist and they used to blow out around the sleeves. And if I could incorporate some licra into the waist and the sleeves, sew the letters on myself, I could probably produce a better product for less money. So it wasn't like some earth-shattering technology or anything. It was just a very basic business, but the pitch, I think, was they saw that here was a guy that was realizing.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “So it's funny. It wasn't, when I remember when asking the professor, Professor Ben Dan Dan Dan Dan Daniel, I'll never forget his name because it was pretty big for a guy that couldn't even get accepted to the school to win the award. It was really the fire in my belly that they saw when I stood in front of the class and made my pitch. It wasn't the idea.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Because Again, all these people just changed my life. But I don't think it's by accident and by chance those things happened. I think I just put myself out there like you probably do or anybody that's had some luck in life. You kind of make your own luck. You don't say no to anything. You take every meeting, you listen to every phone call and stuff just happens for you.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Well, I think I'm sure you see the same things as you make investments or you're hiring people or partnering with people in that there's very few people on a percentage basis that have that fire in their belly. It's not necessarily specific knowledge because I certainly, I'm not that smart of a guy, but I have an enormous fire in my belly from the time my eyes open to the time I collapse on a bed every day to just get stuff done. It's not always the smartest way I attack things, but I'm just relentless. And I think that's rare. I think it's rare. And I think he saw that. And it would have, because I look for that, and I'm sure you look for that. And I think he thought, wow, this would be a waste to have this guy stuck in Queens. Now, you don't know it. Me, I don't know it at the time that that would be a waste. I'm feeling like I'm killing it. And he sees much bigger opportunity for me. And, you know, my dad, my dad later thanked him.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Which he pays me a nice commission on. And just like the head of the Nano Organized Crime Family that changed my life in the pool business and just like Professor Anita Anita Rina changed my life getting into Cornell, he changes my life with disorder and we end up building this giant business right before, you know, just when it was darkest and we were going out of business because I couldn't get anybody to deal with this brand new firm that had no business like the Phoenix from the”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “To ING. For $600 million. And so I thought to myself, again, because I lack intelligence sometimes, I said, you know what, I get to start my own investment bank firm. I know everything about swimming pools. Why don't I start investment bank? So everybody told me at the firm you're crazy. What institution is possibly going to do business with a pool guy? And so I start a little business, and they were right. Nobody when we first started would do business with us. And then one day, just as we were about to go out of business, a guy from Corne”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “And it was no funny business. These were old timers that I guess read the tape well. And I made $100,000. And I said, I'm going to Wall Street. This is crazy. So I spent the next two years trying to get a job on Wall Street because really I'm a pool and construction guy from Queens. I have a textile degree. I have no business getting a job on Wall Street. I'm already making at that point really good money. And so any job I'm even lucky to get would maybe pay me 30 grand a year. And I'm so lucky that I was guided by this guy out of Cornell because he guides me to the institutional side of the business. I ended up getting this job where they train me in the whole industry. I worked in research. I worked in investment banking. I worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. And literally I spent two years just bouncing from department to department, learning the entire business. As I was there, the company got so”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “And so you're like, first pay your damn bills, and then we can talk about So he sits me down as this customer of mine, and he says, Here's the deal. He goes, You're single, you're making quite a bit of money now running this business. If you're ever going to take chances in life, now's the time to do it because you don't have a family. And he convinced me, he called his broker, because I don't have a broker. I don't know how to do this. And he convinces me to take the entire check, the $140,000, and buy this stock, right? And I go from not wanting to invest, and everybody's crazy to within an hour later, I'm investing the entire check in the stock. And the next day the company gets taken over.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “The 87 crash. I'm like, this guy's crazy. And I go to one of my customers' house that day that owed me quite a bit of money for finishing a big construction job. He owed me $140,000, give or take. And hewel drying his hair as I ring the bell to pick up my check. And I said, hey, he was a pharmacist. And I said, listen, a buddy of mine's telling me to buy this stock. It's in your industry. It's called syntax. And he add these towels around the territory. He said, I can't believe you're asking me. He goes, I was just in the shower and I'm thinking of buying some today.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “because I was able to apply all the things I was learning at Cornell to my business. So So I go back and I'm running the business and that judge stays in touch with me and he calls me literally first of the month every month and says, when are you going to get out of the pool business? You got to go to New York City. And I was in Queens. And I said, I'm doing really well. I met this great girl. I'm 22 years old. I don't need to go to Manhattan. And every month he drove me crazy. And one day he says, all right, if you're not going to listen to me. And now I'm probably two years out of Cornell. And he sees that he's losing the battle. And he says, if you're not going to listen to me, I want you to buy this stock. And I had never bought a stock before. And he tells me to buy the stock syntax, which was a drug company. Now, this is an older guy that's been trading and managing money for years, and he'd been watching this stock for 25 years. And he says, I want you to buy this stock. It's $14 a share. It's a drug company. And he's an old-time cape breeder. And I'm thinking, I've been working so hard. I'm not going to invest in a stock.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “After school, or how did that come? What happened was I was so excited that I got into Cornell that I found out, and again I was kind of figuring this out on the fly, really didn't have parents that were guiding me on this because they had no experience with college. And so I found out that there was an MBA program at Cornell that you could do in one year so you could finish undergrad and grad in a five-year program. So I figured, let's just press my bets and go for it. And I took a class to get familiar with the MBA program, an entrepreneurship class, and I won the entrepreneurship award. So during that class, I met a bunch of judges who were very successful people that had graduated Cornell, gone on their own. And one of those judges took a real liking to me. I didn't make the MBA program. They didn't accept me. And I went back to Queens to run that swimming pool and construction business, which was doing very, very well at that point.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “And so it was awesome. It was an awesome experience. I broke out of multi-generation of people not going to school, got into an Ivy League school, and it literally changed my life.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Department, which would study the business of textiles, clothing. And so she says to me, you know, I know your mother. She told me you've been trying your four semesters in here, haven't been accepted. I got this department. It's like 90 women and one man. I'm very interested in that. That would be perfect for me. Do you have any interest? And Claude, I love clothing and they accepted me. And so Professor Anita Racine had changed my life. And she accepted me into this program. If I had to do it again, I would study it again because I could watch any movie anywhere and tell you when that movie takes place based on women's hemlines. I'm an expert in clothing now.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “It's just like the movie Rudy. And I had this pool business was growing and growing. And so now I'm starting to make some really good money. It had turned into a construction company. And so for the summers, I was going down to New York. And I'm thinking at that point, four semesters in and not accepting me. There's no way to win here. I'm just going to go to New York and run my business who needs college. And my mom says to me, you know, I know some people at Corner. She hadn't said a word. I would have never expected her to have a connection. You know, the kind of people that had connections were the people back in New York, like my dad. And it turns out she's teaching a woman yoga that is head of admissions at one of the schools of Cornell. She sets up a meeting and the woman sits down at me and says, all right, well, I'm in the school of human ecology. Cornell has many, many schools, many focuses, and one of the schools within Cornell was human ecology. And they had a textile.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Was pushing to get away from that and get into education. And so I ended up applying to Cornell, which I had no business going to. I wasn't smart enough. I didn't have good enough grades. I didn't do that well in SAT school.”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Focus on health and wellness. And then he lost everything. And it was like the best thing that ever happened to me because I had all those creature comforts and amenities being around a successful entrepreneur that all of a sudden vanished. She couldn't pay the mortgage. She couldn't pay the heat bills. We were losing the house up in Ithaca. And it's just a switch went off that, hey, if I want those things again, I've got to work. And so I started a business. The neighbor of my dad was unbeknownst to me at that time was the head of the banana organized crime family. And he said, hey, I know you're going through some show. Why don't you clean my pool? And so I started cleaning his swimming pool. And before you know it, I had every organized crime figures as a customer in the, not in the tri-state area, but certainly Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, even Staten Island, and it became a pretty big business. Now, my mom was in Ithaca, so she”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “A yogi, vegan teaching meditation, and complete opposite of where we had come from the first 10, 12 years of my life, and really influenced my sister and I to focus on that stuff. Although back then it was not mainstream, it was not normal to be into that. Maybe if you were in California, but certainly not where we were from. So she was shunned and battling a pretty big tide of non-believers that were focused on certainly in Queens focused on sausages and hot dogs and not everything except what she was into. And so I had these two different lives. If I went to go visit my dad back in Queens, we were out all night at Chinese restaurants or Italian restaurants and getting to stay up late as kids. And if I went back with my mom, it was very...”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “So I grew up in Queens, New York. If you've ever seen the movie Goodfellas, I literally grew up right in the center of that. We lived right near Kennedy Airport, and it was a crazy life. My dad was a super aggressive entrepreneur. You had to be back in those days. He had a greenhouse. He had a trucking business. He was an air freight. He had a disc. I mean, you name it. He had it. And around the mid-80s started to have some real trouble just because he was overextended. And parents got divorced. Mom moved to Ithaca, New York to get us out of that insanity of, you know, it was basically just a big organized crime area where we were. It was probably organized crime capital of the world. And thank God she did. But I had my dad's DNA regarding work ethic. My mother completely made a left turn and got into health and wellness in a big way, traveling to India because”

    2014-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep. 16 - Joe De Sena on Grit, Endurance, and Building Empires · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT