Standing by What You Do, and Who You Are to Live A Purpose Driven Life with Joe De Sena and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #420

You know, the day before a breakthrough, it was a crazy idea. And if you look at every breakthrough, in order to have a breakthrough, you got to break something. And that is very difficult for people who are in a certain comfort zone. And I imagine with Spartan, you are literally ripping people out of their comfort.

Zones right off the couch.

And it's, you know, and that is one of the most difficult things for humans to do is get out of their comfort zones. They're just. They're in their own conditioning.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com this week we are revisiting a previous episode. Here are some of the best highlights.

Hey, this is Joe Polish with Genius Network. And I'm here with Joe Decenna, who owns and founded Spartan.com.

I'Ve run businesses my whole life, as have you, and it's no easy feat. Even when you're doing something as purposeful as this, you know, that feels good. You wake up energized. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong on a daily basis with any business. Right. Payroll. At the end of the week, people quit competition, you name it. There's always a problem every day. But I can't complain about anything. I'm having fun.

You know, you're solving problems for a profit. That's what entrepreneurs do.

Yeah.

What problems is Spartan solving for people?

So I think the biggest problem we're solving for folks is people are lost. I think in this. In this age of consumerism, certainly in the first world where we have everything and we live in bubbles, people don't necessarily know how to define themselves. And if they do, they're not defining themselves the right way. So maybe they're chasing a fancy car, they're trying to keep up with their neighbors, cheating on a relationship, addiction with alcohol or drugs. And when they stumble upon Spartan, I mean, I got. I got a story for you. I'm at a race three years ago, and a guy comes up and shakes my hand. Oh, you're the founder, right? Yeah, founder. He's missing his teeth. I gotta tell you, you saved my life. I said, tell me the story. What happened? He said, I'm driving my pickup truck. He says, I'm an addict. I'm on crystal meth, the whole thing. And I hear a Spartan race radio advertisement in my truck. He goes, I stopped the truck. He goes, I listen to it. I look it up on my phone. He goes, I parked the car and I went into the woods. I don't know how much of this is true or not. He goes, I spent two weeks in the wood. I cleaned myself up, and I'm here now, and I'm racing, and you changed my life. This is a hard sell. I'm not selling cotton candy or. Right, right. This is. This is P90X times 50. Right. So how do I sell that when, on the other hand, they got the color run, people go out and do a 5K and splash color all over each other. And there's music like, how do I position that and sell it? And I made the decision, right or wrong, that no matter what, even if no one buys into, doesn't matter, because this is who I am. And I said, you know, we gotta create like a. I don't even know what we call it. A brand roadmap, a guideline. What are our values? How do we speak to people? Because when it was just me and a guy in a room, I just told them what the values were. I just explained it. Now it's six levels down, and I gotta make sure no one screws it up. We never compromise. Like, if we say we're gonna do a burpee mile, it's not 100 yards, it's a mile, because that's who we are. We have integrity. Like, that's our brand. And I had to really punch that home. And the feedback I got from a few of our employees, which is legitimate feedback, they said, well, you know, there's people in some of the other countries, they say, we gotta soften the image a little bit. And, you know, people are having a tough time selling it. And I said, we don't soften the image. This is who we are. I'm sorry if those people don't buy into this. But my opinion, not being an expert, if we soften the message, then we start to become a sellout. And then we're just like everybody else. Like, I don't want to compete on having a taller obstacle or a shorter obstacle or this. I want to compete on authenticity. Right? This is who we are. There's nobody else like us, because we actually. We do this ourselves. We live this.

I think the best expert is the marketplace. I mean, they're either showing up or they're not. They're either responding or they're not. And you deal with people at the level at which they respond. And I think great marketing attracts who you want to attract and repels who you don't. You've been able to take this interest of yours, this lifestyle of Yours. And you've been able to enroll other people into it, accidentally or not, you're doing something huge. Right. I'd like to find. What's the causation of this?

Like, where did it come from?

Yeah. What drives it and what keeps it going?

So I'm naturally driven, I'm naturally motivated. I'm an entrepreneur at heart, which means I go right to, okay, how can we make this profitable? And then I'm really, really fortunate because I've had a lot of businesses in my life, and none of them were purposeful. Purposeful, in a sense. I needed to make money, right? That was my purpose. I want to make money. You're my psychologist here. I probably wanted to make money because my dad went broke. I saw my dad go broke in the early 90s. And so I'm just avoiding that.

It's like having a vision. The ability to have that vision is because other people just don't have it. They don't see it. So you're, you know, I think then.

You got to explain it, right? And then you're. And then they don't. Still don't get. That's the biggest challenge.

Gary Halbert, who was this crazy copywriter who I originally first learned marketing from, he said this great line, which is, the world advances on the backs of its neurotics.

That's great.

And I sit and look at all of the crazy people out there doing all kinds of wacky shit. And my friend Peter Diamandis says, the day before a breakthrough, it was a crazy idea. And if you look at every breakthrough, in order to have a breakthrough, you gotta break something. And that is very difficult for people who are in a certain comfort zone. And I imagine with Spartan, you are. Are literally ripping people out of their.

Comfort zones right off the couch.

And that is one of the most difficult things for humans to do, is get out of their comfort zones. They're in their own conditioning.

I believe Einstein said it, right? Adversity introduces a man to himself. You are going to meet yourself at this event. There's going to be moments. You don't like what you see. It's going to be tough for someone.

That is in a position where they have a job that they hate. They are financially not able to get out of a situation that they are barely scraping by. They don't know what the hell to do. They're looking for a pain pill. What do you say to them?

It's the first step, right? The whole thing is that first step, that commitment. And what I like to do is commit publicly. Because if I commit publicly now, I'm on the hook. And so what I suggest people do is tell everybody they know I'm going to run a marathon or I'm going to get married, whatever it is. I'm going to start a business, whatever that thing is, to get them from that place you just described. They've got to do it, and they've got to do it publicly, and they've got to maybe spend some money, which is why you do that with the Genius network, right? People have to spend, because if you don't do that, you're not going to do it. We all would get the paper done in college or in high school an hour before it was due. So unless you have a deadline, right, it doesn't get done. So you got to publicly commit. You got to set a date for whatever that thing is, otherwise it doesn't get done.

Yeah, okay.

It's got to be an embarrassing situation that you're nervous, right? Like, you don't want to be embarrassed. You want to actually deliver on what you told people you're going to do. Most people are going to respond to that. Shit happens in life. Stuff goes wrong, and you've got to be fit. You've got to be fit to deal with it, right? You want to be a great CEO, you're going to be that much better of a CEO if you're eating healthy and you're staying fit. You're fooling yourself if you're putting your health on hold while you work on some other party. Health's gotta be first, right? You can't do anything else without health.

So what is a Spartan?

A Spartan is somebody who doesn't crack under pressure, right? Has integrity, extremely disciplined, resilient and gritty. You know, has some humor, too. I think you gotta be able to look at all the stuff that happens in life and laugh at it. You got to be able to laugh at it. And it's something that, you know, in the ancient world, the Spartans actually taught the guys. You know, there's a scene in the movie 300 when the arrows are being shot by the Persians. And they're coming over these 300 guys, and they look up and they're like, well, I guess today we'll fight in the shade. Yeah, right. Like, we're all fucked here. You gotta laugh about it.

Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com.