Diana Nyad - Swimming From Cuba To Florida

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the what now Audio Experience. These episodes are my way of giving you that real, raw, authentic look into business and what it actually sounds like. Some of these conversations are recorded in the studio, some are on the red carpet, and some are with my friends over at dinner. So the audio may be a little rough, but what really stands out to me are some of the behind the scenes conversations that take place when the camera is turned off because they provide so much value from people who are living and breathing business every single day. That's what I wanted to do. Bring you something that represents what business actually is, not just what you see on social media. No fake gurus. And by the way, if you need more help with your business, please visit the what Now Academy at www.wharnow.academy. there you'll learn what to do now and what's coming next to build a great business. Be sure to connect with me on social media at Scott Duffy Media across all channels or visit my website@www.scottduffy.com. let's do this.

On today's episode of the what Now Audio Experience, my special guest is Diana Nyad. Now, Diana Nyad, I've got to tell you, of all the people I've ever met, worked, with, interviewed, covered, whatever, Diana Nyad is one of the most inspiring people I've ever had a chance to talk to. At 64 years old, not 24. At 64 years old, she became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage. So that's over 110 miles. And she did it in 53 hours. And that was like it was from Havana to Key West. Now in the 70s, Diana really became known as the world's greatest long distance swimmer and one of the top endurance athletes. She's written a bunch of books. She became a really popular sports broadcaster kind of during her era. And here's what I loved. What I loved is I found her so inspiring and I was going through something with my daughters at the time, at the time that we met. And I shared it with her and.

I guess I'll just tell you what it was. So my youngest daughter, her name is Lexi. My youngest daughter from the time she, she was born has been into music. And when she was in kindergarten, in the first grade and the second grade, all she wanted to be was a dj. And so, you know, we would get her for the holidays and her birthdays and things like that, these little dj, these little spinner like sets and things like that. And one of the way that Lexi and I used to bond was we would go, when she was young, and we would go onto itunes and we listen to all of the difference to the different dance music and stuff like that. And then we download what we like and we'd make mixes and things, and I thought it was so cool. And we would then go to YouTube and we would type in, you know, women DJs and things like that. That would be inspiring for her. And.

We finally would listen.

So we did this for probably two years. And then one day, Lexi came to me and she was kind of heartbroken. And I said, lexi, what's going on? What's wrong? And she said, dad, she said, I've decided I'm not going to be a DJ anymore. I said, why not? And she said, because I've gone on YouTube. I keep trying to find women and girls, girl DJs, and I can't. And she said, so what that means to me is that a woman could never be a top dj, so why should I try?

And it was really heartbreaking. And right around the time that happened, I met Diana Nyad and I shared this story with her, and she became so inspiring. And she gave me a ton of lessons to bring back to my daughters and things and practices that I use today. The other thing that we talked about is I actually went onto social media and I shared this story with others. And then he started to share with others and others, and lady DJs, girl DJs from all over the world came out and offered to teach, mentor, coach, and do all kinds of cool stuff with my daughter Lexi. And so it just. It reminds me of the power of. Of being a role model, right? The power of being a model. And the question I always ask people is this. I ask them, you know, are you around people that are helping you to see a bigger vision? Are you around people that are helping to pull you up or people that are pulling you down? Crazy story. It's a story about crabs. I remember the first time I went crabbing. It was on the east coast, and we were out in this boat. I was a young guy, and I. What we do is we throw these things off the side of the boat, and the crabs would come in, and we catch one, we bring it on, and we put the crab in a bucket. And then you catch another crab, you put it in a bucket, and you catch another crab, and you put it in the bucket. The question is. The question is, if you walk away from the bucket, do you need to put a lid on top to keep the Crabs inside. And the answer is absolutely not. And the reason is there's a really funny thing about crabs. You see when you put them in, what they do as individuals is they start to try and get out and they crawl and they get on top of each other and stuff and they reach towards the lip of the bucket. Now once one of them grabs the lip and actually starts to pull itself out, check this out. The other crabs stop reaching up, they stop reaching for the top and instead they grab the crab that's getting out and they pull them back in.

And the question I always ask is, do you have a lot of crabs in your life? Do you have people that are more invested in holding you back, in keeping you close to them, in seeing you not win? Do you have more people like that in your life than you have people that are pulling you out? And sometimes I understand, sometimes we have to actually like look around us and sometimes we have to just like hit delete and we have to go, we have to find a new crowd, we have to go find a new community of people that will pull us up. Look, you are nothing more, nothing less than the average of five people that you spend your time with. Now what do I mean? What I mean is simple. What I mean is if I asked you to take out a piece of paper, if you even have a piece of paper anymore, open, open something up on your phone and I ask you to write down the names of the five people you spend the most time with. And then next to each name, write down what you think they earn. Five names, what each one earns, add it all up and divide it by five, those five people. And the odds are that's exactly what it is that you earn. It's crazy. And the thing is that's just a financial example. People who are around, you know, wealthy people, hang around wealthy people, people who are around, fit people, hang around fit people, people who are totally out of shape, don't take care of themselves, hang out with people just like that. What I would encourage you to do is write that down. Take a look at the five people you spend the most time with. Are they bringing you up? Are they pulling you up? Are they keeping you down? If you want to build a million dollar business, we got to find people that have built million dollar businesses. You want to build a ten million dollar business, you have to put yourself around ten million dollar players. A person who's built a million dollar company won't know how to do help you to get there. So again, going back to Diana, as it Relates to Diana. What I loved about Diana is that she took the time to talk to me about my daughters and to talk to me about how to build great environments for them, winning environments for them, put the right people around them, put the right mentors around them, how to find those mentors. And that was really cool. So again, I think this audio is a pretty. Pretty scrappy. We were in the, like, literally, like in a hall, in a. This. That I had to pull it out, right, Because I want you guys to hear the real business, the real conversations, what happens behind the scenes when I'm talking to these people. I think this ended up being an interview for Entrepreneur. I hope you guys enjoyed as much as I do. Again, Diana Nyad.

Hi, my name is Scott Duffy with Entrepreneur magazine and S1 Media. And I'm here with Diana Nyad. And I am so excited to get this opportunity to speak with you because you're such an inspiration. The only person who has swum from Cuba to Florida.

There's a long way, I'll tell you. I mean, check this out. Chasing a dream. For 35 years, I first stood on the shore in Havana at the age of 28. I was young. I was looking across brash like nothing get out of my way. I was humbled. And by the time I was 64 and 64 five times, I finally made it to that. It's. It's. It's an. It's a close to impossible challenge. And the point really wasn't that I made it. The point was that I didn't give up on it. That was the real point.

So, I mean, it seems like you're. You're swimming against this. Like you're fighting against this incredible foe in the sea, right When. When things don't seem like they're going right, or maybe your body doesn't feel like it's strong enough to make it all the way across.

Where do you go?

What do you do to overcome that adversity? The adversity mentally resolve.

And maybe, you know, talking about entrepreneurs, maybe there's an analogy in the world of business, I mean, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's small. Of businesses that succeed, you got everything going from the first loan that you get to people who want to leave and move on to other things to, you know, you can't keep up the revenue that's matching what you're paying, putting into it. I've been in that world myself. And if your resolve, if your dream of what that business is is so moving to you, it's so inspiring. You'll get knocked down and you'll get back up. You'll get knocked down again. People talk about, oh, you know, 25 years ago we had this dream of a business. We failed and we failed and we went bankrupt. But we believed in it and we stuck with it and look where we are now. So that was me. You know, the sharks were around, literally.

And you weren't in a shark cage, were you?

Shark cage. And they're there, they know just where you are. You're in their territory. So you're up on the surface making a splash like a wounded, dying fish. Two, 2.2 miles away. All of them oceanic, white tips, bulls, tigers, lemons. They get there in a hurry and they're following you like, you know, I love sharks.

You sound like my daughter. My daughter's nine years old and she loves sharks and she goes through the list with me.

Well, you know what I love is when the shark experts talk to you, they say, look, you don't have to worry because sharks are intelligent. They know that the Homo sapien is not their food. They are not going to come up and eat you whole. Yes, they'll come up and take a leg. You know, that's a pretty serious event, you know, for me. So. But they say, don't worry, they won't eat you. They'll take the leg and then leave. Then you're bleeding to death and the others come in and take you. So there is a serious. But you know what, that box jellyfish, I'd rather see a shark this close, a big shark, 16 foot shark, and take my chance of punching in the nose, it's real. Than a little sugar cube sized box jellyfish. The most potent venom on earth. I should have died the night I was.

You got bit, you got bit.

Swarm. I should have died. And I truly believe it was Will that got me through. Most people die instantaneously. I don't say that to brag. That's what I'm saying. To go back to our original conversation, resolve. When your resolve is that strong, you will get through anything.

And sometimes, you know, in business it feels like we should die. And you know, one of my mentors, Dave Meltzer, he taught me that sometimes the purpose of being in business today is to be in business tomorrow.

Right.

Maybe the purpose of that, that, that stroke you're taking now is to make.

The next stroke also, I guess, you know, I'm at the moment launching an initiative, a business called Everwalk. Okay, so it's Everwalk, Dot Com. We are leading people on epic walks. Like this fall, we're gonna walk from Boston up to Portland, Maine, and we got hundreds of people following us. But two years ago, if you'd talk to me and say we can't get any funding, it's like everybody says, yeah, it sounds great. Where are we gonna make any money? And we don't want to sponsor you. What if somebody dies on the road and it's our fault? So we've been flexible. We've been saying, I don't want to change the dream, epic walks, but how can we make them possible for the business factor? And so now all of a sudden, Marriott hotels and United Healthcare and Johnson and Johnson are saying, you know what, that girl who swam from Cuba to Florida, people want to be epic like her. And people can walk. They want to do this thing. Let's get behind it. So we're still not big, but we're growing. And it's partly because we said, we gotta be flexible. We gotta do what the people, the business people need. But we're not gonna sell our souls. We still want to be Epic Walkers. So that's what everwalk's all about.

You know, my daughters are both swimmers. They're seven and a half and nine years old. And it's so awesome for them to have female role models to look up to. Can you talk about the role of women mentors and women mentoring other women?

Well, you know, all I have to do is look at people like Michelle Obama, you know, and I know Hillary is kind of off the map at the moment, but I'm a big fan and an admirer. So, you know, they talk about the glass ceiling and some young women. If you interview young women right out of Harvard, they'll say, you know, there's no glass ceiling anymore. We can do anything we want. They're going to learn that there is still, like, you could talk. You could talk to any African American. They could tell you think that everything's all nice and equal. The fight is over. It's not over. And you talk to Asian Americans the same thing you talk to women. So your girls, you got to tell them that they're going to have to fight a little harder than the guys around them to get what they want, to be what they want in this world. We're not there yet.

Well, hey, Diane and iad, it is amazing to be with you. Thank you so much. And really thank you for being such an amazing inspiration to us and for my daughters.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the what Now Audio Experience. If you need more help with your business, please be sure to visit the what Now Academy at www.whatnow Academy. We have an incredible community of entrepreneurs and experts that are absolutely committed to seeing you win there. You'll learn what to do now and what's coming next to to build a great business. Also, be sure to connect with me on social media, Scott Duffy Media across all channels or visit my website@www.scottduffy.com. again, thank you so much for joining. Have an amazing day.