Draper University's Survival Week puts participants through a day of physical challenges: hiking San Francisco hills, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge blindfolded, and a paintball scenario called The Bourne. Paintball instructor Ryan Podesta says the fear of being hit mirrors the necessity of showing up in business. The exercises build trust and reveal emergent leadership.
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When they were trying to wake us up, I thought to myself, these people cannot be serious.
And we had another challenge.
This was a challenge, but we were given a bag of items to sell at 8 o'clock in the morning, which are not the kind of items you would normally sell at 8 o'clock in the morning.
I don't do well with sales like that in terms of like selling a product that is just so personal and awkward to talk about.
And then, yeah, it was just a day of like a lot of trekking, and you know, you know, SF is like really uphill, downhill, so with our backpacks on our backs, that was really tough.
And then from there it was a long walk to the Golden Gate.
We got to the Welcome Center and they said, yeah, you have to cross the bridge. It's at the other Welcome Center. So we all got to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, which is something I've always wanted to do. That was my biggest kind of bucket list item to do while I was here in San Francisco, so it was great that it was built in.
I've never been like, you know, alone in a leadership position ever before. And, you know, once I crossed that bridge, it was kind of like, all right, you're in charge, you're team lead, the team's depending on you to, you know—
The most challenging part of it is we did all of this with our full packs.
Amazing Race Day 1 survival experience is probably the only experience where our team really came together.
Keeping everybody together and making people realize, like, this is a race and there is a goal that we have to accomplish. I don't believe that I try hard to be a leader. I think people just see it in me. Even if I don't see it in myself, they see it in me. And I guess behind my actions screams leader, so.
What did we learn that first day? It was all about trust and freedom, right?
Athletics definitely was the foundation of me getting through survival and being okay with it.
The survival experience truly pushed me to my limits in every aspect of the word.
It's not guaranteed that everyone's gonna make it out, like, without a scratch.
Blindfolds down, eyes closed. So this is an exercise we have to be very quiet, but they get blindfolded and they have to walk all the way up this hill and try to get the whole group to move in the right direction. And they have— they started out in the wrong direction, somehow they corrected. It's just what the team's supposed to do.
My favorite activity was paintballing. The Bourne was one of the best paintball setups you could ever have.
Hey, my name is Ryan Podesta. We're here out at Draper University for Survival Week. I am the paintball instructor. I'm a 5-time world champion paintball player. I've been an entrepreneur, opened my own business at 24, and I'm out here sharing some knowledge of what I used over 20 years of being self-employed and entrepreneurial.
Doing paintball, I was afraid of being shot. I gotta just, you know, put myself out there. And it's like the perfect analogy for business. You can't hide, you just gotta put yourself out there. You might get hit and you might get ran over, but who cares, you know?
Why? Because it taught strategy. It's not always about just having a plan. There has to be some sense of execution behind the plan.
So it turns out that the strategy you learn in paintball is the same strategy you learn in business. Survival is one of the most educational strategic planning systems in the entire world.
Everything you do in survival is so team-oriented, so relying on your coordination and understanding that, you know, you can't do it all by yourself.
It was a testament of the deep bonds that we had built over just 2 weeks.
My name is Rock Ryder, and I work with Draper University helping with their leadership and development of heroes. I love coming out here and working with heroes because it allows me to teach them how to be economically free. At survival, what I teach are the fundamentals that I learned both in the military and in the corporate world And as an entrepreneur. So I bring all those fundamentals. We send them through 20 different training exercises. Each training exercise is supposed to give them a skill set that they can take into the real world, apply to their companies, and begin to grow their companies and hopefully achieve the dreams they want to achieve.
Okay, go on down.
So many things that can go wrong up there. There's a lot of poison oak and things like that, and it was really important for us to try to, like, keep some semblance of coherence in staying together. I had to, like, put my foot down on that one.
It was really hard to get around. Especially since it was getting kind of dark and it was in the middle of the wilderness. And at some point we took a wrong turn in this creaky area and we were just in the thick of it, in this super crazy overgrown area, no lights anywhere. Finally, we got out of there after many cuts and bruises. It was beautiful in there. It was the most gorgeous thing I've seen the whole trip.
Seeing the resilience of my team was so inspiring. I can accomplish so much more because I can trust everyone around me, and it suddenly feels like the horizons of what's possible are just limitless. At Survival, you really do put your life in the hands of your teammates.
Going through Survival really reminded me of how tough I am physically and It really took me out of my comfort zone. Those are skills that you need in business, so those are skills that I think I would use in business as well.
I learned a real appreciation for nature, and I learned that nature is one of the most beautiful art pieces you can ever set your eyes on. Right, we get so caught up in all the technology that's given to us that we you forget the true art is in the scenery.
So this exercise is all about teamwork, but it's also about just take it one One stroke at a time, one stroke at a time, and you eventually get there, and you don't think you could ever get there. And that idea of just moving, moving your business along and build it one brick at a time or one stroke at a time, that's the key to this exercise.
Keep the bubbles in the middle! Keep the bubbles in the middle!
Top 10!
So it doesn't matter who you are, but you just have to play the long game and don't give up. And that's like survival is that analogy. It's a long game and just keep going.
It's one of those things you don't realize how much it's impacted you until you get back. You realize very quickly that each of the things that you had to do, it was to really teach you about yourself and to really teach If I'm to strip you from, from everything, everything that allows you to hide, you know, could you survive?
