Lessons - How To Have A Mindset To Face Challenges | Dean Karnazes, Athlete, Runner & Author

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today my guest is Dean Carnazis, also known as the Ultra Marathon Man or the Perfect Human. He popularized Ultra Marathon with his book, Ultra Marathon Man, Confessions of an All Night Runner. He once ran 50 Marathons, 50 States, 50 consecutive days, and has run 350 continuous miles. He's the recipient of the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition Lifetime Achievement Award, and one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. Today we're going to have a short but sweet lesson on setting yourself up to have the right mindset to take on any challenge you encounter in life or in business. What tips you have for getting your mind right to actually accomplish this stuff? How do you actually set yourself up so that you are in the right mental state to go after these challenges? You know, one I think is to have a goal because if you don't have a goal, you're not moving in the right direction, you're moving in any random direction. So once you have formed a vision of a goal, then you can fill in the blanks. How do you get there? How do you achieve what you want to set out to do? To me, it all starts with having that goal, and the back end work is largely about problem-solving. Because inevitably, when you try to do some of these adventures that I've done, how do you run 50 Marathons, 50 States, and 50 days, there's a shitload of logistics. So how do you do the logistics? So I worked with an agency that coordinates the Olympic torch run across the U.S. and I had them do all the logistics because they're experts at logistics and planning. How do you fund this whole thing? Well, I partnered with a company called The North Face and we built the deck and we pitched it to other outside sponsors like Toyota Sponsored did and Nature's Path and TimeX watches. So it's all about problem-solving, but it starts with having this kind of, you know, this term gets thrown around a bit, a beehag, a big, hairy, audacious goal, and then, you know, working backwards from there, kind of reverse engineering into it. And you do that with everything, so that's such a powerful, it's such a powerful process because you do that with something as physically grueling as this, but this could be, this could be, you know, applied to quite literally anything you want to achieve in your life. Do you apply that same mindset when you're going on like another business venture? I'm assuming if you can absolutely kill an incredible athletic endeavor, like launching a book now or writing another book seems like a way less scary because you already, you know the mindset that it's going to take to achieve that thing. Yeah, it's 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. So when you, yeah, it's a lot of grunt, I mean, anyone who's written a book in a test of this, it's, it's not glamorous work, you know, you, it's a lot of word crafting, it's a lot of, yeah, staring at a blank page, trying to come up with a, you know, a sentence structure that works. So it's a lot of just blocking and tackling.