Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet

by Jesse Itzler

Many of us live our lives on autopilot. We do the same thing every day; wake up, go to work, come home, have dinner. Repeat. I found myself drifting in that direction. It was as if my cruise control settings had been set and I wasn’t improving. I wanted to get off it; I wanted to shake things up in a big way.

research shows that stepping out of our routine in life is great for the body and spirit… the brain too.

I’ve also always had an unorthodox approach to business and life in general. It’s served me well. I don’t believe in résumés in the traditional sense, I believe in life résumés. Do more. Create memories. Only when looking back on my successes and failures am I able to connect the dots.

My normal has always been abnormal.

I don’t know if I was thinking about my mortality, or fretting over how many more peak years I had left, or anything like that. I just felt that now was as good a time as any to shake things up. You know, to break up that same routine.

Most of my successes in life have come from learning how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Yeah, that’s it. He ran with a sense of purpose that I couldn’t quite comprehend.

This is a habit I have. When I see or read about someone interesting, I call them up and basically ask them to be my friend.

“The temperature is what you think it is, bro, not what your computer thinks it is. If you think it’s fourteen degrees, then it’s fourteen degrees. Personally, I’m looking at it like it’s in the mid-fifties.”

“Exactly. Enjoy this shit. If you want it to be seventy and sunny… it’s seventy and sunny. Just run. The elements are in your mind. I don’t ever check the temperature when I run. Who gives a fuck what the temperature on the computer says? The computer isn’t out there running, is it?”

“In extreme heat, it’s a totally different mind-set, bro. You have to get medieval. Embrace it! Grind it out. Think about how others are suffering. Enjoy the pain.”

I like to sit back and enjoy the pain. I earned it. —SEAL

don’t think about yesterday. I think about today and getting better. —SEAL

And completely out of nowhere the guy will just drop and give himself twenty—at work, in the lobby, in the restroom. Anywhere and everywhere. It’s not normal.

It doesn’t have to be fun. It has to be effective. —SEAL

“When you think you’re done, you’re only at forty percent of what your body is capable of doing. That’s just the limit that we put on ourselves.”

According to SEAL, if my driver, Smith, was a minute late, it was because he didn’t study the routes correctly. If there was traffic, Smith should have anticipated the accident.

One of the main underlying philosophies in his book is that we use more energy for digestion than all other bodily functions combined. That’s why we are usually tired after a big meal. That said, the average American will eat seventy tons of food in their lifetime. Imagine how hard the body has to work to process and break down all of that food.

“Burpee test, motherfucker. Why do I have to keep repeating myself?”

My legs tremble and shake under my desk. Work resumes and a slight smile comes over my face as I think, Burpee test, bitch!

Every day we ask ourselves: How do we generate buzz and excitement around our products?

Any success I have ever had in my life usually occurred when I was not chasing the money but was doing things out of passion.

“Why not?” I thought. If I was going to take a shot, I might as well take one from outside the arc.

Maybe the best part about my music career was the fact that I didn’t sell that many records. As my wife likes to say, “Failure is just life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you’re off course.”

As my wife likes to remind me, “When I talk to you… please play tennis with me and hit the ball back. It’s called ‘communication,’ and it’s important to a marriage.”

If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it. —SEAL

We realized we needed a different pitch. We needed to show Santulli and Jacobs, not tell them. So we put together our own focus group.

But her disposition being normal is not abnormal to me, as sometimes my wife is in her own world. I mean, she is brilliant but also has her blond moments. I like to say she is 50 percent Lucille Ball and 50 percent Einstein. For example, she built a highly successful global brand with just $5,000 of savings but asks me what day of the week it is often, and means it.

So instead of heading to law school after college, she decided to go to Disney World and try out to be Goofy… naturally.

Instead of using her entire budget on legal fees to patent her product, Sara bought a book on patents and wrote her own patent.

She spent twelve hours a day in department stores promoting her products. It worked!

Sara trademarked the company online for $150 at www.uspto.com.

“You okay?” “No. I don’t feel well,” I say as I keep pace. “Fuck, yeah,” he celebrates. “Now you’re seeing what it’s like to train, Jesse. I hope you enjoy this shit.” He begins to laugh, which soon becomes an all-out cackle. “You look like a pile of spilt fuck,” he says.

“Nah, I just like to go to sleep hungry… so I wake up hungry. Life is all about staying out of your comfort zone.”

If you want to be pushed to your limits, you have to train to your limits. —SEAL

There’s generally a moment in every endeavor I undertake, be it business, love, or fitness, when I say to myself: What the hell was I thinking?

Any time when you live a little outside of the norm people look at you: (a) with some admiration and (b) like you’re crazy. I never cared about that and I still don’t.

I think some people wished they could do it but they never would. The will to keep doing this and the will to put myself through this is what people think is crazy, and I’m paying for this, literally and metaphorically. Maybe I am crazy.

It’s to be a time for us to catch up on any topic we see fit, nothing is off limits, and share some “quality alone time,” as my wife calls

“Twenty-five hundred push-ups, motherfucker. Yes, I am okay.”

“Roger that. So go fuck your bullshit shoulders,” he says. “Whatever you got going on, someone else has more pain. You gotta learn how to fight through it. No matter what it is… Think about someone else and take a suck-shit pill.”

You can get through any workout because everything ends. —SEAL

“What the hell are we doing? This is ridiculous. Can’t you see this is killing me?” “Relax, Jesse, you need to know that everything ends. Just do this shit and it will end.”

Rather than go into detail about my portfolio, I give him a quote that my wife says about money. “Money is fun to make, fun to spend, and fun to give away. That sums it all up.”

“Sara also likes to think of money as a big magnifying glass. If you are a good person before you had money… then money makes you an even better person. If you were a charitable person before you had money… then money makes you even more charitable. But if you were an asshole before you had money… well then, money makes you an even bigger asshole.”

He’s a master at keeping it simple, and I have to say his simplicity looks attractive to me. I sort of want what he has, but I still want what I have.

I know it sounds cliché, but the journey really is more important than the destination. Once you get where you’re going, most of the magic drains out. I could really see myself as a minimalist, just taking life wherever it leads me.

My wife certainly doesn’t need anything, but she definitely needs to see the effort. If there is one thing I’ve learned about marriage, it’s not the gift that counts, it’s the effort. That’s kind of like SEAL, I guess.

Remember when you told me to ‘control my mind’ the first day you moved in with me, well, I’m telling you in business… ‘control the situation.’” “Yo, Jesse man, motherfucking JESSE! You see!!! That’s what I’m talking about, motherfucker. That’s what I’m talking about,” SEAL says,

You can always keep going. —SEAL