Closing the Grit Gap: Why You Should Do Hard Things on Purpose with Clay Speakman

You wake up and you go oh man , like I got too comfortable , I surrounded myself with too much comfort from all the success that I've had , and it's really easy to fall into that trap .

Now here's your host , Brian Glass .

If you've heard me talk about my trips and adventures on Spartan races over the last year , it's all because of a group that Clay has put together and taken us on adventures across the country , and he and I are getting ready to go to Greece in November to run a Spartan race at the home in Sparta . So , clay , welcome to the show .

He's a finisher of the Spartan death race , which will get into several ultramarathons , but on the other side , clay is a highly sophisticated entrepreneur and his background is in behaviors and niches for ultra-high net worth entrepreneurs and families , and so this balance of successful entrepreneur but also maybe like mad caveman is something that you don't find in many

people . And , clay , I want to start by talking about your background and how you got to where you are today .

I went to school , got a degree in business around entertainment . I worked my way up to being one of the VIP directors and largest concert company in the world , launched my own concierge service because I got really good at understanding ultra-high net worth customers through the concert entertainment space and then started building technology around my projects .

And eventually our company became a technology company because we were building unique proprietary software that was for ultra-high net worth families , family offices , private investor groups and that was great . It was the natural succession of things . But , as you and I talked about , the mad caveman kind of came out in the middle of that process .

I was mid-30s , I was successful , I had enough money to do whatever I wanted to , but I didn't feel like a real man . I didn't feel fit . I didn't feel like I was tapping into any sort of foundational principles of why I was created , why I was here on this earth .

I needed a more physical purpose to my life and I was just afraid that I didn't have the grit that I needed if things really hit the fan , if a zombie apocalypse was coming out . I didn't have the manliness and so I started chasing that . How do I find ways to test ?

Am I strong enough , am I a hard enough guy without endangering my life by getting zombie attacks ? So I just started a series of events that would test that and you could say an ultramarathon test set . You can do survival challenges . You can do things like the Yugovi and the Death Racer .

You could just do your local mud run race if you want to just take one step into it . But it all comes down to we were created , our beings were created a long time ago and we had to run away from animals . We had to carry rocks and timber to build our houses . We had to source water , we had to figure out things .

Without GPS and an iPhone in our hand , we didn't have couches to sit on to watch TV all day . We didn't have cars to drive us around . We had to actually navigate land on our own , carry things , source things , and we've lost all that .

We've lost 100% of that , because we've figured out how to invent comforts and all we do is most people work a job so they can buy comforts . Most people spend their whole life buying comfort , and what we lose is our own level of fitness and our own level of grit , which is resiliency , tenacity , integrity all those things .

We lose those because we never practice them , because we don't have to . We don't have to run away from the stuff , we don't have to build our own house , we don't have to source our water . We just sit around and let everything come to us .

So I started a journey to figure that out for myself and I went all the way to the death race , which is something not a lot of people do , but it really just . It became the thing that I am now , which is a person of grit . I do hard things on purpose , because they're hard . That's the reason why .

Had you been in a different business world , do you think you would have felt the pull back to nature and back to hard things as much as you did ?

When you see that level of ultra comfort , ultra success , and you realize at that level there's still a longing for foundational what am I here for ? What am I doing ? The majority of people at that level are still unfit . They're still unhealthy , they're still going to die early of preventable diseases because they didn't take care of their own bodies .

I maybe it was just a point that I just got fed up with that and said this is not what life is supposed to be about , because you can have everything in the world , all the gold in the world . You don't take care of yourself , your inner self . What good is it ? That's what I got to over a period of time .

I just decided to go , do my own journey to find it .

By the time the race was over I felt like I just tapped into something that I never knew existed before and I immediately wanted to do the next harder level . I just kept doing the next harder level for 10 years . Basically , I do something , I fail it , I try it again , Then I succeed . Then , okay , what's the next hardest level ?

What's the next hardest level ? I just became an insatiable desire for what's the next thing I can do to test my level of strength , my level of grit and resiliency . That went along until I finished the death race and there really is sort of nothing .

Next , after that level , you can do it again , but it's an impossible task to try to finish that race again , because it becomes exponentially unfair for any competitor who tries to do it again . Because that's by design . They say if you're strong enough to finish one death race . We're going to make it 10 times harder the next time you try to come back .

I just wasn't about that , but I went back as an instructor to help other people navigate their journey . I really found a lot of joy and purpose in okay , not everybody's going to do the death race . You don't have to do the death race to find grit , but I can help people figure out . If you want to take one step towards grit , what's that step ?

If you want to take two steps after that , I'm going to help encourage people to get out and do that . It could be as simple as pick a parking spot that's further away than you would normally park and just walk more to your car and back . Why ? Because it's just hard on purpose . It's not comfortable . Those little bitty things you do .

If you choose something that's uncomfortable on purpose , you're building grit .

I just want a level set , because most of the people that will be listening to this will have no idea , when you and I talk about the death race , what that means . So can you give us a little bit of an overview ? And I've heard you say you have to be there to truly understand it . But how do you explain that race and the process ? Sure ?

description . Before you show up , you're given a list of things to bring . Some of the things are nearly impossible to source . They might be a certain like rare breed of birds , feathers , or they might be a certain finite amount of scales of a certain fish .

There are some crazy things and sometimes you can't get all the things on the list and you have to like stress about what it's going to mean if you don't show up with certain things . Sometimes you got to show up with a 50 pound metal plate with something carved and then you realize that plate is .

You're going to have to just carry it around for the entire four or five days in addition to 30 other pounds of stuff that you got in your pack . But the whole idea is to navigate chaos under stressful and uncomfortable conditions . That's the premise of the race . And the premise is how much can we push you to past and well beyond your own breaking limits ?

Most people fail the race , but that doesn't mean that they don't get a lot out of it . And fail isn't a word I should use . It's that most people don't finish the race . But you only fail if you don't take away a lot from the race . But the idea is just to stay in the race as long as possible until it ends .

That's really the goal , and if you stay in the race and it ends , you become a finisher . So no , no finish line . There's no finish line and there's actually not a race most of the time it's you're given a list of tasks to do . Okay , everybody , go do this now .

And then you might be split up in one group , maybe doing something , and it's physical labor and it's problem solving and it's navigating , but there's so much chaos thrown in .

You're given conflicting rules , you're given conflicting instructions , sometimes two different people are telling you two different things , and then you're given a job to do , but the only way to do that job is to break one of the rules that you were told never to break . And that's all on purpose . And you have to figure out how to navigate that .

And it's really the instructors trying to figure out what is going to break this guy , what's going to break this guy , what's going to break this girl , what's going to break them , and then pushing that as hard as they can and seeing if you'll quit . And that's really the thing .

And sometimes you don't quit but they tell you nope , you're out of the race , you didn't perform , you got to go do this , but it's just a test because you're not really out of the race . They just want to see what will happen if you do that .

So imagine running your local 10K and the race directors are just running behind you , putting on weight , putting obstacles in your way , pushing you into a tree , taking your water away , telling everybody not to give that person any aid , taking your shoes off and then telling you to turn left when you're supposed to turn right and then telling you're disqualified ,

you missed a cutoff , you can't race anymore . All those things happening , but you still have to run and complete the race . That's basically what the death race is for somebody who would be running a regular 10K race .

There's a group of people that I'm encouraging , guiding , giving advice to , and I'm often back at that event as an instructor , physically giving people direction and helping guide them to whether they quit or whether they finish or not . But the other thing is I do adventure races .

I still do races and runs myself and just to keep that competitive level going , I do a number of ultramarathon races . I just did a snowshoe ultramarathon last year . That was fun .

So I was running in snowshoes on snow , and then I was also running in snowshoes on dry ground , which is probably harder than when it's snowing . But the race director insisted that you had to wear your snowshoes 100% of the time , no matter what the conditions were .

So I was literally running up and down trails on a mountain with snowshoes on , with no snow , for half the time , doing that for 30 plus miles .

All right , I don't live in Cavemanville , but when I am enjoying comfort I understand it as a unique blessing that comes in small spurts , but most of my life is spent embracing the

suck . Running towards uncomfortable things for the benefit of . It's a great experience because it's purposely uncomfortable . And when you unlock that level , you realize that doesn't have any power over you . You can conquer it whenever you want to . And hard things are only hard things if you don't practice doing hard things .

And now I wake up every day and if I've got a challenge I don't want to deal with or something like that , I have no excuse because in my head I go it's not harder than the death race , I should just do it . It's not harder than the death race , it shouldn't scare me , it shouldn't hinder me .

So you get to a certain level of doing hard things and then you realize everything else becomes easier in comparison .

So many of us spend time and effort working really hard to make money so that we can buy nice things right , and so where is the balance between wanting to have all those great experiences and then wanting to get up on a Saturday morning when you don't want to get out of your nice warm bed and go running in 12 degree weather ?

I talk about this thing I call the grit gap , which is that success brings comfort , then comfort erodes grit , and then grit is what you need for success . So when you become successful , you lose the grit that you need to stay successful or find the next level of success . A lot of people go through that cycle .

You wake up and you go oh man , I got too comfortable , I surrounded myself with too much comfort from all the success that I've had , and it's really easy to fall into that trap . There's trillions of dollars of marketing spent every day to convince you to get into that trap . Right , because you've got the money to spend .

Now You've become successful , you can spend all the money . But if you don't balance that out like purposely seeking out running head on into uncomfortable things and challenges , you'll find that you wake up one day surrounded by comfort and you don't know how to deal with being uncomfortable .

The Epic Grit Club is for people who value grit , who want to be around grit , want to have more grit or some guys just have a lot of grit already , but they want to be around other guys who embrace that grit so that they can keep on their grit journey . And that's what it's about . You can't get this from reading a book .

You can't get it from watching videos . You need to go and put your own grit and this is the club where we're going to have events all around the country for people to come get their grit journey going , have a mastermind as part of that so they can open up about how do I translate grit to success .

What is stopping me in my business life , my home life , my spiritual life ? Because I don't have grit . And now what can I unlock ? Because I'm cultivating it .

So this is the culmination of what I've learned through building businesses , exiting businesses and taking my grit journey , which was a side project , is now there's a real benefit to helping business leaders and business owners purposely put grit in their lives and then unlocking the next level of success that they've been holding back from so far .

masterminding , and then going out and doing something hard and then coming back and talking about it over a pizza and a beer have been some of the most impactful time that I've spent in that program .

So I want to thank you and honor you for that and then ask you what does it look like when you're bringing together guys who maybe aren't in an organization together , who are high impact business leaders from different industries , who don't know each other ? Like how do you envision those masterminds looking ?

That's gonna exist , right . So we're gonna go do that stuff . Then we're gonna talk about what's going on in your own life . What are the challenges you're facing ? What are the stumbling blocks ? What are the limiting beliefs ? How do you get to the next level ? What does the next level look like for you ?

Everybody is on the same level when you get to that , no matter if you're 65 or you're 25 . Everybody's got to find that out , and it's tough to find out if you don't have enough grit to get into it .

I was also a serious procrastinator , right , and I can build a successful business around that because I had other talents that masks that . But what grit taught me is you don't run away from the things You're not good at . You run into them and you conquer them , right .

That doesn't mean you have to keep beating your head like doing something that you're bad at . But to run away from it and not and try not to ever do it is You're gonna fail , your businesses are gonna fail because you just seriously just avoided all the things you weren't great at , and everybody's got to be able to figure out that part .

So I started getting into the conversations that were uncomfortable . I started changing my relationships to be uncomfortable because that's where the goodness happens and I found that all the things that I had avoided all my life because I was afraid or thought I wouldn't be good at .

Those are the things I had to get into even faster and even harder , and that was the biggest change in my life .

I need you to delegate the things that you're not amazing at so you can free up the things that you are amazing at . I'm not saying that that doesn't coexist with the idea of grit , but if you're running away from something because it's hard , it's uncomfortable and you're not good at it , then that's gonna limit everything you do .

Now you might go in , you might figure out the best that I can do , the hardest that I can work at it . I tried it , I tried it , I got my hands in it , I ran into Uncomfort , and you do that and then you realize , alright , next time I'm gonna hire somebody to do that . Maybe the best that may be the best thing to do for your business .

Like , I'm not saying that , but to never go at it and never figure it out yourself is , I think that's part of that what's missing in a lot of people right now .

three years .

It was really when I started doing the Spartan program for go-kart , when Matt King and Chris Ryan said , hey , can you form a program so that our business leaders and our members can go through the journey and that was really the first time I put it together of hey , high impact business leaders really need this message and I saw a lot of instances , heard a

lot of people talk about the great gap of I've just become too comfortable with my six and I really need something like this and I thought that's a great thing to do and , if I can find a way to build a business around it , it's really my personal passion and what I call my massive transformative purpose , which is the thing that I'm uniquely qualified to do ,

that delivers the best , biggest impact on the world , and I really think that's it highly successful , comfortable people . These are going to be the people who change the world and if I can help them Understand the value and how to bring their own grit along , they're going to be much better leaders . They can make a much more positive impact on the world .

mud races or the kind of thing that you're putting on ?

Just don't quit and you'll finish right . Most people have no idea how strong they are . Most people don't know what they're capable of . It's because they don't test it . So most people who say I can't do that , that's too hard for me they're . They're lying to themselves because they're too scared to go test and see if they could actually do it .

The human body is incredibly strong and resilient . It just needs to be asked and demanded to do what it can do . And most people are too afraid to ever go ask their bodies , their mental , their physical body , to go do something that it's capable of doing , because it's hard and it's scary .

You can't tell me , you can't go do that thing if a guy with no legs is pulling his own wheelchair with a rope up a muddy hill and you're sitting on the sidelines saying that's too hard for me . There are people who just decide I'm gonna go do it , I'm gonna figure it out , I'm gonna figure out how to get the strength to do it .

Step one is the hardest step and that's to sign up . Put it on your calendar . If it doesn't scare you , it won't change you . Everyone should be signing up for things that they don't think they can do . It's the only way that you're gonna advance . Sign up for something that's too hard , too challenging , too tough .

Put it on your calendar and then tell other people that you're doing it . You will 100% show up and you will probably finish , because you have the desire inside . You have the strength , but you have to call on it , you have to ask it .

But if you're waiting to be ready for it , you'll never sign up . If you're waiting until you're gonna be ready for that hard thing that scares you , you're never gonna do it . You have to sign up first and then get ready . The motivation of not failing is what will get you to getting ready for the event and showing up .

And the advice that you gave me , or maybe you gave the group , a year ago was like don't try to win , don't try to be faster than everybody else , because there's always gonna be somebody bigger , faster , stronger , but just try to have more fun than everybody else .

And so if you approach these kinds of races with that attitude and business , if you approach business and life with the attitude that you can have more fun than everybody else and that's a competition you can win all the time .

So in business , the harder a challenge is , the more you're getting your butt kicked by the opposition , by the economy , by whatever's going on . That challenge can become more fun , right ? Success is boring in a lot of ways . Everything going your way all the time and you show up at work and it's the same old things .

You just push the same buttons and the same thing happens again . That's not fun in a lot of ways . Having to navigate challenges , having things thrown at you , having to make tough decisions that's fun , right . That's being alive . That's a sign of I need to exhibit my prowess here . I need to show the things that I've learned .

I need to be a good operator in this business . Those are all driven by challenges , right ? If everything is all the same smooth , you don't have to be good at your job , anybody can just do it . So those that doing hard things on purpose can also be an extreme version of fun , because it's a sign of life .

They're either bigger or they're stranger to you , and so making sure that you keep cultivating grit in your life helps you overcome those challenges and know frankly that you can rise to the level of those challenges as they come

up . So , clay , as we wrap up here , you're going to be speaking at our Great Legal Marketing Summit and coming up in October in Orlando , so if people want to see you there , they could check you out there , but where else can people find you ? Do you have a website for the new company yet ? I'm working on a websitecom .