Jesse Itzler

“I take a freezing cold shower to start every day, and when I can't take it any more, I count 20 Mississippi's. Then I literally walk out of the shower and say, 'Let's go.'”

“The concept of getting out of my routine, mixing it up, and pushing myself to live the grittiest life is something I try to incorporate every day.”

“To me, the thing is, through good or bad, if you're a Knicks fan, you're down with the Knicks, and that's the bottom line.”

“I'm a New Yorker, man. I'm a Knicks fan.”

“Before I left for American University, my mother told me to sign up for everything I could: to take advantage of everything from on-campus lectures to sports and social events to the amazing...”

“I want to live with a monk... and the Rolling Stones.”

“I was networking every day from 21 to 28 years old. I sent 10 letters a day, which means I reached out to 3,000 people in a year.”

“P Street in D.C. is one of the worst areas in the city. Some of the things I saw, the things I experienced, the things we came through, really gave me a whole new perspective on life.”

“Do everyday things in a new way to get the brain thinking in new ways.”

“No experience is necessary to push yourself past what you think you can do.”

“When I graduated college, I remember all I really wanted was to make enough money to have a swimming pool, because I love to swim, to grow my own fruit. I wanted to have a little plot where...”

“If I'm ordering power bars online, I'll order 480. Everything is times-10 in my life.”

“In a bar, you never know what to expect. A place could be packed, but there might only be five girls there.”

“One thing I thought of, I call it By Sea, By Land, By Foot. It'd be a 100-mile paddle, a 100-mile run, and a 100-mile bike, back-to-back-to-back. But I don't want to end up in the hospital.”

“I realized that so much of our precious time is taken up by obligations that we don't even really need.”

“In the late 1990s, I was a guest on a private plane. By the time my partners and I got off the flight, we knew we had to figure out how to fly privately more often.”

“I do a workout every morning in which I purposefully try to make myself uncomfortable. It sets me up for the rest of the day by reminding me that I can choose to be OK in the midst of tough...”

“Any time I meet someone or learn about someone that's really interesting or inspiring to me or has a story that really resonates with me, I just cold call them, and I try to meet him or her.”

“Routines can be a rut.”

“Failure has never been a signal for me to quit; it's always been a sign for me to go down another path.”