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.'”

“I have always lived my life outside of the box. I find it to be way more fun there.”

“The best gift you can give yourself is getting over the fear of embarrassment because then you're completely free to try anything.”

“We don't aim high enough with our goals. We all have more in us, and we are all capable of aiming higher.”

“It is so cool to live with inspiration.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's better to set a big goal to try and then fail than to never set a goal in the first place.”

“Almost all of my business flights are commercial, not private.”

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

“I was a kiddie pool attendant, and I was a white rapper. That's not going to get you a job on Wall Street.”

“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.”

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

“I don't look at anything in my life as achievements. I look at them as experiences.”

“I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a good flier.”

“When I was 24, I realized I could never be one of the best rappers, but I knew I had some of the best ideas.”

“Anytime you take someone's money, that puts enormous pressure. But I think if you want the most reward, you have to take the most risk.”

“I got a lot of great life lessons from the entertainment industry. The first was being able to feel comfortable taking risks.”

“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 challenges.”

“If I had done 'Go, New York, Go' for the Spurs, it might not have worked. It really taught me a lot about demographics and tastes and styles. I never went to business school, so that whole experience was my crash course in marketing, contracts, negotiations, and product launches.”