03 Sami Inkinen - How a Time-Starved CEO Creates Sustainable High Performance

Purple Patch Podcast

Matt Dixon

Humanpotential, Nutrition, Education, Empower, Fitness, Executive, Coach, Strengthtraining, Purplepatch, Sleep, Cycling, Performance, Running, Recovery, Health & Fitness, Ironman, Swimming, Timemanagement, Triathlon, Meditation, Yoga

4.8 • 647 Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2018

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this eye-opening episode, Matt goes one-on-one with one of his athletes, Sami Inkinen.

Growing up on a farm in Finland, Sami was always intrigued by health, wellness, and athletic performance. He did ride his bike or cross-country ski to-and-from school most days, after all!

He moved to the United States in 2003 to attend Stanford Business School, and it's there where he met his friend and business partner, Pete Flint, and, together, they founded Trulia, eventually turning it public. Today, he is the CEO and Founder of Virta Health, a company on a mission to reverse Type 2 Diabetes in 100 million people by 2025.

It was a revelation about his own health that was the catalyst for this new mission. You see, even though Sami was and still is a top performer both in sport and life, he made the mistake that so many of us make: burning the candle at both ends. “In 2008,” he says, “I had a view that the more hours you train, the faster you become and the more hours you work, the more effective you are.” That way of life led to frequent bouts of flu and fever. Even worse, he recalls, he was forgetting common words and names. He didn’t realize at the time, but he was also on his way to becoming pre-diabetic.

This way of life is a slippery slope for a high-performing athlete and CEO, which is why Purple Patch Fitness and the Matt Dixon “Pillars of Performance” were such a good fit for Inkinen. He put these philosophies into practice during his triathlon training and the results have been astonishing. Here are just a few of Sami’s achievements:

Overall amateur champion at Wildflower Triathlon Long Course, Alcatraz and Hawaii 70.3
Age group world champion at the IRONMAN 70.3. distance
Two sub-9 hour races at the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona
Personal Best of 8:24 IRONMAN finish time

Surely an athlete with these results must train upwards of 20-25 hours per week! Not in this case. Sami did this all on a recipe of 10-12 hours per week.

How is this possible? Well, discipline and trust are two ingredients in this equation. Matt and Sami dive deep into training philosophies and they discuss what’s important to success and life, work, and sport including:

Challenges while juggling work, life, and training
The value of having a coach
The key elements of setting up successful training on limited hours
Tips for managing life and schedules each week
Mistakes of aspirational and ambitious athletes
Importance of adopting a “growth” mindset instead of “results” mindset
His favorite free recovery tool
Rapid fire questions on success

Most recently, Sami and his wife chartered off on a record-breaking 45-day row from San Francisco to Hawaii that they chronicled together at FatChanceRow.org.

Ultimately, the goal of Sam’s success is one that we should all share: Creating Sustainable High Performance in all aspects of life.

We hope you enjoy this high performance episode.

To get a Sami sample training week, visit PurplePatchFitness.com. Here, you can also learn more about our Coaching Services, Training Camps and Matt's Latest Book, Fast Track Triathlete.

:00-:21 Recorded Intro

:21-:3:45 Welcome and What’s Coming Up in Future

3:45-7:15 Word of the Week: Sugar

7:30-54:30 Sami Inkinen Introduction and Interview

54:30 Visit PurplePatchFitness.com for a Sample Sami Week of Training

Thanks for taking a listen and, if you like what you hear, please subscribe, share, rate and review. Your feedback is appreciated.

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Follow Sami Inkinen on:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and
0:05.8	educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential,
0:11.5	you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere
0:17.2	in a great sport into life. All righty guys, episode three. That means that we are
0:23.6	two behind us so far of the Purple Patch podcast and so far so good. Thank you so much for your
0:29.9	positive reviews that you've given us and a lot of the notes it means a lot to know that people
0:35.6	are listening and of course I would like more people to listen.
0:39.2	So a call to action first, if you could, and treat it as a personal favor.
0:43.7	If you could leave positive reviews on Apple Podcasts, if you are enjoying the show,
0:47.8	if you could share it with your friends, it's really, really appreciated.
0:51.6	I'd love to build this into, hopefully, an important and valuable voice
0:55.6	in the performance discussions that we have across sport and across life. Today, it actually
1:01.9	gets real. You don't have to just deal with me, myself and I, this week. We have our very first
1:06.8	guess, and who else could we have on, but Samicanon. Sami was such an important part of
1:12.8	Purple Patch early in our journey we had a partnership as he went on his quest to build Trulia
1:18.3	and he took that all the way to of course going public at the same time trying to compete
1:23.7	and excel in triathlons and that methodology methodology that we created, the journey, the experimentation
1:29.5	that we went through to try and weave a recipe of performance both in life and, of course,
1:36.1	in sport itself, really laid the foundations of so much of the methodology that we have today.
1:42.1	Well, currently, Sami is the CEO of Verta Health. As I mentioned,
1:46.7	he was the founder of Trulia and, of course, he's one of the best triathletes in the world.
1:52.5	He's the epitome of the quantified self. In fact, he's a high performer across business,
	...

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