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The Hard Way With Joe De Sena

178: Grimur Saemundsen found success in an unforgiving climate

The Hard Way With Joe De Sena

Spartan Races

Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Education

4.8874 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2018

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Have you seen the iconic photos of Iceland's Blue Lagoon? On the way back from the Spartan Ultra World Championship we found Grimur Saemundsen, the doctor, and entrepreneur who founded the Icelandic spa visited by more than half of the country's tourists.

Use his exceptional business success story as a parable to guide your own success. The indigo tint of the water comes from naturally therapeutic substances including silica and blue-green algae. Saemundsen worked with existing strengths in his environment, the natural volcanic springs and rugged landscape, to create something new. Even as the spa grows the new architecture follows the natural landscape. Do that yourself by identifying and adapting to the strengths in yourself and your environment. Make them work for you. Iceland took what many might see as negative, the attention a volcano brought to them by stopping air travel worldwide and made it a positive. The used the attention to springboard for their tourism campaigns.

Is it something in the water? We're willing to check for you ...

Lessons:

1. To build success use and emphasize existing strengths - in this case adapting to the local ecology and environment. 


2. Create a passion around what you're doing and others on your team will follow suit.


3. To succeed you ned three keys: vision, endurance, and to remain open to outside opinion. 


Link: Blue Lagoon Geothermal Spa http://www.bluelagoon.com/

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CREDITS:

Producer – Marion Abrams, Madmotion, llc.

Hosts: Joe De Sena with Johnny Waite, Sefra Alexandra, and Col. Tim Nye.

Synopsis – Matt Baatz

© 2018 Spartan

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Spartan Up Podcast. We're shooting this the day after the 24-hour World Championship Spartan Ultra in Iceland, incredibly brutal conditions,

0:09.0

but today things a little bit different.

0:11.0

Today we're at the blue lagoon.

0:13.0

They get literally thousands of tourists here every year,

0:16.0

but it feels like today half of them are Spartans.

0:18.0

This place is crawling with people

0:21.0

tending to their wounds and healing their sore muscles.

0:24.0

Yesterday, Joe met with the CEO to find out what it takes to build a business like this

0:29.0

has become one of the biggest businesses Iceland.

0:31.0

And my fellow submerged Nis is Iceland Mike.

0:35.0

He's part of the team now.

0:37.0

We got Johnny on the weight,

0:38.0

Sefra, and Andrea, our sound engineer and Marion faithfully staying in the rain filming this episode today.

0:47.0

Our producer.

0:48.0

Our producer, the intrepid expeditionary producer.

0:51.0

Marion. Marion. Expeditionary producer. We are in Iceland for Spartan Up Podcast and I am with the founder of a spa you may not have heard of or you may have heard of called the Blue Lagoon.

1:12.0

His name is I want to see if I could do this right,

1:14.5

because Icelandic is a different language. Grimor Simonson, I screwed that up.

1:20.0

No, no, it's very good.

1:21.0

All right. So you said you started this spa.

1:25.0

Do you call it a spa?

1:27.0

What do you call it?

...

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