You're listening to the Impact Theory Podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers.

Join host Tom Billio, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success.

Welcome to Impact Theory.

Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. You were here, my friends, because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it.

So our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams.

Alright, today's guest grew up on the south side of Chicago amid unimaginable violence and dreamed of one day working at Nike designing shoes for his hero Michael Jordan.

Virtually everyone told him that this dream was ridiculous for somebody like him, but he refused to listen, making his mom take him to shoe stores, and that's where he could buy something, but so he could sketch the shoes and see if he could improve on them.

Nothing came easily for him, but just as Jordan put up a thousand shots a day to improve, he began doing a thousand sketches a day.

He persisted and after several rejections, he got a design internship with Nike becoming the first African American to do so.

Insanely hungry to make a name for himself, he took all of the projects nobody else wanted.

His assignment to reinvent laces, the most boring job in shoes, was actually meant to haze him, but he crushed it so hard that it resulted in him being awarded multiple patents and attracting the attention of Nike founder Phil Knight.

He also poured himself completely into another maligned and orphaned project known as the barbecue shoe for dads and turned it into the monarch, the highest grossing shoe in Nike's history.

While it normally takes roughly 15 years to become a senior designer at Nike, he did it in five.

He went on to design shoes for Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, M&M, and of course the King himself, Michael Jordan.

Not satisfied with being a great designer however, he went back to school and received his master's degree in business from Stanford, and when he returned to Nike he worked his way all the way to senior global design director for the Jordan brand.

Having fulfilled his dream and wanting to help his son overcome some health issues, he departed Nike after 14 years and is now embarked on his entrepreneurial journey, co-founding Super Heroic Inc, a company focused on creating quality play products for kids.

So please, help me in welcoming the real life, Lucius Fox, the media designer at Stanford's D School and CEO of Super Heroic, Jason Maiden.

Very lucky to be a girl.

Dude, your story is an insane tale of what happens when you are willing to work yourself nearly to death.

How did you get the mentality, man? Like that's crazy.

Yeah, I think there are several things that I fundamentally believe are true in terms of difficulty and what it gives you.

So for me, being born on the South Side of Chicago in a blue collar environment, you know what makes excuses for yourself.

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