What matters more? Where we start? Where we finish? Or how fast we drive the course we set for ourselves? NASCAR Driver, US Navy Officer and entrepreneur Jesse Iwuji joins Fran Racioppi to show how hard work and focus will close any gap on the open track of life.
Jesse and Fran cover growing up un-athletic in Texas the son of Nigerian immigrants, earning a spot on the US Naval Academy Football Team, deploying multiple times on ships, pursuing his dream to race cars, and his recent partnership with NFL Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith to launch his own NASCAR team; Jesse Iwuji Motorsports.
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In all things Jesse Iwuji does, there are two constant elements: his devotion to service and his inspirational nature to many. Jesse went from competing at the top level of Division-1A college football to rising the ranks of the military as a Lieutenant Commander, and is now the only current driver in all of NASCAR at the national levels that actively serves his country as a US Military member.
It has been key for Iwuji, who is currently serving in our country’s reserve fighting force, to honor his country while pursuing excellence in the business world as a business owner and on the track as a driver. It should come as no surprise that he has championed companies and charities that give back to our men and women in uniform.
Jesse is also a big supporter of NASCAR diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today he is one of four African Americans competing at NASCARs national level of racing. He was honored by NASCAR for two years in a row – the Diverse Driver of the Year Award. He is well versed both on and off the track!
It is fair to say in many ways Jesse is a first in NASCAR. While clawing toward the top tiers of NASCAR, Jesse Iwuji continues to take us all along for a memorable ride showing those who dare to dream that life truly rewards those who stay strong enough, long enough.
What matters more? Where do we start or finish? How fast do we drive the course we set for ourselves? My guest in this episode is Jesse Iwuji. He’s a NASCAR driver, entrepreneur, actor, and an inspiration to all those who have a dream. Jesse’s far from the finish line but also miles from his starting grid. His parents immigrated from Nigeria. He grew up in Texas but wasn’t the most athletic.
He didn’t come from a military family and certainly never drove a race car but he did understand that hard work and focus will close any gap on the open track of life. Jesse pushed himself on the football field and school to earn a slot at the US Naval Academy. He played free safety for the midshipman and was commissioned as a Surface Warfare Officer. Jesse spent 4 years on ships and deployed 2 times. It was in his downtime that he found his next challenge was becoming a professional race car driver.
Jesse and I talk about his start and journey in partnership with NFL Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith to launch his own NASCAR team, Jesse Iwuji Motorsports. Jesse talks about overcoming fear at over 200 miles an hour and how wrecking in 6 out of his first 7 races taught him valuable lessons, bounce back, and mental toughness. This season he is finishing at the top of the pack and inching closer to his first podium.
Check out my conversation with Jesse on your favorite podcast platforms. Watch the full video version of our conversation on YouTube. Subscribe to us and follow @JedburghPodcast on all social media. Check out our website JedburghPodcast.com. Learn more about Jesse at JesseIwuji.com and on social media, @Jesse_Iwuji. Don’t miss him in action in the number 34 car in the Xfinity Series.
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Jesse, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thank you for having me on the show.
We talk about visionaries, drivers of change, and those dedicated to winning, no matter the challenge, so much on this show. We talk about leaders who are impacting their industries, setting an example through their successes and failures, and creating change. You are the only actively serving military member in NASCAR. You are a graduate of the US Naval Academy, where you played free safety. You are active in entrepreneurism. You started Jesse Iwuji Motorsports alongside the legendary Emmitt Smith. On the track, you are a driver in the Xfinity Series. You are 1 of 2 African-Americans in NASCAR. You are an inspiration to all of those who ever thought that they couldn’t do it.
I appreciate you spending some time with me. I know you got a lot going on. It’s the middle of the season, so there’s no time to waste but I want to get right into it. I want to start with your background. You said people have big goals and big dreams but are often too scared to go after them. You’ve attributed much of people’s hesitation to pursue their dreams to the belief that their starting point is too far away from their goals that they can’t close that gap and can’t get there, so they just don’t do it. Your parents immigrated to the US from Nigeria. You grew up in Texas, where you played football. You didn’t come from a military family. You never sat in a race car. You had to work to be the athlete that you became. Why is this starting point important to where you’ve come from?
Starting is everything. There are a lot of people out there who have big goals and dreams. They want to go somewhere and do something. They see themselves accomplishing something but don’t take that first step and don’t start. You have to start and put in that action. That’s all part of it. That’s a difference between desire and ambition. Desire is just dreaming it up the whole day, every single day. Ambition is coupling action with that desire and trying to execute that on a daily basis. That’s what’s going to take you from wherever you are starting to wherever you are going. I equate life and this journey towards whatever your goals are in life.
“That’s the difference between desire and ambition…desire is just dreaming it up the whole day…ambition is actually coupling action with that desire and trying to execute.”
I equate it to a card game. We are all dealt a certain hand. Whatever that hand is, you might be dealt a good hand. I might be dealt a very bad hand but there’s nowhere in that rule book for any card game that says, “If you dealt a bad hand, you automatically lose.” It means it’s going to be ridiculously hard to get to the goal to win but you can still do it. You can be dealt a bad hand and maneuver your way through and still win the game. It’s all possible.
Let’s say you are dealt a bad hand and start going through it, and all of a sudden, you still lose. Take a drink of water, sit back down, and play again. You got time. Keep playing, trying, and going after. Just because you lost firsthand or the hand you were dealt sucks does not mean you weren’t meant to win the game. You can win it no matter how many times you got to play it. That’s how I look at it. No matter where you are starting from, don’t be scared to start.
You have to go after every single day, whatever your goal is. If you have that vision, that means the deal is already done in the future, so who are you to not go after it? You were meant to go after it and achieve it. There will be ripples along the way. There will be walls, blocks, pitfalls, snakes, traps, and all these things that happen. People are stabbing you in the back or from the front. You name it. You are going to take on fire the entire time.
You are still meant to get to the end. If you can clearly see it. It’s like this natural vision that you are seeing every single day. You are accomplishing something, achieving something or whatever it is. That means the deal is done in the future. You must go after it with all your might, and you will get there. When you are starting, don’t get stuck in the analysis paralysis stage, where you paralyze yourself because you are analyzing so much.
[bctt tweet=”When you’re leading a very versatile group of people, you have to understand your people. What it takes to be a good leader is not coming into it with some mentality.” username=”talentwargroup”]
You take ten years to analyze your goals and dreams. The opportunity of a lifetime is now gone. You’ve now not taken the opportunity a lifetime within the lifetime of that opportunity. You got to understand that sometimes it does take a little bit of analysis and planning at first to get your bearings but then you got to go. If you got the parachute and the backpack, jump out of the freaking plane, pack it on your way down, put it on, and then flip it because you now have a timeline once you jump by that plane.
You are not sitting on that comfy plane anymore. You got to pack that parachute right. You got to get everything right so that on your way down, you are not going to go splat on the ground. That ground is going to come up pretty quickly. That’s what’s going to force you to get that parachute packed. That’s how I approach different things.
“Let’s say you are dealt a bad hand; take a drink of water, sit back down and play again.”
One of the things you brought up was parachuting. I want to get into your career in the Navy here in a second and attend the Naval Academy. When you are sitting in that airplane and you are strapped up, nothing teaches you to seize the moment. When the opportunity presents itself, which we were talking about here, sometimes you got to go. People talk all the time, “The time is not right. I got to wait for everything to be perfect.” It’s never going to be perfect. You got to get in. When that ramp opens, the jump master says, “Go,” you go. You don’t have a choice.
No matter what’s going to happen after that, you got to go. You can’t wait. It’s not on your timeline anymore. It forces you out there but forces you to go into the mission and start executing. If everybody had it their way, they would probably sit on the plane the whole ride and never jump out but you got to go.
I have never been so scared as I was the first many times. Let’s talk about the Naval Academy. You played linebacker in high school. You were recruited by the Naval Academy. You played free safety there, and then you became a surface warfare officer in San Diego, 4 years on ships, 2 deployments. After we’ve watched Top Gun come out again, we see all the movies. We can talk about Navy SEALs here because I was a green brain, and you weren’t in a SEAL, so I’m going to rag on them for a minute.
Everybody thinks that if you go into the Navy, you are either a fighter pilot or a Navy SEAL. The reality is that most people serve as you did, and they are Surface Warfare Officers, which to me, for a very long time, I didn’t know what that meant because I’m like, “The Navy isn’t on the surface,” but it means on the surface of the water. What did you learn about leading teams and from being on a ship because it is so unique?
When you are on the ship, you are in a tight community. When you are out there on the water, for people who are in the Navy, you got to think about it. We don’t have a fire department that we can call if something happens. We don’t have local law enforcement that you can call if something happens. Whatever happens on the ship, happens on the ship. You and your group on the ship are the only people out there who can save you and the group. We are our own firefighting squad. We plug holes. We do whatever. We are our own mechanics, electricians, cooks, and barbers. You name it. We got to be able to do it all on the ship.
When you are leading this very versatile group of people, you got to understand your people. What it takes to be a good leader is not coming into it with some mentality that, “Here’s my leadership style. I’m going to go after it. People are going to listen to me.” You got to understand people. You always got to come at something, seeking to understand so that you can understand where they are coming from and their different personalities because we live in a world where there are a million different personalities that come into our military.
“When you are leading this very versatile group of people, you got to understand your people.”
We do what we can to make everybody assimilate and become one. By the end of the day, everyone is still a human being. The more you can understand the person you are dealing with, the more you can be an effective leader for them. Your one leadership style doesn’t just lead everybody. It’s very difficult to make that work. When you understand people, you understand, “This is what makes this person tick. These are the incentives that they like. This is what makes them want to go, achieve this and that, whatever it is.” Once you understand that with the people, you can then get them to move in a certain direction so that you can all be cohesive, execute the mission and achieve whatever the goals are.
Especially when you operate on small teams, we talk about hierarchies all the time in organizational design and people think, “You instill these hierarchies so that someone at the top can look at everyone else and say, ‘Those are my men. I’m ready to tell my men what to do.’” You said, in many ways, effective leaders have to know when to lead and when to get involved and also sometimes when to get out of the way and be a part of the team, too often, we forget that, especially when you get out of the military.
“Effective leaders have to know when to lead and when to get involved.”
Some of it is getting out of the way like they know what they are doing. You’ve trained them. If you’ve done everything you are supposed to do to train them properly, equip them properly, give them all the tools and help their capabilities to be the best that their capabilities can be, get out of their way and let them do their thing. Empower them to go out and do their thing. It’s huge when you are a leader.
I want to ask you about the transition into race car driving because everybody wants to be a race car driver at some point in their life. When I was getting prepared to come and speak with you, I was watching my son. He’s playing with race cars in the other room. I was looking at him, thinking, “That’s the dream of many little kids.”
You have this quote that I want to read it’s, “I was just sitting in my room and told myself, ‘I like cars. I like racing. I’m the type of person who I don’t like to sit on the sideline. Jesse, you are going to become a professional race car driver.’ I wrote that on my whiteboard. I put that on my wall, and literally, that’s where my journey began.” That’s incredibly powerful because I remember sitting in my room and planning a vacation in Norway when I was deployed. You were getting ready to become a race car driver. Why do you want to race cars?
I’ve always liked cars and racing since I was a little kid. I watched the cartoon Speed Racer and the show Knight Rider with David Hasselhoff. It was a great show. It was cool. I watched a little bit of NASCAR and Formula 1 when I was a kid. I watched it all. I liked it a lot but never thought I was going to get into it. Once I graduated from the Naval Academy, I needed that next thing to do and the next exciting competitive sport to be a part of, and football was over for me. I wanted to explore more about my interest in cars. I was like, “I’m an officer. I make a little bit of money. I can go buy a fancy car.” I bought a Challenger SRT8 and Corvette Z06.
I would take these cars to tracks, drag strips, and road courses. You name it. I would go to all these tracks and do these open track days. After a few years of doing that, one day, I decided, “I want to take this to the highest level. I played college football at the highest level college football Division I-A college football. That’s the highest level you can be at. I was in games with 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 or 60,000. I wasn’t even in the game against Ohio State, 107,000 people were in the stands. I wanted that feeling again. I was like, “Where else was I going to get that feeling again?” I could get it being a professional race car driver. I was like, “I’m going to get that feeling again.”
I decided that I wanted to go after it. I had to figure out the resources of what it took to get into racing, what resources were necessary, funding money, experience, time, equipment, you name it. I had to figure out the timing on it like how to do it. I was still on active duty in the military. I had to put all these different parts and pieces together. I went through a lot of grinds and intentional thought, planning, networking and putting energy forward, stepping forward, taking action every single day, and not being scared to do it. I started meeting people.
When you start putting this crazy focus and energy towards something, it’s crazy how the universe will start putting it back into you. They will start opening up doors. Pathways will start opening up that were always there, but now, you finally see it. That’s what I started doing it. That’s what allowed me to get on that path, to get into racing. I met a guy at a car show who was racing at Late Model Stock Cars. He introduced me to a Late Model Stock Cars team.
I started short-track racing in 2015. I had to find the money to do that. I was finding a little bit of sponsorship. I was doing crowdfunding campaigns. I started my own small business to make extra money. I was doing everything I could to make extra money to race. That was when I started working my way up the ranks. The business that I started, it started doing better. That helped me to pay for some of the racing.
[bctt tweet=”When you start putting this focus and energy towards something, it’s crazy how the universe will start putting it back into you.” username=”talentwargroup”]
I found more sponsorship that helped me. I found an agent eventually who helped me find even more sponsorships so we could go to the higher levels of NASCAR, and we kept on grinding. That’s what it took to get there. You can’t even answer the question, “How long it’s going to take? How many this you got to do? How many dots you got to get?” It’s whatever it takes. If someone asks you, “How many reps have you got to do to get stronger?” “How many whatever it takes?” If someone asks you, “How much time it takes?” “However long it takes?” There’s no limit. You do whatever is necessary to get there.
“There’s just no limit. You do whatever is necessary to get there.”
In the last episode, we interviewed Scott Dikkers, who’s the Founder of The Onion. He said, “You have to be obsessed. Most people think that when you say that someone is obsessed, it’s a bad thing. When you are building a brand, following your dream or trying to achieve something that you’ve always dreamed and set out to do, you have to be relentlessly obsessed.” If you remember our time in the military, what do we talk about? We talked about the relentless pursuit of global terrorism. We did that for twenty years, and we will do it for beyond. That’s how you achieve what you set out to do.
I always tell people, “You have to insanely and obsessively believe that the goal will come true.” That’s what you have to do because no one else is going to believe it for you. You got to see it for yourself. Some people want to support you because they want you to do good. Some people aren’t going to want to support you but you got to be your biggest cheerleader. That’s the only way you are going to make it happen.
“You have to insanely and obsessively believe that the goal will come true.”
You rose through the NASCAR ranks. You spent time in Canaan, the Camping World Truck Series. Now you are full-time and the number 34 Chevrolet Camaro. You founded Jesse Iwuji Motorsports. Your business partner is Emmitt Smith. You and he both said, “The goal of this venture is to create an opportunity-generating system for those who never thought they could be in the sport or achieve their dreams.” Why are this partnership and this initiative important in NASCAR?
That is big. NASCAR has been a place that was, in a way, one-dimensional. It was not super diverse for a very long time. It needed some change. Over the last few years, there has been a lot of great changes have been made. It’s become more diverse but we knew with my journey and where we wanted to go with NASCAR and everything, we needed to create or start our own system within the system. For you to affect positive change, you have to be able to have ownership.
With that ownership, we were able to create an opportunity-generating system. Having a team, we can create opportunities from this team, from transitioning service members who were looking for a place to work. Also, to be able to leverage what we got with the team to do positive things out there in a community for kids, whether it’s kids who are at risk, who might be in bad environments or who need a positive way to get out of it. It’s even kids who are in hospitals, who are dealing with life-threatening illnesses being able to figure out ways to leverage our team to help those folks.
With everything we do in racing, there are a lot of Science and Technology, Math and Engineering that go along with it. There are ways we can leverage the team on STEM aspects with different STEM initiatives. All these different things on even the diversity side and everything are all ways we can continue to create opportunities. The only way to do it is when you have ownership.
If we didn’t own a team and I was racing for other people’s teams, how can I tell them what to do? I don’t own the team. I can’t walk into McDonald’s and tell the CEO, “This is how you need to spend your money, do this and that.” I can’t do that. I don’t own it. The only way to truly affect positive change and truly create something that’s worthwhile is by you being able to own it, and that’s what we did.
I watched an interview with you and Emmitt Smith where he talked about you and the partnership. This is a guy who has been in a number of different business ventures, had a lot of partners, and can choose a lot of people to work with. Two questions for you. 1) What did he see in you? 2) What do you take away from him on a daily basis about building a business and leadership?
What he saw on me was a younger him.
You wore 22.
When I was in the seventh grade, I wore 22. Someone who was driven to do all the right things. He had a good head on his shoulders. With everything I was doing, I always did everything with integrity. I did the best I could to be the best person I could be. I was a go-getter who was able to make things happen. There are a lot of people out there who talk and say a lot but never truly do a lot. You can tell the people who are doers, people who can go out, set their mind on something, and accomplish it over and over. Those are the people you want to bet on and align with.
“You can tell the people who are doers…those are the people you want to bet on.”
You don’t have to look at their current stats or this and that. You got to look at, “Is this person the type of person who has a vision, a goal, puts action towards it, and then eventually accomplishes it?” If you can align yourself with those people who will take you and everything else that you all got going on to the next level. That’s what he saw in me. What I saw in him was somebody who has been around and achieved some of the highest beats you can achieve in sports. He has three Super Bowl wins and played football at one of the best schools in the country in Florida. He is the leading rusher in the NFL and still has that record twenty years later.
No one has beaten it or going to beat it anytime soon. Everything he’s achieved and in the business world after football was able to achieve a lot as well. He is into a lot of real estate investing and some other things. You can always learn from those people who prove over and over that they can set their mind to something, put action towards it, and execute and achieve it. That’s what he’s done pretty much his whole life. That’s why we are a good mix.
I’m going to ask you about fear and pressure. You’ve succeeded in football in the Navy, entrepreneurism, and every week you are getting out there and racing cars at 182 plus 200 miles an hour around a track. A lot of this, in my mind, comes down to character. In this show, we talk a lot about the nine characteristics of performance that are used by Special Operations Command to recruit and assess talent, drive resiliency, adaptability, humility, integrity, curiosity, team ability, effective intelligence, and emotional strength.
You’ve spoken a lot about fear and the need to overcome fear in what you go through. You wrecked 6 out of your first 7 races. There’s an incredible amount of pressure. In the moment at large but then also when you are behind the wheel. Can you talk about confronting fear basing it? What goes through your mind, and how do you push through?
That fear side is always really difficult. In my first year of racing back in 2015, I was involved in six different rags in those first sets of races. Some were my fault. Some were things I turned around by somebody else. All different kinds of things happened. At the end of the day, I was still involved in those rags. It was tough because you look at yourself you are a beginner at the sport. You are trying to learn. You are involved in these rags and think, “Is this really for me?” You have to look at that when you are going through any journey in life. You are going through a very dark tunnel through that journey. In that dark tunnel, there will be times when you trip and fall.
Even at the darkest point of the night, the sun will still rise. Life is a cycle. Your journey is a cycle. Just because it’s going down, it doesn’t mean it’s not coming back up. It’s just a cycle. It’s going to come back up. When? Nothing is guaranteed when that comes up but setbacks are setups for phenomenal comebacks. Every time I had a setback, once I got over the initial sadness, I would smile and be like, “This is a setup for a phenomenal comeback.”
[bctt tweet=”The only way to truly affect positive change and create something worthwhile is by you being able to own it.” username=”talentwargroup”]
The phenomenal comebacks are coming. It doesn’t mean it’s coming next week. It might come 2 weeks, 1 year or 1 month from now. The setbacks are setups for phenomenal comebacks as long as you are willing to continue to put action, be creative, and find new ways to continue to move forward every single day. That’s what’s going to allow you to bounce back and be even better. Eventually, you will be laughing at the times when you are reckoning.
What’s next for you?
What’s next is to continue to build a team. We have a one-car Xfinity Series team in NASCAR. We plan on eventually expanding that out to a two-car team, maybe even more. Who knows? We eventually want to have a Cup Series team in NASCAR and be at the highest level in NASCAR. I want to be racing in the Cup Series. My goal is to eventually be racing super competitively in all the series.
“Setbacks are setups for phenomenal comebacks as long as you are willing to continue to put action and be creative.”
I want to be able to race, get wins, and then eventually, race for championships and win a championship. That’s the goal. That’s what I want to do. It takes time and effort. Mistakes get made along the way but I’m going to continue to work on me, make me better, and work on the team to make the team better so that we can have the necessary resources, people, equipment, and things needed so that we can make it to the levels that we want to make it to and be able to achieve these dreams.
That’s my goal on the NASCAR side of things. On the other business stuff that I got going on, I want to grow my other businesses. I’m in real estate investing. I put on drag racing events. I’m in Esports. I have a trucking company. I want to continue to grow those businesses, help them reach their max potential, and then stay at their max potential as long as possible. I want to be able to be a great investor and turn different investments into bigger things. Eventually, I want to do some Hollywood work too as well. I am a big Marvel cinematic universe guy. I would love to be in some big Marvel film, Fast & Furious, DC Films or Transformers.
Sleeping two hours a night should be okay if you can achieve all that in the day. The Jedburgh in World War II had to do three things every day to set the foundations for success. You could call them habits, foundations or baseline. They had to be able to shoot, move and communicate. If they did these three things with the utmost precision, they could focus their attention on other more complex challenging tasks that came their way. What are the three things that you do every day to set the foundations for success in your world?
The three things I do are important to me. One, you got to pray every single day because that faith side of it is what’s going to guide you for everything, the stuff that’s unseen. You are not going to be able to see what’s going on and where the magic is happening, but it’s happening. You got to have faith. I pray each day. I make sure that I go into my list of things to do. I’m putting in action and energy every single day towards accomplishing things on that list so I can move forward.
If I’m not putting energy towards moving forward, then what I’m doing is subconsciously putting energy going backward. I make sure I’m doing that each day. Also, your health is your wealth. I’m making sure that I’m staying physically fit on a daily basis. You can’t do anything or achieve anything if you are lying in a hospital bed with health conditions that are caused by not being a healthy person.
Pray and have faith, take action and energy towards the forward-moving list, and stay fit and healthy.
If you do that each day, you would be surprised how far you start moving in life.
We talked about the nine characteristics of performances that are used by Special Operations Command to be an elite performer to race on the NASCAR circuit, to play football, at the Naval Academy to be a Surface Warfare Officer to achieve what you have, and now to venture into entrepreneurism, which might even be the biggest test of everything that you’ve put yourself through.
You have to display all nine of these, never at one time but in different variations, depending on the situation that you are in. You have certainly done that. You’ve talked about most of them here in their own way. At the end of each of these conversations, I think about one that exemplifies you and the conversation that we have.
For you, I think about the drive. I believe everything starts with drive. When you wake up in the morning, are you mentally, emotionally, and physically prepared to move forward, take the next step, go out there and reach for your goal? Be better today than you were yesterday. Be better tomorrow than I was today. Even though you are going to have to be resilient and adaptable and you are going to get knocked down, can you get back up and keep going?
None of those other things matter if you don’t have a drive. It’s fitting for you because you drive for a living and drive fast. It compliments absolutely everything that you are doing out there. Jesse, I appreciate your time and perspective. I love what you are doing. We are following you, myself, and the whole show team is a fan of you, the 34 car, and all your endeavors. I look forward to talking to you. When you are on that podium or somewhere close to it or whatever you do, we are going to be there and cover it.
Thank you so much. It was awesome being on the show. Hopefully, some tips here can help some people achieve their goals and dreams. Hopefully, people will take that step and that action. No analysis paralysis. Just jump out of the plane and go.
You got no choice. Thank you.
