The insatiable Dana White

In this episode of the Tony Robbins Podcast, we bring you to Business Mastery – where Tony interviews the business leaders behind some of today’s fastest-growing companies. You’re going to have a front-row seat as Tony sits down with Dana White, who transformed the entire fight game when he built The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) into a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

Who is Dana White?

Dana White is the president of the UFC and a successful entrepreneur and businessman. Outspoken, charismatic and unabashedly unapologetic, it’s fair to say that there are not many leaders of major sporting organizations quite like him. Coming from humble beginnings in the Northeast, his fight to the top was an unlikely one – and nothing short of a rollercoaster ride.

Dana has learned how to be successful on a massive scale – he took the once-fledgling UFC from near bankruptcy to a globally popular enterprise, and sold it for a whopping $4 billion back in 2017. But his fight isn’t over – and as he tells Tony in this special interview, he feels he hasn’t even scratched the surface of his total impact.

An enduring vision

Dana White’s rise to success in the UFC and in life began with a vision. He says, “I knew exactly what I wanted to do from the time I was a young age.” But people thought he was crazy, that the fight game could never change. His answer? “I had a lot of ideas and I believed it could.”

At 19 years old, he was working as a bellman at a Boston hotel and was not happy in his present circumstances. He wanted to be in the fight business. By knowing exactly what he wanted and how he wanted his life to look, he effectively took control of his situation.

“Every day when I woke up,” Dana says, “I would work toward that goal.”

By having his endpoint – working in the fight business – in mind, everything he did pointed toward it. A vision is a powerful tool; by understanding what you want, you can more effectively create plans and take actions that will bring you to it.

Forging his own path

This particular Dana White interview reveals something he’s never shared before: Every day he would walk to work, listening to Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within on his Walkman to help him power up. He also listened to Personal Power, and would even buy them for people as gifts. To this day, he says, “Everything that was in there is absolutely true, makes sense and applies to everybody’s life.”

As he moved through the fight industry, he practiced Tony’s modeling technique, learning every detail of the field from Peter Welsh, a street fighting and boxing legend in Boston. “This guy was my sensei in the fight game,” Dana says, recalling the three years of education he received. “I went to him and said, I want to work with you and learn everything you know.” Dana knew that to achieve success, you must surround yourself with successful people – and that’s exactly what he did.