Eric Mannix is a competitor. Lots of senior leaders at big companies are. The CFO of Blue Water Systems is dedicated to growing the success of the manufacturing plants that he now runs. But there’s something a little different about Eric’s story. What a lot of guys like Eric don’t share when walking the halls of facilities are why they do what they do. This episode sets that old-school mentality aside. Eric operates his life on a really cool philosophy: try something hard every day. When he found himself in a misaligned internship just after college, he deployed that Detroit-bred idealism to start building bridges between factory floors and offices.  Mannix shares with Mike and McD that he sees humility as a birthright after growing up a kid of Zug Island worker who spent his nights and weekends playing defense for the legendary Little Caesar’s youth hockey club. When he got cut from the team at age 16, he didn’t give up his lifelong sport… he adapted it.  Now, nearly twenty some years later, Eric instills that do something hard everyday mentality in his kids and shares how he competes in ultra endurance sports today. You read that right, this guy doesn’t just get up hours before dawn for a workday, he trains and competes at the highest level in events like the Leadville endurance series and can teach you how to drive a Zamboni machine.   If you just found conventioNOT through this episode, make sure you check out out our other episodes, just like this one on all podcast platforms. conventionot.com