An Interview with the Founder of Daniel Kanu Fitness and Lifestyle Magazine

I sat down with the CEO and founder of DK Fitness Products, and was immediately struck by his size. After a firm handshake, I was quick to assess that everything about him was big from his hands, to thick muscles and an even bigger personality.

We’d like to hear your story, from the start, to the end; your success story and the struggles it took to get there. If you could just start from the beginning: the come-up from Aba, Nigeria.

Well I grew up in Aba, I was born in Aba to a middle to upper class family. Mine was a family of seven kids: five boys and two girls. I was the fifth boy. In elementary school, we didn’t have much in the way of sports. There was no track and field- well, there was an empty field that kids kicked the soccer ball around in, and that was about all we had. It wasn’t really organized, but the city was quite bustling.

And please Mr.Kanu, let’s talk more about you going to school. As we could imagine, going to school in Nigeria would be quite different than school in the U.S.. Could you start off by telling us more about your experience in Nigeria

Well for me, at the early stage of my life- preschool, I wasn’t really interested in education. Just like every little boy I was more interested in playing in the streets and hanging out with my friends. Elementary school was the same thing, I didn’t really concentrate because education just wasn’t very important to me at that stage in my life.

Just like most little children, I needed something to entice me to education. I found it challenging, although I graduated onto Federal Government College Okigwe. That’s a junior-high, high school level based on the education system there. At that point we had school sports, but they were very skeletal. Actually I would classify them as below minimum. We had a field but it was just two old soccer posts, no grass, and no courts. They called it track and field but there was no track.

Just field?

Exactly, no track, just field and the field didn’t have grass on it. So it really wasn’t much to write home about. About my second year at this school, my parents decided that I was too distracted with friends, and I wasn’t doing very well. They decided to send me to the United States to get an education.

(Above Left: As a student athlete in 1989 At Berkner High School, Richardson Texas USA)

Ok, so now you’re in sports. You’re in middle school and you’re the running back for the team. Please, take us to the classroom. You started off in a totally different environment- from Nigeria, with a totally different classroom style, and a barren field where kids kicked around an old ball, to a full-fledged sports-immersed environment. Let’s do a little compare and contrast. How would you compare your sport environment there to the one you found here? What are the main differences that you see?

Well there is a huge contrast; a huge disparity. It’s like going from 1 to 100, a hundred percent difference. In the United States of course sports are much more organized, first of all. Parents are much more interested and involved, which is very important to encourage these kids to participate in these sports.

We had a field of course, for soccer. We had a field for American football, for baseball, for track and field. All of these facilities were present at this junior high school that I was attending. Most importantly, the sports were so organized that, for example, on Tuesdays 7th graders played, and everyone comes out to watch them. On Wednesdays, 8th graders came out to play. 9th grade, Thursday. Then there was Varsity, who played Friday nights. Varsity is the upper level- the 11th and 12th graders.

Sports in the United States are very well organized, and it was back then. This motivated kids to participate in sports because they wanted to be able to showcase their talent in front of their parents, and even come out on tv every now and then. That was the incentive for us to do well in sports, but there was a catch.

In the United States, there is a rule called no pass, no play. That rule essentially means that if you receive any grade 70% or below, you can’t play in sports. You could still practice with the team, but you couldn’t play on those performance nights. So of course that became the driving force and the incentive for us to try to pass, so that we could play in the games.

Now, based off of the No-Pass-No-Play, was it a big deal back in Nigeria, or was there anything similar?

There was no “no pass no play”. There still is no such thing in Nigeria. What it is, is a carrot and stick strategy that they use in the United States. In this scenario, the carrot is the performance. You’re going to go out and perform. Scouts will come out and watch you, and if you do well, you get scholarships to big Universities.

Now, the stick is when you fail (laughs). If you fail you can’t perform on those nights. And of course every kid wanted to get a scholarship. So we all had this drive to want to perform well in school. This is what actually drove me to want to be a straight-A student. I ended up making all 90’s, as opposed to all 70’s or 60’s.

So No-Pass-No-Play really helped you out? It helped you focus in school and you had no issues with it? Obviously you wanted to perform and you knew you were good on that football field and you wanted to perform well in class to show your skills.

Absolutely. There was no better incentive for me to do well in school than the draw of the stadium.

Mr. Kanu, do you believe that your success in business has a correlation with your fitness habits and your success in sports?

There is no doubt in the mind that the two factors are convergent. To give you an example, I think that tenacity in sports translates into tenacity in business and otter facets of life. Athletes know how to lose and recover from it.

What do you mean by that?

Well I think it is important to realize that a loss is not defeat, and that when you lose a deal, for example, you pick yourself up and get bigger and better the next week. Athletes have a no- lose attitude, and it really would behoove employers to recruit from athletic backgrounds if they want go-getters who never give up.

Tenacity is one of two key virtues that athletes learn early on. I define tenacity as being aggressive enough to outwit your competition. My coach always used to tell me “great teams win at the last minute”. The mindset of an athlete is to play your hardest until the very last second when the whistle blows and the game is up. People who don’t think like athletes tend to get worn down, and they lack that final push in the end.

The other virtue that is instilled in athletes is discipline. If you’re an athlete, whether you like it or not, you go to practice. It could be raining outside and you will still have to go. The same goes with business. You need to have an attitude of firmness with yourself that most people learn through sports.

(highschool)

(University)