Jan 15 • *PROFESSION/PASSION
WHAT'S YOUR PASSION?
One of the most fulfilling ways to spend your life is to live your passion, every day and be compensated for it. The saying "If you love what you're doing, you'll never 'work' a day in your life!" is true. No matter what's going on in my day, walking into the gym, seeing those who showed up to eradicate their weakness waiting for instructions makes my day better.
Helping people become bigger, stronger and faster has been a passion of mine since I used myself as a lab rat in my teenage years, trying to get better at football. But that's not how, or why, I chose the path of becoming a trainer/gym owner. Rather, it was born out of a desperation to get my best friend back, then morphed from there into using training to facilitate change.
"THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN ME!"
When I was a junior in high school, one of my best friends was a guy named Willie Hyatt. I was a football player, and Willie was a tennis player. He was nationally ranked and had a bright future ahead of him. Not only that, but he was also a stud! ALL the hottest girls in the school were on this dude's sack! It was quite impressive to see. He could also fight! Back then, it was quite common to have a clash of different cliques. Willie and I were part of the weed smoking athlete crew. We went back-to-back in several squabbles. He always held the line.
One night, Willie came by my house to pick me up to go hang out with some girls in San Antonio. On any other occasion, I would have jumped at the chance to go! The girls he was meeting were absolutely gorgeous! Success was all but guaranteed! But I had spent the entire night before hanging out til 5 a.m., blue balling myself into oblivion before having to go to work. I had just gotten home and was ready to shut it down! It was the only time I said "NO!" to kicking up dust with him...
The next day, I called him to see how it went. The answering machine picked up, so I left a message and went on about my business. I called again that night, same thing. I left a message and started thinking "That's weird! Willie's mom is ALWAYS home...." I shook it off and carried on.
When I got to school on Monday, I went to our smoking spot where Willie and I would pre-game blaze before first period. He wasn't there. His car wasn't in the parking lot, anywhere. I went to class clear minded for the first time all school year. That would serve a purpose in just a few hours after the first bell rang...
I can still remember everything about the moment I found out where Willie was. The bell had just rung for lunch, and I was running down the breezeway to get to the parking lot before lunch traffic got too jammed up. The tennis coach yelled my last name, and I froze in my tracks. We weren't supposed to run through the school like that, so I was absolutely certain I was about to hear about it. I braced myself, turned around and prepared to be read the riot act. Immediately, I knew it wasn't about me running sprints. He was visibly shaken, holding back tears that had already carved a trail down his face that had been lazily wiped away. "Willie is in a coma, in San Antonio...."
The night I tapped out, Willie went to the store to get some 40's before coming back to my house one more time to apply peer pressure. There's no question he was drinking. But the circumstances could have happened to anyone. An 18 wheeler merging onto the freeway didn't see Willies Firebird in the right lane. The truck "merged" over his car, mangling it from the passenger side over. When I saw the picture of the aftermath, my first thought was: "That Would Have Been Me..."
After a few weeks in a coma and a few months in the hospital, Willie came back home. He was a shadow of himself. He couldn't walk. He could barely stand up. His mother was having to care for him just as she did when he was an infant. It was humiliating to him. It was more than that. He had gone from being the guy everyone wanted to hang out with the guy who couldn't wipe his own ass. He wanted to end it all. I wanted to get my battle buddy back!
For the next few months, I did everything I could think of to help him regain his former self. We lifted weights, played tennis and did as much walking as he could handle with little movement toward the goal of getting him back on the court again. Nothing worked enough to give Willie any hope of being who he once was. Eventually, he would succumb to the desire to escape and dove into drinking and taking drugs with reckless abandon. I was helpless and at a loss to offer a better solution. At that moment, the seeds of obsession for knowledge of the human machine were planted.
Since that moment in time, my life has been a roller coaster of change and growth. Many things have changed, even the core motivation for why my passion has not only remained consistent, but it has also gained intensity. The desire to take someone from a place of despair to a place of domination through discipline and physical mastery has been my passion since the day I realized I couldn't bring my best friend back. Today, that could be the obese man who hasn't seen his penis in years, or the under-developed athlete who is tired of being a blocking dummy, the tools are the same.
What is your passion? If you don't know what that is, what would you do with your time if you didn't have to worry about money, bills, etc? Are you engaging this passion? Are you compensated? If not, what problems could you be solving through engaging your passion?
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WHAT'S YOUR PASSION?
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