30) Talk to the Twenty Year Old Me

If you could go back in time, what would you say to your 20-year-old self?

At 20 years old, I was well underway with a major transition. At this point, I had been personal training for about a year. I was paying rent, training clients, and getting my feet wet in the personal training world. They came to me and they said, "Well, we're not doing this rent atmosphere anymore. We're now taking 30% starting next month." Mind you, I'm literally 20 and a half years old. I'm not even 21 yet. I'm thinking to myself, "Motherfucker, I'm about to give you 30%?"

What would happen if I started my own gym? I didn't have any money. I had to borrow $3,500 on a 20% interest credit card. I had $500, and I asked for a thousand bucks from my friend. I opened my first personal training studio before I turned 21. Not because I had set out to do this, but because I was forced into a situation.

I wasn’t about to let these guys at my old gym press me down and just tell me what the fuck I had to do. I started driving around the area. I found a small facility, 900 square feet at $600 a month. I signed the lease for three years. I said, "Let's go get this." Up to this point, I had never had a monthly payment before in my life. Not even a car payment.

I was in “no man’s land.” Luckily, I had great support from the people around me. People were bringing me dumbbells and other equipment. When I say that it was a gym, that’s a stretch. It was a ladder closet inside of a mini mall that wasn’t currently being rented.

If I could go back, I would say, "It's all going to be fucking worth it. Dude, all this uncertainty. All this work that you’re going to figure out over the next 22 years. It’s all going to be worth it. You're going to reach levels you didn't even think were possible."

That’s what it comes down to: you’re not always going to be able to see it. You’re not going to always be able to touch it. Not a lot of people were going to believe it. In order to put the work around it every day to make it happen, you need have to have the belief in the things you can't see and touch.

You can’t deny the gifts and passions bestowed on you. At 20 years old, I surely wasn’t denying them. I believed in me, even when others around me had no fucking clue what I was doing.

So, if I could fly back, I would say, "Double down, keep believing, act crazy, and do your thing. It's all going to be fucking worth it."