A Short: The Current State of Fitness Entrepreneurs

In the last sixteen months of my life, I’ve changed something major about myself: I’ve started being healthy.

A year and a half ago, I was eating like crap, not working out, and generally feeling awful. It was a tough life, and I realized quickly that I couldn’t sustain a life like that. It was impossible. So I hired a trainer to force me to be better. I made an enormous lifestyle shift, and I am so happy I did.

But it made me realize something about the current state of fitness entrepreneurs. And I want to shine a light on it.

Everybody defaults to what comes easy to them. That should be obvious. But greatness comes from adversity; it comes from looking a challenge directly in the eye and having the fortitude to step up and go after it.

This is what’s going on with the fitness want-repreneur world right now.

Everyone is going for what is easy. And that isn’t going to pan out if they are serious about becoming a business person. Just like I knew being a great business person wouldn’t pan out if I didn’t get healthy.

Fitness entrepreneurs want to do the minimal work and still expect a huge return. It’s easy for fitness entrepreneurs to do the push ups, to do the squats and deadlifts because that is exactly what got them to where they are now. They started in fitness and now they want to make money just by having those guns or that body. They default into what is easy without recognizing what is hard: running an actual business.

You know what was hard for me? Waking up early. Not eating what I wanted to eat. Powering through workouts. Yet it was easy to build 50M dollar businesses.

I wanted to pass off getting up and running. I wanted to pass off lifting, squatting, stretching. I didn’t want to do it. But I had no problem working eighteen hours a day, taking meeting after meeting, and putting in the actual work.

Fitness “entrepreneurs” want to pass on replying to tweets all day to get the word out. They want to pass off the marketing. They want to pass off working hard to create a great interesting post, or doing a bunch of podcasts to get a larger audience. They want to go straight for the mirror selfie so you can get a bunch of Instagram likes, then call that their “business”.

Well guess what? It’s not good enough.

I have sympathy for how long it can take for something to come together in a big way. I get thousands and thousands of emails a year from people saying they’ve been working for months at something and they aren’t seeing results. It can be disheartening. In a weird way, working out has shown me that more than anything else. I’ve been working out for sixteen months now and I’m happy, but if you told me sixteen months ago that this what I would have by now, I might say “Ehhhh…”

But the reverse is far worse.

That’s why I say to you: just start the work now. Do it. Work hard. Be diligent. Do not let up. You have the body. You have the chops. You did all that. Now get to the business side of things and grow that muscle too.

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