On this day—whether you celebrate in a religious sense or not—be thankful for where you are in life. Mine hasn’t been all roses, but I appreciate where I am and I am thankful for the opportunities that I have had. It shouldn’t take days like this to remind us of that, but typically it does. Most of us don’t reflect much outside of the walls of holidays, myself included. Remind yourself, as I do, that all of the “bad” things in your life have built this “good” point in your life. That makes the bad things necessary, for without them, your life would be completely different.
I have never really been one to conform. In fact, I find some sort of odd satisfaction in being different than other people. It is very possible that I want to stand out from the crowd, I suppose. I don’t need the fastest car (or truck) or the fastest motorcycle, but I do enjoy having my shit not look like everyone else’s shit. I have said for years that I loathe mediocrity — not just for myself, but in others as well.
This is likely what turned me onto bodybuilding at such a young age. For those of you who are young, it may appear based on your small worldview or small, self-contained bubble that everyone is in great shape, works out, and eats right. Yes, social media is a huge place, but let’s be fair: most of you only surround yourselves with people who think like you, act like you, and have the same interests as you. We didn’t have that privilege 30 years ago — at least not on the grand scale that we have today.
The advancements in technology, specifically as it relates to communication, are most times taken for granted; I know I am guilty of this. I remember sitting in high school English class (okay, it was pretty much in every class) and reading muscle magazines cover-to-cover to gain as much information as I possibly could. These days there is so much information at our fingertips that it almost is overwhelming to a lot of people, due to so many different opinions and contradictory information. To those that complain about this, though, you need to know that it would have been awesome to have so much information back then, with the only real issue being trying to figure out what was accurate and what wasn’t. My generation considers the next quite spoiled, yet I find myself constantly having to remind myself how good I have it these days.
In high school, I would have never thought I would ever make a living doing what I do. As most of you know, there is a huge problem right now with the market being saturated by wannabe nutritionists and prep guys, just as the market saturated itself 15 to 20 years ago with personal trainers. Everyone pretends to be an expert, and as irritating as that is, I understand completely why they are doing it: they see how appealing it is to do work that they don’t consider work, and get paid well for it. As with anything, though, the weak and inexperienced will typically weed themselves out. Obviously there are those that will steal your ideas, copy you, and be relatively successful (by low-cost-of-living standards), but when push comes to shove, they go to bed at night and, while staring at the ceiling fan, know their place in the pecking order.
I have clients and friends all over the world. As you read this right now, I have friends in town from South Africa staying at my house for the holidays. I have trained people in places that I had to get a map out to see where in the hell they lived. My kids find it interesting as well. They were perplexed when my friends from South Africa arrived and were…white? A brief history lesson of South Africa ensued.
Though I sometimes bitch about the internet and the trolls that live there, I would never have met and become friends with a lot of people—including my good friend Jimmy Kennedy—or met anyone else in the NFL, professional bodybuilding, etc. More importantly, I wouldn’t have made life-long friendships and I likely wouldn’t have had the flexibility to stay at home and get my rotten kids to all of their sports games, practices, after-school activities, and even take frequent family vacations.
I would be a completely different person without the electronic world that I sometimes bitch about.
“What you need to do is be thankful for the life you got, you know what I’m sayin'? Stop looking at what you ain’t got and start being thankful for what you do got.” —T.I.
Just Sayin’.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to your family from mine.
