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I’ve always wondered if I was good enough. From the time I was a little kid, that question has driven me: good enough to start on the soccer team, good enough to make the honors class, good enough to get into Harvard, good enough to build a high school program from scratch, good enough to be principal, good enough to be a personal trainer, good enough to make my family proud. It’s a battle I’ve fought for decades, not years. But here’s the truth: there’s no real answer to the question: Am I good enough? Because in whose eyes are we measuring? What one coach might see, another might not. What one teacher values, another might overlook. What one employer or family member might consider “enough” will always vary. The only constant in this equation is me. Am I good enough in my own eyes? Even that answer changes over time. What feels good enough in one part of my life might fall short in another. That’s where goal setting becomes essential. Goals can’t exist to satisfy anyone but yourself. At the end of the day, you’re the one who has to live with you. Working out is one of the clearest examples of this—and, for me, one of the best analogies for life. My favorite movie is American Beauty. I love the twist ending and the shock of it the first time I saw it, but what keeps me coming back is its depth—depth in its characters, and in how honestly it depicts the American family. If you’ve seen it, you’ll remember when Lester quits his corporate job, extorts his boss, and suddenly decides to start working out. His neighbors are runners, and he sprints up to them one day asking for fitness advice. The first thing they ask him is what his goals are. They offer a few suggestions before Lester shouts his own: “I wanna look good naked!” Every gym rat has a goal. They might differ—lose fat, gain muscle, get lean, look good naked—but in the end, only you decide when you’ve arrived. That’s why I love fitness so much: it’s irrelevant what anyone else thinks. The work is for you, and only you. If you’re not satisfied, you keep going. You keep grinding. Knowing when something is good enough takes maturity and self-awareness. But that’s the point—it’s your life to live, no one else’s. Stop worrying about whether it’s good enough for anyone else. At the end of the day, the only person you have to please is you. If you’re proud of your effort and feel good about yourself, that’s enough. If not, do something different. Because regret always starts with “I wish I…” — not “I wish you…”
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It’s no secret that I’m in good shape, but somehow, that fact always seems to work its way into conversation. Maybe it’s after someone jokes about eating too much Halloween candy and says, “What are you worried about? You don’t need to lose weight,” or when a tipsy guest at a pool party finally blurts out, “Damn, you’re jacked!” Either way, people always seem compelled to comment on my body. The only thing I can equate it to is pregnancy. For whatever reason, when someone’s pregnant, everyone suddenly feels licensed to comment on how they look: “Wow, you look so pregnant!” or “You look great for eight months!” But here’s the difference: no one wonders how you came to look so pregnant. Everyone, however, wants to know what you did to become so fit. And that’s usually the follow-up question: “See, I wanna look like that—what do you do?” It sounds innocent enough, but honestly, it drives me crazy. Not because I’m an introvert who hates small talk—though I am—but because everyone who asks wants the results, not the reality. They’re looking for the cheat code, the hack, the shortcut. They think, If I just know the secret, I’ll look like that too. But there is no secret. There’s no hack, no quick fix, no surface-level solution. What you see is the result of consistency, discipline, and work—day in and day out. It’s not a routine; it’s a lifestyle. It’s tracking calories, prioritizing protein, drinking enough water, getting quality sleep, and showing up. It’s logging every exercise, every rep, every set. It’s training not for 45 minutes or an hour, but until the work feels complete—whether that takes 60 minutes or two hours. You don’t fit workouts into your life—you fit your life around your workouts. And you can’t do it because you “want to lose 30 pounds in two months.” You do it because you’re tired of saying, “I’ll start tomorrow.” Until you understand that, it doesn’t matter whether I prefer free weights or machines, cardio or intervals. Because the truth is, it’s not about the program—it’s about the mindset. This is called progressive overload, not instant overload, for a reason. It’s hard. It takes time. And if you somehow manage to “get shredded” in two months, you’ll end up fatigued, malnourished, and right back where you started. So next time you see someone who’s fit and feel tempted to ask what they do, pause first. Think about what you do to look the way you do. Because if you aren’t honest with yourself first, that conversation is a waste of everyone’s time. No one was born fit or shredded. Every one of us started by looking at someone else and wondering, What do they do? But we all eventually learn that the answer lies not in the workout, but in the moment—the moment we decided to stop living the way we were and start getting comfortable with discomfort. So instead of asking me what I do, ask me how I got here. How I learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s a conversation worth having. Because ultimately, we all know how to get stronger— just like we all know how to get pregnant.
To claim that my journey to today has been unique, would be shortsighted. While I have been quite open about my life experiences, I have, in no way, convinced myself that my experiences have been more important, impactful, or meaningful than anyone else’s. I’ve struggled with self-doubt, low confidence, self-loathing, fear, and expectations, just like everyone else. When I stood at my dying mother’s bedside, one of the last things I asked her was, “Are you proud of me?” Forty-five years later, and my biggest fear was that my mother wouldn’t be proud of what I had accomplished or where I was headed. Think about that? On her deathbed, my mother had to, yet again, confirm her approval of me. Now there are a lot of nuances to every relationship; good, bad, ugly, indifferent. My mother and I’s relationship had its fair share of those, and then some. But at the core of every interaction we have with someone else, no matter who that person is in relation to us, is acceptance and respect. We want everyone to think highly of us. But have we ever thought about the relationship we have with ourselves rather than everyone else? It was this very question that led me to this moment. Two years ago, I was laid off as a successful, impactful, and respected high school administrator. It was the second time in my career as a public school educator that I had succumbed to small town politics and big egos. I needed a job and badly. While I was offered a new job as a school administrator, I was also offered a corporate gig with a higher salary. I chose the latter, following the money but staying within the educational sector (at least I was still using the degree I paid for). I went into that six figure corporate job believing it was temporary; I never imagined my public school career was over. But less than a year later, I was no happier than I had been while employed in brick and mortar schools and I was looking for yet another job, most likely back in administration. But I came to realize something; something I had never been able to put into words before: The only reason I was looking to go back into schools was because I had to get my full pension, right? At the age of 45, for the first time, I was able to express that the only thing keeping me in schools was my pension, but at what cost? With ten years left, I had no idea where I would be at 55. I was gambling on my future by risking the present. I simply couldn’t do it anymore. I had spent so many years worrying about what others would think of me, I hadn’t even thought about what I thought of myself. I had spent 45 years prioritizing my relationships with everyone else, never putting the relationship I had with myself first. I had become a martyr. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to; angry, frustrated, miserable, and bitter. Age plus years of service must equal 90. It was all I had been saying to myself for decades. But the only 90 I was seeing were my feet 90% of the way out of the educational door; pension be damned. So I decided to do something I never had before, put myself first. I wanted to make ME proud. I wanted to make ME approve. I wanted, you could say, to do something I could live with. If I couldn’t prioritize my own well-being, what made me think someone else would? And you see, that’s just it; no one prioritizes themself anymore. We either do what we think we’re supposed to, or we put everyone else first and are left with nothing for ourselves. I retired from teaching and began my own business as a fitness trainer, not because it was the financially wise thing to do for my future, but because that’s what I needed to do for myself. And much like working out and training, the rewards of such a career change don’t come right away. Training is not like teaching. You don’t deliver a curriculum, connect with the students, and in a few weeks or, at most, a couple of months, see the qualitative and quantitative results of your efforts. Rather, you build programs, teach clients, correct form, make regressions and progressions on the fly, encourage effort, extrinsically motivate, provide nutritional guidelines, explain physiology, build trust, and all the while, it can take months or even years for clients, and you, to see the results. But just like I tell people when they’re training, it isn’t about intensity, it’s about consistency. It’s about showing up everyday for myself. Some days it’ll feel like everything is clicking, and other days it’ll feel like an uphill climb. But the pride is in the process. The happiness is in the little accomplishments. And the drive is in knowing if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. But they’re not. They’re still fighting for 90. I’m fighting for 100. Today, tomorrow, and everyday after.
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