Education
After completing 2 Master’s degrees — an M.B.A and a Master of Science in Exercise Physiology — earning 8 industry-recognized certifications in wellness, working as a Graduate Assistant, Course Advisor, becoming a Certified Flight instructor, and teaching, training and educating over 1,000 wonderful people during my wellness career, I believe I’ve made one of my goals in life quite clear: I aim to leave behind valuable ideas and resources for others.
The irony is that there are even more certifications and licenses than mentioned above, but these are the ones worth mentioning here. Perhaps more rewarding than the formal education and certifications earned is my personal study and development. In fact, a bigger benefit than the content of all the education mentioned above is learning how to learn; and having learned something new, more than what was learned.
These days, information is so pervasive and widely available that you may not need to pay someone else for the education you seek (though I am a huge proponent for formal education).
Wellness
In the Wellness industry, specifically personal training, countless individuals call themselves trainers merely because they are athletic, they look the part or people just tend to seek them out for advice. And there are merits to those attributes, but more often than not I identified individuals lacking depth of knowledge, who really didn’t know much about their craft. Perhaps they were able to regurgitate what they learned from someone else (e.g. a high school coach), but they were lucky they never encountered dire circumstances. I wanted to be different — I wanted the depth of knowledge, a full understanding about how the human body works and how to scientifically and intentionally help people achieve their goals.
More importantly, I wanted to know how to prevent injuries. I wanted to know what I did not know, so that I steered paying clients in the proper direction. Since I often found myself in leadership roles, I was also fueled by staying ahead of the other trainers under my supervision to help them avoid issues as well. This is what led me to complete my first Master’s degree in Exercise Physiology with a concentration in Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation Science. The desire for knowledge, understanding and credibility at the highest level. (And had I stayed in Wellness industry, much to the chagrin of my wife and best friend, there likely would have been a Ph.D in a related field.)
Business
I imagine there are two primary ways to get into business for yourself. On one path, you go to school and get a business degree, work for several years to save money and learn the industry, then break off and start your own thing once you possess the means. Down the other path, you start out with no real experience and, in the case of most entrepreneurs, no real money and you figure it out along the way; reinvesting into the business to continue to stoke the fire.
I took the second path, or should I say found myself on the second path. After experimenting with a few online business ideas, I took a small loan from a dear friend and started my first traditional business: a functional fitness gym in my hometown. I successfully sold that company, partnered in a chain of personal training studios and moved across the country to Houston, TX. That company effectively dissolved with Hurricane Harvey, around which time my wife and I started an online company called Two Fit Travelers. We sunset the business toward the end of the COVID-19 pandemic to prioritize our health and finances (we were each essentially working 2 full-time jobs while investing heavily in the business). And because of my modest success in business, I was asked to consult a few wellness companies toward the tail-end of my career in Wellness.
I appreciated that people wanted to learn from my success in business, but impostor syndrome overcame me. Yes, I had a couple successful businesses, but I was also responsible for some unsuccessful companies. Sure, I exited my first company successfully, but the money earned from the sale was not enough to retire on. And besides, my experience and success was really limited to a very specific vertical in a very specific geographic area with a certain demographic. Although I may have picked up some core success principles and behaviors along the way, again — I was intimately aware of my shortcomings, in this case, running businesses outside of my niche.
So, I knew I wanted to pursue education in business at some point. I desired the structure that I imagined the business degree people had. I wanted to know what I did not know. And again, if I was entrusted to lead others as a consultant or to lead my wife in business together, I needed to know that my information was accurate and effective.
Aviation
The only difference here was that I have been extremely intentional about my second career (granted, by now, this is really about my fourth “career”, I consider Aviation to be my second full career to Wellness). Pilots have to earn every single privilege. Most pilots build time early in their career by becoming a flight instructor, and although it was not my first choice for building hours, I came to accept that many of my strengths lie with instructing and educating others.
What no one emphasized to me early on, but that I came to appreciate through training, is that each level of certificate simply makes me a better pilot. We are only expected to have a certain level of knowledge, skill and understanding at the Private Pilot level. The standard of our ability is increased when we add-on the Instrument rating. Expectations are even higher, and the skill required is even greater at the Commercial Pilot level. Becoming a CFI requires even more than Commercial Pilot skill (now flying from the right seat instead of the left), and also the ability to teach what one knows to varying levels of students. CFIs train the next generation of pilots, and to ensure that standards of quality and ability persist from generation to generation, little, if any, weakness is allowed to seep through. (As I type this paragraph, out of the corner of my right eye sits a 700+ page manual of lesson plans I’m expected to be able to teach effectively.)
Personal Development
An understated tool in my life has been reading personal development books. Some day, I might craft a list and total them up, but last time I counted it was in the neighborhood of 100. Now, that may not sound like a huge number to you, but comparison of various statistics suggests that:
only 50% of people read regularly or at all
people who read regularly tend consume 8-10 books per year (a majority of the personal development books I read were consumed over a 4 year period in my early 20s)
of the people who read regularly, many read for leisure, return a book to the shelf in mint condition, “speed read” (exaggerated eye-roll), listen to an audiobook or watch a video
When I say, “I read 100 books personal development books,” I mean I studied those books. I took notes, I re-read many of those books more than once, I applied teachings and principles, practices habits and behaviors from those books. I was unable to re-sell most of my books because they were marked and highlighted, pages folded over or torn. This is not devaluing other methods of reading, I’m simply painting a picture about the value I gained from consuming those books. In fact, I’ll admit that it is March as I write this paragraph, and my wife has already read 36 books this year alone.
Back to the point: I read these books as if I was going to have to teach the content to another person. If I was going to apply the teachings in my daily life, or if I was going to have to explain myself and my methods, I needed to know it the right way; the way it was intended. Since the first real learning experience I encountered was reading these books, each subsequent learning experience was compounded. As I alluded to above, not only did I learn how lift is created in flight or how to apply macroeconomic trends to forecasting, I began to learn how to think. I studied to a point that I began to recognize what information is falsehood. I learned so much that I began to realize how much information out there I don’t know. I developed (a tiny bit of) maturity and wisdom that has benefited me in every area of my life.