“You’re gym saved my life.”
When I heard that, I thought about reducing medications and preventing diseases like diabetes and heart disease. But I was wrong.
She had tears in her eyes.
“I wasn’t in a good place. I hadn’t been for a while. My therapist told me this would be a good idea.”
That was the third person to tell me that we contributed to preventing their suicide.
This is not how I thought I’d save the world.
When I was 22, I was going to: start a CrossFit gym, convert all of the nay-sayers, disrupt predatory businesses, and put the fake “gurus” and snake oil salesmen on TV out of business.
There are still fake “gurus” out there, but now they’re on Instagram. People will still freeze the fat from those stubborn areas along with a healthy diet and exercise.
But here’s the problem with that approach. The more I focused on what was wrong with the world, the less I focused on what I could do right within it.
Heres my 2020 advice to everyone: You need to let go of about 80% of the stuff you’re worried about.
You’re not letting the world around you go to hell in a handbasket. You’re affecting it more by narrowing your concerns to what you can actually affect and then taking action on it.
There’s no way in hell I could have stayed in this game long enough to make some good things happen if I kept focusing on the bad things.
I can’t sink twelve million dollars into lobbying against evil companies tomorrow, but I can step out of my office and join a crowd of women cheering on a client I encouraged to “do them all unbroken” at the beginning of the class. If I can inject some good into just a handful of people’s lives in a meaningful way, there’s a chance they’ll spread it like a good disease to another person. And if enough people do this, for long enough, changes happen. Bonds form. Causes reach the right people, and the right people find you.
You may not change “the world” tomorrow. But you can change the world for a few people right in front of you today, and tomorrow, and the next.
And I think that’s how this saving the world thing is done.
