I’m currently waiting to board a flight to head over to St. Louis to teach a workshop with Tony Gentilcore on everything Shoulder and Hip for the weekend. It’s been a pretty cool ride to be able to teach workshops all over the continent, even being asked to speak in Europe and abroad, and also to have these opportunities come from the initial backing I’ve had in writing for this site and others, as well as digital products.

It got me thinking to what I could consider the original catalyst moment for everything online to begin. I was doing a podcast with Dr. John Rusin recently (out soon) and I mentioned the back story of how I got in to writing, so I thought I would share it here for you today.

Around 2007, my wife and I had just moved into our first house together (then boyfriend girlfriend), and I had just moved into a brand-spankin new facility in downtown Edmonton after surviving a 6 month purgatory following the close down of our old space, training out of a temporary location during the build of the new place, and losing over half of my clients because of the move.

I was thinking that training clients was awesome, but stuff like this that is out of my control could seriously impact my financial future, as well as my ability to just enjoy what I was doing.I figured I needed to make a change to get a bit more of a solid future in place. Since I had always been kind of drawn to medicine, I decided to try my hand and see if I could get into med school.

I know, it’s a bit of a jump from personal training to medical school. It would be a huge sacrifice, meaning 4 years in school before starting a residency, and depending on what I chose for my residency that could be another 2-5 years before I was able to consider myself a full fledged doctor, in a position to be board certified. On top of that, the cost for medical school, coupled with the costs of living would likely mean I would have to take out a new mortgage to pay for it all, on top of the substantial credit card debt I already had at the moment.

I wanted to give it a shot though. I never wanted to have a time in my life where I felt remorse about not trying to give it an honest shot, especially since this was a massive decision. I bought a bunch of study guides, registered to write the MCAT exam, and spent the next 6 months studying in preparation. I went in to it feeling about as confident as possible in my study preparation.

And I failed. Hard.

Apparently doctors need to be pretty good at chemistry. Go figure.

The exam is broken into 3 components: Physical sciences, biological sciences and 2 writing samples. On the biological sciences, I managed a meagre score of 40%, but scraped out a mere 21% on the physical sciences section.

However, on the writing samples, I scored in the top 95%. If the only condition to getting into medical school was being able to write a convincing argument, I’d be doctor by now.

This told me a couple of things. First, I could spend the next couple of years working on improving my aptitude for the physical sciences component, and if I managed to get a good enough score squeak into medical school admissions. From there I could barely survive the hectic pace of school, daily grind of rotations and potential burn out from residency 16 hour shifts. This was a lot of “possible” and not a lot of sure things.

Or, I could see the info I got from the test as a positive. No, I didn’t have to devote energy to becoming a med school reject, but I seemed to be okay at writing, so maybe I should spend my energy there.

It’s not very often you can get such a clear cut explanation of where your strengths and weaknesses are, and to have such a clear cut difference made a big impact on me. I’d always enjoyed writing, managed to get pretty good marks in high school and university, and saw it as something I could thoroughly enjoy doing if I wanted to do something different.

This would be an example of using my strengths to my benefit. I’ve never bought into the thought process that once you identify a weakness you have to work at it until it’s a strength. In some things, that’s just not going to happen. I’m not all of a sudden going to start working at becoming a gymnast and keep working at it until I’m representing Canada at the Olympics. I admire those who have the ability to do so, but it’s not me. Likewise, focusing on a weakness means you’re not utilizing a strength. Why would you want to be average at almost anything when you could be exceptional at something?

So I started writing on a free blog hosted by Blogger. Eventually, I got to the point where I wanted to invest a bit of money into the site, so I set up on Word Press with a site I designed by myself. It looked like a site I designed by myself.

From there, I was able to get to write for sites like T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, and a bunch of others featured either quotes or entire articles from me. This helped to build some social capital and expert recognition. That eventually lead to the release of products, distance coaching options, and now workshops all over the place.

Now the funny thing is, I had been looking at some different blogs and websites for some time when I failed the MCAT. I always looked at it as something that was nice, but not for me. I wanted to focus on being the best trainer I could be, and didn’t want to put my ideas out there for others. I realized this was somewhat counterproductive, as I could have a beneficial effect on a lot of other people by willingly sharing what I could do, some of the results my clients had managed to get, and some of the ways in which I helped them to get those results.

Consider this: If 100 people read about a cool way of doing something on my site, and those 100 people happen to be trainers, and those trainers then show 10 of their clients how to do the new cool thing, I’ve managed to positively impact over 1000 people that I otherwise wouldn’t have had access to.

The big moment came after failing the MCAT, seeing I had a stand out writing score, and then having the lightbulb moment come on: all of the big names in fitness had to start somewhere and build up from there. I won’t be any different.

Since then, it’s been 8 years, over 1000 blog posts on this site, 6 products (on my own or in conjunction with others) and over 20 workshops around the world.

And it all came from failing.

Fear of failure is one of the biggest hindrances to most people deciding to take action. They feel they have to succeed or else their personal value will fall, the floor will open up and eat them whole, or some other terrible thing. If I had been afraid of failure, I would have never attempted to get into medical school, but failing helped me to learn what path I should be on.

Success never brings introspection. We win, there’s a ticker tape parade, and everyone marvels in our glory. We never look into the exact mechanisms of why we succeeded or how precipitous the victory may have been. When we lose, there’s forensic examination down to the smallest fiber of each and every variable that could have contributed to the loss.

We learn more from failures than we ever could from success. failure produces adaptation. In many ways, success produces stagnation. don’t ever be afraid to fail, especially if it gives you the chance to learn something really cool about yourself or about ways to adapt to find success later.