In the beginning, one of the first promises I made to myself was that I was going to do a burpee challenge.
I made it up on the spot. No plan. No grand strategy. I just decided, right there, that I was going to do 20 burpees a day.
Now that might not sound like a lot to you. But at the time I was very out of shape and I weighed over 300 pounds. Twenty burpees was not hard, but it was not pleasant either. And every single day that went by, I would add one. Just one. One more burpee than I did the day before.
Here’s the part that mattered most: I didn’t tell anybody. Not a single living soul. This wasn’t for show. It wasn’t for some guy to nod at me on the yard. It was a promise I made to myself, rain or shine, no matter what.
And I want you to understand where I was when I made it. You are not allowed to run anywhere in prison unless it’s on the track. Everywhere else, you walk at a medium pace. Anything else is expressly forbidden. So I’ll cut to the chase — a lot of my workouts were done in a public restroom at a men’s prison. That means pull-ups on the shower bars. Burpees on the bathroom floor, because it was the only space with any open area. Push-ups. Dips. More burpees than I ever want to remember.
Absolutely freaking miserable. And not for physical fitness. For mental toughness.
One more than yesterday. Every day.
Eventually I got up to hundreds of them. I had to start breaking them down into sets of ten, counting them off — do 10, take a 60-second break, repeat, until I hit the number I needed to hit that day.
And somewhere in there, people started to notice. Not because I told them. I told no one unless they asked me directly. They noticed because of the consistency. They saw a fat, broken man show up and do the work every single day, and something about that got their attention.
Because here’s what nobody tells you about a challenge like this. It sounds easy at first. Twenty burpees, big deal. But come 90 days in, 120 days in, 170 days in — somewhere in there, you’re going to be sick. Or tired. Or sore. Or injured.
This is where the excuses come in.
This is the moment. Right here. This is where you find out who you are.
You can quit on yourself. You can break the promise you made. You can be the loser that your negative mind is looking for you to be. Because that’s what it’s doing — it’s looking to confirm what it already thinks it knows about you. That you’re a bum. That you can’t ever be trusted. That you’re a piece of shit.
Or you can choose a different path.
You can do it anyway.
You can acknowledge that you don’t want to do it, that it hurts, that today of all days you have every reason to skip it — and then you go do it anyway. And when you do that enough times — specifically when you do that exact thing while you’re absolutely miserable, broken, tired, whatever — when you keep that promise to yourself anyway, not once, not twice on a fluke, but consistently, when you want to give up and you overcome that feeling over and over again…
Those become your success secrets.
That’s where it starts. You start believing in you. That you can change. That you are a person who can be relied on. A person of value. But it starts with you doing the training. You have to trust in the training, not the other way around.
You can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to be rich and famous one day.” Or “I’m going to be totally fit one day.” Or “I’m going to have X, Y, and Z sports car, or the watch, or whatever luxury item du jour.” That’s not how it works. You actually have to start by taking action, consistently, and then waiting for the moment when it’s the most inconvenient, the hardest, the worst — and doing it anyway. Embrace the suck, as David Goggins says. Do that enough times, and you build up some real semblance of self-worth.
And as that self-worth starts to come up, it attracts other people. Not because you’re braggadocious — I never bragged, I told no one unless they asked me straight to my face what I was doing. It attracts them because they saw the work. Many of them started quietly rooting for me. They wanted me to keep going. There’s a respect there that you can’t fake and you can’t buy. When people watch another man do something hard, over and over, for a long time, something in them tips its cap to it. Even if they don’t like you. Even if they’d never say it out loud.
I finally stopped the burpee challenge for one reason: I felt I had completed what I set out to do. My shoulder was wrecked by then. I was sore most days. But I’d done it anyway. Rain or shine, I did my burpees. And that consistency is what actually started the rebuild — the self-worth, the sense that I was a man worth something again.
It was painfully small in the beginning. Day after day, adding just one burpee to the stack. By myself. No one watching me. No one knowing what I was up to.
So let me say this to you, whoever you are, wherever you’re reading this from.
Whatever you’re going through. Whatever failure you had. Whatever disaster you’re living in right now — I’m telling you, you can get to the other side of it.
But not with some grand sweeping gesture. Not with a Hail Mary.
It comes from consistently showing up for yourself. Proving to yourself that you are a man of your word, over a long period of time.
It will come back. And it will be built on a rock-solid foundation.
One more burpee than yesterday.
That’s it. That’s the whole secret.
Next chapter: Helping Others While You’re Still Broken →