One power couple has had a larger positive impact on diabetes, heart disease, and depression than the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association combined — Alex and Leila Hormozi. That’s my assertion, not theirs.
Let me break it down.
Gyms have basically two business models. Large gyms are incredibly expensive to open, fairly expensive to maintain, and bizarrely inexpensive to join. They make money on low prices and high volume (like basically all big corporations). You can get a membership at a mega gym for less than fifty dollars a month. You get a pool, all of the workout equipment you can imagine, and probably a smoothy bar. Smoothies cost extra. You also get anonymity — which isn’t necessarily a feature. There are basically two kinds of customers at a mega gym — the people that this model is wonderful for and the people this model is awful for. The people that this model is wonderful for are already in impressive shape, know their goals, don’t struggle with motivation, and are often qualified to be personal trainers themselves but still hire them sometimes anyway because they’re always eager to learn new things.
Most of the customers are of type two, though. These are the people who sign up because they have a loosely defined goal and the barrier to entry is low. For years, places like Bally’s and 24 Hour Fitness charged a simple, flat, twenty dollars a month. Things have gotten more complex now, for reasons that might come up in book three, but these places are still super affordable. Nearly everyone in category two does go to the gym, at least once. But, without an established fitness habit, they’re doomed. When they show up to the gym, they see the type one gym goer. They see a lot of them. Now, type one only makes up 1–10% of their gym’s customer base. But they go to the gym every day. So, they look great. They aren’t struggling. Some of them are gruff and intimidating. Some of them are chipper and gregarious — which can just be a different kind of intimidating. Almost all of them have only good intentions, either to stay focused or to be encouraging, but the effect, in that environment, with those imposing high ceilings, mingling aromas of Tiger Balm and meat must, jargon being bantered around in the background, expensive and specialized clothing, and subtly different social rituals than those which take place anywhere else, it all combines to create what may be experienced as an impossibly exclusive environment.
So, that type two gym customer slowly, or all at once, stops going into the gym at all. But they signed a contract, and it’s only like thirty bucks a month, and maybe after they finish that project at work and they’re less stressed out, just maybe … and then the contract auto-renews, and that’s how big gyms make money.
Small gyms fail when they attempt to emulate the big gym model. They’re too small and human to hire someone with the stomach to do contract enforcement. And they don’t have the big shiny halls of impressive looking machines. Small gyms succeed with a different business model. Small gyms succeed by creating processes that encourage people to stay engaged and meet their goals. Small gyms succeed when they recognize that the person coming in isn’t supposed to have the understanding to know what their journey will be like or the motivation to stick with it. If they did, then they’d be better served at a mega gym where they could spend less money and have more toys. What a successful small gym does is operate a system that makes it simple for a person with no experience and no motivation to succeed at goals they didn’t even understand before they walked in the door.
That’s how a small gym succeeds. But most small gyms fail.
Most small gym owners know a lot about health and fitness. They don’t necessarily know as much about motivating the unmotivated, let alone systematizing the process. Or! They didn’t before the Hormozis came along. Sure there were successful gym owners doing it right here and there. Some of them were fortunate enough to grow up as preacher’s kids or come out of the military. Being a gym owner is one of a tight set of circumstances where those histories are straightforwardly beneficial. At the very least, those backgrounds prepare you to lose people to problems you warned them about yesterday. The few small gym owners who were doing it right by pedigree, though, weren’t doing a lot to teach the whole industry how it’s done. Then the Hormozis upset things by opening a distributed college of gym ownership called Gym Launch. Right now, you can open a gym, start listening to the Gym Launch podcast, download a slew of operational guides, and skip past thousands of gym management mistakes that nearly every small gym owner makes. And, it’s all a free gift. If you want help with it all, or you would like to use some specialized tools, you can hire Gym Launch to help you.
But, this isn’t an ad for Gym Launch.
Something that is significant here, which is what I opened with, is that the side effect of the Hormozi business venture is that tens of millions of people no longer have type two diabetes, or saved themselves from ever getting it, tens of millions of people aren’t slowly, or quickly, dying of heart disease, et cetera. You see, the mechanism by which a small gym fails is that people give up on their health and fitness goals. They stop believing that they are the kind of person who can change their life. They give up on achievements they looked forward to. They lower their expectations for their relationships, life expectancy, and active capacity, and they leave the gym. And when people aren’t joining the gym faster than people are leaving, the gym has to close its doors. It’s easy math.
So, why did I belabor that explanation of gym management so long? Well, it’s because all of the details provided are closely related to the process of building and sustaining a community of any kind. And, the methods and consequences are outstandingly similar — only bigger.
Sometimes something unfortunate happens to a person with no prior political or social organizing experience. It could be that they lose a job for an unlawful reason, that they get mugged, are victimized by an authority figure, have their wages stolen, stumble into a rainforest clear cut, see videos of clubbed baby seals and factory farms, or have any number of ordinary interactions with bureaucrats. These things happen. This kind of experience can compel a person into a passion of political motivation. Usually, when someone finds themselves in such an unfortunate position, they don’t have a clear and specific goal. They know the experience was awful, and they know they want to do something about it. But they don’t know what that looks like, not in specific terms. They may attach themselves to a cause, and assume that the cause leaders have it figured out. But the vast majority of political leaders have unstated motivations, motivations sometimes they don’t even understand, and those motivations are almost never to help their followers become independent of their leadership. And, because the people are just following these leaders, nearly all of the vocal participants in any cause are entirely incapable of discussing the details of that cause in any functional way, or even of describing the movement strategy.
I’ve worked with political groups which have focused on legislative advocacy, like the Green Party, the Denver Community Spokes Council, Occupy, and the like. And, yes, Occupy did succeed at mobilizing hundreds of people into legislative advocacy — just speaking for Denver. Sudden arrivals of fiery newcomers to politics make up the bulk of every movement — by energy if not by head count. And they are pretty much all people who have had legitimately awful experiences. These experiences can make them eager to testify in front of the state legislature or city council about their experience. Which is wild because testifying in front of the legislature is a crap experience in its own right. It’s basically like going to court except that court hearings usually have clear outcomes. And the worst a judge can do is send you to death row. The senate might decide that you don’t have the right to defend yourself against sexual assault, (cough) Illinois (cough), or that all of the children in your county are going to be sent to forced reeducation camps run by Mormons, (cough) Arizona (cough).
When a person with no prior political experience stumbles into a venue where big decisions are made, they experience a lot of personalities and sensations they are probably not familiar with. Some people are gruff and intimidating. Some are chipper and gregarious — which is often just a different kind of intimidating. Almost all of them started out with good intentions, either to solve a particular problem or to make a generally positive difference. But, in effect, given the constraints of the political environment, with those imposing high ceilings, mingling aromas of last night’s brandy and cigars leaking through exhausted pores and expensive aftershave and perfume, jargon being bantered around in the background, expensive and specialized clothing, and subtly different social rituals than those which take place anywhere else, it all combines to create what may be experienced as an impossibly exclusive environment.
There’s no reason that community organizers have to remain ignorant of the machinations of finance, policy, and legislation. An outstanding number of people are hard at work making the facts and the strategies that are relevant to every form of organizing and change-making available. The above publications are free to all, and we would be most appreciative if folks would put them to good use.
What we can’t do is make learning and applying these strategies as cathartic as going to a protest and wrecking your voice into the echo chamber. Walking through the door of the gym will never be as comfortable as staying on the couch with ice cream and Netflix. But with a little design and some follow-through, the leaders of communities can make it so that walking through the door is the last major feat that people struggling with an awful circumstance have to do alone. It will never be easy to do pull ups to failure. It’ll never be convenient to sit in deliberation about community decisions. It’ll always be easier to just not. It’ll always feel better to blame the government.
The work of getting in civic shape does have to be difficult. The challenges of politics will always be those of weighing tradeoffs. There will never be solutions to hard problems that don’t come with hard costs. It will always be painful. But it doesn’t have to be confounding and hopeless.
And no one has to do it alone.
So, the gym management metaphor will take us a little farther, but only a little. What I have left to squeeze from that well is a bit about the importance of accountability rituals. But the specific accountability rituals I’m going to reference don’t come from gyms. One comes from The Book of Acts, another from a mathematician I used to know, and then I’ve got some examples of how human culture develops health and evolves fitness in various practices and forms within the humanities and hospitality trades.
I’d love to have you along for this ride. If you aren’t already following this project, you can do so by signing up for this infrequently sent newsletter.