My client Tony had secured a windfall.
He invested in some real estate in a resort town on Long Island and, by the magic of the market, he managed to make several million dollars on the deal in two-and-a-half years.
Tony was by no means poor. He was a partner in a major law firm here in New York City, but the sudden influx of cash prompted his partner to buy him a Maserati for his birthday.
Now, I told you that Tony wasn’t struggling prior to this payout but that wasn’t always the case. Tony grew up with a single Mom and money and security were tough to come by.
And, because of this - even though it was a gift and even though they had the money - he didn’t feel good about the car.
He tried.
He would take it out of the parking garage on Sundays and drive it up the West Side highway but the more he drove it, the less comfortable he became and the more he grew to hate the car.
So he did the only thing he felt like he could do. He sold the Masserati at a substantial loss and bought himself the childhood car of his dreams, a brand new Chevy Camaro.
The most expensive thing isn’t always the answer.
And the idea that you “get what you pay for” is only sort of true. Value is not an absolute. The more you pay for something does not necessarily mean the more joy or utilization you will get out of it.
This is something often referred to as the value equation. - the value you gain from something compared to the cost/time/effort it takes to acquire it - and, quite honestly, it is the favorite part of our gym. I think we have a remarkably favorable value equation.
Most people equate personal training with one-on-one training. They also think, because it’s the most expensive, it must be the best for them.
Kind of like Tony’s Maseratti, this is not the case. Most people don’t actually want the awkwardness, the non-stop focus and the small talk during rest periods that comes with one-on-one personal training.
And, one-on-one is not the most expensive because it is superior to everything out there. It is the most expensive because you are paying for that trainer’s time (and often their travel time). And since they can’t make other money during that time, you pay for it.
But that doesn’t make it good. It just makes it expensive.
(By the way, any time I share this opinion on social media I get everything from disagreement to death threats from one-on-one trainers and facilities. But I speak from experience here. I trained people one-on-one for a decade.)
Exceptional personal training is not defined by the size of the group. It is defined by the ability to be coached effectively and have things progress and regress on an individualized basis based on capability and need. You can achieve this in groups of two or three or four and when done this way, the value equation improves dramatically.
On the flip side, groups of 30 or 12 or even 8 don’t offer enough of a personal touch. These are often environments of controlled chaos. The energy is fantastic but there is no way for a coach to effectively work with a group this large. Which is why so many large group fitness classes are led by an instructor with a headset, up on a podium and much of the facility investment is in a sound system and lighting package.
Not good.
Clearly it is not easy to pull off exceptional personal training with a good value equation because so few do it. Instead you end up with the aforementioned personal trainer who charges you hundreds of dollars to execute a program he hastily wrote on the subway or you end up with a glorified deejay leading a large group while encouraging you to grab random weights off the racks.
And I don’t tell you all this to be self-aggrandizing. That my way is the best way. I tell you it because it’s the truth and perhaps it will help you. I promise you, as I mentioned, in certain circles, it has made me anything but popular.
Which reminds me of another Tony story.
Or perhaps it’s the other half of the first story.
While Tony’s real estate deal went smooth financially, it was anything but emotionally.
As he made improvements to the commercial lots he purchased he got a lot of resistance to those changes from the community. The community that was also his home.
Part of the impetus of the sale was not just financial gain but also (and perhaps moreso) that he was just emotionally devastated by the reaction to his projects. That his friends and neighbors would turn on him for making, what he felt, were improvements.
He told me he called his Mom, now in her 80s and her life made easier by Tony’s success and generosity, to tell her what was going on and share how he was feeling. They were always close that way.
She listened with patience and concern, as Moms do, to him for 20 minutes before delivering a single line of advice that still resonates with me as some of the best I’ve ever heard.
“Tony. If you became successful in order to be popular, you made a big mistake.”