Too much chocolate, as good as it can taste, will make you sick.

Too much training, as much as people say “more is better,” can cause you some serious joint damage, like it did me. The picture above is one of my two artificial hip joints, now more than a decade old.

Many of my peers are enjoying their new hips too, although let me tell you, there’s NO PLEASURE in what leads up to a hip replacement. It’s all discomfort and pain, back, leg, and hip pain, loss of movement, and a slow and agonizing realization that you’re dreading the walk to the car, to the store, through the airport, and/or anywhere (forget running to catch a ball, backpacking, or performing martial arts at a high level).

But the great news about hip pain is it’s your hips! It’s not your neck! Or lower back. This is a joint that can be replaced and, literally, give you your life back. 

Now let me ask you, what’s the equivalent of the worn out hip joint to too much focus on “business?” What wears out when you do things, over and over, that have the potential to wear out parts of you that are both hard to find and costly to repair? I see it all the time in martial arts school owners. 

They wear out their passion. When school owners get caught up in the trap of sales, sales, sales —they wear out their sense of mission and intent and purpose. So my organization, The 100. —is fast becoming the repair shop for career-inspiration-replacements. The work can’t be seen in an x-ray, but it can be found in the bounce of the step in people formally hobbled by a focus on endless sales and membership campaigns, giving pizza parties and ice cream socials, looking at every student as just another pay-day, and losing their focus on the here and now.