The Finish Line That Keeps Moving

You hit the goal, the goal moves, and you start proving all over again.

There’s a question I keep circling. In coaching sessions, in videos, in my own head: when is enough enough?

I’ve turned it over for years. And at some point, looking back across my whole life, I finally saw the answer sitting there in plain sight.

I’ve been running the same play my entire life.

Here’s the tape. I left the Marines in 1992, after leading a platoon in Desert Storm. Spent 4 years in outside sales for a Fortune 500 company, made President’s Club, won the award for the biggest account sale in the company one year. Then adventure racing, eventually with a Red Bull sponsorship. Then, in 2004, I co-founded CrossFit Los Angeles, the 9th CrossFit affiliate in the world, and grew it from 8 members to more than 350. Competed at the CrossFit Games in 2009. Then the Whole Life Challenge, an online health program I built from scratch that reached 250,000 people over 8 years. And then coaching, which is where I am today.

For decades I told that story as a man following his curiosity. And I believed it.

Then I looked at the shape of each chapter. Start as a beginner. Claw my way up. Get something real to show for it. And then, somewhere I could never quite pinpoint, the ceiling moved. The proof stopped counting as proof. So I’d scan the horizon for the next arena and start over at the bottom, earning my place all over again.

I couldn’t see it while it was running. It took 30 years and a lot of looking backward.

There was a second track running the whole time, and it’s probably the only reason I can see the first one.

Starting in the mid-90s, I spent close to 15 years with a spiritual teacher. Almost 7 years at the Santa Monica Zen Center. A Master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology. Decades of the slow, unglamorous, sometimes uncomfortable kind of inner work.

For years those two worlds stayed in separate rooms, and I just walked between them. The guy doing the deepest inner work was also the guy most driven to prove something out in the world. Both things true at the same time, for decades.

I doubt I’m the only one built that way.

And I’m still in it. My coaching practice is the current chapter of the same story. Building again, beginner again, hunting for the proof that this time, finally, it’s enough. The proof keeps moving, same as it always has.

I want to be clear: I’m fine. I love this work, and the people I work with matter to me. But underneath it I can still feel that quiet hum. Not yet. Keep going. Prove it first.

My clients know that hum. Most of them can’t stop because they have no idea what they’d be left with if they did.

So here’s what I can actually say, having watched this play run for 30 years.

I plan to keep building. What seeing the pattern changed was the belief riding underneath the building: that enough lives at the destination. That once the practice looks the way I want it to and the proof stacks high enough, I’ll finally get to exhale.

That belief prints targets for a living. Hit one and it hands you the next. It doesn’t care how much you’ve already accumulated.

Enough is available on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of the building, long before the destination. It shows up the moment you stop making the destination responsible for your worth. You can still want the win. But when the work runs on genuine curiosity, on love for the thing itself, something loosens. The ceiling stops being the point.

I’m still working on that distinction. Probably more slowly than I’d like.

But I know the difference now. And knowing it, even imperfectly, is something.

With love, Andy

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