Aaron Colvin was doing tricep pushdowns at the gym when he spotted a cartoonishly huge bodybuilder across the mirrored room. The guy was coaching a woman through a set of cable rows, and the 18-year-old Colvin paused to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and lumbered over, Colvin got concerned. He figured he was about to be accused of ogling the man’s girlfriend—one of gym culture’s cardinal sins.

But the bodybuilder only wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin was about to begin his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm on college; he wanted to devote himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At 13, Colvin had vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special-education teacher who had raised him with little help. As an intensely driven teen, he’d launched a series of one-man ventures that never quite panned out: T-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He was currently working daily shifts at both Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal-training business.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/spectacular-burnout-solar-panel-salesman/