5 Years In: What Nobody Tells You About Building Something Real
I've been posting content for five years.
Five years of building Outlaws Training the brand, the community, the vision. Five years of putting something out into the world when nobody was watching, when the numbers didn't move, when the people around me didn't fully understand what I was doing or why. Five years of life happening in the background while I kept going anyway.
I'm writing this right now, in real time, because something has shifted. And I think it would be dishonest and useless to you if I didn't acknowledge it out loud.
The Thing Nobody Warns You About When You Start
When you decide to build something a brand, a business, a body, a life that operates on your terms people will tell you it's hard. You've heard that. You've probably said it yourself.
What they don't tell you is the specific texture of that hard.
It's not one big battle. It's a thousand small moments where quitting would be completely rational, completely understandable, and in many cases, nobody would blame you. The numbers don't move. The algorithm buries you. You put out work you're proud of and it gets twelve impressions. You watch people with less skill and less conviction get more recognition faster, and you have to sit with that and keep going anyway.
What they also don't tell you is that you will be bad at this for longer than you want to be. I was. Not bad at lifting, not bad at understanding training but bad at communicating it, bad at building an audience, bad at the content side of the brand. And I'm the kind of person who, once I've decided I'm doing something, I don't stop. Which sounds like a strength, and it is but it also means I stayed bad at some things longer than I had to because stubborn and relentless aren't always the same thing. Relentless without the willingness to adapt is just spinning your wheels faster.
Eventually you learn. Eventually the stubbornness becomes an actual asset because you're still in the room when most people aren't.
Substitute Teaching, What It Actually Is, and Why I'm Done Letting Others Run My Clock
I substitute teach. Multiple counties in Maryland. I'm good at it genuinely good at it. I connect with students, I manage a classroom, I show up prepared and I leave having done the job well.
And I am tired of it.
Not the students. Not the work itself. The position the way people relate to you in that role, the way a substitute teacher gets treated not as a professional or an asset but as a warm body to deploy. You get the call, you show up, you do the work, and then you wait for someone else to decide where you go next, when, how, and for how much. You have almost no say. Someone else controls your schedule, your income, your location, your day. You are a resource to be allocated, not a person with a direction of their own.
I've sat with that. And I've made my peace with the fact that the issue isn't the students, isn't even most of the people I work with it's that I'm no longer willing to accept a situation where someone else has that much control over my time and my life. On any level. At any job.
This isn't about being too good for a job. I reject that framing completely that's ego, not clarity. This is about recognizing that I have built a life with a direction, and continuing to make myself available to systems that pull me away from that direction is a choice I make every single time. And increasingly, the answer is no.
If it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no. That's not a motivational poster line it's a functional decision-making framework when your time is actually your most limited resource.
What Five Years Actually Looks Like
The vision was always there. But the vision at year one and the vision at year five are not the same thing. Not because I changed the destination but because clarity compounds.
In the beginning you know the direction, you don't know the path. You're posting content and hoping something sticks. You're trying formats, trying angles, trying to figure out who you're talking to and what you actually have to say that's worth someone's time. You're figuring out the Outlaw Mindset not just as a brand concept but as a real lived philosophy what does it actually mean to operate with that ethos, not just post about it?
Over five years, the path got clearer. Not because life got easier life has happened. Things I didn't plan for happened. Directions I didn't see coming became priorities. The vision didn't get simpler, it got sharper. More layered. More honest. Less about performance and more about actual sovereignty financially, physically, personally.
The fitness brand is real. The community in the Vault is real. The content has an audience that actually engages, that actually responds, that has a real engagement rate at 6,000 followers that a lot of accounts ten times that size would want. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because five years of showing up consistently builds something that shortcuts can't replicate trust.
The Validation Piece And Why I'm Careful With It
I want to talk about this carefully because I think most people in this space handle it wrong.
A few weeks ago, I did brand outreach to Schiek a serious strength and fitness equipment company. Not a request, not a mass email blast a real conversation about real alignment. And I heard back from a decision-maker named Paul directly. Genuine interest. Not an automated response, not a "we'll keep you on file" reply an actual conversation with someone who has the authority to move on it.
That's a first. A real one.
And I'll be honest I had to be deliberate about how I received that. Because there's a version of that moment that becomes a dopamine hit, a thing you celebrate before anything is real, a story you tell yourself that becomes a substitute for the actual work. I've watched people do that. They get one good signal and they coast on the feeling of it for weeks while the real work slows down.
What I actually did with it: I noted it. I recognized it as signal that the direction is right, that the brand has real-world value, and then I kept going. The validation is information. It's not the destination.
That might sound cold. It's not it's protective. The goal isn't to feel validated. The goal is to build something that outlasts the feeling.
Why This Post Exists
I'm not writing this to inspire you in a generic sense. I genuinely don't care about being a motivation account. The Outlaw Mindset isn't about positivity for its own sake it's about being honest about what the path actually costs and choosing it anyway.
What I want you to take from this is something more specific:
You will not be ready when you start. I wasn't ready when I started posting five years ago. I wasn't ready when I reached out to brands with under a thousand followers. I am not fully "ready" for anything I am currently building. Readiness is a myth people use to avoid the discomfort of starting in public before they have evidence that it will work.
You will suck at this. If you're stubborn like me, you'll suck at certain things longer than you have to. The fix isn't to quit the fix is to stay in the room long enough to learn, to adapt, and to keep moving forward instead of just repeating the same broken version of effort.
Others will try to dictate your life on every level. Jobs, systems, algorithms, people with opinions about your choices all of it. At some point you have to decide what level of external control over your own existence you are willing to accept. For me, that line keeps moving. I keep narrowing it. I want less of my life governed by other people's decisions, and I'm building accordingly.
The vision gets clearer, not dimmer. Five years in, I know more precisely what I'm building and why than I ever have. That's the gift of staying in it. Things that seemed separate start connecting. Work that seemed unrelated starts compounding. The picture gets sharper.
Where I'm At Right Now
I'm building. Not one thing multiple things, in parallel, on purpose. Some of it I'll talk about when it's done. Some of it I'll share as it develops. Some of it I'm keeping close until it's real enough to say out loud without the conversation becoming a substitute for the execution.
What I can tell you is this: the path is working. Not because it's been easy or fast or clean. Because I didn't stop.
That's the whole thing. The entire message, the entire brand, the entire five years distilled down:
Don't stop. Learn while you go. Own your time. Know where you're headed.
That's the Outlaw Mindset. It's not a vibe. It's a strategy.
If this hit follow Outlaws Training on Instagram and get in the Vault on Patreon. That's where the real work happens.
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