 Thanks for having me guys. Thanks to Dean for bringing me out. My name is Mike Farg. I went to the school for my entire life. My mom worked here for a very long time as a Spanish teacher. My dad was highly involved in the school with camps and leagues and coaching and different things of that nature. Pretty much grew here and like Dean said, I do kind of a fitness thing now. In my eyes, I'm still just kind of a coach rather than a powerlifter, basketball player, whatever it might be. I've had a lot of opportunities over the last five to ten years to talk to a lot of different groups all over the nation. High school kids, college kids, professional strength coaches, professional athletes, a bunch of different cool people that I get to speak to. But often I'm speaking about a topic. Often I'm speaking about lifting, health, nutrition, discipline, work ethic, whatever it might be. And I talked to Dean about what to talk about today and he said myself. And that's going to be a little difficult. So I need a favor from all you guys. I'm going to talk about myself a little bit. I'm not good at it. So if you have any questions, think about them. Hold them to yourself. We're going to take them at the end and that's going to allow me to talk a little bit better because talking about myself is, I'm good at a lot of things. Let's be honest. I'm not good at talking about myself. So we'll figure it out as we get there. Always a lot of your guys' ages. I think I was probably in third grade. What's the youngest grade we got in here? Yeah. So I think when the camp was here, whatever year that is, 1998, somehow connections, I snuck in as like a third or fourth grader and the youngest age was sixth grade. So I've been a part of this camp as either going to it up until about eighth grade and then coaching it for probably 10 years after that. So 15 years plus I've been here, fell in love with the sport of basketball, probably around second grade. As many of you have heard the name Michael Jordan. He's built a name in the brand. I just started watching him on TV every single day I could. Started to work out in basketball. I didn't know it was working out. I didn't know it was this thing called training, but every day after school or all summer long, I'd be in my backyard working on different dribbling moves that I saw. Guys like Gary Payton or guys like John Stockton doing on TV, trying to get better, trying to get better every single day just because I knew I love this thing. And the benefit of loving something is, one, you like to do it, but two, if you do it a lot, you're going to get good at it. And so I started to become pretty good. And that's kind of why I think I snuck into that camp as a third grader. Fast forward a little bit. I never really played organized basketball. I had these camps. I never really got onto a team or anything until I had a tryout in sixth or seventh grade. I wish I remembered the name, but it's one of the AAU teams here in the area. Three or four of my best friends were going to try out. And I didn't make the team. I thought it was really good. I was killing things, going left and right, running all these drills, getting all these buckets, getting all these assists. Didn't make the team. All my friends did. That was probably my first taste of what many call failure, what I like to turn around as maybe a lesson. So sixth grade, didn't really make a team, didn't know what to do. I was sad. I probably cried. I probably punched a wall, probably punched a pillow, probably yelled at my sister and my mom. And then luckily enough at this school, we had a seventh grade team. For me, I guess this was maybe my first taste of redemption. My dad coached us. We had a pretty good team. We had probably three or four guys on my team that really loved basketball as much as me. And my dad got us into, I believe, the eighth grade public school league here. We just started smashing heads. We weren't winning all the games. We didn't win a championship, but we're a group of seventh graders coming into this eighth grade league. The public school league, as many of you know, are probably in the Waldorf system. It's a smaller school. We're playing kids with thousands of kids, tryouts, paid coaches, all this stuff. And we're making a name for ourselves. Like, who are these kids from Waldorf? Whatever, whatever. Next year, we weren't allowed in the league. There's another little taste of sourness in my mouth. I'm supposed to be the big eighth grader. I'm supposed to go win a championship. I'm supposed to be, you know, whatever, the queen song. We are the champions, lift my dad up, whatever it might be. We didn't get to do that. That same eighth grade year was a big year for me. I played a lot of basketball, and I focused on nothing more than going to go play professional basketball. That's the only thing that popped in my head. I think that's the time, you know, parents are talking, you guys are talking, what are you going to do for a living? Are you going to go to school? What are you going to study? I didn't even, I didn't even cross my mind. I said, I'm going to go to Arizona because that's where good point guards go. And I'm going to go straight to the NBA. Like, that's just how it goes. That's what happens. My first memory of Dean Stark, we had talked. I was the kid sitting on the baseline at every single waves basketball game. Every away game, me and my dad would drive 40 minutes, hour and a half just to watch the waves. I'm counting stats. I got favorite players. I probably made a jersey, wearing signs. I did it all. I did it all. No joke. Every single game here, it wasn't even here. It was at La Sierra at the time. We didn't even have this facility. Just aging myself. Just aging myself. Talk to Dean. And I said, Dean, I'm going to play varsity next year for your team. Because of that battle I had with this kid named TC, and I know TC played varsity as a freshman. He started. Not a lot of kids got to do that here. Under 10? Under 10 probably in the history. I said, well, I'm the best kid at this school, so I'm going to do it. And so me and my dad had a conversation with Dean. I probably didn't talk, so I was pretty shy. But my dad probably talked for me and said, my son's going to play. And I said, in my head, yes, I am Dean. Dean, still to this day, we've grown very close over the years, and I still don't understand him fully. I don't know if he said it's going to be very difficult to challenge me, or as a nice way of saying, get lost kid, you're going to be playing JV. But in my head, it was like, get lost kid, you're going to be playing JV. It made me mad. It made me real mad. I remember he played summer league games over at Del Campo. Dean invited me in there. And all I knew how to do was work my tail off. I was a pretty good passer. I could handle the ball pretty good. My jumper was whatever. I was this exact same size. I was five, eight, maybe a buck, 60. So we're playing against, I don't even know who, maybe Capital Christian. They had a seven footer full ride to UCLA. Just, you know, and I'm used to playing guys, your size. Now I'm this size, and it's seven footers everywhere. Played pretty well, long story short, ended up making the team, ended up starting that season. And that was kind of my first taste of setting a goal and accomplishing a goal. Writing down, putting in my head every night before I went to sleep. I'm playing varsity, and I'm going to start, whether Dean knows it, whether Steve Kerr, coach of the Warriors knows it, and whoever knows it, it doesn't matter. I'm going to do it, and it's going to happen. Fast forward a little bit. Great career here at playing basketball. Looking back, I'm about to be 30. It's probably some of the best times of my life. Most of my lessons and what I do now for a living, business wise or coaching wise, we're all learned here either through a player or coaching alongside Dean. And we'll dig into those maybe a little bit later. Some of my faults or lessons that I've learned along the way is I was very, very tied into that NBA thought, but I didn't always want to put in the work. Or maybe I misplaced my work. My confidence, my ego, sometimes will start to tip. You always have to find balance in your life. And that's something I struggle with to this day. Balance with work and family. Balance with kindness and weakness. Balance with hard work and laziness. Balance on where to put your work. Ego. I had a couple of offers to play at some schools to walk on to some schools, play at a D3 level. Some junior colleges were lightly recruiting me. And 17-year-old Mike again had that in his head, no, I should be talking to Phil Jackson. Why are you talking to me? Why isn't Phil Jackson hitting up Dean to come get me? This is wrong. And that's where things like perspective and that balance come into play. Ended up playing a year of junior college basketball. It's a blessing and a curse that you all in this school has Dean because then once you get another coach, it just didn't work. He didn't understand me as a player. He didn't understand me as a human. And that's something Dean does very, very well. And so we just didn't get along. He didn't give me the minutes I thought I deserved. He didn't even give me the opportunity I thought I deserved. And I ended up dropping out of that college, transferring schools and getting a coach with Dean. That's kind of where my lessons of coaching and learning about humans came into play, as well as my love for fitness started to work out as hard as I could. I basically went to college or classes, maybe eight to 10 or 11 in the morning. I'd then go to the gym and lift. I'd then go to whatever practice was first here. It started about three. I don't know if it was guys or girls, coach and play with the team. Then I would go for the next practice and actually coach if it was the guys per se, five to seven. And then I would drive to the gym and get my shots up. And that was a regular routine for probably three years where I was deciding on where to go to school next or what I was going to do. That's where I kind of learned the grind, which is something Dean and I were just talking about. The grind is not going all out every single day, not coming in here and shooting free throws. If I shoot a thousand free throws today and then never shoot a free throw again, am I going to be good at shooting free throws? Probably be okay. But what if every single day for the next five years, you come in here and even just shoot 10, just shoot 10 free throws as well as you can, you'll probably be pretty good from five years from now. And then if you're capable of doing 10 a day, you can maybe do 20 a day, 30 a day, 50 a day, whatever it might be. So I started to learn that grind, what pace I could handle, how hard I could go, and stretching it out, days, weeks, months, years. I got pretty good at basketball. I got pretty good at basketball. That was probably, sadly, the best I had ever been, 20 to 23. And I wasn't playing on a team. I'm killing high school kids as a coach, killing open gyms, playing in some semi-pro or A leagues with my man Demario over there inviting me to some leagues, playing with XNBA guys, full ride D1 guys, playing really well. And then something just clicked in my head and it just told me this probably wasn't my path, that I think coaching was my path. And that's when I opened my first business. I was probably 21, 22, and I opened a training facility. Started working with some athletes here. Started working with some, my dad's friends, whatever might be in the community, teaching them how to lift, teaching them how to be healthier, feel better, have healthy habits. Long story short, got a job at another gym. This gym created a lot of content, content meaning YouTube videos. We started a podcast, things of that nature. And the last probably seven plus years of my life can basically be found on the internet. I've done, traveled the world making different videos on how to instruct athletes, lifters, normal people that just want to be healthier. I've done thousands of hours of podcasting, which those, I don't know if everyone knows what podcast is. It's just like a radio talk show kind of deal. We got a fan. As well as kind of the social media world that's kind of taken over. That's kind of what I do for a living. At my core, I'm a coach, but in the grand scheme of things, I kind of create content and try to teach people different things and share my experience. The choice that I made when I was probably 23 to do it, whatever it is I do right now, it's even hard to explain. I put my face on the internet and a lot of people watch it. But at my core, my goal, the choice that switched in my head was to do it. I need to help people get better. I need to stop worrying about me going to the NBA or me being whatever it is that I wanted to be. I have to let that go. I have to help people towards their goals and I also have to make people's lives a little bit better. There's a lot of things that happen in my life from about age 18 to 23 that really changed my perspective. I lost a lot of loved ones in that time. This community lost a lot of loved ones in that time that were very close to me in this community. And when you go through hard things in life, you can be sad. You should be sad. You can still on the couch and cry for months, years. You can do whatever you need to do to get going. But if you don't learn from that, if it doesn't change your perspective or change you as a human, like that word failure, it's all kind of a waste. We need to really start to focus on not failing, not losing, not missing a shot. If I miss a shot short, what do I do with my next shot? If I'm hitting the front of the room, every single jumper, what do I do with my next shot? Get a little more leg into it and adjust. That's it. We're going to put a little bit more leg into it and we're going to adjust until that ball goes through this silly hoop and I start getting buckets again.