Ask For Help

What the Barber Chair Taught Me About Building Gyms (and Asking for Help)

TL;DR:

From cutting hair in college dorm bathrooms to building out my garage gym with friends—I've learned that asking for help isn't weakness, it's an invitation. Whether it's the honesty that happens in a barber chair or grown men building something together, the best moments come when we stop trying to do everything alone. People want to show up, trust is built through shared effort, and everything good—gyms, teams, friendships, businesses—gets better when you let others in.

What are you trying to build alone that could be better together?

Main Article:

I started cutting hair in college. Not because I was trained, but because I was broke, curious, and had a few brave friends.

It began in the bathroom at Dodds Hall on the Miami University campus. I called it the "Bathroom Barbershop." I wasn’t technically allowed to run a business out of my dorm, so I accepted "mandatory donations" from my clients. A pair of clippers, a desk chair, and the naive trust of guys who needed a clean-up before a date or a night at First Run. I wasn’t great at first. But I got better. And over time, something else showed up in those makeshift barbershop moments: honesty.

You learn a lot with clippers in your hand. Guys open up when they know they’re stuck in a chair for twenty minutes and can’t make eye contact. They’ll tell you what’s actually going on in their world—relationships, doubts, hopes they haven’t said out loud yet. It’s like therapy, minus the couch. And I got hooked—not just on the craft, but on what happened in the chair.

I've never stopped cutting.

These days, I cut my friends’ hair in my pantry room or garage. Some nights it’s for a big meeting. Sometimes it’s my daughters, sitting still while I gently angle cut off their split ends. I cut the boys on my son, Wake’s lacrosse team (mainly ensuring buzz cuts don’t look like a terminal diagnosis), and some of the high schoolers too, usually right before a big game. We crank music, talk trash, and pass the broom between cuts. It’s part ritual, part refuge.

The chair’s still the same. So is what happens in it.

Which brings me to the gym.

Five or six mornings a week, I meet up with AKB4, JB31, and Dandy—our ragtag Pirate crew—for an early morning workout session along with a few other friends. Most days, we go to the CrossFit Symmetry gym. But a couple times a week, we flip the scenery and work out at my place, or over at JB31’s. My garage gym had good energy, different equipment, and just enough space to work. We’d bounce between the two spaces, mixing it up depending on what we were working on.

And over time, it wasn’t just us using the space.

My wife started hosting a Saturday morning bootcamp—14 women, loud music, full send. My kids have gotten older. Teenagers now. High school athletes. They and their friends started lifting, too. The garage became a kind of crossroads—part gym, part clubhouse, part community hangout. “Sensei Steve” even showed us how to execute a roundhouse kick on a Saturday night. It wasn’t just mine anymore. It was ours.

So we decided to expand it. Not for more machines or more gear. But to make room. For the people. For what this space had become.

And when the extra equipment arrived, I considered taking the Peters’ family tried and true method: Gut it out yourself with no forethought and consider how to do it easier after you’re done. Or I could have paid a crew to come set it up. But something in me said: don’t do that this time. This one should be different.

So I asked the guys for help. And they showed up.

There’s something sacred about grown men building something together. Something pretty rare. It wasn’t just labor—it was laughter, a shared meal, problem-solving, standing back to admire a new crossmember that signified progress. It felt like being on a team again. Like being part of something.

I used to think asking for help was a weakness. That if I just worked harder, I’d earn respect. Sometimes I still do. But asking isn't a weakness—it's an invitation. It’s how you let people in. It’s how you remind yourself you’re not meant to do this (life) alone.

That gym buildout wasn’t just a project—it was a reminder. That people want to show up. That trust is built in shared effort. And it struck me that what we built there—side by side, sweaty and sore—wasn’t all that different from what I’ve been doing for years in a barber chair.

In both spaces, people let their guard down. They talk. They pitch in. They laugh. They belong. The clippers, the weights—it’s all just backdrop. What matters is that we’re doing it together. That we’re showing up for one another, not just with words but with hands and presence.

Everything good—gyms, teams, friendships, businesses—gets better when you stop trying to do it all yourself.

So that’s what I’m sitting with this week.

Ask for help. Not because you can’t do it alone. But because it’s better when you don’t.