Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

—Calvin Coolidge

Profile in Success: Jake Steinfeld

Heard of “Body by Jake”? That’s the tagline of fitness guru Jake Steinfeld, who has whipped many a body into shape, including that of Harrison Ford. Jake has also acted on the large and small screen and been the voice of animated characters. Now in his 50s and still one of the fittest people in America, here’s what he has to say.

I was a fat kid with a stutter when I started growing up. My response to confidence and self-esteem issues was to eat lots of Twinkies. Also, I was brought up in a Jewish home where I had to finish everything on my plate, because if I didn’t, Mom would look at me like, “What? It wasn’t good?” So I got heavy.

Stuttering was a bigger problem. I was such a terrible stutterer that I was lucky I wasn’t put into Room 222, which was for the kids who were called “special” because they had learning problems. Still, it was very challenging for me as a kid growing up. I could not get up in front of the class and speak. I couldn’t even order a pizza, if you can believe that.

I tried the most desperate things while growing up. In class, when the teacher said, “Okay, everybody, we’re going to read out loud. We’re going to take a paragraph. Everyone take a paragraph, and we’ll start.” I would try to count the paragraphs leading up to when I had to read. So, I would try to memorize them. Now, it wasn’t like I couldn’t read. I wasn’t a moron, right? But my stutter was debilitating.

All through my life, the stutter was tough. People made fun of me. Do people really understand? I mean, look, you don’t make fun of cancer. But people laugh at a guy with the stutter. It can be a real stumbling block when you can’t communicate. It was very challenging. But I’m talking now, right? My life is about communicating. The kids I grew up with look at me now and say, “Man, we never thought that you’d amount to anything.”

What started to turn my life around was when my dad bought me a set of weights when I was 14 years old. It changed my life. Not only did the weights build my body, but more importantly, working out built my confidence and self-esteem, which I think everyone can understand. If you believe in yourself, it’s amazing what you can accomplish.

My parents believed in me, too, and supported me, encouraged me. Most importantly, it was my grandma who really believed in me. She was the coolest. She took me to places I would have never seen. She took me to a racetrack. She took me to the old Madison Square Garden, where I saw Joe Frazier fight. As a little kid, she exposed me to Broadway, helped me see and understand plays. She did all these different things and always told me, “Hey, you can be whatever you want in your life.” I’m a big believer that you’ve got to have people. You’ve got to have mentors you hang out with who are winners, and someone who buys into your plan so you can be a winner. She was the one who mentally pushed me, but she talked straight to me, too, since I am the oldest of four.

I’m a big believer that life is about moments. My mom always said that I was the greatest. She’d say, “My oldest son, you can do whatever you want.” So I decided in eighth grade that I was going to try out for the basketball team. I didn’t practice much, but I loved basketball. I was a big fan of the Knicks, and I tried out for the school basketball team with a bunch of my buddies. After tryouts that Friday, the coach put a list on the gym wall of the names of the guys who made the team. I went with a couple of pals. I looked down the list, and my name wasn’t there. I thought, “Oh, no. This coach is kidding me. Come on.” I even looked behind the list, thinking someone was pulling a prank. But the fact was, I got cut. It was the first time in my life for that.

Then I thought, “Wait a second. I put myself out there. I’m not in my backyard. I’m not out with my cousins. I put myself out there to be with a real team, and I got cut.” I’m telling you, it was a devastating moment. But I had a poem given to me by a girl in eighth grade called “Don’t Quit,” and she signed it on the back. It’s an anonymous poem, but it inspired me and inspires me today every day:

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but don’t you quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow—
You may succeed with another blow.
Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man;
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down
How close he was to the golden crown.
Success is failure turned inside out—
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far.
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit—
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

What motivated me was that poem and my dad taking the trains off my train set so we could use the cardboard bottom as a backboard. We had a little backyard. We got a hoop and put it in the backyard, and I shot all summer. I’m a lefty, but on the left side of the hoop, we had an overhang from the house, so I couldn’t shoot from the left side. I had to practice my corner shot from the right side. In ninth grade, I made the team. Our first game was against Shreveport, our archrivals. You’ve got to picture me, okay? In ninth grade. I was 14, with an afro and braces. It was a great look. I was at the far edge of the bench, the 11th man. Our two starters, true story, collided with each other with about 17 seconds left in the game. They literally smashed into each other and got taken out of the game. We were down by one point. My coach, Mr. Cohen, looked down the bench and said, “Steinfeld, get over here.” He told me, “All right, get in the game. Don’t touch the ball. Don’t touch the ball.” I said, “Okay, coach.” He was petrified. We had taken the ball out at the opposite end. I stood at midcourt, figuring that no one was going to pass me the ball, that they would go to Mike Miller, who was the star of our team, right? But everyone else was covered. They threw the ball to me. The clock was ticking down. I dribbled. They fouled me, with no time on the clock. It was a one-on-one situation—against Shreveport, our archrivals. Here I was, the 11th man, who hadn’t even made the team the year before.

Shreveport was tough. They were all tough guys, right? They were all ninth graders, and I went to the foul line. I used to shoot a foul shot the way Rick Barry did in the old ABA, as an underhand foul shot. The ref blew the whistle and passed the ball to me, and I flipped it up—swish. I’d tied the game at 36–36. The other team called a timeout. I went to the sideline, and Mr. Cohen practically slapped me in the face. But I went back out there, swished the second shot, and I won the game. That was the kind of moment when I said to myself, “Man, I can do this. I can compete.” I became the captain of the team all through high school, because Mr. Cohen went from the junior high coach to the high school coach.

I got my work ethic from my grandma, who worked every day. She worked at a hotel called Manhattan Beach Hotel in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. And I got it from my dad, who worked seven days a week. My dad got up in the morning, put on a suit and tie, and went to work every day, Saturday through sometimes Sunday, selling. We were a middle-class family. That’s what they do to get by.

I really woke up when I got to college, Courtland State University. I got into college because I played lacrosse. I wasn’t that great, but they took me. School was not my deal. I just got into bodybuilding. I really loved working out. When my dad got me the set of weights at 14, things started to come together. Girls started to recognize me. I was no longer the fat funny guy, Jake. Now the girls would say, “Ooh, can I feel your muscles?” I was starting to feel good about myself. I was in college. I was doing it for my mom, right? I thought I had to be in college because that’s what you’re supposed to do. We lived in a neighborhood, Baldwin, made up of Italians, Jews, Catholics—it was all one. There were a lot of black kids in the neighborhood, but it was predominantly white. In our neighborhood, it was, “Yo, where is your son going to college?” “Oh, he’s going to Harvard. He’s going to Yale. He’s going to West Point.” But I wasn’t at any of those places. I was at Courtland State.

I was there three months, playing with the lacrosse team. We were scrimmaging at Syracuse in 1977. I played on the fourth midfield, and these days my pro lacrosse players tell me, “Gee, Jake, I thought there were only three midfields at Courtland.” So you can see where I stood. I was a face-off guy. I’d come on the field, face off, and then get off the field. Well, that one day in Syracuse in November, it was frigid. There was a freezing rain, and I was standing on the sideline becoming this lacrosse ice sculpture, when I said to myself, “This is it. I’ve got to call my mother. I’ve got to tell her I’m going to go to California to become a bodybuilder, because that’s my dream.” In my dorm room, I had pictures on the wall of all the big, muscled monsters. I knew, “This is what I want to be. I want to be a bodybuilder.” You may think, “A Jew and a bodybuilder? That doesn’t match. It’s like milk and meat, socks and sandals. Jewish and bodybuilder don’t go together.”

Bodybuilding made me feel great, and I stood up straighter. People recognized me. I was training every day. I saw myself as big and strong. I’d look in that mirror, posing like I saw in the magazines, and I wasn’t a skinny kid becoming muscular—I was a fat kid becoming a muscular one. When I went home to tell my parents, my dad said, “Look, you have a dream? Then you go do it.”

Before I left, all of my friends, the gang of guys I used to hang with, said things like, “What are you doing, man?” I said, “I’m going to go to California; I’m going to become Mr. America.” One said, “You’re a fat joke. You’re never going to make it to California.” They all said stuff like that. “There’s no way, man.” “You’ll never make it. You’ll be home by summer.” I hear those voices sometimes still today. It gets me. I love when people bet against me.

My passion has always been bodybuilding. But I never became Mr. America. I came in second place in Mr. Southern California. The guy who beat me was on steroids. I’d made a very conscious decision that this was not a good thing. I was 19. So I wasn’t Mr. America. But I said to myself, “I just can’t go back. I love training. I love working out. I will do something with this. I don’t know what it is, but I’m not going back to New York.” So I became the first guy to do personal fitness training. It happened by accident. A girl asked me to help her at my apartment complex. She was getting ready to do a Club Med commercial, and I got her in shape. She was connected to other people in town. One person led to the second, and the third person was Steven Spielberg. He and I became like brothers. To have someone like that and Harrison Ford and Bette Midler and Priscilla Presley and Steve Royce and Warren Beatty all meant a lot. Here I was going through these people’s homes. I knew this was the moment.

Still, you have to keep following through with yourself. You look at yourself in the mirror sometimes and know you have a great idea. You write it down at night, and you wake up the next morning with all the excitement and enthusiasm to pull off this idea, this dream, and all of a sudden you start thinking of the reasons why you can’t. By the time you’ve had coffee and gotten into your car, you stop thinking about succeeding because you start toying with the notion that you can’t do this.

What helped me get past that was being around the kind of people I was with every day. I learned the greatest lesson of all. I realized, wait a second, they’re no different from me. The only difference is they had a dream, they never quit on their dream, and they never took no for an answer. And that said to me, “You know what? I might never direct E.T., but I’m going to have my own success.” That was the moment. I became famous by association. I was the first guy to do personal fitness training, make it into an occupation, and parley that into videos and books. Ted Turner gave me my start doing the “Fitness Break” on Cable News Network in 1982. Ted became a friend and a mentor.

The thing is, never quit. Because you never know when the coach is going to look down the bench and say, “Stedman, there’s nobody else in here. You’ve been sitting here staring at me for a long enough time—get in there already.” And now you’re up. You’ve got to be ready.

Here’s my legacy, what they can put on my tombstone: Take a shot. Be passionate. And don’t quit. The last thing you want to have happen in your life is to look in that mirror when you’re 30 or 40 or 50 or 60, and say, “You know, I had this chance. I should have taken a try at this thing. I was going to do this. But I didn’t.” That’s what drives people crazy. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you fail. Everybody fails at something. It happens. I did. We all do. Try to learn from your failure. You also can tell the kind of person you are, and the kind of people you are around, by how you handle yourself not just when you’re at the mountain, but when you’re in the deepest, darkest ditch. Never quit! Never!