We recently connected with Heath Martin and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Heath, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.
During my freshman year of high school, I was a starter on the varsity soccer team, and went on to earn the Rookie of the Year and Goal of the Season awards. It was then that I knew a career in the sport was ahead for me.
I then transferred my sophomore year of High School to IMG Academy in Bradenton, FL — a boarding school creating the ideal environment for student-athletes to develop into professional athletes or high-level collegiate athletes. Many famous athletes come to IMG Academy to train during their off-seasons, preseasons, or other times of the year.
During my sophomore year of high school I ran into some adversity — getting injured, living away from my parents at the age of 16, and many other small things that you could imagine building up in a teenager’s mind during adolescence. One thing stayed consistent throughout my struggles — my day-by-day improvement mentality. No matter what happened, my focus was to get better every single day. As the days and weeks went by, I began to transform into a different player. I was always looking for ways to improve little by little in every area I could think of. I started playing more and more, became a starter, began to play up with the age group above mine, and started to see things coming together for me. I then found myself earning an offer to play for Atlanta United’s academy team for the following year, and earning the Most Improved award from IMG Academy.
I then went on to play for multiple professional MLS academies, and then signed a two-year professional contract — these were huge results that came from a day-by-day mentality centered around progressing as a player and person.
During my time in the MLS academies, I began to encapsulate my mentality into my brand, Nonstop Progress, where I began to show the training, nutrition, and lifestyle habits I was building that would help me continue to improve. I created the social media accounts, the website, our programs, and app to help players progress day-by-day. When the covid-19 pandemic shut everything down, I continued to forge my mentality around day-to-day progression, and kept showing up to create automatic habits to support this continuous growth. I started training harder than ever, and my desire to improve became so invigorating that I began to post all of my training across social media to share the hunger that I had to succeed. I soon noticed thousands and thousands of athletes tapping into my platform as a way to improve themselves as well. It was at that point that I not only had my internal motivation to keep going, but I had external motivation too.
A key concept that played a pivotal role in helping me do what I did is known as the aggregation of marginal gains. This concept, developed by Dave Brailsford of the Great Britain Cycling Team, was basically the idea of breaking down a skill into as many components as you could think of, improving all of those components by just 1%, and then adding them all back together again. Dave Brailsford did this by improving every area of cycling that you could think of for his team — the pillow that would offer the best night of sleep, the best way to wash your hands to prevent infection, and they even painted the entire team bus white to spot and get rid of dust that could potentially affect the performance of their bikes. The results of these compounded incremental improvements were massive. The British Cycling Team won multiple Tour de France competitions, and dominated the competition at the Olympics by winning roughly 70% of the gold medals available using this strategy.
For me, success became a side effect of being obsessed with the process of progress. As of now, Nonstop Progress has grown to over 150k followers, and continues to grow every day.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
The goal of the creative journey has been to create a progress-based way of life, and form the theme that it can be applied to all areas of life. The mentality of day-by-day improvement, or incremental progress, has been at the backbone of every decision I have ever made, and it has led me to where I am now.
I think this lesson can be carried into almost all walks of life, and can be fitting to almost any field or occupation. The goal for the brand evolves every single day. Global impact and community support is one of the top priorities of the brand moving into the future.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
As I mentioned before, the success became a side effect of being obsessed with the process of progress. I never became obsessed with external factors such as money, fame, or outside incentives — I was driven by an inner desire through personal goals that, once achieved, would satisfy the basic psychological needs we all have — mastery, autonomy, and purpose. I then took this mindset, repeated this process consistently, and formed habits that would allow the progess to become automatic — creating a way of life.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nonstop-progress.com
- Instagram: @nonstop.progress
- Facebook: Nonstop Progress
- Youtube: Nonstop Progress
- Other: Tiktok: @nonstop.progress
Image Credits
I own all the rights to these images.