The founder of CrossFit credits his success to one simple secret

Greg Glassman is the founder and CEO of a rapidly growing fitness company with millions of fanatical customers. To hear him tell it, though, he is merely the caretaker of one of the great wonders of the world.
He compares CrossFit, his business, to the "natural process" that created the Grand Canyon. His contribution? "We didn't f--- it up."
As he told CNBC at the Iconic conference in Boston, "We are the stewards of something fairly spontaneous."
Glassman isn't just a businessman. In his mind, he's delivering "a profound metabolic truth" about diet and exercise to a fat, sedentary, disease-ridden
population.
The 60-year old former gymnast started training individuals throughout the 1970s, and in 1995, he opened his first gym. Less than two decades later,
there are 13,546 active affiliates in 144 different countries operating their own franchise gyms, called "boxes." There are around four million CrossFit athletes, as best as Glassman can guess.
Headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, CrossFit champions as a panacea an intense regimen of physical training combined with a high protein, low
carb diet. Lifting monster truck tires overhead and cutting out sugar could, to hear Glassman tell it, all but cure the human race.
His evangelical approach to fitness and dieting has earned its fair share of critics. But Glassman is unfazed. He didn't invent weightlifting or what has
been popularized as the Paleo diet; rather, Glassman says, in packaging and selling them together as CrossFit, he is a Moses figure, attracting and shepherding those who were lost.
If Glassman can take any credit for the rapid growth of the CrossFit empire, he says, it's that he has largely avoided making mistakes out of greed.
"I had amazing success as an entrepreneur showing restraint against the opportunities that appear, not that are real, but that appear around this movement," says Glassman. CrossFit has avoided putting its name on related consumer products, even when the product would potentially be attractive to CrossFit athletes.