My Career

I've got massive deadline to prepare for the "Transformations" release, which is coming out August 1.

A million things to do... A million things to do...

That being the case, I'm alotting myself exactly 25 minutes to write up this week's blog.

It'll probably wind up being an hour but let's do it.

This week I want to talk about my career and what's got me to this point.

I get a lot of questions about what I'm doing and what my future plans are, so thought I'd write a bit about it to give people a better perspective of where I'm going and where I've been.

First up, as a "figurehead" I'm probably about the furthest thing from the hang-out and party Vincent Chase archetype that you can get.

I maintain involvement in all management aspects of Real Social Dynamics, from promotions to web development to creative content.

It's never a good idea in business to try to be the guy who does everything (as opposed to delegating) but I have a working and up-to-date involvement with everything that goes on.

I'd say that my two my Herculean tasks are working with instructors to keep their skills and live program quality at top level, and generating content via massive amounts of research and creativity.

In order to get to where I'm at I've pretty much always had to have a consistency that few people are willing to maintain...

If that's meant going out 7 nights a week for years on end to get my POOO-AH skills as sharp as they can be, or constantly researching and re-structuring my workshops to get client results up higher and higher -- I've done it day in and day out.

For better or worse I'm an all-or-nothing type of guy...

If I'm not working every day I'm probably not working at all, so maintaining momentum is *everything* to me.

When I've got momentum I'm good to go for 14-15 hour workdays but if I take a long break I find that it's always an nightmare to get myself back on track. That being the case I like to take short, high-impact off-time like hiking in the Hawaiin jungle (mountains, waterfalls, etc..) or surfing on the kick-ass beaches out here for an afternoon.

Then I get back at it...

I essentially view fun as being a neurological recharger. It instills a self-reward system and allows me to shake off any built up tension or stress that I've built up and then -- bam -- I'm ready to go again.

A lot of people wonder why I have this mindset...

The simple reason is that I WAS NEVER "SUPPOSED" TO GET HERE.

I was never "supposed" to be anything in life. I was never "supposed" to make it this far.

Growing up I had failing grades in school and was always being pushed into alternative learning programs for kids with learning disabilities.

I was constantly in trouble in school and in the principle's office, or getting into problems with the other kids. Most of my friends were in and out of jail although I was lucky to avoid all that. I was prescribed all sorts of medications that they gave to kids like me who supposedly had Attention Deficit Disorder and Depression, even though I never took them.

For all intents and purposes I was basically meant to be the guy who if I could get through high school and land a menial job, I could at least live out my days in small-town Canada drinking beer and complaining about the government to my equally dysfunctional kids.

......and that would be if things would have gone *well*.

The big break for me was when Mike Harris (the Premiere of Ontario at the time) legislated a "Work For Welfare" program, and I was forced to start attending school five days a week instead of my previous two.

I was 19 years old in my sixth year of high school, and I remember getting back my first semester report card with straight A's.

I'd always scored poorly in school and it had never occured to me that if I would have just showed up instead of cutting class that I might actually do alright. I sat there vexed in utter disbelief and I had this nerdy European buddy who used to sit beside me like "Ohhh you could get into university with those grades..."

At the time I'd never thought I'd graduate High School and I thought of College as being for "Snotty dickheads with rich parents" so the idea of getting into a post-secondary institution was totally outside my frame of reference.

The story of how I got into Queen's University would take too long to really explain in this article, but I basically pulled every string in the book to make it happen. You guys can imagine the mental-clutter I dealt with on a daily basis, walking that old historical campus basically thinking "I don't deserve to be here... I'm such an imposter... These people have no idea who I really am..."

Overall I'd describe the first two decades of my life as being an amalgam of anger, depression, anxiety, and utter self-delusion.

I'd never go back to it... for anything.

Anyway, meeting Papa was my next lucky big break.

Papa pulled me out of Canada and introduced me into all the major cities of the world and taught me about what it means to live a life of abundance and success.

Papa is a very interesting guy, probably the most resourceful person that I personally know. He has a worldview that can be narrow at times but also disturbingly accurate in many respects. His view is that there are people in the world who make it and people who don't. The people who "succeed" have a work ethic and core values and willingness to shoulder risk that allows to them to make it in life..... and the people who fail to cultivate these qualities live out an existence of being a "have-not".

If you've ever seen the Japanese anime TV series of "Street Fighter II" -- I've always thought that Ken dragging around Ryu all over the world to learn from the masters and achieve self-actualization was a lot what our experiences were like. I'd love to write a book about it someday as it was without a doubt a hard-knock real world education at rapid speed, with all sorts of funny stories and debauchery along the way.

Both Papa and I have polar opposite skills and personalities and very different goals, however we also have mutual understandings and similar overall commitment to RSD.

Regardless of head-butting throughout our five years of working together, this has allowed us to specialize in our respective duties and cover all our bases extremely well.

We've really come a long way...

Back in the day we used to have to sneak into buildings under construction or abandoned school rooms to teach our programs. Usually we'd have to sleep on people's floors 2 hours outside of town and take a bus into town in the morning on 4 hours sleep to teach the next day.

We were always broke and hustling for the money to pay the airfare to get to the next city where the next program was, trying to avoid being stranded in a foreign country or city with no way home. My voice was always shot from teaching and chasing girls every day, and it actually took me several months of near vocal rest in 2005 to clear up the nodes that were developing in my vocal chords.

At the time I'd dropped out of college to get RSD off the ground, and my biggest goal was to get the money to go back and finish. I had to live in a walk-in closet in Project Hollywood for 18 months, because when everyone left it ran Papa and I several hundred thousand dollars into debt as he was the lease-holder and there wasn't a person on the planet who wanted to rent out the empty rooms (we bartered them for whatever we could get, which wasn't much...).

Being that far in debt at 23 years old was about as unsettling as you'd imagine it to be. I used to wake up at night with anxiety attacks on a semi-frequent basis.

It's funny because when I finally got back to college, we had a hard-earned professional reputation, we'd almost paid down the monster debt from Project Hollywood, and I had a great girlfriend to boot. Everything was all good and I felt like I'd almost "made it".

Then in September 2005 when I was still 24 years old, a New York Times best selling book by an ex-roommate comes out that basically rips me a new one.

Instantly the majority of my friends and professional relationships in the community stopped returning my phone calls. The same forums that were previously filled with awesome articles and kick-ass program testimonials were suddenly saturated with all sorts of anti-RSD sentiments and I couldn't even write a simple post without stirring up a flurry of hate.

Believe it or not, to this day I still get "I hope you die" type messages in my email and unpublished comments on this blog from time to time -- although I'm sure that none of these are remotely credible.

Mentally I was somewhat burnt out and really looking forward to that year away from RSD that I was supposed to spend focusing on school.

Still, out of nowhere the brand suddenly had a pretty nasty black eye and I was now called upon to be more resourceful and clear-thinking than I'd ever been.

Oh yeah, and I had to finish college at the same time... *shrug*

With a lot of creativity, research, persistance, and outside-the-box thinking I managed to not only save the brand but also to get us back to the top. People often say "That book did nothing but good things for you guys" and that's a tremendous compliment because it means we made it look easy.

There was a lot of the fear and uncertainty creeping into my mind at the time, and it really forced me to work out my "inner game" and get myself focused on what I really wanted and not what I was afraid of.

All during that time I had to keep on a strong face for all the people who count on me. I never had the luxury of complaining or thinking "I'm so frustrated... I don't know if I can really do this..." It's always had to be "This is gonna happen... We're doing this... There's no question about it... Everything is fine..."

Anyway, these days everything is good.

RSD is going strong. I've spent the last several years developing myself as a writer and a public speaker.

In the next few years I have a clear-cut path of what it will take to take this in the direction that I want it to go. The things I've been doing and that I'm going to do have never been done before, and I'm going to take it a level that nobody has ever seen.

At this point I feel like I've seen it all and nothing can stop me.

Things may continue to go as good as they've been going, or they might fall apart again.

Who knows??

I've re-wired my mind over the years to work effectively under pressure, and I've had an education that I couldn't have gotten in the finest of institutions. I'm 100% at ease to deal with whatever comes my way.

The situations I've put myself in have forced me to develop at rapid speed, and while there have been growing pains, it's allowed me to learn more about what I'm capable of and how resourceful I can be when I'm put in a position where I haven't got a choice.

I think I finally realized how lucky I am when I was talking to a married couple who are friends with my girlfriend, and I telling them about what brought me to Hawaii.

They looked at me and they were like "That's so f*cking cool..."

This surprised me, but it finally "clicked" at that point that while I'd been had some bumps and scrapes, I was lucky to have a lived a life that was challenging and interesting and that forced me to become that person that I've always been capable of being.

I feel like I'm living the dream and that my thirties and fourties are only going to get better and better.

Maybe that's just rationalizing and trying to make sense of my past. But I haven't met a single successful person who regretted what they've been through, because they know that that's an intrical aspect of what makes them who they are.

Anyway, as a so-called "self help guru" I guess it's my job to be open about my personal journey in the hopes that people in similar circumstances can read them and make better sense out of their own lives.

Hopefully that's been the case for somebody out there reading this.

Tune in next week for more ramblings on dating, self-actualization, and whatever else comes to mind!!


Tyler