My Story — Part II

This is the second instalment of my two-part blog post about my story. I hope it gives you insight into who I am and what personally drives me. If you haven’t read the first part yet, check it out here.

I left off last time with my early life in college. I was moleded and challenged by my environment, pushing myself to step up and grow in so many different ways. As I moved on in college and pushed myself more, I started looking at leadership positions and ways to not only challenge myself, but also give back to the people and organizations who shaped me. The primary way I pursued this was through leadership in my fraternity. I started where I had noticed a need in my Fraternity; we had done a pretty good job of establishing a strong brotherhood within the fraternity but weren’t all that socially active on campus. I started helping the previous social chair to learn the job and then got elected to the position. This position pushed me and grew me in so many different ways.

I was most proud when I was able to encourage and help other people to push themselves and when I was able to help connect people and build relationships.

When I started, I had a bit of a lone-wolf mentality and thought I could get it all done on my own. But the more time I spent in leadership the more I came to realize that the differing personalities and ideas on a team could, together, dream up and execute tasks and events that never would have come forth or even happened without them. I learned that leadership is less about knowing the answers and making everything happen or run smoothly, but more about creating an environment where other people’s creativity and ideas have a space to grow and inspire and lead to action that everyone is passionate about pursuing. I was most excited when I was able to encourage one of the people under me to come up with and plan a social on his own, with only a little bit of help. He didn’t think he had the potential to do things like that and reminded me of myself when I was younger, but he did a great job and it inspired him to pursue leadership positions of his own.

I think I accomplished some good things while I was social chair including boosting our social presence on campus and increasing the number of socials we had, but I was most proud when I was able to encourage and help other people to push themselves and when I was able to help connect people and build relationships.

As I was working through college, I got contacted about an awesome opportunity to work with a traveling Christian youth summer camp as a production director. It was a really cool opportunity for me personally as I had just the summer before decided to stop working at the camp I had been at for several summers back home so that I could stay in Nashville and do more work with audio. This opportunity gave me the chance to do both. I was brought on to run all the audio and media equipment as we traveled, setting up and taking down everything, as well as leading the younger staff as part of the leadership team. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this job was going to push me so much as an individual and as an audio engineer. We worked on a scale much larger than anything I had led before, setting up full concert set-ups each week in a new room and running shows all week long with different bands and pastors. I learned so much about how to work well with others and communicate well so that everyone feels comfortable and on top of everything going on. This was especially important working with bands and pastors who were very dedicated to a high quality performance, free of issues or distractions. Often times we would be using some equipment that wasn’t our own and wasn’t entirely reliable and would have to work through issues in the minutes leading up to a show. It taught me how to perform well under pressure and not lose my cool or get mad at people, all while communicating to others so they were comfortable too.

My first year was growth in more technical areas in huge leaps and bounds. My second year was more about the people. I was pretty good with all the equipment and working with the bands so it became more about pouring in to the people around me and trying to help them grow through encouragement and leading by example. I tried to be a lot more focused on helping people through the struggles they faced on the road, issues that I had dealt with some in years past. For me, seeing the real world process of learning turing into mentoring in such a small concentrated example was cool and set the template for how I hope to live out my future: always trying to learn and grow and improve myself, followed by trying to help those around me through the same processes in any way I can.

I wanted a purpose beyond money and fame.

These experiences pushed me to realize that my passion wasn’t necessarily for making music. I was finding my Venture Management and Marketing classes more interesting than my audio classes. It was almost a bit scary. I had been so sure of what I wanted to do for so long, but the more I looked into real-world ways to make that happen, the more I realized a lot of the music industry was not a place I wanted to be. I saw so much greed from executives, just trying to do the things that made the most money in the short-term instead of considering long-term plans. People followed old-school ways of pushing music and all the discussions were about how we could stop the push technology was putting on the music industry, fix streaming, sell more albums. Basically, industry power players were often more concerned with what they liked and what made them happy than they were with bringing the best product to the consumer and giving them a great experience. I came to see that even with the entrepreneurial pursuits I had though up, there was no way I could inspire a new life into what I saw as a sick and dying industry where people were more concerned with building up a false, temporal feeling of success and fame than truly affecting people and changing lives. I wanted a purpose beyond money and fame. I realized that this wasn’t where I wanted to be. But if not music, the cornerstone I built my past four years of life on, then what? And to top it all off, time was running out, my life was changing in dramatic ways and I was about to graduate. After all the hard work, learning, and growing, I felt wildly unprepared and lost.

It was in this time around graduation and shortly after that I started really looking in to what I wanted out of the next few years of my life and what I cared the most about. If I I came to realize that everything in my life was centered around three, values: my faith in Christ, my desire to help people, and my desire to do creative and innovative work. These things had affected everything I was pursuing up to this point. Music, social chair of my fraternity, my different internships and jobs, all of them were me pursuing creative ways to impact people for God’s glory. I was still not too sure of where that would lead me or what that meant, but I was sure that I wanted it to be about these things.

In the past few months I’ve decided that I would love to pursue a long term plan of entrepreneurship and going after a couple ideas I have to create businesses that not only are successful but also impact people and grow communities. In the more immediate time frame however, I want to continue learning and growing so I can be effective in the future. For me this involves pursuing work in a more business focused field such as marketing, where I can improve myself and do things that reach people and can help them all while gaining skills that I can use to be more effective in my future pursuits. And even more personally, this means pursuing ways to grow and teach myself the tools I need. I don’t have everything figured out, but I have a foundation to build off of and a direction to go.

Now, I wrote my story out for a couple reasons. I think the primary way we connect as people is through story telling and I wanted to give you a way to connect with who I am. Everything we are now is made up of every experience and lesson we’ve had from the past. I’ll probably dive more into different, more focused stories in the future, but for now I think this gives a decent overview of who I am and where I’ve come from. I hope it gives you a look in to what I care about and my reasons for what I do.

I also think vulnerability adds a certain amount of intimacy to personal interactions. In Brené Brown’s powerful TED talk about the power of vulnerability she talks about how vulnerability is essential to joy in our own life and deeper connections with others. I completely agree and hope to make that a cornerstone of everything I do.

If we connect through stories, then what is your story?

Finally, I wrote these two posts to challenge everyone who reads them. If we connect through stories, then what is your story? What do you care about the most? What are your values? Why do you care about those things? And what are you doing about those things? How can you live out your values? And to top it off, who can help you or who can you help through these things? Can you help me? Or maybe there is something I can do to help you? This is how we improve and impact people. This is what gives our lives purpose and brings us some degree happiness.

Take a few minutes and think about your own story and your own life. I would love for you to write me in the comments or in a personal message and share your story and purpose and pursuits with me, even just to be able to put it out there. It’ll feel awesome, trust me.