I am xcesiv
My actions and presentation of myself purposefully define as an oxymoron the very word that the pronunciation of my name — /ikˈsesiv/ — originally was intended for, excessive. I am the Voice against the term, and I do so with my fingers armed and resting, ready to fight, a top my trusty keys. I do not capitalize my name nor any adjective describing who I am, and do so with purpose. My intention with every action I take, every decision I make, and every moment in-between is for each final result to be the antithesis of the word excessive.
Simplifying for optimization vs an ironic identity struggle
Orignally, my parents provided me with a name, which my federal government generated a licensed name for — just the same but in all capital letters. Even with this name, however, years before I became xcesiv, I took to the simplification of it, and used an all lowercase approach to any introduction, presenting myself as such in my online persona and professional career. For the first few years of my career I struggled to explain why exactly I chose to do this. I’d often refer to it as a stylistic preference, self-branding tactic, or a method to tighten the SEO optimization of my already very common name. While these all are true, there was always another layer of purpose to it that took years of self-reflection to understand.
Like many people of my age bracket, I grew up playing video games. For myself, games were a creative and competitive outlet. I learned to program thanks to gaming, fueled my competitive nature on an intellectual level by gaming, and my first entrepreneurial endeavor was centered around gaming. However, unlike my friends and the majority of the people I played with, I struggled figuring out who I was. Whether it came from what roles I was best at playing, which game I wanted to play, my choice in console, or what my online handle was going to be, I never was able to pick. My history as a competitive gamer speaks wonders to this point. My first breakthrough in competitive gaming was Halo 3, where I had reached rank 50 in what felt like every game type, but spread out amongst 4 gamertags.
Why so many accounts though, is it really that important?
I couldn’t decide who I was as a player and never understood that, to me, my name online had to be reflective of my goals within the entire realm of the internet. I wanted to have a whatever my name was be memorable, unique, and have purpose. Also being a guy who wanted to play music on stage and starting out as a programmer in the age of computing where hacking was still prevalent because the world hadn’t yet caught up in adoption, I felt the pressure of defining myself in all three and was persistent in finding one that fit all three.
The moment I found out that this was important not only internally, but externally for myself in the long run was when I first learned of David Walsh’s online persona, yhslaw. It immediately clicked to me that this want for a unique name was not just me being eccentric or stubborn, but a necessity in personal branding for any career in three very different, very deep industries. Gamer handles were going to define the players associated with them, just like hackers and musicians.
A unified front is built from a strong understanding of purpose and intent
If I were to develop a presence that was known ubiquitously in all three industries, I needed to find the name that represented my ideology. What was my ideology, though? What stood out about yhslaw to me was how people knew to pronounce it Walshy even if they never played him before (mind you in this era social media wasn’t as prevalent and YouTube was still young). They knew it even though spelled backwards it gives no hints to a word like Walshy. More importantly than that, his name excelled at the job of defining the fact he was different from anyone else, his approach was “backwards” so to speak.
Yhslaw was the pro gamer that treated his opponents during MLG competitions with an attitude like that of a professional athlete, a unique thing at the time. To him, the Arena was a stage, he was the entertainment. No, he was the best entertainment, and his opponents so terrible, their awful game play was the comedic relief. He was the JJ Watt of competitve gaming. He was the “WOO!”
The best in the businessness, the feared player on the field, and the guy who’d not only show it, but wasn’t afraid to say it. That’s what yhslaw was known for. His approach to competitive gaming helped propel the scene into international spotlight as a form for entertainment for an entire generation. He was one of the earliest professional gamers to set the stage for those to come to be treated like sports stars, his entertainment value helped generate the next generation of competitve gamers, the eSports players. He was a pioneer for the even bigger names of today, the badass players at the pinnacle of Professional eSports, the League of Legend superstars that thirst to come back and win championships and entertain the masses. He set the stage for the birth of monumental players, people like Doublelift. I mean, like, I still get goosebumps watching Chase Your Legend.
Every victory is sparked in a moment of desperation and failure
Throughout my entire youth I was bouncing from game to game trying to find the right one to compete in, genre to genre trying to find the right one to perform in, and platform to platform trying to find the right one to programmer with and, admittedly, hit a brick wall of identity crisis. I was also filling this void of self identity for years with things that were actually irrelevant to what I aimed to accomplish in the long term. Athletics, academics, social societies, clubs of different sorts, doing whatever I could in attempt to succeed at something while I struggled to find a singular defining term that represented me.
It was in 2012, a year into college, that I finally had my “breakthrough moment”. I had my biggest personal failure yet to date, completely removed from these three industries I’ve spoken of, and with the one thing that I felt most confident in prior to: academics. I failed out of college at the University of Michigan. Though I returned a year later (only to leave again two semesters shy of graduation to start my first business) and the circumstances that immediately proceeded this are quite traumatic and private, this is not relevant to the fact that I undoubtedly went into college over confident and under prepared.
In reality, this happened because I was lacking the most quintessential skill that I never developed prior to that, I never learned how to learn. I never found or tried to put myself in positions that encouraged trying to learn something that I needed to apply the skillsets required to truly learn. Skills such as mindfulness, humility, and reflection. Which, I now know, should be requirements when approaching an environment you’re completely unfamiliar with, accomplishing a task you’ve never been introduced to before, or interacting with someone whom you do not share a background. I had the mindset that if I didn’t want to learn something, I had no reason or obligation to do so. Such an approach is just woeful ignorance, fueled by inappropriate privilege, and is not acceptable, ever. It’s extremely dangerous and harmful within a society such as our own where that attitude has been the catalyst for some of the most horrific events in human history.
One must also recognize that while in my first year at Michigan it wasn’t the actual educational material that was difficult, I was more or less proficient in that because it’s very difficult for any educational institution to remain up-to-date with the rapid pace of development in all fields, computer science just so happens to be one that this is abundantly clear due it’s general youthfulness and even more so as an academic discipline. See, what I really failed at back then was the proper the allocation of my time, the application of privileged methodology to that which I was unfamiliar, and not being comfortable enough with myself to see the blatant decline in my mental health at the time.
Secondary education was an environment I had never been in, that is, I had never been in a completely free-decision making system where I not only made the decision to-do or not to-do something, but also had to build the structure of my day-to-day activity. I became overwhelmed in such an unfamiliar environment, took on too many tasks at once, and feared being inferior to my peers who were properly equipped to study academics. So, I weaponized my charisma in such a way that if I saw the opportunity to skip certain events I pledged to attend or didn’t do tasks I took responsibility for their completion, I would do so. Unfortunately, what I ended up being most successful at was finding a way to excuse my actions, regardless of whether or not that excuse was viable, accurate, or detrimental to others. I was selfish in all the wrong ways.
I wasn’t trying to develop myself or become more knowledgable, I was trying to manipulated a system already rigged in my favor. I thought that so long as I believed something enough that I was able to get away with it. I was apart of the problem for acting this way and I deserved to fail.
Inception in learning — you only learn by first learning how to learn.
I did learn something, though. Every action we take is a learning moment. That I am my own person, yes, but that doesn’t mean my decisions impact only myself. That history is cyclical in nature and to break that cycle we must be proactive. This is an important concept to learn — we must go above and beyond to achieve, however, I still didn’t know how to absorb these new concepts properly and then apply them appropriately in my actions.
Instead, I based my actions, work ethic, and belief on a previous system. The one my past found success in, the “good enough” model I adopted in high school. I applied justifications that would net result in an overall “good enough” rate of return in each individual instant. I was “good enough” in the moment, but never was striving towards a goal. In primary school the goal was simple, “Graduate with good enough grades to go to the best college and get the hell out of this town.” So, I just made sure my report cards had A’s, inside of the American public education system and inside a small, lower class town in the middle of no where, that required little to no effort on the part of anyone with a inherent potential for academic success. What I needed to learn back then that I didn’t realize was that in-order to learn something, you must approach it with the executive of it resulting in achieving a goal within whatever you’re about to attempt to learn. That’s how, at least for me, learning happens positively. If I take the approach that each moment is a learning moment and that I must always have a goal with each action I take, I will be deliberately setting out to succeed.
I didn’t have a goal for the semester that I failed, and so I didn’t succeed. I simply was living life and blindly following the system previously presented to me. When you follow a structure and don’t know who you are, that results in failure. The first thing we must learn is who we are, who we want to be, and then build said goals for learning new things. This will point us in a direction to succeed in becoming the best version of ourselves.
Broken, in a moment of unfamiliar failure and utter humiliation, culminating in my lowest point of self-confidence, I was uplifted by the girl I had recently started dating. She looked at me and said, “You need to figure out who you are and stop being what everyone else wants you to be. I know deep down you’re a nerdy, creative guy who’s just afraid that expressing that is okay. Stop putting excessive amounts of energy into pleasing everyone and focus on what you love for a while.”
Sometimes you need to stop doing and start observing
It was right then I decided to take a year hiatus from school. I tried many different things, I adopted a love for strange food and the gastronomic side of cooking, even became a chef for a while; I fell in-love with animation, I began reading books, writing, and absorbing as many different cultures and observing what made each individual person… tick. What fueled their fire. I even gave up the keyboard during this time, trying to find who I was and connect with the real world.
I kept coming back to music and the idea of making something from my own mind that would impact and benefit the people who used it. I learned to appreciate all kinds of music and cultural actives. I would go to many different types of concerts and events, truly embraced the idea of experiencing a multitude of random things. I learned to accept the idea of being “uncomfortable” I found myself appreciating that fact that others enjoyed things I didn’t and would continually find myself debating with others why their personal taste in one thing was superior to the personal taste of someone else I had previously met. This often made me recite those words she said to me on that terrible day, “stop putting excessive amounts of effort into pleasing everyone else…”
Everyone around me enjoyed what they did themselves so much, they were able to defend it, and even become offended if others didn’t agree with them. I found this… fascinating. I also found it all to be too much. People cared so much about the appearance of their actives being superior they would act in such excessive manners to prove it. This is a bit outrageous, selfish, and absolutely unnecessary in my opinion.
Your enemy is often your greatest asset
That word kept popping up again and again there after. Excessive. In particular, music in the local area was way too excessive. Dubstep was all the rage, a sub-genre of electronic music I still firmly believe took the electronic scene down a path of misconception and negligence that led everyone to think they could make music if they just were able to make the bass drop harder. The actual “musician” was dying. DJing, as difficult as a skill it is to master, is just as easy to “jump into” and appear decent enough with the creation of new technologies. Partying was the thing to do, being on a major university campus, every night was party night.
Through the development of recent social media platforms at the time that “let you be there with your friends” (snapchat), it developed the worst few years of electronic music. The time period just after the development of the “Wah Bass” and the release of Ableton Live 8. The actual musicians and sound engineers of the time still don’t get recognition from the era, people like Feed Me, because they were pushed out by songs like “Harlem Shake” by Baauer, “Putcha Back In It” by DJ Sliink, and hip-hop stars like Kanye West trying to conquer a hype market with songs like “Mercy.” I’m not saying these songs were bad, they had their moment, but they were excessive. They weren’t simply well composed pieces of art, they had no vision, they were the excessive representation of a saturated market.
It was around this time I was moving into a new apartment, a temporary establishment, with a friend of mine that our bond was built on a horrific experience that happened a few years prior that to this day I’m certain it was this lack of self-awareness I had is to blame. Regardless, it was a fresh start, school had just finished for them for the year, and I had nothing to do. The three of us spent practically every day together, and they both could tell I was ready to move forward and pushed me to answer the question. “What was my goal?” While she was on the path of creativity through media and himself on the path of some sort of political career, I had bounced from engineering to music to cooking to, at one point, thinking about religious studies. Still, despite the efforts, all I could muster was four simple words, “Let’s change the world.”
They both kind of looked at each other, then at me, and said, “Let’s? Like all of us together?” I began then ranting about how there needed to be a call to action in this world, there needed to be something, someone to say, “If we focus on what we love, stop caring about what others love so much, and worry solely about how we can impact society for the better, collectively, we change the world.” I wasn’t sure how this would turn into a career, but I knew this was my goal. To provide a mode of pure self-reflection for each individual that would, in-turn, collectively net a positive outcome.
Cooking wasn’t the answer, gaming was becoming too much a recreational activity for me and the games I was good at competing at weren’t ready to be a profession yet, like Magic: The Gathering. However, computer programming and electronic music were proving to have endless opportunities. So, I picked up the keys again, both the musical and typing variety.
Embody your hatred to find the X Factor
I quickly found myself looking at my past and thinking, “What experience do I have that I can use to impact such a large scale.” I stopped myself and said, “don’t do too much, don’t be excessive…” So what could I be? “Shorten that ugly word.” I thought. “Remove all the extra bullshit from life and make a stance,” was really what I wanted to do. “Stake your claim as something you’d have to think about, double take to get it, and would make people think twice about what they’re looking at,” I said to myself. “Pick a name that starts with a letter that defines what you want to be,” I started with. X. The X factor. X marks the spot. Be X. What word starts with X? Nothing good. But excessive should… why doesn’t it? Xcessive. There are so many unecessary letters in that word. Two S’s? Make it one. A random e at the end? Don’t conform to the norm, having it there is just semantics. Xcesiv, that’s a great simplification of the worst word I’ve ever heard.
I spent the better half of the next few years honing what it meant to be Xcesiv. First, it means to be different. To remove the extra fluff, to provide simple context for what you’re doing. To find the key points and drive them home. I made music that was out there, songs using untraditional instruments like a song completely made with a bop-it, followed by songs made with traditional recording methods of a grand piano as covers of originally excessive songs. I would start software businesses that aimed to refine the more over-abundant and excessive aspects of our daily internet use. A search algorithm that aimed to generate user specific results, a web development company that aimed to remove the excessive headaches small businesses face with needing an ever growing online presence, and joined communities that focused on individual security and priority of individuality within their environment, aka what you probably know me from, blockchain technologies.
It wasn’t until just this past summer that the X became an x when I did what would be the last public show I’ve down as a musician. That same woman I was dating, now a close friend and colleague, was designing the flyer for the event. She went with an all black and white banner and simply put, “xcesiv comes home.” I looked at it and asked her, “why not orange?” (The color my personal brand has been since I was 16 years old) and she just types a couple lines, deletes them, and types again, probably four or five times over instant message before she says, “You’ve become the antithesis of excessive. To be xcesiv, you must remove all things excessive. To be xcesiv you must see things in black and white, have no prioritization of one thing or another, be the most pure example of simplification in the moment.” That was the answer to the lifelong quest I’ve had.
So…
Who am I?
I am xcesiv.
I am an oxymoron to the word my name shares a pronunciation with. I am the leader of the company that is implementing the ideology I have established for my own life into two industries that desperately need to move away from the excessive amount of saturation and emptiness returned to their customers. I aim to achieve one goal, provide everyone with the ability to do what they love, remove the excessiveness around them, and be xcesiv in finding success. I cannot do it alone however, as this is impossible and defeats the purpose. I align myself with those who wish to join the fight, those who wish to help others do what they love and find success doing so, and ultimately, we aim to further achieve this for you. So, I’ll say what I say to each new person I’m certain is ready to join the fight against abundance.
