How Never “Fitting in” Has Made Me a Natural Leader
Growing up, I never fit in and to this day I’m sure most people consider me something of an iconoclastic weirdo. My difference from most of society boils down to two things from my point of view:
For starters, I’ve always had a unique personality type that many find difficult to interpret if they don’t know me well enough to understand the way I think. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had miscommunications because of the assumptions others have made about what’s apparent in my words or actions. According to the Myers-Briggs personality test, I’m an INFJ-T type personality. The rarest of all personality types. Having issues with CPTSD and the social anxiety that comes with it certainly doesn’t help my issue with relating to others “properly”.
Second, I’ve had a uniquely difficult path that has served a dual purpose: both to test my strength in ways many people could only imagine and to alienate me from the feelings of being connected with society at-large. When I was five my mother violently divorced my father for a registered sex offender, and then spent first grade being smuggled across a state line weekly to avoid the appearance of violating a divorce agreement for visitation rights after my mother moved out-of-state. At the end of that school year, I was raped in a bathroom stall by another student only to be brushed off because the story was too incredible coming from an eccentric first-grader. To top it off, three months later my mother passed away at police hands while she and her pedophile fiancee tried to murder my father in his own home to end the custody battle for my sister and I.
Most citizens of the first world can’t really relate to the experiences I detail above… especially not when you consider I had gone through all of this by the age of seven. I don’t say this to downplay the struggles of others at all. We all have our own path to walk in life and we all deal with these traumas differently. But, for you to understand who I am now its entirely necessary to understand who and what I come from because I’m certainly a special blend. If you look at it through a purely psychometric lens, I may very well have ended up being some sort of psychopathic criminal if I had made some of the wrong choices and kept some of the wrong people in my life.
Struggling to Find Myself
My father and I have never seen eye-to-eye, even from a young age. We were always very different in all the right ways and similar in all the wrong ones. We’re both extremely tenacious and determined personalities. We are the two most stubborn people I’ve ever met in my life and when we want something, we pursue it with an unrivaled single-mindedness. These qualities make he and I strong leaders in what we pursue, but they also tend to create lots of opportunities for conflict when he and I hold very different outlooks on life.
The chief of these outlooks is my career. You see, my father is the straight-laced and materially focused type. His careers have included the steel industry, aerospace/military technology design, trading floor of the NYSE and construction. To him, art and music should be relegated to hobby. He views professional musicians as “people who didn’t have the skills or opportunity to do much else in life”. As someone who is now a professional musician working with some of my biggest heroes on my debut album, I can’t help but point out the irony of that statement coming from a man who has been playing guitar for almost 50 years and still can’t read sheet music or write songs of his own. He kicked me out of the house at age 18 when his girlfriend at the time locked me out after a major argument, leaving me homeless in the harsh winters of Northern Utah. The chief point of contention? The fact that I wasn’t able to pay my own health or car insurance yet because I’d taken an internship with a talent agency to further my goals rather than something higher-paying. My mental health after graduating high school was in complete meltdown and to this day I maintain that I would not have been able to hold down a normal job in my fragile condition at the time. Two years later when I became the youngest CEO ever selected to present at the prestigious COLLISION conference and I asked for help in making it to the event his response was “I’m not continuing to fund this ego trip of yours any longer”. Never mind the fact that I was mostly self-funded at that point by working as many hours as my managers would give me, but plane tickets are an expensive commodity to someone that isn’t even old enough to drink yet.
To my father’s credit, my path into the entertainment industry got off to a rough start. After my first job as an intern for my agent at the time, I ended up getting my first record deal offer and I was absolutely over the moon — until it came time to “negotiate” the terms of the contract. My single-minded approach toward this opportunity was what led me to take a job with a music industry non-profit called World Peace One. This ended up being one of the worst and best decisions I’ve ever made simultaneously. I didn’t know it at the time, but the founder of WP1 has a reputation a mile long in the entertainment industry for being a very high-level con artist having ripped some very famous acts off in the past with rumors of embezzlement swirling around their “organization”. Following my new boss Lawrence out to Oregon to play some shows for him ultimately led me to move there to pursue the opportunity only to be told one day after arrival that I would need to move to Los Angeles with him. Moving to LA with him led to me getting abandoned by him in a town I didn’t know with all of my possessions still locked up in a storage unit clear up in Oregon. I was totally on my own and cut off from all my support networks. My only solution was to endure periodic homelessness and couch surfing in the strangest variety of both the richest and poorest suburbs of Southern California. One night, I’d be staying in a mansion in the Palos Verdes estates. The next, I’d be sleeping in my car a mile North of Compton. After that, I’d be crashing in a heroin house in Canoga Park even though I didn’t do any drugs other than smoking Cannabis to ease my CPTSD symptoms. I woke up in the middle of police raids on multiple occasions with the LAPD SWAT team using my car as cover, facing the fact that if a firefight broke out with the meth house across the street they would knowingly use me as a human shield. My blind loyalty to my sense of purpose led me to endure these things thinking that one of my bosses would eventually “slip up” and give me some legitimate work in the most stressful game of chess you could ever play. I can only imagine how scared my father must have been during this time, considering he doesn’t really know much of my survival skills. I understand his bias towards what I do after watching me go through with that — but I still disagree with it.
I tell you this not to rail on my dear father, nor to earn your sympathy with my sob stories but to illustrate how the complex nature of my life and our relationship truly set the stage for my outlook on and path in life. To show you that from day one, I’ve had to learn the difference between mentorship, criticism and Machiavellianism the hard way. From day one, I’ve had to learn the process of sorting out constructive vs destructive advice and who its coming from — even if that destructive advice is given with the best intentions.
Learning to Use Pain as a Motivator
As horrible as that experience sounds (and was), I learned a set of skills that most kids raised in a rich-blooded place like Park City, UT will never have because they’ve never been pushed anywhere near such discomfort. Especially not in the name of fighting for something they believe in. Better yet, I ended up making friends with some of my heroes through this path and because of that was able to establish my reputation as an “up and comer” in the music industry. Getting to meet one of your favorite artists or one of their producers is quite an experience. Earning their respect and friendship is an honor unlike any other I’ve had to date.
Here we are, with me at age twenty-three at the time of writing this. I’ve now been an elementary school band/orchestra teacher, an agency worker, a performer, producer of my own record, CEO of a cymbal company I once endorsed as an artist and the founder of a streaming-based record label called Mobius that is my flagship project. Having experience with every aspect of the music industry from equipment manufacturing, to distribution, to education, to being an artist myself has given me a unique knowledge base very few possess. I can’t think of any record label executives that have been public school music educators in the past. I’m very proud to have such a holistic insight into the industry. Everything I do is dedicated to making the world a better place for other musicians. To go through the underworld so that tomorrows musicians — some of my students — won’t have to. I believe having this unique combination of experiences puts me in a position to become the go-to music industry guru by the time I’m thirty years old. That’s my goal, anyway.
Still living in my car at the time of writing (don’t worry, I’m talking to a friend about renting a room), I’m now the only homeless person I know with a former Goldman-Sachs accounting executive working with me to launch a startup. I’m the only homeless person I know with a lot of his biggest heroes helping him carve his grand entry to the world-level music scene; and I’m the only homeless person I know that gets private meetings with members of congress to address the issues I care about. The many trials and tribulations aside, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s my identity at this point. It suits me. As difficult as it is, I like being the person that makes people think twice when they assess harsh judgments on those who are struggling. I like being the enigmatic figure that makes people say “is he for real?”. I like being more than meets the eye.
A Work Always in Progress
The arcane and autodidactic nature of my personality is exactly what made bootcamp programs like Praxis and Bottega a more logical choice than college to continue my education. For starters, the college social scene just isn’t my cup of tea (can you blame me after being picked on all through primary schooling?). I can’t imagine myself at a large University and being happy at the same time. I just don’t value the idea of a social circle as much as many people do. I pick and choose my friends based on characteristics, not proximity. I also learn best when I’m given the opportunity to teach myself rather than being force-fed pedantic assignments, so being able to work on real projects as a means of learning is absolutely ideal. I carve my own path. I always have. Praxis is there to give me resources to continue to do that rather than force me to put my life on hold for the sake of earning a certificate that cost me five or six figures of debt.
Everything I do is built into Mobius. Rather than passively complain about the current state of music as so many coffee shop revolutionaries do, I offer solutions to guide us to a new golden age. I work to build a new model for the industry in the twenty first century having experienced the depravity of the current one first-hand. I teach students the way I wish I would have been taught so that tomorrow’s musicians may be more musically literate and creative than today’s. I work to design exciting new equipment to expand the sonic palette available to artists who value experimentation as much as I do. Will I one day become wealthy in doing so? Very likely. But that isn’t my goal. The correlation between income and quality of life ends at $200K per annum, so anything I make beyond that will probably just get re-invested into my projects. At the end of the day, I exhaust myself like this for the love of my craft. I don’t need be reminded of this, either. My reminders come when my student’s eyes light up during a lesson and I can think “I made a musician today”. My reminders come when people who have worked with my idols tell me how much potential they see in me. My reminder comes every time a struggling artist gives me his/her phone number and says “your platform sounds amazing, please let me know when it’s up and running” or a drummer tries my cymbals for the first time and falls in love like I did. That’s why I’m in this business: revive art and culture any way I can or die trying.
