Have Some Motherf*cker to Prove Wrong

I carry a pretty big chip on my shoulder.

(I always felt like I had something to prove)

I wanted to show everyone that I could be successful.

Let me tell you where this comes from:

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Until I was 16, I lived in a small mountain town outside of Seattle, WA.

It was one of those towns where everybody knew each other.

I had a good amount of friends and I was pretty popular

Life was good.

But when I turned 16, we moved all the way to upstate New York because my dad had a new business.

It was a big change.

I went to a new high school where nobody knew me.

It was much bigger, with lots more kids who all had grown up together, so they all knew each other.

This town had to be ten times the size of my old town…

I didn't really have any friends there.

Nobody wanted to talk to me,

and I got bullied a lot.

People took my stuff, threw my backpack around, tossed my hat around.

Just little things that really sucked.

I ate lunch alone in the library because I had no one to sit with.

I didn't tell anyone because I thought it would make things worse.

Instead, I just kind of laughed at myself…

I kept a list of people I wanted to prove wrong.

I wasn't the best student either.

I was pretty much a C average kid.

Because I didn't really have any friends, there was no drive for me to do well in school.

It was just one of those things where it's like, okay, I'm just going to skate by.

So you can imagine I'm not very smart.

I don't have any friends.

It was like just the biggest loser type of thing.

I wasn't good at tests, and I didn't see the point in memorizing stuff that wouldn't help in real life.

Even though I could do it, I didn't want to.

But I knew high school wouldn't define me.

I was really good at art.

I would create my own comic books.

I would create my own characters.

Just doing stuff that maybe all normal kids weren't doing

Putting my time into things that at the time people around me said, okay, you're wasting your time doing this.

You should be studying, things like that…

My teachers would tell me to stop drawing all over the all the tests.

I used to draw all over the Scantrons to the point where they weren’t scannable.

I remember my math teacher told me that I would never amount to anything because I don't put any time into actually studying math or whatnot.

Honestly, those things stuck with me, and I'm glad those things happened because that is the fuel that I use to keep going.

When I was close to finishing high school, I realized I needed to go to college.

I wanted to start fresh, far away.

So, I worked really hard in my junior and senior year and got straight A's.

I got into a college in New York and moved there.

I ended up just crushing it in college.

I transferred to an art school, and I was honestly, humbly speaking, better than most of my professors.

I was self-taught in design, so I mean, to give them some credit, they did help me learn the design principles and whatnot.

But at the end of the day, I was just way faster than them.

And I saw a way to make money doing this.

Honestly the other day, somebody from high school messaged me

(he was probably one of the kids who was actually nice to me)

This is the first time I've heard from him in over ten years

He said, “Hey, man, I saw your podcast. It's crazy like how far you've come from being like that shy, reserved kid in high school to what you're what you're doing now.”

To sum things up, my philosophy is

(this might not be what everybody agrees with)

I'm very for always having a chip on your shoulder and always have an enemy

Not an enemy that you wish harm to, but an enemy that you can continually prove wrong.

And that enemy could be or could be your friend, your parents, your girlfriend, your sister, your brother, whoever.

It could be somebody that's not even related to you,

but some mother*cker that you always want to prove wrong.

And honestly, that works for me.

That keeps me going.

It could be a coworker, it could be your co-founder. It could be anybody.

But always have an enemy.