 All right guys, we are here in Tampa 2014 for the 21 Convention and we have an amazing speaker for you. This guy is somebody who is a veteran of the 21 Convention, but also a part of the 21 Convention documentary series. He's an architect, a philosopher, somebody who is really a foundation of masculinity and the philosophy of masculinity. Let's welcome on stage Socrates. Hey, thank you man. Call me Socrates. I'm partial to that opening. It reminds me of one of my favorite American novels from Herman Milville, Moby Dick. And it relates to me in a number of ways in my own personal progression throughout life is that I have a sincere connection towards both central characters of that novel. Two individuals that are highly damaged and highly flawed, terribly passionate about what they do and they believe, thrown amongst nature and the universe. It also studies their individual obsessions and reflecting upon that and projecting into that novel and seeing myself reflected back in that. I reflect on a regular basis, my own obsessions. One of which is my historical past, my involvement in my life and my place in life in the universe. And it has been a slow one. That being said, it has taken me 28 years of an adult life to get to this spot today. That is a very slow progression. One of the things that hinders that progression was my early education. I was taught to believe certain things. I developed limiting beliefs. One of which was that I was told, and I still have this in writing today, that I would not amount to much because I was a dreamer. That carried with me through 28 years of an adult's life. It has taken me 28 years to go through that process to realize that that's not necessarily a bad thing to be a dreamer. But if you're going to dream, you need to execute. And the reality is this, in the absence of strenuous change, nothing occurs. People don't change. You're going to need to act. And the Irish have a great proverb that is, again, another one that I found inspirational and guiding when I faced moments of fear, anxiety, uncertainty. And the proverb goes like this. You'll never be able to plow a field by turning it over in your mind. And there's two points to this. One, the obvious. You need to act. The second one's embedded in like a Trojan horse. And that is the reality of this. If you want the benefits of the plowed field, what comes from that, you have to be willing to put in hard work to achieve it. And you have to act on that. And that is something that we all have to face when we look to capitalize on our dreams. I have a friend that actually said something in passing. And I thought it was rather remarkable. He said, it would be interesting if we treated average like a terminal disease. Average is at risk with everything we do, all right? As soon as you exceed average in thinking, in your research, in your study, in your approach to life, in the decisions you make, in the thoughts you have, and in particular, the people you surround yourself with, the qualitative nature of your life will dramatically change. You have that opportunity right now. You are surrounded with people that have like minds, like ideas, and are focusing on similar type things and directions. That is an amazing resource to have to be able to capitalize on. It has been particularly true of my experience with the 21 convention. I actually predate the 21 convention with Anthony. I'm one of the few people that can actually stand here and bear witness to what's occurred. And so my history with this goes back to when I actually realized I wasn't failing, I was failing, I wasn't happy with the nature of my life, and I wanted it to affect a change. How best to do that? I could have capitalized on certain ideas. I could have focused on certain things. Instead, I decided to make room for something, to release myself to the currents of what would become my life. I actually sat down and said, I'm going to make room for something rather than trying to force an issue. And what I realized is going back in my life, looking at the moments of my success, I tried to recreate those environments. Not the people, but the environments, or the situation, but the environment. And part of that was surrounding myself with like minded people committed to a like minded cause. Having done that, I joined a number of communities and found a group of men that were willing to work on themselves. As we progressed, we started making more and more relationships. We were a slew of us from a variety of different backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, age backgrounds and maturity levels. It was rather dramatic. One of them was a young punk, a young 17 year old punk. I'm in my late 30s. Try to relate to that as a peer group. I found it rather difficult. That was something I had as a limiting belief. He progressed, I did too, and what we found as we progressed together independently, that there was a lot of commonalities. We had similar interests. Part of that was we actually read similar type books, relayed that information and shared things that I didn't necessarily have time to do myself. One of which was a 1930s book written by Napoleon Hill called Think and Grow Rich. Here we are in 2000, reading a book written and published in 1930s. It was old, antiquated. The language was antiquated. You really felt like you're dusting off some piece of ancient history, because in this essence you were, but there were truths to be found in that. Part of it was this element of a mastermind, of the concept of three people coming together with a like purpose that we're going to hold each other accountable. Part of that process is that you come up with more ideas, more insights than if you had them on yourself or with just one other person. We started formulating small groups, tried testing this stuff out. That was one of the things I really liked about this organization, was we tested things out. We documented these things. We wrote journals and then we put them online. And we put them online for others to read and to comment. Many instances it was a very brutal process. It was a very humbling process. If you put yourself out there, you're exposing yourself. You're opening yourself up to things you are already insecure about. But what we developed was a culture of men. We developed a culture of sharing and supporting each other. And that I find immense richness to this. As this progressed, we started doing it more and more. More and more people became interested. Eventually, we ended up having it at somebody's house. And at one point, my house held 25 people for three and a half hours sitting down and talking with one or two keynote speakers giving a presentation and everybody discussing it. It felt like an oversized Oprah book club. It was rather remarkable. Somewhere along the line, we just knew we couldn't do this. We wanted to be a little more professional about it. We couldn't find people that had a facility to do it. So we used the library. We actually went to the conference rooms and actually utilized the conference room. In some cases, there are rooms as large as this. The problem was the library didn't decide to charge us for it. I figured at that point it wasn't going to happen. I thought it was a challenge getting guys to show up at the library to actually commit to doing this stuff on a regular basis. But I was kind of surprised. They did.