 Alright 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. 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. There 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. And 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. And 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. And 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. And so we started formulating small groups, tried testing this stuff out. And 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 found 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 then 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 a 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 gonna happen. It was, 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. But then when we actually had to pay a fee for this, I thought no way in hell is this gonna happen. And interestingly enough, we did. There were three of them. And remember that young punk I told you about earlier? He came up with this great idea. Sounds wonderful. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna do this, but we're gonna do it in even a better facility. We're gonna rent a hotel room. We're gonna have a conference. And instead of relying on the people that are in our community, we're actually gonna open this up to actually have people fly in because I know there are more people outside of Orlando, our area where we live, that wants this information would like to be part of it and could join us rather than relying on the small geographical location of a catchment pool of what we had available. I had other things going on in my life. I wasn't thinking that clearly. I also wasn't that committed to it. I had my own things to do. But what resonated me was, you're out of your fucking mind. Are you shitting me? You're gonna spend how much money of your personal savings to be able to put this sort of show on. And with the expectation, our people are actually gonna deliver. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know how he was gonna do it. These are gonna be two key things. Everyone looks at it. I miss the most important thing on the wall. Here you have a 17-year-old teaching a 30-plus-year-old professional something about life and getting something done. He had purpose. And when you know your purpose, you'll figure out what and how. And what and how is less important than your purpose, your why of what you are doing. He had that. I didn't. In 2007, he puts on his first dog and pony show, the first 21 convention. And it was a success. It was an obvious success. We're here today. I was amazed. He continued it the next year. And we're like, rock on. He does it again this time in 2010. Now most people try to travel the world. I know I would have liked to travel more than I have. Okay, and that's just me buying an airline ticket and going someplace I wanna see. What does he do? He decides to take this road show overseas. He goes to Europe and puts on two conferences in countries he's never been in, has limited connections, but he does something else. He just doesn't have a purpose. He utilizes global connections. It's gonna be something I'll talk about in a bit, but he leverages those connections. Okay, the what and how. He figures that out. And I can imagine the fear that's going through him. I know what I faced, when I faced any of a number of my projects, but we've talked at length on some of these others and he shared that. But he took those fears and he ignored them. He paid attention, but he figured out a what and how tax will respond to his fears and he figured it out. Not only did he figure it out, he actually acted on it. I'm amazed. Thoroughly perplexed. Just stunned. And then you have to sit back and thoroughly recognize the individual and his achievements. They were profound. Anthony being Anthony, he was already kind of known being stubborn, bullheaded. You just sort of made room for him because you weren't gonna resist it. I've talked about that, I think in the documentary. 2012, he takes it global. Not just overseas, global. Three separate continents, one year, 17 freaking time zones. Who the hell does that? Who does that? That still boggles my mind that he was able to achieve that. He has a purpose and the purpose wasn't just putting on the conventions or the presentations or the million plus hours of video content he's uploaded for free on YouTube. His purpose is self-education. His purpose is to develop a culture of men to help support him to better himself and better each and every one of us in a process. That is stunning. That is something our cultures collectively have let go of and we've lost. And here you have a very young man achieving that. Not old men. Not old men that are afraid. And I'm here to sit down and stand in front of you and tell you I would have been terrified by it and I would not have done what he's done. Take that lesson today into your hearts. You are in a special place. Capitalize on it. Find your purpose. Look then to solve the what and the how. As we go forward, I want to recognize that the 21 convention has done a number of things and the next six points are going to kind of keynote on some of these elements that the 21 conventions does either explicitly or inexplicitly. And the first and primary one and something Anthony's leveraged very successfully is we've won the history's lottery ticket. There is no better time to live than right freaking now. We have access to information, research, dialogue, communities, other people globally at our fingertips. The internet is an amazing device and tool to learn, to harvest information, to share, to put information out, and to get feedback and responses. The Gutenberg Press was one of the most famous human inventions around. It is a device made for printing that had the all the power of a tweet and it launched a human revolution in thought and ideas. It changed nations. It changed societies and it changed our world view. What we have before us is vastly more powerful and you're leveraging it. All right. You need to be able to have a direction in your life. You need to know which way you're going and you need to pursue that. That's gonna be part of the connection. You have to have a degree of knowledge, self-awareness, and be willing to share that. And then you need to actually leverage your global connections. Right now, I don't think half of you know each other. It would be a shame if you lost out on that opportunity not to make the connection, especially in this economic era of service industries. All right. It's not enough just to get an education. You have to then have practical experience to compound that. That's gonna take time. The other element which education systems to do a pretty poor job at is developing transferable skills, okay? The last thing that they absolutely don't do is actually make a global network of connections. If you're gonna be successful in a global environment, you're gonna need to be able to leverage the education, experience, and then you're gonna have to leverage the ability to make the connections to make something function. Anthony did all those things when he went international and went global. The other element is education is a terribly personal responsibility. Our education systems are horrible. And if there's no greater testament to it than after 12 years of an American education, you're not worth anything more than minimum wage. As a matter of fact, we have to have a minimum wage to force employers to pay you that little. The reality is if your education was better than it was and it was as good as they say it is, your employers would be competing to outbid you for you. They're not, they're not going to. Employers have no problem throwing money at resources they value. The average high school graduate isn't worth any more than what they get with minimum wage. And there's a reason for it, all right? The skills you're being taught are not leverageable in the societies in which we live in. You need to have transferable skills and one of the most primary will be social skills, your social interaction and connections with people. How to be able to team build, how to be able to manage those relationships and how to be able to maintain those relationships. When we talk about the ladder of success, one of the first things you have to understand is avoid the fucking pitfalls. We know what they are. Don't make the known mistakes. Avoid those things. Be smart. And it's not just a ladder of success. It's a ladder for your success. Know your passion. Find out what industry or what area it lies. And then find out what are the common mistakes people have made? Make a map. Make notes to yourself. Edit it and make sure you don't replicate those mistakes. Removing the negatives are gonna be improve the quality of your life faster than any skills you add to them. And that is the first lesson of management. Remove the negative. Avoid the known pitfalls. The other is the human notion that you're not gonna succeed when somebody pulls you up the ladder of success. It helps for a rung or two, but you're not gonna climb the ladder of success by being carried to the top. You're gonna have to utilize your own initiative effectively and self-start. You're gonna have to self-educate as part of that process. And that is an essential component of it. Learn what you can learn. Research the material. Avoid the known mistakes. And then dedicate yourself for self-education. You guys are all doing that right now. This is for the TV audience, the people that are not here. They're missing out on this connection as well. Capitalize on that. Use a personal accountability for your life. You have to be personally accountable. Another major component of the 21 convention is this, is that most men live lives of quiet desperation. We're desperately fearful of the things we want, of stepping outside of conformity. And there is a tyranny of conformity. It will hold you down. People who don't want to be bothered. People who don't want to see you try and succeed because it'll show in their face what they weren't capable of. It will hold you back. If you allow that to happen, you're submitting yourself to that tyranny. And for men to be free, you have to free yourself from those shackles and those restraints. You need to attend the personal details to fulfill your personal objectives. No one's gonna take care of your business quite the way you'll take care of it. You have to be accountable. You have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to reach for your dreams. Find out what those are and pursue them. I can guarantee you, Anthony is scared shitless every time coming up to one of these conventions. I know I'm worried about these presentations, but you have to turn into your fears. And there's something funny that happens when you actually prepare yourself. You work towards it. You dedicate yourself to it. You get excited about it. You're living a life in combination of fear and excitement all at the same time. And you know what? You never feel more alive. And that is remarkable. Embrace the fear. Couple it with work. Couple it with dedication. Couple it with your purpose. And then you'll kinda enjoy it. It's kinda weird, but you'll enjoy it. The other is the ease of which people can complain. There's one thing to complain to release steam, to release tension. That's a human nature. But it becomes another issue when people use it as a crutch. And that crutch is called mediocracy, okay? It's comfortable. And the weak use mediocracy as a handrail to support themselves. They have to have it, right? Be very careful in letting yourself go too long in the nature of complaining between releasing tension and it being a narrative in which you are propagating. When it transcends into a narrative, you're gonna be holding yourself back. You're weighting yourself down unnecessarily. If we are gonna have passions and we're gonna execute on those passions, you're gonna need to get up and rise and grind. You're gonna have to find your motivation. You're gonna have to find your purpose. You're gonna have to build a degree of momentum and a head of steam through action, through course of work to get it accomplished. You're gonna have to understand how that progresses forward. What's the nature of these things? How is that achieved? Those are the what's in the house. You'll need to also research. You can figure that out as you go along. But you need to get up and you need to go after your dreams. Okay, one of the last ones, and this is one of my particular favorite because it really does describe Anthony, is he's absolutely fucking unreasonable. That's an admirable thing. It is an absolutely admirable thing. He's not willing to stay with average. He's not willing to set the status quo. He's not willing to let other people say, like I did, you can't do this. He's not willing to listen to his fears in his head saying don't do this. That's unreasonable. We should all strive for that. It is a remarkable, remarkable situation when you can let go of that. And move forward. I wanna talk about the mediocrity as the default state of life. That's where we normally are. That's natural. So when you kinda get down on yourself and you sit down and say I'm doing, I'm pulling off a little bit, understand that, recognize it for what it is. But don't tolerate it for long. If you feel lazy, that's okay. Move on from that. Allow yourself to have that time off because without it that, you're probably gonna need it from time to time. Degree of ego depletion, just the degree of emotional drain, everything else. You need to take a break. But then pick it up and move on. The other is surround yourself on a regular basis with like people. There's a phrase about steel sharpening steel. And it is true. The quality of the people you surround yourself with will reflect highly in the quality of your life. And unreasonable people don't accept low quality individuals in their lives. They know it'll hold them down. Overall, take these things forward. I'm surrounded in a room with people who are unreasonable, who are acting on their dreams. I see a room full of dreamers. I see people who have already committed heavily to pursuing the life that they want. And you're surrounded with like-minded individuals. Capitalize that on the next three days. And welcome to the 21 convention. All right, give it up for Socrates, man. Awesome stuff.