As I get older, I try to do the world around me some good and pass on the lessons I’ve learned in case some random souls out there have the ears to hear and a heart to understand.  I believe it’s one of our obligations as human beings to give something back, to make our personal contribution count.  So here goes, take the following as you wish.  Hopefully there’s something in it that you can take with you and make yourself a better person with that gained knowledge.

I steadfastly believe in the adage “if the shoe fits, wear it.” (photo: Hannu Eskelinen)

HUSTLE (like your life depends on it)

The older you get, the more you both understand – and feel – life slipping away at an increasingly rapid rate. When you’re young, it feels like forever as you look ahead to your future. Waiting to hit legal age, waiting to finish college or university, waiting to find that right girl to spend your life with. It all feels so long. However, in retrospect, life goes by in a flash.

If there is one thing that I have learned here by my mid-40’s, it’s that you’ve gotta hustle. Boy, you have got to make your two cents count, for the time is frighteningly short. You have got to bust your ass and make the most out of every opportunity because most key opportunities only come by once in a lifetime. And living with regret is a bitch and half, let me assure you.

What’s Your Driver?

Nowadays, more than ever, we’ve got armchair quarterbacks galore sitting behind their computer screens living a virtual life of nil content. It’s stagnating, the sedentary prison of tech slavery that most of us have succumbed to. A friend of mine once said, ”If you look back at your life and ask yourself what have I been doing most in the past five years, and if your answer is sitting at a computer staring at a screen, you have seriously got to get yourself a life.” Truer words have seldom been spoken. And many of us need to really get busy finding that life of worth, value and meaning… especially in our age of tech gadgets, virtual reality, escapism and social media overload.

The bottom line is that the crucial thing that your self-respect and healthy ego hinges on is getting shit done. Period. You have to make your contribution count. You have to create value in order to feel valuable. You must put one foot in front of the other and make strides toward goal after goal in order to have a life of meaning. There is simply no other way. In order for this to happen, you must hustle and work toward achieving worthwhile goals of quality substance.

If you don’t have a driver in your life – that being an incessant need that pushes you to get shit done – you’ll simply stagnate, and that only leads to death. You cannot simply stagnate and just remain as is. No, stagnation will change you, and moreso, kill you. Like a limb left inside of a cast, you will atrophy mentally and spiritually, leading to another kind of death before your physical time is up. But in order to have a driver, you must first have a passion. Something you burn for. For a man without passion is a sorry individual, indeed. Just take an honest look at your own social circle and you’ll certainly see the drifters, the ones without aim, purpose or passion in their lives, and this point will become crystal clear. ‘Nuff said and point taken, I gander.

The thing that has driven me in my life is something as simple as the fear of mortality. I never asked for this life but now that I’m here, I’m damn well going to make the most of it. My motto is: before you know it, we’ll all be dead, so get busy!

Who the hell are we, anyway? Just another wayfarer on this earthly trek, another generation come and gone, returning to the dust from whence we came? Before that fateful day, I want to get a lot of meaningful things done and make this one and only life worth something, if for no one else, then for myself and the sake of my own self-worth, self-respect and sanity. If they write about me in the annals of world history, great. If not, so fucking what. What counts is that I personally will have had a life worth living, a life full of meaning, brimming with worthwhile content. Then, when one day it will be my time to give up the ghost, I can do so as a fulfilled man that went out and did all he could with the time that was given to him.

My Story

I was born to an immigrant preacher couple in Canada back in 1973. The doctors never gave my mother any hopes of having a child. Her womb was too small, they said. My father, ever the servant of the Lord and a minister to the bitter end, encouraged his wife to trust in God above. I am her only child, the son that was never to be, and so she called me Michael, after the arch angel in Scripture.

I was the outcast since childhood, shunned by other kids simply based on proxy: I was the preacher’s kid. I became the lone wolf, the one that took the path less trodden. I went out into my personal wasteland in order to die and be born again, to reach full manhood, with a clear, personal identity, in order to be something more than the status quo.

Thus, I followed what my heart burned for and became a professional wrestler – the closest thing to a real-life superhero that there is. Of all the vocations on the academic palette, pro wrestler wasn’t in there. Yet, I knew I didn’t want to be anything on the list offered. So pro wrestler it was. And more than that, I became the most accomplished professional wrestler in history to date out of Northern Europe. Yes, longevity-wise and contribution-wise, I arguably even eclipsed the late Tony ”Ludvig Borga” Halme of Finland, who worked briefly in WWE between 1993-1994. I became pro wrestling champion the world over, on several occasions, and I still grapple to this day, currently holding a version the German world heavyweight wrestling championship. I’ve coached up talent in six countries to date and I’ve headlined in many of the countries and promotions that I’ve worked in over the past 25 years of my in-ring career. So yeah, I’ve done pretty well for myself and it’s something I can be happy about.

Due to the immense passion that I’ve put into my personal piece of business, I’ve had an effective driver that has propelled me to the heights that I’ve achieved and enjoyed. The reason I can hold my head up is because I’ve done my due diligence and put the time in, and therefore through true achievement I can lay claim to healthy, strong ego and self-respect. Where others have quit, I’ve persisted and fought even harder. I don’t say this to boast, I say it to validate the point made.

Brother, I have hustled and gone the extra mile time and time again for the things that my heart has burned for. And I continue to hustle, because life still continues.

Get Busy!

Life is short, so get busy! Get off your Playstation and Pornhub and start doing something worthwhile. Don’t care what the naysayers and critics think. Don’t listen to their lack of faith and disparaging remarks as to your aspirations or your seemingly, overtly-ambitious, goals. The dogs will always bark as the caravan passes by, such is the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe your wife or girlfriend will bitch you out, thinking whatever you’ve put your heart to achieve is a waste of time. Maybe your family won’t understand if you jump out of the rat race to pursue your true ambitions. Maybe the world around you will hold you to be a fool. Don’t listen, filter it out. You have to know where you are headed. You and no one else. Don’t look for affirmation from the outside. Brother, you have got to know yourself! Get your shit – and your head – together.

You must add value on a constant, unending basis to your life in order to draw value to yourself in turn. Value always comes to value, be it on a micro or macro level, just as water always seeks its own level. If your contribution is valuable in the eyes of those around you – and I mean valuable in a way that no one can discredit or discount that value – you will be successful before long. Maybe not as fast as you’d like, but yes, you will find success. It’s the law of life, you reap what you sow. In the measure that you meet out it will be met to you, to quote the Good Book. And like Simon Sinek says: ”People don’t buy what you sell, they buy what you believe.”

A History of High Achievement

When you look back on your life, it’s not so much what you want them to say about you when you’re gone, it’s how you feel about the actual value of the life you’ve lived up till now. As long as there is breath in your body, it’s never too late to turn your ship around and start living a life of high value.

How does one live and engage in a life of high value? Simply, by pursuing high achievement.

Plain and simple, and especially as men, our self-worth, self-respect and self-value is directly hingent upon how much we feel that our contribution has been worth to those around us. This is where the self-serving, modern mindset fails in spades, as it cannot bring about value due to its selfish nature, which is all about me, me and more me. You absolutely must make it about others, about your contribution to the world around you, no matter the size of your social circle. The social mirror just works this way. It is what it is. You get what you give in the measure that you give.

Coming from a pro wrestling background myself, one of my biggest inspirations early on was a fairly famous wrestler from the 1980s named Tully Blanchard. Tully was most famous for being one of the original Four Horsemen in the mid-’80s and his name has thus gone down in grappling lore. One of Tully’s most famous promo quotes was: ”Be whatever you wanna be, just be the BEST.” That’s something that has stuck with me all these years. Just choose to be as damn good as you can be at whatever endeavor you apply yourself to. Have that amount of personal pride in your doings. Don’t settle for second best. Be a leader, be an alpha.

Motion creates emotion, it’s an old adage and wisdom at that. You cannot feel good about yourself unless you actually do something to justify feeling good. That’s why drugs and alcohol fail to achieve this end. Dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin simply don’t just get triggered by any random thing. The reward center of the brain is geared to release ”feelgood hormones” only after the justifiable effort has first been put in. Of course, you can sabotage your dopamine levels, for example, through indulging in porn, playing the slot machines or winning at Playstation, but none of those will create fulfillment for you. True fulfillment comes through successful accomplishment, even winning smaller battles along the way, long before the war is ever even over.

The world today is handicapped and plagued by the social sedation brought on by technology and the virtual addictions that come with it. Simply reasoned, people today are less fulfilled than ever, due to the fact that they simply achieve very little outside of the immersion of virtual reality. Watching TV, Netflix, movies and YouTube won’t make you feel fulfilled. Playstation and gamer culture won’t make you feel fulfilled. Engaging with yourself while watching porn won’t make you feel fulfilled. The drought in your spirit won’t go away unless you feed it with meaningful, tangible action. So get busy.

To Sum It Up

In closing, ask yourself one, simple question: ”If I were to die tomorrow, what will have my life have been worth?” The answer should suffice to wake anyone up and start hustling.

Lastly, consider the words of Theodore Roosevelt from his ”Man in the Arena” speech:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Word.