I Hated The Name Mashman
Host: Isaac Mashman · January 19, 2021 · Episode 44 · 20 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited for names and terms. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
listening to Chase the Vision with Isaac B What is going on everybody? Isaac Mashman here and welcome back for another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman the podcast. The show that is all about helping you become a better individual and chase after your vision. Now ultimately I believe that at the center of all success is personal growth and if I'm able to share my experience, share my knowledge with you, you know, things that I've picked up over the past couple of years, over the course of my lifetime and, you know, save you some time off of your own journey and off of your own progress, then I think that that's definitely worth the time of you listening to this right here right now. So guys today I'm going to be telling you a story that I think many of you could probably relate to.
It's not just going to be a story that I throw in there. No, that this is the center of today's podcast because I believe that there is power in the story of other people because you're able to relate to other people if you've been through similar experiences. And for those of you who do not know, I run a public relations firm called a Mashman Ventures. Now I'm not here to promote my business. I'm not here to promote my company. But what I am here is to tell you about the backstory of the name. Now you're like the backstory of the name, right? It's named after you, right?
Mashman Ventures. Exactly my point. Now before I share a little bit more of the story, I would like to ask something of you. And that is that if you get any value from this episode, if you're able to relate to what I share with you, share this episode with a friend.
I'm not running advertisements. I never will run advertisements. The only time that you will ever hear me promote something is either from a very close friend of mine who I believe in very deeply, right, or a friend's company, or it's going to be my own company. And I'm not just saying just a random friend. No, it'd be someone who's like close to me, my inner circle. But I don't want to fill up your ears, take your time advertising some product off of Alibaba. I'm not here to try to sell you the next course that's going to make you a million dollars. The only thing that you have to do is buy my course.
That is not what I'm about. That's not who I am. That's not what I want to be known as. So please, guys, the one way that this show is going to grow outside of my own organic marketing through my personal brands is through you guys.
It's through word of mouth. Now, word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing and that's why it has existed since the beginning of time. Excuse me. guys, back to story time. Now, this is going to be a personal episode and I'm going to share some things that are very, very personal and private that I really don't talk about too often. And this is going to give you guys a lot of insight into why I got on the path and got on the journey that I'm on today of pursuing business, pursuing wealth, pursuing freedom, pursuing a great lifestyle. And I'm not on this journey to show off.
I'm not, know, if I talk about having a Rolls Royce, if I talk about owning a private jet, it's not because I'm trying to impress anybody.
It's because I genuinely enjoy those things. I believe that if there are things out there that I can achieve that are obtainable, that would improve my personal experience on this life, you know, we only have one life to live at the end of the day, then why not pursue those things as long as you're not trampling on the, you know, the heads of other people, the shoulders of other people? I'm not here to obtain wealth and obtain success through immoral or unethical means. You can achieve success very quickly without a lot of thought. But at the same time, are you achieving that level of success in a moral and ethical way?
That's a question that you have to ask yourself. You see a lot of these people do things that you could argue are unethical, but then is their success going to be long lasting?
I believe in the law of attraction, I believe in what you could argue or what you could call and refer to as karma. Karma is something that what you give, you perceive, and I would rather do good and not have to look over my shoulder or question what I'm going to be getting in return from the universe. So, I come from a very humble beginning. I come from a single parent home. I never met my biological father. This is something that if you've listened to any podcasts that I've been on interviews you might have picked up on this, but it's a part of my brand that I don't like talking about because I don't want to be perceived as some pity story.
I'm not trying to share my pain points and have you guys be like, oh, look at Isaac. That is not what I'm trying to do. That's not my intention. But in the journey and in the intention of being authentic, I would need to share this with you. So I come from a single parent home, biological father left and I was like maybe two or three years old. I've never met him before.
I have very little memory of my biological grandparents up until recent times when I reconnected with them after I turned 18 after I turned into an adult and growing up I watched my mom struggle. My grandparents were a huge part of my life I remember going to drop my grandfather off at his carpenter shop rather he was building cabinets for somebody and he was a woodworker and I could say that nobody my family has really ever made over $50,000 a year. That's what I come from. And my mom had the last name of Mashman as well. For her privacy, I'm not going to disclose her first name.
But you know, her last name was Mashman. And so I took after the name of my biological father and I actually was named off of my biological father's best friend. His middle name was Isaac. And so hence Isaac Mashman. My full name is actually Isaac Samuel Allen Mashman. That's a little bit of a mouthful, right? Sometimes I forget I even and have those two middle names.
And so growing up with that last name and without that father figure, I really didn't have this level of pride in who I was. I didn't have this level of pride of having mashmen, right? That's not really an attractive name. You have mash like mashed potatoes, and then you have man. What do you do? It's easy to say, it's easy to spell. But aside from that, you know, it's not something that is unique in a sense of, you know, I would feel pride in it. You know, I think that that kind of stems from not knowing who my father was. I mean, I knew who he was, but I never met him.
So I didn't have any characteristics to put with the name. I had a face to the name, but I didn't really have a voice.
I didn't have anything other than that. And so going through our school with the whole go-to-school, get-good grades mentality, and that's something that I kept up until the time I graduated pretty much. I kind of lost that my senior year when I stopped caring, but I was bullied. I was that chubby kid who was overweight. I was always taller than everybody. I was a big kid. I started elementary school earlier than most kids. My birthday is in August, and so I managed to start school when I was four, and I turned five literally two weeks after, but I was always the young-in of the class.
Other kids would bully me for my last name, and it was something that I was very self-cautious over. Now, looking back, it really wasn't a big deal. When you're going through and experiencing something, it oftentimes seems like the end of the world.
That's where perspective as an adult, perspective as a young adult, and a growing teen is very important. I had an episode on that where I talk about the importance of perspective to where you could take any situation no matter how bad and turn it into something that is not that big of a challenge. But they would make fun of me and say Isaac mashed potatoes. They would say smashmen. They would call me fat. They would call me chubby. They would call me all these different things. And that caused me to become very self cautious of my last name. I was very self cautious of being named Isaac Mashman.
I didn't have a name that I was proud of, I didn't have some father legacy that I needed to live up to. This idea, right? You have some kids who would be like, man, I love my last name because that's my father's last name.
That wasn't what I had. And so that was a very big point of self-cautious. It was just, it was causing a lot of issues and a lot of conflicts. And after elementary school, kids mature a little bit and going into middle school and high school, I was never made fun of for my last name, but I was made fun of my weight. And that caused a lot of, you know, criticism, self-criticism and dark times, right? I went through a very dark time as a teenager, I think, to some certain degree everybody does. But I went through, you know, that emo stage, there's points of suicidal thoughts.
Like, I'm being real here. It was not a great time. And, you know, my mom later remarried when I was seven or eight, and she took on the last name of my stepfather.
And I didn't want to take on the last name, right? And I still never met my biological father. And I kind of just felt numb to mashmen. I felt numb to that. I felt numb to who I was. There were a lot of points throughout my life and through my teen and adolescent years where it was a struggle. It was deep dark times. I might want to go into all of those different things. I'm going to save that from a book. I'm going to save that for another time, another story time. But going into my senior year, and I was getting involved with entrepreneurship, I was getting involved with this idea of pursuing great things, of pursuing success, of pursuing more. I saw that everybody else had names that were common. They had names that were taken.
They had names that were used. It could be like your first name is Kevin and your last name is Brown, right? Kevin Brown, that's a common name. And then I was looking at all these different people building businesses or even securing their names on social media. I was like, man, they don't, they have like Kevin Brown one, two, three, or they have Kevin Brown 74 because they cannot get Kevin Brown. And slowly but surely I started to realize that there was a level of pride in Mashman, not for the person who gave me that last name, but there was a level of pride of what I could build, right?
There's this quote that says, I'm not working for my first name, I'm working for my last. That's where the entire ideology and the thought process behind legacy comes into play.
And so I secured Isaac Mashman on every single social media platform, even on platforms and websites that I was using throughout school, right? Investipedia, there was a simulator game and I was able to get at Isaac Mashman and I thought that was the coolest thing ever because all these other kids were taking handles that weren't their name. It was like they would take pseudonyms or they would take and add numbers to it. And so I was able to secure at Isaac Mashman and it was over this, over the course of a couple of years and over just small different things adding up where I was like, man, you You know, Mashman is so unique. And then I was like, so what these kids used to make fun of me. So what I was a little bit overweight.
So what all these things. Like what do their opinions really matter anyway? And I started to embrace that struggle and embrace that pain and turn it around and turn it into all of the more reason why I would want to build something up for myself. Why I would want to get into better shape. Not for other people, but I was starting to evaluate, I've been doing this over the past couple of days of like, what has really gotten me to work? And it's not trying to impress other people, But it's rather trying to impress myself, not saying that your self-worth is directly correlated to what you do in achievement, but at the same time, if you're not achieving the things that you know you should be achieving, then why do you think you're depressed? Why do you think you're in a low state of self-confidence, self-esteem?
It's because you know you are not living up to your potential. Grant Cardone talked about this before. He talks about depression and his argument point is that depression is caused because you you are not doing the things that you know you should be doing, right? That's to paraphrase it. And so I was like, you know what, what company can I start with? Mashman and it was in 2000 and let's see, 2018, I had the idea of Mashman media, right? I was involved with network marketing, I was involved in all these different businesses. I talk about this often, I talk about how I was trying out a bunch of different business models and I wasn't really having success in anything.
But I was going through trial and error and having different experiences. And I wanted to do a media company because I saw everybody else do a media company.
And so I was like, and then I got Mashman Coaching and then Mashman Lifestyle. And then I started to get the handles for long-term thinking, Mashman Airways and Mashman Hotel, who you could laugh at that. But at the same time in the future, when I start to make some of these things reality, it's like you recognize that the power is in the last name. It's brand equity. Now, love them or hate them, but Donald Trump is a fantastic example to use for this. But I'm not saying that my success is trying to duplicate Trump's success. But you think about his brand. He took the Trump organization that he got from his father and from his grandfather, and then he expanded it into Trump golf courses. Trump hotels, Trump vodka, Trump University, and all these different avenues.
And there is a level of elegance that I would argue prior to the presidency came with the last name of Trump. It's when you get involved with politics that your brand equity kind of gets split into two, right? Because it's a divisive topic. And you don't have to be on the left, you don't have to be on the right, you have to be able to respect what he did for himself when it came to business. And so regardless, I was like, you know what, I could do something very similar to that with Mashman. And then you see Gary Vaynerchuk with VaynerMedia. And so after acting as a sole proprietor and trying to figure out different freelance gigs of social media for MashmanMedia, at the beginning of 2020, that's kind of when I got clarity on my business, it got clarity on what I wanted to do.
And I knew that I didn't want to be put into a box. And so I made the transition, I filed for my LLC and took everything legit and then I launched Mashman Ventures, right? It's not just a media agency. And then I later defined it as a public relations firm. Now I give you guys a very quick glimpse into a lot of my life in a very short amount of time. And I mentioned and brought that story up to say that I am certain that there are levels or there are different things in your individual lives. And every single person's story is a little bit different, but oftentimes there are a lot parallels that can be drawn, a lot of perspectives that can be, you know, compared.
Many of you are probably relating to that story that I just told you. You were bullied when you were younger, or you hated your last name. You were like, man, I freaking hate my last name. It's dumb. It's or you hate your middle name, or you might even hate your first name. And I'm here to challenge you to ask yourself why, right? This could sound cheesy. This could sound cliche. You're like, like, man, you're grown up, you should grow up here.
But that's the issue. People like to brush past traumas and past issues and past regrets or past mistakes under the rug until we just forget about them, but we don't realize what subconscious pain they're causing us in the long run. They're preventing us from stepping into the individuals that we really want to become and we want to act as because it was an issue and a trauma that we never addressed. It was an issue that we never really recognized as something that we should have fixed or we should have conquered and overcome. And I want you to really evaluate if there is anything in your life right now that you are not pursuing because of a low self-cautnet, a low self-esteem because you might be self-cautious, right? You're self-cautious about something. And if you are self-cautious, then I'll be honest with you.
There might be a good reason why you're self-cautious, right? If you're self-cautious about your weight, but you are also overweight, then that's something that you should work on. You should strive to become better. You should strive to improve. But if it's something like your name and your self-cautious about your name, I challenge you to embrace it. You know, if you're self-cautious about your health or self-cautious about the state of your mental wellbeing, address those issues, right? Be humble enough to recognize that you are not perfect, but you are striving to become perfect. you are striving to ultimately live up to your potential. I'd spent so much time trying to define my purpose in life, and then I recognize that it is defined as to live up to my potential. That covers all bases of life.
That covers all areas. And so guys, recognize that that thing that you hated, that is unique about you, is probably the very thing that you can leverage, you can use, and you can benefit from. I don't have to worry about other people securing at Isaac Nashron on social media platforms. New social media comes out. I don't have to worry about going in and securing the handle because nobody else is going to take it. Now down the line, I get more attention and more respect to me and build up my brand. It's like the same people hopping on a platform early to get at Gary V and at Kim Kardashian, for whatever reason.
But I don't have to worry about that right now. I don't have to worry about that for probably another couple of years, maybe another 12 to 18 months.
I don't have to worry about marketing myself because somebody else has Mashman. There's only one other business out there that has, he has Mashman as a last name. And I'm starting to come up on him on Google because of what I'm building with my brand and with my company brands. It's something that, as a kid I never expected and never anticipated to use to my advantage, I wanted to change my last name. And then I came into embracing it. I came into accepting it. I came into starting to use it. And so guys, that's all I have for you today. I hope that you got an ounce of value from this episode.
And I hope that you were able to maybe draw a parallel and take this and lean into it a little bit. Don't be so shut off from your emotions, especially men.
This is something that I've had to really dive into lately because I've recognized that in certain areas of my life, I've really closed myself off from feeling things. And I think that feeling things is actually something that allows you to vibrate on a higher frequency, not just in some crazy law of attraction, guru spiritual BS approach, but no, like the way that you feel determines the way that you act, and then that determines the results that you receive. But that all starts with your thinking. If you think positive, you feel positive, you act positive, you get positive results. So go out, 2021 is going to be a fantastic year.
Don't be so caught up in everything that's going on because the people who said that 2021 is going to be a clean slate. No, they're going to be getting the same results they did last year and the year before that and the year before that.
But for you who is going into the new year, and if you're listening to this halfway throughout the year, use this as a point of reflection and use this as a time to stop, pause and think about different things in your life, different areas of your life that you can improve. Maybe that goal that you set, you haven't checked in on for six months. Use this as a time to check in with your goals, right? A lot of people set goals and instead of being consistent with their goals, they write them one time and they never look at them again. You have to continuously look at your goal, remind yourself of your goal, and then take action to achieve your goal. Well, with that being said, much love. Be able to look out for more episodes.
Make sure you follow me at Isaac Mashman on all social media platforms and I cannot wait to continue providing you value and taking you on this amazing journey that is known as life, always chase after your vision and if you would want to work with me and let's say you're building up a personal brand and you're interested in learning more about what I can do to help you and working with my company, Mashman Ventures, shoot me a message at Isaac Mashman and we will make sure to get you on the right path. Much love.