I Hated The Name Mashman

0:07

[You're] listening to Chase the Vision with Isaac [Mashman]. 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, things that I've picked up over the past couple of years, over the course of my lifetime, and 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.

1:00

It's not just going to be a story that I throw in there. No, this is the center of today's podcast, because I believe that there is power in the stories of other people, because you're able to relate to other people if you've been through similar experiences. For those of you who do not know, I run a public relations firm called Mashman Ventures. Now, I'm not here to promote my business. I'm not here to promote my company. But what I am here for is to tell you about the backstory of the name. Now you're like, the backstory of the name? It's named after you, 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.

1:46

I'm not running advertisements. I never will run advertisements. The only time that you will ever hear me promote something, it's either going to be from a very close friend of mine who I believe in very deeply, or a friend's company, or it's going to be my own company. I'm not just saying just a random friend. No, it'd be someone who's close to me, in my inner circle. But I don't want to fill up your ears and 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, where 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.

2:31

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. 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. I'm not on this journey to show off.

You 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.

3:13

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 in this life, and 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 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?

4:01

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 where what you give, you receive, 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. If you've listened to any podcast interviews that I've been on, 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 with the intention of being authentic, I need to share this with you. So I come from a single parent home. My biological father left when I was maybe two or three years old. I've never met him.

4:57

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.

5:08

My grandparents were a huge part of my life. I remember going to drop my grandfather off at his carpenter shop where he was building cabinets for somebody. He was a woodworker.

5:24

My mom had the last name of Mashman as well. For her privacy, I'm not going to disclose her first name, but her last name was Mashman. So I took after the name of my biological father, and I actually was named after my biological father's best friend. His middle name was Isaac. So hence, Isaac Mashman. My full name is actually Isaac Samuel Allen Mashman. That's a little bit of a mouthful. Sometimes I forget I even have those two middle names.

5:52

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 in having Mashman. 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, it's not something that is unique in the sense that I would feel pride in it. I think that that kind of stems from not knowing who my father was. 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.

6:29

I didn't have anything other than that. So going through school with the whole go-to-school, get-good-grades mentality, and that's something that I kept up pretty much until the time I graduated. I kind of lost that my senior year when I stopped caring.

7:14

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.

9:07

Going into my senior year, 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.

9:22

They had names that were used. It could be like your first name is Kevin and your last name is Brown. Kevin Brown, that's a common name. Then I was looking at all these different people building businesses or even securing their names on social media, and I was like, man, they have like Kevin Brown 123, or they have Kevin Brown 74, because they cannot get Kevin Brown. 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 in what I could build. 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.

10:04

I secured Isaac Mashman on every single social media platform, even on platforms and websites that I was using throughout school. Investopedia had a simulator game, and I was able to get @IsaacMashman, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever, because all these other kids were taking handles that weren't their name. They would take pseudonyms, or they would take their name and add numbers to it. So I was able to secure @IsaacMashman, and it was over the course of a couple of years, and over just small different things adding up, where I was like, man, you know, Mashman is so unique.

10:44

I started to embrace that struggle and embrace that pain and turn it around and turn it into all 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. I was starting to evaluate, and I've been doing this over the past couple of days, what has really gotten me to work? It's not trying to impress other people, but rather trying to impress myself. I'm 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?

11:22

It's because you know you are not living up to your potential. Grant Cardone has talked about this before. He talks about depression, and his argument is that depression is caused because you are not doing the things that you know you should be doing. That's to paraphrase it. So I was like, you know what, what company can I start with Mashman? It was in, let's see, 2018 that I had the idea of Mashman Media. 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. I wanted to do a media company because I saw everybody else do a media company.

12:03

Then I got Mashman Coaching and then Mashman Lifestyle. Then I started to get the handles for long-term thinking, Mashman Airways and Mashman Hotel, and you could laugh at that. But at the same time, in the future, when I start to make some of these things reality, you recognize that the power is in the last name. It's brand equity.

13:03

Regardless, I was like, you know what, I could do something very similar to that with Mashman. Then you see Gary Vaynerchuk with VaynerMedia. So after acting as a sole proprietor and trying to figure out different freelance social media gigs for Mashman Media, at the beginning of 2020, that's kind of when I got clarity on my business. I got clarity on what I wanted to do.

13:23

I knew that I didn't want to be put into a box. So I made the transition. I filed for my LLC and took everything legit, and then I launched Mashman Ventures. It's not just a media agency, and I later defined it as a public relations firm. Now, I gave you guys a very quick glimpse into a lot of my life in a very short amount of time. 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. Every single person's story is a little bit different, but oftentimes there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn, a lot of perspectives that can be 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. Or you hate your middle name, or you might even hate your first name. I'm here to challenge you to ask yourself why. This could sound cheesy. This could sound cliche. You're like, man, you're grown up, you should grow up here.

14:26

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 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. I want you to really evaluate if there is anything in your life right now that you are not pursuing because of low self-confidence, low self-esteem, because you might be self-conscious. You're self-conscious about something. If you are self-conscious, then I'll be honest with you.

15:19

There might be a good reason why you're self-conscious. If you're self-conscious about your weight, and 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 you're self-conscious about your name, I challenge you to embrace it. If you're self-conscious about your health, or self-conscious about the state of your mental wellbeing, address those issues. 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.

16:00

That covers all areas. 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 @IsaacMashman on social media platforms. When 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, [as] I get more attention and more respect and build up my brand, it's going to be like the same people hopping on a platform early to get @GaryV and @KimKardashian, 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.

16:44

I don't have to worry about marketing myself because somebody else has Mashman. There's only one other [person] out there who has Mashman as a last name, and I'm starting to come up above 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 using to my advantage. I wanted to change my last name. Then I came into embracing it. I came into accepting it. I came into starting to use it. So guys, that's all I have for you today. I hope that you got an ounce of value from this episode.

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.

17:29

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. I think that feeling things is actually something that allows you to vibrate on a higher frequency, not in some crazy law of attraction, guru, spiritual BS approach, but no, 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.

18:20

But for you who are going into the new year, or if you're listening to this halfway through 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. 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 [sure] to look out for more episodes.

19:00

Make sure you follow me at Isaac Mashman on all social media platforms. 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.