The Business of "Me": Illuminating the Past to Bring Change to my Future

By Victor Vinziant

The inner workings of a man are intricate and delicate BUT you would not know it by looking at the exterior. Come take a journey with the author as he allows you to journey with him in time to unveil what makes him who he is AND perhaps what makes you YOU.

As he unearths his true self in The Business

• Language: English
• Publisher: SL Elite Publishing
• Release date: Feb 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950289097

Victor Vinziant

Victor Vinziant is 40 years old as of the release of this book and is a disabled veteran with multiple combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an ambitious real estate investor and entrepreneur. He is a two-time Bestselling Author and the host of the Podcast called #Codetalk. He is also motivated to become a public speaker. He is committed to community building and follows a code that captures the spirit of life and personal success is available for all that want it. He is married to his lovely wife Shonnie.

Book preview

1

Me

M e – everything you do starts with ‘you’ and if you’re being introspective and telling your story to the highest level of accountability in first person then you’d be talking about ‘Me’ as in ‘yourself’.

I wrote this idea kind of like a double entendre and a mental riddle. Either way, to solve the riddle, it requires ‘me’ to put the focus on ‘me’ to solve my issues for myself. As I sit here writing these words, it’s September 9 th, 2019 and I’m at work thinking of how to create a path to resolve my problems. The first step for me is distinguishing that which I have control of from that which I can only influence.

What I can always control is how I respond to a certain stimulus. I can always respond with any reaction and make it justifiable but how much emotional capital can I expend before I ruin the path to a solution? Am I willing to sacrifice specific relationships to prove a point? Am I risking my dignity? Or do I really want the opportunity to just be reactionary and intellectually irresponsible? These are my exercises that I take a second to pause and review before communicating my ideas.

I’m in control of myself within a great personal life and all of the things that people can wish for - shy of being rich or wealthy. I have a beautiful wife, two dogs, a nice home in a gated community and a great job. I also own a few investment properties and by the time you read these words, I’ll likely be successfully closing another real estate transaction. On a small scale in middle-class America, I have it all: on a larger mental scale, I have anxiety and uncertainty just like someone that’s focused on making ends meet with less resources.

My moments of anxiousness aren’t rooted in the chaos of people surrounding me. In fact, my friends and family are my greatest peace. My uncertainties mostly reside in never having enough time to accomplish what I need to in order to validate my existence to myself because I don’t want to leave incomplete projects behind. At the same time, I’m not exploring death more than I’m just simply exploring time as a resource.

At 40 years old, I feel that my life has just begun to settle in enough so that life can actually begin for me. After 40 years of living, I feel the pressure to teach and lead more than ever but I have to be able to do that with a list of manageable tasks that I can see through to completion. Jotting these thoughts down have become the necessary therapy I need to bring me back from the brink of implosion at times. There was an intensity that I was feeling as I was writing these words in this scenario that I don’t feel that I’m alone with.

Individually, your projects and concerns may be different than mine but your worries are universal in terms of feeling unaccomplished or incomplete. I think it takes a high degree of self-awareness and vulnerability to be able to bring those concerns into a normalized conversation.

I’ve been to therapy sessions in which I attempted to connect with the therapist and it all seemed so contrived and forced. I felt as though I was just another time slot at the end of a period of a therapist’s workday. I put that feeling on myself more than the therapist though.

Sarcastically speaking - The audacity of a person to commit to the task of mental health and learning the client’s woes and issues for me to just blow it off and make myself unimportant. I said that to say that sometimes we cheapen ourselves to make what we’re going through less important.

If we lessen our identities mentally, it automatically makes our problems less taxing. It also forces us to shut up and suck it up and drive on – also a popular military phrase that means to deal with it. That philosophy is necessary in certain acute situations but the nature of those situations is that they’re infrequent occurrences.

Acute, high stress events are accompanied by a sense of heightened awareness for the required period of time but it isn’t sustainable. There’s only so much ‘driving on’ in all of us before we inevitably collide with an immovable mental object that we either created or ignored.

Going to therapy gave me a small window to the clarity that I needed for that moment in time shortly after my Dad passed away in December 2018. Since his passing, I’ve experienced spells of emotional numbness, confusion, frustration and anger. I’ve also laughed for no reason at the thought of my Dad and his jokes only to follow the smiles up with tears for the conversations I needed to have with him at this point of my life that he’s no longer present for.

There are a lot of things that I wanted to gain more insight on from him as a man being raised in the era in which he was raised. As a ‘Generation X’ black man in America, there’s an unwritten philosophy of accountability that I’m part of by default. My generation is invested in correcting and understanding what the previous generation was unable to.

I feel a certain obligation to ensure that the word ‘legacy’ extends beyond how many children will be conceived and raised. I’m aligned with the idea that my generation is invested in destroying falsely assigned values for ‘living through an era’ as if that’s enough for clout and credibility. My generation is socially invested and vocal about doing something to set our legacies on a path that creates positive imagery and reference points for those after us.

That’s not to say that the previous generation wasn’t invested in doing the same more than it is about me speaking for my own equity within my generation of young people. Not everyone that looks like me is FOR people LIKE me. Part of me being able to uphold my obligation of pushing us forward is to be able to engage and understand the representatives of my parent’s generation.

Unlike myself, my Dad wasn’t a man of many words and was born in an era of even less emotions. I needed something intangible from him that he wasn’t likely able to provide even if he were alive today. I didn’t need advice or mentorship as a man; for I had already surpassed him in quite a few areas simply based on access to technology.

His era of youth was rooted in a different type of survival that didn’t afford him the access to certain information and resources that I currently am enjoying. I’m not saying that to say that I was in competition with him in any way, shape or form; I’m saying that to say that I needed something ‘specific’ from him and living or dead, I knew he wouldn’t have been able to provide it.

I don’t