Who am I?  It’s certainly not an easy question to answer.  It’s a question that Admiral James Stockdale asked in a 1992 vice presidential debate while running on a ticket alongside billionaire business magnate and entrepreneur Ross Perot, and it’s a question that Jean Valjean asks in the great musical Les Miserables, based on the 1862 Victor Hugo novel of the same name.  It’s a question that is important for each and every one of us to ask ourselves, and it’s the question that I am attempting to answer here.  So, who am I?

I am a recovering workaholic who has gone from constantly being exhausted and beaten down by life to having hope, optimism, and excitement about the future.  I am a coach who provides premium programs to help adults change careers and to help teens figure out what they want to do after high school.  I help adults unlock their dream careers, and I help teens plan their futures and get into the college they desire or successfully pursue other opportunities.  I want to help as many people as possible find the fulfilling careers of their dreams, since work occupies a large portion of our lives and a lot of our time.  I want to help as many people as possible find careers that bring them joy, fulfillment, and excitement, and I want to rethink careers, what we prioritize with them, how we view them, and how they fit into our lives.  I have experience working with adults who are hoping to change careers through the meetup group I host in Houston, and I have a lot of experience helping high school students with college applications and other aspects of planning their futures from my previous job as a high school history and geography teacher. I am the creator and host of a history podcast called the Places and Profiles Podcast, which is a podcast that explores the issues, stories, and people that have shaped places into what they are today, and I am the founder and director of Texas Challengers Quiz Tournaments (TCQT), which is an organization that provides fun, affordable, and accessible opportunities for middle school and high school students to compete in Quiz Bowl tournaments in the Houston area and across the state of Texas.  I am a world traveler, unconventional thinker, mentor, and entrepreneur.  I am someone who wants to live a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life while maximizing my own contributions to the flourishing and success of others, and as such, I hope to provide inspiration, encouragement, and motivation for those who are struggling with finding their purpose and path through life.  I hope to help others develop the courage and bravery to pursue their own passions, interests, and dreams and to do what they love and will make them happy.  I am someone who has struggled with being a workaholic and being exhausted and beaten down by life, and I am someone who is seeking to improve his own life in any number of ways.

I enjoy traveling the world, and I have been to 50 states, 26 countries, and 6 continents, as I have a burning desire to increase those numbers and travel a whole lot more in the years ahead.  I am someone who feels a fierce sense of loyalty to family, friends, and the people I care about and who is willing to do just about anything to ensure their happiness and success.  I am someone who believes in the value of connections and relationships, and as such, I work very hard to maintain friendships and relationships with a large number of people from several different parts of my life.  I am a former high school teacher who quit after working 85+ hours per week, having my job consume the entirety of my life, and essentially doing the jobs of multiple people everyday.  However, I continue to try to be a mentor to many of the students with whom I worked during my years as a teacher and who I still hope to help become happy, fulfilled, and successful adults.  I am someone who has a wide variety of interests, ranging from sports to classic movies to aviation to travel to entrepreneurship to podcasting to country music to history to geography to politics, and I am someone who has had a deep interest in airline route networks for almost 20 years.  I am an introvert who enjoys getting out on the open road and exploring Texas and the rest of the United States, and I enjoy landing in a completely different part of the world and exploring the cultures, history, and geography that make each of those places what they are today.  I am someone who has been scammed in Thailand, had diarrhea in the Peruvian Amazon, gotten food poisoning in Costa Rica, and suffered from bad allergies in New Zealand and the South of France.  I have enjoyed staying in a bungalow in the Amazon and gazing up at the unpolluted night sky of the Moroccan Sahara less than six months apart, and I have explored the natural beauty of the Thai islands of Ko Lipe and Ko Phi Phi and the awe-inspiring aspects of the Louvre, St. Peter’s Basilica, the pyramids of Teotihuacan, the Sydney Opera House, the Great Ocean Road, and the fjords of Flam, Norway and Milford Sound, New Zealand.

I am someone who believes that there is great value in knowing a lot of information, and as such, I can recite all kinds of information about geography, politics, sports, history, and airports.  I enjoy watching classic movies and college football, and I love learning about different parts of the US and the world and going down Wikipedia rabbit holes related to all sorts of obscure and esoteric topics.  I have been inspired by Chris Guillebeau’s great books The Art of Non-Confirmity and Born for This, and I have been influenced by countless entrepreneurs ranging from Gary Vaynerchuk to John Lee Dumas to Steve Jobs to James Altucher to Juan Trippe to Richard Branson to Sam Walton, as each one of them provides hope and inspiration for me as I pursue my own entrepreneurial goals and endeavors.

It could certainly be said that I am many things, but above all else, I am someone who is taking control of his own life and who is trying to help others do the same.  Ever since I was a little kid, I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to appease others, whether that be parents, relatives, teachers, bosses, or what I perceived to be society’s expectations.  No longer!  I am trying to, if I may modify the title of James Altucher’s great book, choose myself, and I hope to help all of you choose yourselves too.  I am trying to give everyone the courage to chase their dreams and find happiness and fulfillment in their own lives, and I am trying to achieve greatness in my own life and encourage all of you to decide to pursue greatness in your lives as well, with my definition of greatness being based around having the courage to do what is in your heart, following your passions and desires, showing kindness towards others while trying to help those we care about, being grateful for the truly wonderful things we have in our lives, and doing what is truly best for ourselves and for others, while ignoring the negativity and skepticism of our detractors.  My experiences as a teacher, world traveler, unconventional thinker, mentor, and aspiring entrepreneur have taught me that each of us is a unique individual with our own set of gifts, talents, passions, and interests, and I hope to provide each and every one of you with the inspiration, courage, and tools to follow your heart and pursue your own passions and interests.

The great classical liberal and libertarian thinker Albert Jay Nock used to say that there was only one way to improve society: by presenting it with one improved unit – yourself.  I hope to continue to improve myself, while helping all of you improve in your own lives as well.  I have been told that I am uniquely talented at making connections, building relationships, listening to what other people have to say, and providing people with a sense of community and belonging.  The great Think Different campaign that was launched by Apple in 1997 features an ad that says, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”  While I am definitely not arrogant enough to think that I can reach the same level of influence as the world-historic giants shown in that ad, which features black-and-white images of people ranging from Albert Einstein to Bob Dylan to Thomas Edison to Muhammad Ali to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to Pablo Picasso, I do think that I can make a positive impact on the lives of countless numbers of people as a coach, mentor, guide, and inspiration who helps other people unlock the fulfilling careers of their dreams.  Gary Vaynerchuk talks about how we each have “one life” and that we should live it with “no regrets” (profanity is used frequently in both Gary Vaynerchuk links).  Steve Jobs, in his great 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, says, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, and most important[ly], have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.  They somehow already know what you truly want to become.  Everything else is secondary.”  I am now taking the initiative to live my own life, not someone else’s, chase my own dreams, and help as many other people pursue their own lives and dreams as possible.  I hope to help people develop the self-confidence, motivation, drive, passion, skills, and fearlessness to find and fulfill “the stuff that dreams are made of” in a very real and life-changing way, not in the sarcastic and mocking way that Humphrey Bogart’s character, Sam Spade, says that line in The Maltese Falcon.  It’s like Tim Robbins says in the great 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption while portraying the fictional Andy Dufresne, “I guess it comes down to a simple choice really: get busy living or get busy dying.”  I am choosing to get busy living, and I am going to do what I can to encourage all of you to do the same.

Thank you for visiting adamcamac.com.  I encourage you to schedule a chat with me at https://adamcamac.com/chat/.  I look forward to meeting you and chatting with you soon!  Thank you!