Hey Greenblasters!

For my “Story First’ workshop next week, I want the attendees to have something for “further reading” after the event.

Usually, I send them my book.

But, my “3-Act Origin Story”, which I’m teaching in the workshop, and which I’ve shared with you all before (under the name “Founder Story”), isn’t in my book.

And I don’t have time to write a new one in 5 days, even with A.I.

(Sorry ChatGPT, I’m not using you to write for me. Ever. Go f*ck yourself.)

(Respectfully. Please help me with other things though!)

So, I decided to write what I’m calling:

A “mini-memoir”.

What’s the point, Will, you loser?

Jeez. So hurtful you guys.

The POINT is, this is a long version your story. From here, you can condense it down into:

• 3 minutes, spoken, like at the beginning of a workshop

• 30 seconds, spoken, like introducing yourself to someone on Zoom

• 15 seconds, spoken, like at a networking event

• Or 1 sentence, written, like as the tagline on your LinkedIn profile

This helps people who meet you or sees you online understand:

1. Who you are

2. Why you do what you do

3. What made you this way

4. And why they should trust you

But more than that:

This 3-Act Origin Story can be used as a strategy to inform the decisions you make as a speaker, coach, creator, or entrepreneur.

Your story is what shapes you.

When we get disconnected from our story, we’re disconnected from what we truly care about, and we take on jobs, clients, or projects that don’t align well.

Writing and formalizing our story, as a “personal brand asset” but also a strategic reference point, helps keep you on track.

(I’ll write more about this in another Greenblast.)

Ok, enough business-y chit chat:

Below is my “mini-memoir,” an extended version of my 3-Act Origin Story. It’s long, but I think you’ll like it.

I hope it a) helps you understand me more deeply, and b) inspires you to start to write your own.

My Origin Story

When I was 6 years old, the now-unthinkable happened:

The Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series. 

Joe Carter hit a 3-run, come-from-behind, walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth to win it all for the Jays at home, in the legendary Skydome - since corporatized by the Canadian telecom giant to become the “Rogers Centre” - in front of 50,000 screaming fans in downtown Toronto.

I wasn’t there. But my dad was.

All I remember from that day was my father coming up the broken concrete walkway in the front of our little brick house on Bellwoods Ave, near Trinity Bellwoods Park on Queen St, screaming his head off: We won! We wonnnnnnn!!!

Me and my little brother Luke (barely 4) were cheering too, waiting for him on the front porch. I don’t think we knew why, but we knew something exciting had happened, and that our dad was happy.

A year later, my professional career would begin. Eventually spanning 26 years, multiple countries, and hundreds of thousands of dollars before I turned 18, at age seven I became an actor.

The day my acting career truly began, I was playing with my little brother and some family friends after school. They were the weird kids who weren’t allowed to watch TV, but as a result had active imaginations. We were improvising a kind of dramatic scene in which my brother and I were the heroes, and the other kids were the bullies. I remember this gem of a line very clearly from one of the “bullies”; as I stooped to pick up a rock, he said in a sneering voice: “What, you gathering minerals for your mineral water?” Genius. This kid should’ve been the actor.

My dad came by to pick us up in our beaver-panelled beige station wagon, unlocked the gate at the end of the walkway, and like the year before (although much more calmly) seemed extremely happy as he walked toward me. His smile getting bigger, he said:

“You got the part!"

I couldn’t believe it. After my first ever audition (plus 3 callbacks) I had booked a lead role in an American feature film, starring alongside Oscar Winner Anne Bancroft. I only had the opportunity because my father and my older sister Natasha were actors, and were both represented by the same agent. She’d jokingly sent the script to my parents with a circle around the description of the character “Sammy”, who was “feisty and mischievous” or something, with a note in pencil: Remind you of anyone? Does William want to audition?

My parents asked me, and I said yes. My older sister was auditioning for things all the time, and both my parents were involved in theatre, so I thought this was extremely cool and of course totally normal for a 7 year old.

This movie with Anne Bancroft, called The Homecoming (please don’t YouTube it. Ok fine, but don’t make fun of me) launched a pretty crazy childhood acting career. Managers and agents from LA called my parents at home, suggesting that they fly me out there to meet with them. I got audition after audition, booking several parts in shows, TV movies, cartoons, and a Pizza Hut commercial (perhaps the best day of my young life. I ate about 4 large pizzas on camera and had absolutely no regrets that I can remember).

As I grew older, it became clear to me what I was meant to do: I was going to be an actor, doing movies and TV, and maybe a bit of theatre to be a “real” actor. When I stayed awake in bed at night, listening to my little brother’s snores in the bunkbed below, I imagined myself being interviewed on talk shows and rehearsed answers in my head.

But while I built a career many young adult actors would’ve been thrilled with, I always felt a bit separate from other kids my age. I would miss long chunks of the school year to go shoot TV shows, something the other kids didn’t exactly think was fair. Plus I didn’t know how to make people like me without performing, something I’d mastered in the audition room, and so I never felt able to be myself around kids my own age.

As I got to high school, I started making friends. The kind of friends I still know and love. Sleepovers in each others’ basements, “study sessions” where we’d break up weed on our history textbooks and smoke outside the window to hide the smell, watching hilariously stupid comedies on DVD: Old School, Zoolander, Beverly Hills Ninja, Anchorman. Playing NFL Street 2 and Ratchet & Clank on Playstation, talking about girls, sports, and which guitarists or rappers were the best (my top 5 rappers: Tupac, Biggie, Big L, Eminem, and Immortal Technique. I know, that last one doesn’t belong, but it’s my list).

These friends would eventually hold me up - sometimes literally - when the summer before graduating high school, my family experienced the kind of tragedy I thought happened only in movies.

It was August. I was 17. On a canoe trip in the Northwest Territories of Canada with Camp Wanapitei, I watched as a float plane found our group in the middle of the wilderness, and dropped a sac filled with empty milk cartons, and a note that instructed our leaders to use their satellite phone to call the camp. They started crying, and told us all to paddle down the river to meet the plane. They didn’t say why, but everyone knew. I’m sure we all thought it was for us. I was the unlucky one who ended up being right.

My dad walked toward me, awkwardly on the beach made of boulders, and grabbed me in a bear hug as I kept my hands tucked under my chest inside my lifejacket. Sobbing he told me there’d been an accident, and my little brother Luke had died. Luke was on his own canoe trip with Wanapitei in Northern Ontario on the Harricanaw River, and drowned while playing in the rapids with his campmates. He was 15 years old.

Most of us, at some point in our lives, have a moment like this. A piece of news comes, a person appears, an incident happens, and it cleaves your life in two, like the split playhead function in a video editing program, into “before” and “after”. For many people, this experience is beautiful, like meeting their spouse or having their first child. For many others I speak to, this moment is the worst of their life.

I became a different person. Instantly, I went from the middle child to the baby of the family, and my divorced parents and older sister treated me accordingly, gathering around me to make sure I was ok, giving me vocabulary and context to understand the magnitude of what had happened, even as their grief was just as painful. 

I started drinking and smoking weed much more than before. It was ok, I told myself, I was grieving. At some point, weed turned on me and started making me paranoid, and my friends were doing cocaine, so that became my weekend habit. I went to the gym, to try and get some rage out. I wanted so desperately to have a girlfriend that I put up with some really toxic relationships that I contributed to.  I was depressed; diagnosed, but untreated, and self-medicating.

When I arrived at theatre school, still according to my plan from the “before times,” I found the worst possible environment for my mental health. The teachers wanted us to “use our pain onstage,” and pushed us in ways that only make sense if you’ve been to theatre school pre-Me Too, or you’ve seen the movies Whiplash or Black Swan (ok, not quite that intense. But it was still fucked up).

By the time I graduated, I realized I needed to run away. 

I was living in my mum’s house back in Toronto, working as a busboy by day, a bouncer by night, and auditioning for guest star parts in TV shows. I was doing coke and/or MDMA with my friends twice a weekend, and sleeping from 4 am - noon most days (at least I was getting 8 hours!) 

So, I bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona, and became an English teacher in Spain.

I stayed for a year and a half. I learned Spanish. I started developing confidence in myself, and having more real conversations. I realized I loved teaching, because it was like acting but with a  response from your audience. I could see people “get it” in real time, which I loved. But I was still doing drugs and drinking too much, and still performing whatever version of myself I thought would be sexy, cool or just acceptable to get people to like me. My demons were waiting for me in Canada when I returned.

So I left home again, this time for an English education startup in China as one of 7 first-time co-founders (spoiler: it didn’t work out). I also stayed for 1.5 years before coming home with a herniated disc from the stress of being a startup founder and all the psychological pain I’d never dealt with. 

In my road to recovery, I started therapy (not just the physio kind). I started coming to grips with what my brother’s death, and the various ways I’d been punishing myself, had done to me over the past decade. I learned CBT, and mindfulness mediation, and yoga, all of which helped transform my outlook on life. I started opening up, speaking more vulnerably, sharing my story. I started healing, slowly but surely, in all the ways I needed to.

One day, my former acting coach, and family friend, invited me to watch a class she was teaching at the University of Toronto. I sat in the back of a dingy fluorescent-lit basement classroom and watched her transform a room full of science students as they practiced their presentations out loud in front of the room. I realized instantly that the techniques she used to identify their communication struggles and help them overcome them were techniques I recognized from being an actor, and an English teacher. Since China, I knew that you could be something called an entrepreneur and start your own business, so that’s what we did. OutLoud Speakers School was born less than an hour after that class at U of T.

Since starting OutLoud, and my work as what I now call a “Speaker Writer Coach Creator”, I can’t begin list all the ways my life has transformed. But here are some highlights:

• I’m a 2x founder

• I’ve grown an audience of over 10K 

• I’ve coached 5000+ ppl

• I’ve done 250+ talks with an NPS of >80

• I’ve spoken and coached executives at companies like:

  • Remax

  • Google

  • Ericsson

  • Boston Dynamics

  • Government of Canada

  • Achēv

  • Bird Construction

• I’ve been paid to travel and speak all over the US, Mexico, France, and China

• I became sole owner of my business

• And grown it to $250K+ in revenue

And most importantly, I became a husband and father. And almost 20 years after my brother’s death, I can honestly say I’m happy, and feel only the tiniest twinge of guilt for saying that.

Now, I dedicate my career to telling my story, however I can, wherever I can, to honour my brother’s life and keep his memory alive; to continue to heal myself and others who hear it and relate to losing someone; to be a guineau pig for doing this onstage and online to prove that personal stories matter as much as almost anything we do as human beings; and to make the business case that it has what we business types refer to as “value.”

My dream is to build a 7-figure solo speaking business, teach 1 million entrepreneurs to do the same, and retire in the countryside with room for my entire extended family.

That’s it for this week!

Please reply with your thoughts on this, if you read this far. And thank you, btw.

Until next week, Greenblast… OUT 🚀

P.S. When you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Let me help you get onstage with a Speaking Strategy call

2. Join my community Speaking Heroes to for 2 hrs/week of group coaching to accelerate your speaking career

3. OR book an availability call for me to speak at your company