To chase a dream...

Good afternoon to all readers. My name is Chuck Johnson. Maybe you've heard of me. Most likely, you haven't. But I'm venturing a guess that with time you will. What I am is a dream chaser, and this blog, from now on, will be my journal.

Starting from the time that I was 11 years old, I've known in my heart that I was meant to be something special. What exactly that was, I didn't particularly know. Afterall, I wasn't particularly good at anything...video-games aside. I couldn't play sports to save my life, and although I was an okay student, I was certainly nothing special. To top it off, I was small, goofy, and easily intimidated. I had a bad haircut, big glasses, braces, and on top of that, having just moved up from Detroit to the the well-to-do suburb of Okemos, at the time, I was also struggling to adapt to the vastly different style of dress, slang, and social atmosphere in general.

Still, something inside me always burned to be great, and for the life of me, I couldn't get the feeling to go away. Perhaps, I was just crazy, I thought. To that end, I didn't speak a word about it to anyone. If I was crazy, I certainly didn't want anyone to know about it. I had a hard enough time fitting in at school as is... the last thing I wanted was for anyone to think I was some kind of a megalomaniac. Back to Street Fighter II!

For years I just sat on it. Ignored it. Pretended that it was just the delusions of a kid who was justifying his own isolationism. But at the same time in the back of my head, I couldn't help but wonder if I felt isolated simply because I was different. Not just culturally, or racially, but inherently. Even if I didn't show it in school, I knew I was smart, and I knew I was catching things that other people around me missed. I could read the feelings of both the kids and adults around me like books, and my mom had once told me that I was the only 2-year-old she'd ever seen comment on the difference between when a woman was and wasn't wearing make-up. When I was in middle school, and my friends started experimenting with drugs, despite the peer pressure, I always refrained. But I had no idea why. I just had a feeling that I'd need my body to be strong. But for what?...I had no idea. As I said before, I was certainly no athelete. Back to Street Fighter II: Alpha Edition!

Then at 15, it happened. My Korean friend introduced me to Tae kwon do. For having previously no experience with sports (except IM basketball- which I promptly quit cuz I got tired of being labled as 'the black kid who can't ball'), I took to it right away, won my first trophy 5 months later, and then became the Michigan State Junior Olympic Champion for my weight class two years after that. At the time, I'd only been a black belt for 6 days. With that, both my self-confidence and drive increased, and my grades went from a C average to all As.

Maybe I wasn't crazy afterall...I just needed a path. And I'd found one: I was supposed to go to the Olympics! All the way baby!! Nothin's stoppin' me!! Except...that I was the youngest of six, had to pay my way through everything on my own, and knew absolutely NOTHING about the process of success. To further complicate matters, despite the fact that I'd grown both tall and strong, for a fighter, I was still incredibly gentle-looking, (Facial shape, eyes, voice, you name it), and even if I won most of the time in the ring, I was still really new to sports, and easily intimidated...and coaches could see it. Despite my size, strength, and natural flexibility, I just couldn't get them to take me seriously.

This was definately going to be a hard road to walk. But being raised in the states on the ideals of the power of an individual's will, and having heard all the stories of the little guy climbing to the top, I was bound and determined never to give up.

I went to Korea on my own. (And for once, all those years of learning how to deal with feeling like an outsider came in handy.) I found teachers and trained wherever I could for free, while still taking classes to finish school. When no one would train me, I would train myself. I did things like skydiving, bungee jumping and rock-climbing to learn how to face fears and remain calm in chaotic, fast moving situations. When I didn't have other tae kwon do people to fight or train with, I'd study other systems of fighting to look for underlying patterns in movement and philosophy. I started traveling as a teacher, volunteer, or backpacker to overcome lonliness, to increase my level my mental and social adaptability, and to learn how to read people -regardless of language or culture- a skill that I thought would be infinitely useful in the ring. Beyond that, I started reading books to find heroes and mentors that I didn't have, hone my people skills even further, and study the underlying form of success itself. And through it all, above all else, I never gave up.

I wish I could tell you guys that when the 2004 Olympics rolled around, I was ready for it, I kicked ass, got a gold medal for my country and then went home, but that isn't exactly how it turned out. I did as well as one person ever could have, and I'm proud of how far I went, but being alone, in debt, knowing nothing of financial self-management, and most of the time having to work outside of my own language, the chips were just stacked too high against me. I just needed a few more years than I had, and by the time I turned 25- 10 years after I started, I knew it.

At the same time however, I also knew that I'd gone too far for me to go home, and just get a job. Despite the hard times, and despite the struggles, I'd gotten a good strong taste of what it's like to truly believe in something, and to dedicate yourself to fighting for it with all your heart...and it was addictive. Beyond that, I'd also gotten a strong feel for the world outside my hometown- and country- and even if I had failed in my first attempt, I knew there was still opportunity out there. I just needed to find it. So with that, and having lived in both Korea and China for school & training, I decided to move to Tokyo. And after a few years of searching, as luck would have it, I found not one new path, but two. One in Action Films, the other in business. And not being able to choose one or the other, I decided to simply do both at the same time. Afterall, by then, I'd read 150+ books on the process of success, traveled to 33 countries around the world, studied 9 fighting styles, learned to speak 3 foreign languages, and fought in more martial arts competitions than I can even count. If there's anything I can do by now, it's juggle and multi-task.

At this point, I'm 27 years old. That isn't old by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn't exactly young either. And I know that in both of these paths, it means, again, that I'm going to have a hard road to walk. One because I'll be older than almost all of my competition, and the other because I'll be younger and more inexperienced. At the same time though, I've also spent 13 years fighting my way through a lifetime's worth of failures and struggles, and because of that, I have no fear of them. I've lived out of a suitcase for 7 years, so I have no real property to speak of, no commitments, nothing tying me down and nothing to lose. And more than anything, or than anytime in my life, I have the feeling that I going to win this. Call me crazy-

Chuck Johnson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhHWg8m8PME