• My Life's Biggest Failures

    Full transparency on where and how I have messed up in life, as well as what I've done to overcome the consequences.

    1. About
    2. Personal Failures

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LEADING BY TRANSPARENT EXAMPLE

This page is about being honest about my biggest personal failures—before anyone even provokes the need for me to do so.

It is about making an unprovoked sacrifice as a demonstration of quality character, integrity, and love for my target audience—whom I would respectfully request to trust me on various things.

Meanwhile, I define “love” as “the willingness to suffer.”

Therefore, I publish this page while knowing it can cause me ridicule because I am willing to suffer for the target audience I love most. 

Doing so is also meant to moot the need to create “EXPOSED!” videos about me in the future.

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WHY AM I DOING THIS?

I am doing this because I genuinely love my audience. Saying so is neither an exaggeration nor hyperbole.

I find many of the women who follow me genuinely attractive in both physique and character.

I find many of the men who follow me genuinely honorable and worthy of respect for their intelligence.

I’ve gotten to personally know many of you on private calls and direct messaging and I legitimately care about you, my target audience, and would sacrifice a great deal for you to uphold your trust and our genuine connection. 

Few tend to do that with their personal brands. 

Nor do people tend to present themselves as mere students the way that I do. 

Usually, people try to exaggerate their credentials while hiding their failures.

With this, I am doing the opposite.

No one forced me to do this. There aren’t any “Mike Norton EXPOSED!” videos out there on me.

I’m just doing this because my heart tells me it is the right thing to do, to win and keep more of my audience’s heart as I move on to attempt greater and more daring things requiring their support to succeed in.

So, let us begin.

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FAILURE #1 — The Navy SEALs

Despite two mentors writing good reviews of my character in my record, I quit the Navy SEAL program and never rejoined.

Why?

 

At some point during my training, I lost sight of why I should become one.

On the surface, it was because I fell in love with a girl. But really, if we’re being totally honest as a demonstration of extreme ownership, my allowing my love for a girl to distract me from further training was on the basis of realizing that I wanted to become a good family man more than I wanted to be a SEAL, but didn’t know what a man even was.

Knowing what a male is is a matter of common-sensical science, but knowing what a man is is a much deeper philosophical matter of metaphysics.

I ran into a philosophical dilemma in the middle of training, one that stemmed from having grown up in a chaotic, single-mother household that caused a developmental delay in character requiring more years of self-reflection before I could self-actualize into the man I am today—a man worthy of the special forces.

I was a boy, enduring special forces training—not yet a man.

It is as simple as that.

And by the time I had become a genuine man with strong self-knowledge, a stable identity, and masterful control over his willpower after transforming as a person in the Chinese wilderness over the process of four years—fate presented me with the same decision to make again: Be totally devoted to the SEALs, or be totally devoted to your family. 

Not both.

I made the decision to stay with the woman who eventually became my wife. We are happily married and we now have a large, growing family. (All children born in wedlock with the same woman.)

This means that, at the end of the day, I simply didn’t want to be a SEAL that badly.

But at least then, I was truly certain of my decision, the way a man should be.

The book, Yield, explores the psychology of this heavily in the character named Erik, who is based on me.

“Son, there are SEALs who complete the official training to become excellent warriors—but horrible men. A lot of them hurt their wives and are never there for their children when the children need them most. They uphold their oath to protect their civilization in one way—but fail their own families, who are the building blocks of our civilization. Without whom, there would be no civilization to protect in the first place. Many of them become alcoholics who drink their traumas and failings away,” Erik continued, his jaw tight. “They can win an outer war against an enemy soldier…yet, fail the inner war against their greatest enemy: themselves.” —Erik Anderson, Yield

And, in Yield, I make it clear that while I am not a Navy SEAL, I am still a veteran who served two tours in the Middle East and I sought special forces mentoring even after I left the military to fill in the gaps of my Navy SEAL training.

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FAILURE #2 — Fighting for Redemption (My Very First Book)

Fighting for Redemption is a memoir based on my actual life. 

It has gone through several revisions throughout the process of hitting the bestseller charts on Amazon six times and counting.

Yet, I still count this book as a failure.

Why?

Because I do not equate the amount a book has sold with quality literature.

Fighting for Redemption originally started as a series of MySpace blog posts back when that website was the king of social media before Facebook usurped its throne.

I was journaling about my life, particularly my childhood traumas, as a form of therapy. It developed a following that found my thoughts fascinating, and the crowd recommended that I turn it into a book.

That’s all fine and well; however, the reason why I consider Fighting for Redemption as a failed piece of literature is because I missed my creative mark due to my ego.

I tried to do something extremely avant-garde while building a reputation as a bad boy alpha male, when I was about 19ish years old. 

This coincides with the inner conflict I had with Failure #1 in this list, because I was dueling with my inner definition of what a man should be like—and there was much about me within that was weak and false that would have otherwise been made strong by the presence of a steady and loving father.

I didn’t lie about how my mother and stepfather treated me growing up. I didn’t lie about martial arts or SEAL training, but I did lie about many other internal things pertaining to the strength of my character as depicted in the book: At the time of its writing, I hadn’t actually healed from my traumas. I hadn’t actually fixed my issues and cured my insecurities.

I hadn’t actually faced my demons. I hadn’t actually slain my personal Fáfnir.

In my heart of hearts, I would like to think that I was a truly good person deep down—but I had so many insecurities—from my masculinity to my racial identity, to psychosexual trauma inflicted upon me by my stepfather and the black community.

Meanwhile, because I wasn’t sure what to do with Fighting for Redemption, I tried to do far too many things with it.

In one way, it was a depressed, sincere suicide note to the world. 

In another, it was a personal branding prop to become one of those fake alpha male coaches before the red pill community was even a thing. I lied about how I claimed to get women to sleep with me, as well as how many.

In actuality, I was a really good kid who merely thought he needed to project himself to the world as a “bad boy” to get anywhere. Upon completing the book, I would attract some emotionally damaged women on the basis of that persona, but then wonder why they’d leave when they’d come over for a booty call when really all I wanted was to carve pumpkins with them for Halloween (true story).

I was a genuine sweetheart behind the bad boy persona who wasn’t actually into wanton, promiscuous sex, and I thought I should have been ashamed of that.

But I was wrong.

As I strengthened my internal character, I realized that while nice guys may finish last, bad boys don’t actually win the race—good men do.

Nice guys, bad boys, and genuinely good men are three different archetypes. And I merely needed to figure out what a genuinely good man even was, philosophically.

So, now, I have actually become strong both within and without (hence, why I am even publishing this very page and why Yield is vastly superior as a literary work). However, I simply needed more time to build that inner strength while becoming a man and thus fill gaps of wisdom that a father would have otherwise filled.

I simply had to take more time to put the real work into evolving through the trauma-inflicted developmental delays of character, taking years to slay one dragon of insecurity at a time. To strengthen one pillar of character at a time.

One step at a time.

Self-reflectively.

Now, the final revision of Fighting for Redemption is a significantly improved rendition of a much healthier mind with my children as my target audience.

However, I would still count this in my list of personal failures.

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FAILURE #3 — The uRay of Wolven Industries

Wolven Industries isn’t a failure, but our first product was.

Why?

 

The uRay was a genuine project, derived from a heart of golden intent for our civilization.

I was studying physics at the University of York at the time of its conception, through its OpenPlus program.

It was the brainchild of an attempt to provide people with an alternative solution to the mRNA vaccines during the COVID crisis, as the parts we used within it were proven by Tel Aviv University to successfully kill COVID-19.

It contained advanced coding within its firmware that gave it enhanced, intelligent features that let the user know when the microbes had been successfully killed.

That was all real and true. All of it.

We did good work. Solid work.

My team of physicists, engineers, and I.

That said, the project failed because of several reasons

— The COVID crisis made logistics an absolute nightmare. 

It was virtually impossible to have various electronic components delivered in a timely manner as necessary to fulfill certain orders in the beginning of the pandemic.

— Market demand dwindled after peak public fears subsided. 

There was a point in the pandemic at which anyone would have bought anything if they believed it would have protected them from the virus. We missed that window because we started building the uRay in response to the pandemic, not pre-emptively to the pandemic.

— It was my first time ever running a real tech startup.

I was an experienced CEO of a marketing firm, but marketing is a different industry to hard technology, especially when we’re talking about a tech company that aims to compete for military contracts the way Wolven Industries does.

— A tyrannical landlord threatened murder and homelessness if I didn’t grant him a position in the company that paid him more than I paid myself.

David C. Haggith was a multi-convicted pedophile who had already spent years in prison for sexually assaulting children and manipulated my family in various ways throughout a key moment of vulnerability with our company. I successfully protected my family against him and his network. He never got the chance to harm my wife and kids, but at great personal sacrifice on my part which drastically affected my ability to serve uRay orders.

A double lawsuit against David had been filed.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised (most of it boostrapped by my marketing firm), but these were the four nails in the uRay’s coffin, leading to the temporary collapse of Wolven Industries.

I rectified what I could of the situation by granting customers 150% refunds out of my own pocket, and worked around the clock to repay debts to private investors.

At the time of this writing, there are still two private investors I need to pay back, but the trajectory of my finances now that I am successfully rebounding makes both their repayment and the revival of Wolven Industries with a new and different product line in home security an inevitability.

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FAILURE #4 — My StarCraft Pro-Gaming Career

StarCraft is a real-time strategy war game.

When I was a teenager, I competed in the World Cyber Games, Pro-Gaming Tour, and the World Gaming Tour in Starcraft: Brood War.

Three different international leagues. 

I was a Zerg player who could play at around 180 to 230 actions per minute (APM), which is an insane speed of neurological capability that only perhaps 1% of gamers in the entire world could achieve.

I was one of the only, if not the only, known “black” player in the leagues playing at that level.

There was a point at which I was the #2 ranked player in the East Coast of America, and had a B- pro gamer ranking.

I was also the leader of an amateur pro-gaming team named “Clan Chimera.”

…and I consider this a failed career.

 

Why?

 

I consider my StarCraft career a failure because it arguably wasn’t a career. 

I had achieved a B- rank, and right before I had reached A-rank, opening me up to the possibility of big-time contracts to play on Korean television, I chose to leave for the military.

This was due to the holistic toxic environment that made me such a fantastic StarCraft player in the first place.

For an American to get that good at StarCraft requires deep emotional pain and the right genetics that you express in your gameplay. (As the Starcraft community would often talk about genes being a factor in the world-class elite players like I was, the hybrid vigor involved with being mixed-race probably helped a lot with my abnormal Starcraft skill.)

From the outside looking in, I was playing a mere video-game.

From the inside looking out, it was not the video-game, but flow state—a neurological modality achieved only under specific conditions of challenge, that relieved psychophysiological pain that I chronically endure even to this day due to the various abuses I overcame as a child.

Now, years later, I have achieved a skill level of being able to play at neurological speeds 250 to 350+ APM (which would qualify me for A-rank) but the pro-gaming scene isn’t the same, as it is an old game.

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ON MY MAJOR LIFE REGRETS

With all that said, what are my major life regrets?

Trick question: I have none.

I may have some random failures, yes.

But do I have regrets, though? No.

To “regret” anything would be to say that I would change something about where I am now, which would mean risking the consequential possibility of losing what I have now—such as my wife and children.

No, everything has played out well in my life, despite checkered failures here and there that have occurred. 

I either have no regrets, or at least the right ones (which is a philosophical conversation we could have at length).

 

In Conclusion

 

I herein demonstrate that I have truly faced my past and these are four of the most embarrassing failures that stick out in my life.

You don’t need to wait for a “Mike Norton EXPOSED!” video—I’m providing that to you right here.

I have grown over decades of world travel and self-reflection.

My failures have healed into reminders of what was survived, what was learned, and what was carried forward into strength. I have failed many times, but each failure has become a stepping stone in the architecture of the man I am now.

I am not ashamed of them. I share them with you not because I need to, not because anyone threatened me, but because I want to—because I believe love is proven in sacrifice, and transparency is one of the hardest sacrifices a man can make in public.

If you take anything from this page, let it be this: a man is not defined by his victories alone, but by what he dares to face about himself, as well as to endure and rise from. 

My failures are many, but my regrets are none. For they have all brought me here—toward my family, toward my purpose, and toward you.

So judge me, if you must. But know that I love you. I am willing to be laughed at for the sake of truly earning and keeping your trust, and if you hear about my biggest from anyone first…

…it should be from me.

With honor and integrity.