Victory Darwin? Is that your real name???

[Linkedin-Entrepreneurs.com Victory Darwin]

I'm sure you can imagine how often I hear that. Or even worse, they just assume I don't know how to spell, and correct it for me... "Victor". Well, it really is Victory, or if you prefer, just V for short, not Vic !

So, why'd my parents name me Victory? Well, actually they didn't.

My Grandfather did, but he was the only one who used it. My father named me after the world champion motocross racer of his day, since he was a dirtbike champ himself, and I guess hoped I would be one day too.

The one motocross race I entered was on a old 500cc Sonic, while I was just 11yo and weighed about 85 pounds. That would be like strapping a rollerblades and a jetpack on your kid, then sending him down a gravel road. Needless to say, I crashed enormously and more than one, and came in dead last.

For my 16th birthday my dad paid for half of an '82 GPz 750, the Eddie Lawson replica.

That was good for a few years of terrorizing the city, until one day the cops had enough and laid out a spike belt for me. In short, bikes are very agile, and 1992 Mustang Interceptors are apparently not.

The pursuing cop drove the car straight through a concrete light pole and literally blew it up, Hollywood style (he lived). They had only just bought the car 2 days previous, so they had a lot of explaining to do in the media. The court ordered them to return my bike, but they had the last laugh. I went to pick it up, and it had been disassembled and thrown into a big box. They said they were searching it for drugs.

right... my name... so I finally got to meet my Grandfather, in Detroit, just before he died, and he told me some old war stories of fighting in the Polish Underground (Polish Secret State),

and escaping to America when his wife became pregnant. My dad was born in the USA shortly after, with the last name Darwin, which my Grandfather had just pulled from the phonebook, assuming it was a common American name.

My father was an active pacifist, and when he was drafted for the Vietnam war, he took his pregnant wife across the border to Canada, along with about a hundred others who he taught his border jumping plan to.

So then, I was born in Canada, and my grandfather suggested the name Victory. My dad vetoed it based on the war reference but from my perspective, both their lives were parallel where it really counted. They both took action to protect their families.

Years later I became a student of Trump Universities "entrepreneurship mastery program". I had great expectations and so was greatly disappointed when it turned out to be a very poor quality program. It came to a head when during the Q&A on the "branding" chapter the dean suggested that when you start a business you have to get your logo right the first time because you don't want to change it later and weaken your brand. He said you should pay $3,000 to get a quality logo made.

I told him that I had bootstrapped my way to $2million+ in 3 different businesses, and the advice I would give a startup entrepreneur is to spend his money marketing to test his core concept first. You can get logos for $99 on the web, that will do just fine.

I realized in that moment that the big difference between the meaning of TRUMP and VICTORY. Trump means you just crush the competition because you always have the better hand or more money. Victory means you are the underdog. You may be broke, but you will find a way to triumph in the end.

I thought I could create a better entrepreneurship program than Trump's and I'd teach how to start a business from nothing, using my bootstrapping methods. The number one thing I learned from Trump about branding is your name brand should be your name. So I called it University Of Victory. And the number two thing I learned was your logo should be made of gold, and so it was!

I told my dad about my new connection with the word victory, and said I'm going to make it my legal middle name, and so I did. He said it also worked well for him, because he hadn't yet got me a birthday present, and he happened to have a leather jacket in my size still on the rack. He owned a motorcycle shop that sold the made in USA, Victory motorcycles.

So that's the story of my name. What's happened since?

University Of Victory has since become World Vision Entrepreneur. It's a similar concept but more in line with my original purpose. It's taken off on it's own without any marketing effort.

Amazing how that works when you get yourself in line with the universe, eh!

~V

[Linkedin-Entrepreneurs.com Victory Darwin]

Should you change your name to create a better name brand?

I address this in my 7 Virtues of Branding.

Here is the first 4.

#1 Make your name your brand. Don't use a clever sounding acronym or generic string ending in "enterprises" or "systems".

#2 If your own name is stupid or boring then change it. Sometimes it only needs a tweak. e.g. Oldstein could be Goldstein, Fichdale could be Richdale, Nerdstrom could be Nordstrong.

#3 Your company name should match your website url, which should match your 800#, and should also be the name of your first hit product; kind of like a self-titled debut album.

#4 Get a professional picture of yourself and stick it everywhere; your product package, website, business cards. If you are ugly, you should at least look really happy or really smart.

Click below to read my Virtues # 5, 6, and 7 and also...
Trump's (Shocking!) TEN COMMANDMENTS OF BRANDING!