Greetings and Salutations, I'm Eric.

"I was a bad student” is my common answer when asked about my early school years. However, I was “gifted”, or at least designated so by my teachers, my test scores, and my smart-alecky mouth, and I had a personality that was long on enthusiasm and short on patience. I could be a teacher’s best friend or worst enemy, alternating between charismatic participant and equally charismatic dissident depending on my passion for the lesson or assignment. As my brother once perfectly encapsulated: “If Eric doesn’t like doing something and it takes longer than fifteen minutes, he’s not going to do it.”

 

Fortunately for me, my erratic academic performance and even more erratic behavioral performance (not everyone can say they were sent to the dean at four consecutive schools) was commonly excused as precociousness (some might call it obnoxiousness). I was lucky to have teachers that understood me, or at the very least were patient enough to give me space to learn in my own way. I later came to realize that not every student has that luxury. 

 

Let’s face it, school is designed for certain types of people. For everyone else, it's an exhaustive marathon of tedium, awkwardness, and social castigation. We’re often told that it’s a phase that we’ll grow out of, but why should we grow out of something we are, just to be something we’re not? It hurts to be misunderstood, but it hurts even more to be gaslit into believing your value differences are an illusion, and if you’d only conform to someone else’s standards of happiness you’d, in fact, be happy too.

 

That is why I’ve devoted the last two decades of my life to helping people forge a path to success that works for them. I founded an education company with individualized growth as its mission statement. I’ve coached teachers on how to work with their students’ personal needs, and provided business professionals, in leadership and non-leadership roles, with the tools they need to attain collaboration, productivity, and personal growth within their team.
 

As creator of youtopiaproject.com and the Youtopia 16 assessment, more than half a million users have benefited from my teachings since the website’s creation in 2016.

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My book, The Power of Personality, is the culmination of decades of research and application. I’ve personality-typed over fifty thousand people during my career, which is no small sample size. Good thing I have a strong memory! The main takeaway? Our relationship to others will only be as healthy as our relationship to ourselves. 

 

Random things about me:

 

I’m a classically-trained pianist, backyard-trained BBQ dilettante, three time fantasy football champion, professional mentor, amateur magician, and infinite Pez dispenser of saccharine bits of 80s and 90s pop culture. 

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I’ve also managed a golf course, hosted a pre-podcast radio show out of a dilapidated radio station in East Hollywood, coached high school basketball, designed the leadership structure of a boy scout troop using my personality-typing method, lectured at businesses and universities, and graduated from UCLA where I studied English literature and screenwriting.