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Star Wars meets Personal Development
Welcome to Path of the Jedi, the podcast and now BLOG where Star Wars meets Personal Development! Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me on this incredible journey that I hope is as much a journey of discovery and learning for you as it is for me.
Star Wars is absolutely one of my most favorite things in life. In fact, as with many people of my generation, I don’t know a life without Star Wars! From some of my earliest memories as a child watching the original Star Wars Trilogy to my giddy excitement with all the latest releases on the Disney+ streaming service, my love for this venerated universe grows more and more with each passing day (and that’s not even mentioning the books, comics, AND Star Wars Celebration!).
One of the most beautiful things about Star Wars is the richness of its characters and how they navigate experiences they live through. A willingness to take a closer look into any of the characters in Star Wars can yield myriad valuable lessons that we can all in turn use to help us navigate our own day to day lives.
I have been a devotee of self development and personal growth for most of my adult life and now I have the unique opportunity to meld that love with my love of Star Wars to delivery you a podcast unlike any you’ve listened to before, and one that you’ll surely come back to again and again.
And that’s what I hope to do with Path of the Jedi. With this podcast, my hope is to take the wisdom of Star Wars and transport it from their galaxy to ours.
So enjoy the first episode and its transcript below!
Welcome to our inaugural episode of Path of the Jedi, the podcast that was created because us Geeks need personal development too. Now what is this podcast about? Path of the Jedi is what happens when Star Wars meets personal development. These are two deep passions of mine. I love personal development, I love Star Wars. And so I wanted to share personal development with you all through the lens of Star Wars. But more about that in just a little bit.
I first and foremost want to introduce myself. My name is Ronnie Cruz, self-professed geek and your host for this amazing adventure that really honestly has been a long time coming. I have been toying around with the idea of starting podcast for a little while now and I just never got around to it you know. I just kept putting it off, putting it off. It’s something completely foreign to me, completely out of my wheelhouse and so because of that I was unconsciously avoiding it, right? So finally I just said to myself, screw it just dive in, just go ahead and pull the trigger – whatever other cliches you want to throw in there – let’s just make this happen, for better for worse, let’s launch Path of the Jedi.
Now I’ve been a Star Wars fan pretty much my entire life and I’m going to talk about that in just a little bit. I wanted to really dedicate this episode to answering the question “Who am I?“
Now to start off with, just some basic resume type stuff, qualifications, etc. I am a professional Network Marketer. I’ve been in this profession of network marketing/direct sales for 15 plus years now as of this recording. I’ve been with the same company since 2009 and have been full-time since 2013. That’s a pertinent fact because it was this profession that introduced me to personal development, right… self-development. It put me on this path of growth that I’m still on today, and this podcast is just the next iteration of that.
Back when I first got introduced to the network marketing profession and I joined that first company… it was Amway as a matter of fact… You know as an aside, a lot of network marketing leaders, a lot of leaders in this profession got their start from Amway. So I have to give them credit for that. I love that company. I wouldn’t be where I am today without having been introduced to Amway.
So, I joined that company and the very first book I read was Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich. And really that book absolutely transformed my life. It still has a huge, huge impact on me today. In fact, I was given some advice many years ago by a dear friend who is no longer with us, but he gave me the advice of reading that book once a year… okay so let me backtrack… actually he told me that his mentor told him that if he read that book once a year he would eventually become a millionaire. And so he gave me that same advice and I’ve been reading Think and Grow Rich once a year ever since. I actually give that advice to everybody that’s willing to listen. It’s a phenomenal book and as I said it started me on this journey of personal development, of growth, of self-discovery.
Some other resume/qualification type stuff: as a result or actually as an extension of being a professional full-time Network marketer and leading big teams, I’ve been a featured speaker on many platforms. Of course, I’m a coach and a mentor. And very recently have become HSOS certified. HSOS stands for Human Success Operating System. And I’m going to go ahead and read this right off the website:
“The HSOS is a psychology based foundation for understanding, influencing, and transforming human behavior for yourself and the client’s and audiences you serve“
So yeah, I wanted to become certified in HSOS to expand and improve my ability as a coach and a mentor, to improve my ability to help people achieve the things that they want to achieve in their lives.
Some other things I’ve done in my life: I was a musician for a time… not actually for a time, I’m still a musician. I just don’t play as much as I used to. I was with an amazing band called Bruther Monk with some incredible individuals, dear dear friends of mine that I grew up with here in North Carolina. And yeah, that was a tremendous amount of fun. I have a deep, deep passion and love for music. It’s been part of my life since I was a small child and will always be a part of my life.
I also was an actor as well. I got bit by the acting bug in high school and that led to studying acting in college – acting and theatre. So, I’ve done stage work, I’ve done films. I don’t do any acting currently at the moment but yeah it’s one of those things that I absolutely, I absolutely love and I look forward to the day when I’m able to get that back into my life. The funny thing is, it was acting that actually led me to my present course today as a Network marketer.
I was working on a picture in California. This was back in like 2005 I think, 2005-2006, around that time, maybe 2007. Anyways, I was working on a film and one of my cast mates one day on our day off was talking to me about some health products that he was using and that’s how I got introduced to my second company called XanGo. Once I got done with that film and came back home to North Carolina, I looked at the company and joined. And it was from that company that actually led me to meeting the individuals that I partnered up with in my current company.
Now, as far as my love for Star Wars and where all that fits into this crazy equation… I’ve loved Star Wars pretty much for as long as I could remember. I mean it’s been an indelible part of life as I know it, especially part of pop culture for the last 40-plus years. And so, because I was born in that era, there’s not a time that I remember Star Wars not existing. It’s been a huge, huge part of my life. I watched New Hope, I think it on betamax, which is completely dating myself. And then Empire Strikes Back on VHS, which is actually no better. That’s still dates myself, both completely extinct mediums. I did catch Return of the Jedi in the movie theater. Then there was the made-for-tv movies, Battle for Endor with Drew Barrymore. Actually, I remember recording that and watching it over and over again. And of course Ewok Adventure.
The action figures was a big part of my life. I had a neighbor, one of my best friends growing up, and I would always go to his house in the afternoons, especially in the summer times. He had the best collection of Star Wars figures! We were always playing in the backyard building like, I mean probably if I look back today they were just messes but for us… We we built these these kind of dioramas, these amazing kind of landscapes, dug them out in the backyard, and just really had the best time playing in this amazing pretend universe that Lucas created.
And that pretty much carried me through and solidified Star Wars being a huge, huge part of my life. Into the 90s, there was obviously a little bit of a lull… as I got into college into the mid-90s I was exposed to some of the the games that were out for PC, especially a lot of the the piloting games like the Tie Fighter and X-Wing type games. And then in the late 90s when the prequels came out, man… I mean it’s not that I ever fell out of love with Star Wars but that really rekindled my deep passion for it.
I remember when Episode 1 came out, the Phantom Menace, like there was merchandise out the Wazoo being released. One of the things that I got really into was collecting the different Pepsi cans… I don’t know if you guys remember that but they had they had Star Wars characters from the Phantom Menace on the series of Pepsi cans and I got obsessed with collecting as many of the different characters that I could on these cans. And I held onto them completely unopened… I had to eventually ditch those things because I guess it was the acidity in the soda started eating through the cans and they started bursting and leaking all over the place. So I don’t have those things anymore. They were there beautiful, beautiful collectibles, but yea… because of the contents I think yeah, they weren’t really meant to last and to stay intact.
So yeah that takes us through to like my mid to later twenties. And then of course the cartoons started coming out, the animated stuff started coming out. Even before the Clone Wars, even before the CG animation stuff, there was some hand-drawn animation that came out in the early 2000s. And then of course the Clone Wars after that and then of course then leading up to the most current with the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm.
Since then they’ve been just churning out Star Wars material to get to the point where I can’t even keep up right. As of this recording, I haven’t even started… and I’m ashamed… as a Star Wars fan I’m ashamed to admit this but… I haven’t even started watching Bad Batch yet. Yeah, I know I’m a bad Star Wars fan… Well, the only reason why is because I wanted to re-watch the Clone Wars in its entirety leading up to the Bad Batch so that’s the only reason I’m behind, guys. And you guys know that the Clone Wars is a long series right? So yeah, I’ve got some work to do.
Then on top of all that there’s the books I’ve really been getting into the last couple years. And I actually forgot to mention Star Wars Celebration! My first exposure to Star Wars Celebration was in 2012. A friend of mine invited me to meet him down in Orlando and here’s the thing – I never even knew that Star Celebration existed! So when I was exposed to it in 2012 in Orlando it absolutely just blew my mind again and fueled an even deeper, deeper obsession with Star Wars. After the 2012 one I went to, uh what was it?… Anaheim in 2015, and then back to Orlando in 2017. Then the last one I went to was in 2019 in Chicago. Hopefully next year 2022 everything goes according to plan and we’ll get back out to Anaheim.
So yeah, I mean so many things over the years has continued to fueled and feed my love for Star Wars. It’s just such a rich, rich world that from a cultural standpoint again has been a huge part of life. And it really just resonates with me on so many levels. Again from being this indelible part of Pop Culture, to the universality of the themes that Star Wars touches on and dives into really… and this is not anything new that I’m bringing to the table, but George Lucas did drawn on the Hero’sJjourney when he created this this space saga. That’s why I think people really connect to it, because it’s so easy and readily available to see a part of you in any one of the characters, whether it’s Luke, Han, Leia, Rey… Lando Calrissian. I mean come on, Lando is one of the coolest ever, hello… But you guys know what I mean…
And then for me personally, I have an even deeper personal connection to it because of how I was raised and how I grew up. I was actually adopted at a very young age by my uncle and was brought to the US. So as a child not only have and hold on to this identity as an orphan but I immediately connected with Luke because here was a character that was pretty much me right? I saw myself in Luke. This was a boy that grew up with his uncle and his aunt and it was that circumstance that really sets on his hero’s journey, his journey of discovery. And this team is visited over and over again, especially in the films, in all three different trilogies. You have Anakin in the first one who at a very young age was taken from his mother for his own good, right? For his own benefit. And then of course Luke in the original trilogy, which we learn through the course of that original Trilogy also Leia. And then in the sequel trilogy with Rey who spends the entire trilogy trying to find and discover who she is and as she says in the movie Fire Trilogy trying to find and discover who she is and as she says in the movie:
[Rey audio clip from the Last Jedi] “I need someone to show me my place in all of this.”
So while Star Wars is this incredible phenomenon that connects with everyone pretty much because of the universality of these themes, it also really connects with me on this deep personal level because it again it is the circumstances of how I grew up that really has sent me on this course of my own hero’s journey of self-discovery and finding out again like Rey said, where my place is in all of this.
So to explore the depths of the characters in the Star Wars Universe is really to answer the question, “Who Am I? Who is Ronnie Cruz?” I’m a musician. I’m an actor. I’m a professional Network Marketer. I’m a coach. I’m a speaker. I’m a mentor. And now I’m a brand new podcaster. But really am I all those things? Am I any one of those things at any one time? Or am I none of those things?
Going back to the character Rey in the sequel Trilogy… I love this character because her journey and story arc in the entire trilogy is seeking out the answer to “who am I?” And the answer that she comes to at the end is absolutely beautiful in that she doesn’t have to be any one thing. She actually makes an active choice in who she is when she says, “I’m Rey Skywalker.”
So who am I? I’m all those things. I’m none of those things. I am Ronnie Cruz.
Well that wraps up our very first episode of Path of the Jedi. Thank you guys so much for spending the last 15 minutes or so with me. As I said it’s been an absolute adventure and the great thing is we are just getting started. So tuned into the next episode where we dive into perhaps the most popular and most referenced quotation from the entire Star Wars universe
[Yoda audio clip from Empire Strikes Back]”Do or do not. There is no try.”
So until next time, be well, be safe and May the force be with you.
