Within three short stories, you will get to know me as a person. I write with the hope that some of you can relate to, or at least be entertained by, my depiction of some of my experiences in this life thus far.

*There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion..."- Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. I'm a High-School Drop-Out and an A-Grade Student

I dropped out of school with two more years to go, I was just 16.

At the time, I was only really going to school to play rugby and had very little interest in the subjects being taught. Rugby was a big part of my life, and I spent most of my free time learning bro-science on the internet and lifting weights in the hope of improving my game.

After I left school (and also rubbished any delusions I had of getting paid to play rugby!), I moved in with some older guys I was friends with, and over a decade later, am still best buddies with. I spent the following few years partying too much and working random jobs (construction, furniture moving, and painting).

An action shot from the party era of my life

That’s when the economic recession hit Ireland hard, and I finally yielded to my mother’s advice and warnings. I decided that if I was going to get anywhere in life, I was probably going to need some qualifications.

Being 20, too young to gain access through the mature student door, and with minimal secondary level education, I had to go right back where I left off. I always had an interest in lifting weights, nutrition, body composition and the like, so off the back of my interests and sporting experience, I got into a 1-year entry level Fitness certification. After this, I did another year to get me up to the level 6, the minimum requirement for entry into 3rd level college.
I ended up getting accepted to go to a small college in rural Ireland to study a level 8, B.Sc. (Hons) in Sports Strength and Conditioning. My long-suffering mother and I were ecstatic about this. Not only had I access to the highest level of college degree possible, but it was in a field I had always been interested in.

But I wasn't out of the woods yet. I was yet to build the discipline required to attain a college degree. I ended up taking the 'easy' subjects for granted, and failed 2 key modules in my first year, by just a couple percentage points too. This gave me two options- either call it quits and drop out, or do the first year all over again- this time only doing those two modules, which equated to around 3 hours of lecture time a week.

I had already done two years just trying to get into this degree course. I was carrying the fear of reliving the regret of leaving education early and thankfully, this was preventing me from quitting. I went back, did the time, and managed to get myself into the second year of the four year degree. And then the third, and then the fourth.

At this point in time, I’m just a couple of months away from finishing this degree, and I’m gunning for first-class honours.

A Screen-Grab of A Slide From a Recent Presentation

My best grades tend to come from presentations. I have some skills in making slides, graphics and public speaking, probably more than your average student. This is because...

2. I Campaigned for Years to Get Drug Laws Changed

Try explaining that to any potential employers in a field that has a whole industry around catching athletes using banned substances.

A shot from the 2015 Support. Don't Punish campaign

Through seeing the combination of harms caused by the current punitive model of drug policy in Ireland, and becoming aware of the potential benefits of law reform, I started a Facebook page around the dangers and prevalence of contamination in illegal drugs and managed to grow this page it to around 3.5k followers. This led me to meet more people in this scene, and I got involved with a group called Students for Sensible Drug Policy Ireland.

SSDP is a global organisation that sets up chapters in universities, and they have chapters around the world. At the time I joined, they had chapters in a couple of major university campuses in Ireland. Though at the time, I wasn't yet a university student, the folks there welcomed me in any way to join in on behind the scenes discussions.

Over time, my contributions to the group grew. I ended up getting increasingly excited about the potential of leveraging social media in changing opinions and boosting awareness of our cause. I started viewing it as a modern, more effective form of traditional methods like flyers and handing out pamphlets.

‘If I can get one person to share, I’ve got a few hundred eyes on something with inherent social proof through them knowing and liking the sharer. If I can get 50 shares…’

After digesting every word of every Gary Vaynerchuk book and keynote speech I could find, I meticulously studied the engagement and reactions we would get to posts. I became obsessed with making every detail of every post as engaging as possible. Thankfully, it quickly started to pay off. SSDP Ireland page grew from around 2.5k followers to over 5k in about 1 year and we amassed hundreds of thousands of views on native videos.

Not bad for a page that has ‘Drug’ and ‘Students’ in the title, on a platform that the follower's parents are probably on.

Some Sample Posts from my work with SSDP Ireland

We had some great successes off-line too, with events and campaigns, and I have also appeared pictured, spoken and debated in national and international media through the organisation.

It also wound me up in a room with Richard Branson, the founder of Bebo and Irish Government ministers, but I'm planning to tell you all about that in another post.

While we’re talking about me speaking, let me tell you about how…

3. I've had Two Different Accents in my Life

So yeah, admittedly this is a weird one. To explain this, we'll need to go all the way back to my childhood.

I was born in London, England to two Irish parents who moved over there during an economic recession in the 1980's.

I grew up around a friend circle that was a mix of kids from African, French, Swedish and English descent in the cultural melting pot that is London. I lived there until I was six, and growing up, my parents would always tell my older brother and I that we would be moving “back home to Ireland” at some stage. We would spend every summer, Christmas and Easter at my grandparents’ house in the midlands of Ireland, and it did feel like home.

We moved back over just before my 7th birthday, and I started attending the same primary school that my father attended when he was a boy. Imagine our shock when some of the other kids treated us like outsiders because of our accents. Ireland has typically had a xenophobia to English folks inherited by their historical occupation of the country and unfortunately, some of this was being passed on to children who would go on to inflict it on other children. Little did they know, they had been buying sweets in my uncle's shop, which they got to via passing my grandmother's house, my aunties house and my parents' inherited plot of land, all of their lives.

As time went by, mine did change. My older brothers did also, but not to the same extent. To this day I often wonder if that child version of me did that to fit in, or if it just happened more naturally with me, or was it a combination of factors? In any case, what was once a child's London accent, is now an adults' pretty flat Irish midlands accent. Weird.

So, now you know quite a lot about me. So what am I, @MarkCullen, going to do on Steemit?

I thought about that question long and hard myself. I'm aware that conventional wisdom would suggest to pick a niche and build a community around it. But I don't want to that.

As you may have gathered through my collection of tales, I am a changeable man. My fingers often crave a new pie. For that reason, I’d hate to pigeon-hole myself into any particular niche on here.What if I want to talk about something different? Where would I go then, folks?!

I plan to post daily content and write about whatever I know bits about, in the hope that I can get my writing to a level where I don't need any particular niche and that some of you will read anyway. Hopefully, this isn't too lofty of an ambition.

I have developed a schedule of posts that you can look forward to, and most of these are already written and ready to drop.

This week, you can look forward to...

1. Exercise For Depression. Just How Effective is it? The Undertold Research
2. In the Future, All Kids 'Throw Like Girls'. Here’s Why It Matters
3. Caffeine Consumption for Health, Performance & Cognitive Capacity. What you need to Know
4. Your Parents & Grandparents Need to Lift Weights and Drink Protein Shakes. Here’s why.
5. How & Why Fatigue Monitoring Tech is Dominating Elite Sport
6. How I Got in the Same Room as Richard Branson, The Founder of Bebo and Government Ministers: My Time as Drug-Policy Activist

My first post on the efficacy of exercise to alleviate depression will be dropping in the next couple of hours, so click @MarkCullen to follow me if that, or any of my other posts for the week sound like they might interest you.

If you think I could help any of you individually then be sure to let me know. My goal here is to build mutually beneficial relationships as we grow this platform together. To sign off, I’d like to just say...

Thank you for reading this!

..and for the up-vote or follow, if you have felt that way inclined.

Take care of yourselves, and I hope to talk to you again in the near future.
@MarkCullen