About Karel Kylián

In case you missed this video on the front page, I recommend playing it. It could give you a picture of me. (if you are here only for the papers, they are on the bottom of the page)

 I was born and raised in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic and it will be the place I call home no matter the current location. It is a pretty small country anyway, so the second largest means that the city is even smaller. But totally lovable.

I should know the german language because I attended a german language gymnasium, but the fact is that it doesn't work like that.  At least English is my friend since I was a kid, mainly thanks to computers. I was basically a nerd until puberty kicked in, and then I started being social. I feel like I came back to that nerdy part now while maintaining all the experience and skills from my social early adolescence. 

My puberty also came in with a few uninvited guests, namely alcohol, cigarettes, weed and coffee. I can't say I was struggling with them, because at that time I didn't even see it as something problematic. But later on, I realized that I was chained. To this day, I am grateful to all my addictions, because they did what I wanted, I became more extroverted, productive, social and creative, but as they say, you cannot use training wheels forever. I discovered my own (a bit different) approach how to figure out addictions and now I am free from them while still having all the positives from this encounter. It really feels like Hannah Montana's way, the best of both worlds. And that is why I made my first book about this approach when I was 25. Well now my age depends on when you are reading this, so if you are curious, count the current year minus 1994.

I wasn't a psychologist from the day I was born. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist with all that glassware and chemicals, sometimes an artist, and at some point, I even wanted to be a vending machine. You know, not doing a whole lot, just standing there and making money. But luckily I realised that the man who is resupplying the machine also takes the money away ... and that is a great metaphor for life in general.

Soon as the "What do you want to be?" question became urgent, I realised that I would love to be a psychologist and explore people's complex situations and help them... but everyone around me was discouraging me that I will not make any money and I will go crazy. So I had no clue what to do except psychology. My college applications went towards Garden Architecture, Consumer Chemistry and Management of Tourism. I didn't want to draw a portfolio for the first one and missed the entry test for the second one so I made myself a little dream of having a restaurant and went to the Economy School. It is sometimes useful to know some theory behind management and entrepreneurship while I am an entrepreneur myself. But What I definitely don't miss is Math and all the derivations and integrations. I still like to excuse myself from any type of counting by words "sorry I studied humanities, not science."

So I went in, hated economy, loved social psychology lessons and started drinking as a usual student. That was the point when I realized that I want to become the best.... did you expect the word Psychologist? No, I wanted to become the best bartender, an expert on spirits and cocktails. I remembered almost all of the 170 bottles that we had in a bar where I was working. All the origins, stories, and tastes. I loved talking with guests and I remembered so much information about them that I sometimes forgot what was their order. I realized that I couldn't handle a huge amount of people during the day because I like caring individually about them. Yeah, that's why I chose to work as a shop consultant at T-mobile later, serving 60 people a day, sure. But that is another story.

I ended my economical torture at college and realized one more thing. If I wanted to be the best bartender, I would have to invest my whole life and do more than others and that's how I can reach financial stability. Well, that is how it works in other fields, right? For example, in psychology! So I turned my life around and got accepted to psychology despite a 4,5 % chance because of some organizational issues that year, and started the main storyline of my life.

I basically completed my master's degree in 4 years instead of 5 and I spent the last year in Wisconsin studying Marriage and Family Therapy at Edgewood College. I also enrolled for my fourth year of psychology in the master's degree programme in environmental studies. I just finished all the classes without taking final exams and I never made a thesis, just so I can focus on psychology while learning something new out of my scope. Thank god that higher education is free in the Czech Republic.  When I think about it, I always made more than I had to. In my master's programme (only in psychology not in the other programme) I had 172 credits while you had to have only 120 to pass.

And this all surely doesn't represent what all I was doing on top of the necessary. I had a lot of papers, certificates, and confirmations, but I lost loads of them. I don't really care about what knowledge people have, because what matters is if you can apply them in your work. And there is no paper for that.

But if you care, enjoy some of my papers! You can click on them to see them full-sized.

Since we got formal education out of our way, now comes something that people like to call "school of life".  Before my trip to the USA, I wrote my book, Almanach of Addictions, and founded ltd corporation Karel kylián, s.r.o. I thought that it will be easy to sell the book in large numbers soon because I can make deals with individual booksellers instead of huge distribution supply chains, that are destroying the free competition in the Czech book market. And that was the wrong idea. I travelled to almost all bigger cities to find out that booksellers don't care about their doom, they don't want to have one extra contract with me or have extra invoice only for my book. It is so convenient to buy in bulk from a big distributor.

So going back from the USA, still having something around 600 out of the initial 700 books next to my bed, I realized that I just had that perfect entrepreneurship experience that probably every single entrepreneur has. That didn't go well, let's plan something else. Let's save some money again and do something else. So I graduated and realised that I am missing that employee experience. The first stop was AT&T as customer support. Three months were more than enough. So I started looking around and found small pharmaceutical distributors who were looking for someone to manage their online shop for B2C customers. Despite working in the pharmacy field, Coronavirus landed also on our company, and they had to lower costs on side projects. Like mine.

Then I wanted to become a freelancer but wasn't doing a whole lot in terms of actual sales, I just learned everything about audio, video and photo production, a bit of coding, design and streaming. This is surely beneficial but I had a client here and there wasn't enough to survive. I depleted my reserves and even got a bit into debt. So I was wondering what to do next.

This is the time when I started working in T-mobile CZ, part of Deutsche Telekom. I was selling plans, internet, TV and phones in retail for a full year. It was the best corporate experience in terms of long-time employment stereotype, classic non-functional corporate rules and also human encounters. Everyone needs a phone, so I was talking with all social groups. I also saw how sales works, how much manipulation and "operating in the grey area" lies there and what I don't want to do in my own company. Since I hated marketing as one big mass of manipulation, I never even tried it, but having this one year of experience, I can recognize pure self-promotion from the manipulation that I hate.

I was always sucked out of life energy because that is what happens when a diligent person, who is not able to do things halfway, ends up in a corporate environment. That almost stopped my entrepreneurship for a year because I wasn't able to do anything outside of my work. My youtube channel was around 10 views per month and my passion for what I loved was cold. So I started streaming again, to practice live performance and to do something that matters to me. 

Slowly seeing that I can make a few crowns for having the best-satisfied customers (once  I was second in our country) while others make fortune ruining their customers, I decided that I won't be prolonging my contract, and well, here we go again!

This time I also learned my value from coaching sessions that I was doing during weekends and on free days during my work in T-mobile, and I also finished long-term Coaching training to know also theoretically what I am doing. And I also learned a lot about social media and hopefully, you came around because of my content marketing.

I hope I will come around in some time to update this story, but for now, It is all folks.

Have a wonderful life full of experiences that will lead you towards the things that you will enjoy.

Karel

23 June 2022