Why I Have “The” in Front of My Name

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 6 seconds

I think it’s time to finally make this public. Let me just first clarify that in no way is this an interesting story. If you just want the basics, skip to the very end: “the two reasons.”

Many summers ago…

My first college summer. Having just finished my freshman year at St. Olaf, I was on my way to Stillwater, MN. Stillwater is a rather romantic riverfront town here in the Midwest. Luckily enough, I was on my way there with a particularly cute girl. Maturity levels notwithstanding, she happened to be a whole year younger than I. Stillwater is an hour’s travel from our hometown, Plymouth.

Of course, the first thing I did – the only thing I knew how to do – was make nervous conversation. It certainly didn’t help that she was quite attractive. We talked about all the regulars: life (good), school (bad), boys/girls (good/bad), parents, siblings, and everything in between. Being rambunctious, tense teenagers, the conversation naturally included talk of relationships. And that’s when it happened.

Cute Girl: “Yeah, but I just can’t believe I’m in the car with the Tyler Hayes.”

My brain: Wait, what? Dost mine ears deceive me? Perhaps she was rehearsing French in her head, and accidentally translated du into the? Wait, no, English doesn’t have partitive articles. And besides, the is a definite artic… Uh-oh you’re losing her… get back to the conversation dimwit!

Me: “Wait, what?”

The cute girl went on to explain something about how girls in high school wanted to date me. Let me clarify here that this has NOTHING to do with my ego. To this day, I still am shocked at whatever she was implying, and think it’s 100% poppycock. Not to mention I was no jock, as I’m pretty sure one season as 3rd string wide receiver on the football team doesn’t mean much. No, no… Debate, Mock Trial, Choir, AP classes, and building computers were my life.

Long story short, I was dumbfounded. The date was okay, but I became a nervous wreck after that moment; a rare occurrence for me indeed.

Returning to college

Unfortunately, the cute girl and I didn’t work out, but that’s really not the point of this story. Upon returning to school that fall, I mistakenly blurted the story to my friends.

As anyone who’s gone to a small college knows, news spreads fast. Juicy news spreads faster. Embarassing news spread instantly.

Fortunately, as a nickname it didn’t really work well. Not much function to it. On the other hand, it worked out very nicely at parties. At bars, perfectly. I imagine that if one were to chart “Use of obnoxious nicknames” over “Intoxication level,” it would increase at an increasing rate.

Hence, I did what any other self-respecting man would do: started a website. The original TheTylerHayes.com was a community site for other St. Olaf students that had my similar passion for writing – don’t ask me why because I don’t know. It started out with the 7 other guys I lived with, and expanded slowly from there. (See a horrible rendition of it at Archive.org). It was the Huffington Post of its day.

Graduating college

I changed. I grew. As a personal extension, the website evolved in tandem. As other writers faded away, I felt a need to reign the site in. Social media was all the rage my senior year of college, which was the first sign of where the site would go. June 22, 2008, not one month after graduating, I signed up for Twitter. I discovered people like Seth Godin, Dan Schawbel, Penelope Trunk, Chris Brogan, Robert Schoble, Gary Vaynerchuk, all in the span of a couple weeks. This was my future, I could feel it.

After some self-education about personal branding, I morphed TheTylerHayes.com into a self-serving blog about web design. This made sense in 2008, as my main career path as I saw it was to become Minnesota’s top freelance web designer. Quickly it became apparent social media was a truer calling.

What this has to do with my personal brand

Once I knew I wanted to cement my own personal brand, I did what seemed logical and tried to buy tylerhayes.com. Sadly, I was informed that this required a forking over of $1,500. Fat chance!

Differentiation seemed to be one thing a plain name like “Tyler Hayes” might need anyway, so I adopted “The” into my personal brand and it is what you see today: a world-dominating, multi-national, Fortune 500 company.

And that’s how it came to be.

The two reasons

If you really boil it down to two reasons, “The” Tyler Hayes is my personal brand because:

1. The cute girl changed my life forever by uttering one simple world in front of my name. Who would have known dates could be so fortuitous?
2. www.tylerhayes.com has been squatted since October 14, 2001. And they want $1,500 for it. Never going to happen.