We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joshua Marchant a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Joshua, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
This topic is very important to me, Without my purpose I would not be the man I am today. When I was younger I didn’t know how important having a purpose is to a human being. Human beings need a purpose to survive. Look at what happens to people who retire too early. Without a new purpose to replace the job they left. Most of them wither away and die. Because when you lose your purpose, you lose the will to continue pushing forward in your life. You lose the drive to get up in the morning. For me, I learned this lesson the hard way. I have said in my past interviews that when I was a kid I wanted to be a lawyer. I was dead set on it. I took every pre-law class I could in high school and had an internship at Sandy City Court Office. After high school I needed money for college so I got a job on a cruise ship and moved to Hawaii. I worked on the ship for almost a year then when I came back to Salt Lake it was time to enroll in college to get started on my journey to being a lawyer. I had all this money and I was filling out what classes I wanted to take and all of the classes I wanted to take had something to do with law in some way or another. My father told me I should hold off and take one law class just to make sure I still wanted to pursue the law. With great reluctance, I choose to listen to him and enrolled in a criminal justice class. Thank god I listened to him. I started the class and quickly realized I hated the law. It was so boring, I couldn’t keep my eyes open most of the time. After I realized I didn’t want to study the law anymore. I felt pretty lost I had spent so much time preparing myself to be a lawyer I never imagined myself being anything other than that. 18 to 22 is a tough time for a teenager. You’re supposed to know exactly what you want to do with the rest of your life right out the gate from leaving high school. Most of my friends were already in college learning what they wanted to do with their lives and I was back at zero with not a clue as to what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, I never figured it out. It wasn’t long before I found myself doing a bunch of things I never wanted myself to do. I fell pretty hard into drugs and alcohol I found myself in places hanging out with people who were not good to be around. As you can imagen my life took a turn pretty fast. It started out just doing drugs for fun but then it turned into my whole life in the blink of an eye. I did this for a long time. Ten years in fact. I went from being a lost 18-year-old kid to a 28-year-old loser so fast I honestly don’t know where the time went. After ten years of doing the same thing every day, I was still just as lost as I was when I was 18. I was working as a server barely making ends meet. I had no ambitions or dreams to do anything with my life. Then one day I decided I needed to change. That I needed to find a dream any dream besides where I could get more drugs. just as long as it was something different than what I have been doing for the last 10 years. I was about to turn 30 years old and I was moving to a new city (Las Vegas) so I thought if there was ever a time to get my life in order now was that time. I remembered that when I was 24 I wanted to be my own boss like my father. To have my own business, I would spend the next 6 years doing everything I can to make that dream come true. I created Marchandize. Now I am not where I want to be with it, I have had many letdowns and failures but those failures just kept me going. Looking back on everything, knowing where I am now and knowing where I could have been. I realized that all of that could have been avoided if I had a purpose that was stronger than my purpose to party. My life was great when I was in high school because I had a purpose to strive for. A dream I wanted to achieve more than anything else. But once I lost that purpose I found a very different kind of purpose one that took me down a very dark path that most people never come back from. But luckily for me, I found a new kind of purpose, A purpose to gets me excited to start my day. A purpose that I willingly work at every single day. I have a great drive to succeed in life, but without that purpose to strive for, I would have no direction on how to get there.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
As I said I spend most of my time chasing my dream of having a successful business. To be my own boss and to live off what I have created for myself. I have several businesses. I have Marchandize which is a custom T-shirt marketplace, I have Roscoe’s World which is my biggest project. Roscoe’s World to my true passion right now, I wrote a kid’s book that will be released on July 27, 2023. With Roscoe’s World, this project has a lot of layers to it and keeps me very busy. Constantly creating new products and stories. I am only just getting started. I have Vegasliquidations which is a resell auction site, I buy products from auctions and resell them to people who live in Las Vegas. I also have 3 charities that I have been working on getting started. The first one is called Roscoe’s Dawgs which is going to be a charity that helps families with the end of life costs for dogs. I have Pearl Productions which will help kids get into after-school programs who can’t afford to go. Finally, I have Geneious which is a cancer-related charity that will help pay for the test to see if you have the precursors for cancer. All of these businesses and charities keep me pretty busy. I would love all of these projects to become very successful in some way or another. but the one I want the most to succeed is Roscoe’s World. This project is based on my dog Roscoe who died a few years ago and working on this project keeps him close. So please consider reading my book for Roscoe’s World I believe you will love it. You can find out more info on Roscoe’s World or any other of my projects at Marchandize.com
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three most important qualities to me for achieving any dream are DETERMINATION, CONFIDENCE, AND IMAGINATION. I am sure there are more great qualities but without determination, you won’t do what it takes to succeed. Achieving any dream big or small will require you to fail at some point and in my case many times. Without determination, you will not have the will to continue to keep going and to try again. Failure has many important lessons to learn, without it, you would not know what to do when you do fail. You have to lose in order to succeed. Confidence, without confidence you won’t be able to believe in yourself. You will find that a lot of people will not believe in you. People who are closest to you will tell you to stop acting like a child and do what everyone else does and get a standard job and be like everyone else. As a kid, everyone asks what you want to be when you grow up and they tell you to follow your dreams and be who you want to be. But the older you get the more people stop asking you what your dreams are and they begin to tell you what you need to be. Without confidence, you will begin to believe them and give up on your dreams. Once you do that will then you can consider yourself a failure. and finally, you have imagination, without imagination, you can’t be creative enough to get over the many challenges you will face when chasing something that seems impossible to most. Don’t be afraid to shoot for the stars, If you need to learn a new skill to make your dream come true then do what it takes. Never settle for less. It doesn’t matter what your dream is as long as you have one. it provides great purpose. A dream can provide joy and happiness in your life in ways you never thought possible.
Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?
This question is easy for me, The person who has gone above and beyond for me in helping me with my dreams but more than that helping me be a better person is my father. Mark Marchant. My father has done everything in his power to help me succeed in life. The most important thing he has done is believe in me. He believes that I can have everything I want in life. He gives me confidence when I am down on my luck and think about giving up because whatever I was working on doesn’t work out. My father has had some pretty big setbacks in his life and he helps me with advice to make sure I don’t follow in those same mistakes. He lets me decide for myself who I should be and supported my decisions no matter what. He works day and night as I do to make my dreams succeed not for himself because I know he knows he most likely won’t live long enough to see how far I made it. He does it because he loves his kids. and at the end of the day the only thing my father wants in life is for his kids to be happy. My father has ALWAYS been there for me. When my parents got divorced. He would spend every dollar he had just to see us because we lived in another state. When I told him about the drugs and how I wanted to clean my act up, instead of getting angry or upset he said what do we need to do. When Roscoe, my dog died and I was completely heartbroken and had to euthanize him, He was with me in the room. Telling me it was going to be okay. That is why when he got cancer in 2018 I left my job and took care of him while he battled two different types of cancers at the same time. I took him to every doctor’s visit, made sure to get him all of his medicine, and Went to every cancer treatment. I wanted to give back to him a small amount of what he has done for me. Together we beat both cancers and together we work every day to make my dreams come true. So for all those reasons and more, he is the reason I am who I am today.
Contact Info:
- Website: marchandize.com
- Facebook: marchandize
- Other: I am about to change all of my social media accounts soon but for more info on everything I talked about yu can find me at Marchandize.com
