INTRODUCTION: WHO THE HELL IS TONY V.?
Episode 2
Before we go any further, I need to explain the cast of characters in this
book.
Anton.
Tony.
The Chauffeur.
Mike Tyson.
They’re all me.
No, I don’t have multiple personalities.
At least, not officially.
Anton is my birth name.
Tony is the name I use now.
That isn’t some random reinvention I pulled out of my ass.
Look up nicknames for Anton.
Tony is one of the most popular.
It’s especially common in places like Germany.
And it makes perfect sense.
Andrea becomes Andy.
Anthony becomes Tony.
Anton becomes Tony.
Nobody calls an Anton “Anty.”
That sounds ridiculous.
You pull the middle out of the name, add a Y, and there it is: Tony.
Anthony is the English version.
Anton is the Russian and German version.
Antoine is French.
Antonio is Spanish and Italian.
They all trace back to Antonius.
And hiding inside every one of them is Tony.
So Tony and Anton are not entirely different names.
But they became two very different identities.
The name Tony had been hiding inside Anton the entire time.
The man had to be built.
A Better Name Was Hiding in Plain Sight
I didn’t suddenly wake up one morning, announce a new name, and demand
that everyone play along.
Tony had history.
It had been hiding inside my usernames and online accounts for more
than thirteen years.
Secretly, I had wanted to change my name for almost twenty.
I just never got around to it.
Like so many things, it belonged to the life I imagined living someday.
Then someday arrived.
When I started using Tony publicly, people accepted it.
Then they started calling me Tony without thinking about it.
The change stuck.
I had a friend who tried changing her name.
It bombed.
Nobody took the new name seriously.
Eventually, she gave up.
Tony was different.
It didn’t feel imposed.
It fit so naturally that people barely questioned it.
And yes, there was another reason I liked it.
Tony Robbins.
I once heard Tony Robbins say he didn’t believe he would have become
as big as he did if he had gone by Anthony Robbins.
He was probably right.
Anthony Robbins sounds like someone who prepares your taxes.
Tony Robbins sounds like someone who walks across fire.
Names matter.
I know that better than most because I spent fifteen years learning how
words influence what people think, feel, buy, and believe.
My Name Had a Marketing Problem
There was another problem with Anton.
It confused people.
And as a copywriter, that bothered the hell out of me.
I spent fifteen years eliminating confusion for a living.
If a headline confused people, I rewrote it.
If an offer required too much explanation, I simplified it.
If customers couldn’t remember the name, the name was wrong.
Clarity matters.
Friction kills.
And there I was walking around with a name nobody understood.
Anton.
People didn’t know how to pronounce it.
They didn’t know how to spell it.
They wondered where it came from.
They assumed I was Russian.
I’m not Russian.
I don’t speak Russian.
I grew up on a tropical island in the Caribbean.
The name communicated absolutely nothing useful about me.
You rarely meet an Anton.
You almost never see an Anton as the hero in a movie.
The most famous fictional Anton I can think of is Anton Chigurh, the
psychopath from No Country for Old Men.
Wonderful.
Meanwhile, everybody understands Tony.
You hear it once.
You know how to say it.
You know how to spell it.
You remember it.
Tony Robbins.
Tony Soprano.
Tony Montana.
Tony Stark.
The name is familiar without being invisible.
Simple without being boring.
It has personality.
It moves.
That matters to me.
