Trust me, ... I know where my heart is and my heart's right here. I'm going to keep doing everything because I love to do it, but I will never sacrifice my time between the ropes. That's no shot to anybody. Everybody's got different career paths. This is mine.
My advice to young people in the wrestling business would be to repeat such questions to yourself as: "How am I standing out? How am I getting recognized? How am I getting over?" And if you don't have definitive answers for doing those things, you are doing it wrong. It is, essentially, on them. There is no right way to do it, and that's one of the great things about this business because you can be creative. People who say they have it figured out are wrong.
I think that any sort of hindsight, especially in this wrestling industry, is a waste of time, and time is extremely valuable. I don't control that. People ask me to do something, and it is our job, as entertainers, to do the best that we can to accomplish that goal. What I get upset about in this business is that so many people talk about the "what if," instead of the "what is." The "what is" is more important. If someone were to go back 15 years and say, "You should have done this," it's too late. I was told to do "X," and I was trying to do "X" the best way that I could.
The thing that's helped me from wrestling is sometimes when you do live television, things change immediately, so you can be immersed in one story and then the story shifts. Ultimately, if you just get the point of what you're trying to accomplish, if you know the story, then you can put forth a good product.
My dad is the reason I actually started watching wrestling. My dad was never big into sports; we were all big into sports as kids, and he'd go to our Little League games or whatever and not really know what was going on, because he didn't know about sports, but he knew about wrestling.
Wrestling is a performance. Its entertainment, we [wrestlers] tell stories. We make our fans happy by telling stories but the long and short of it its pretty much the same thing as acting.
