This community has made me feel like a magician, some kind of superhero with special powers to help and encourage people.
I was born in Israel on May 29, 1998, and grew up in a neighborhood with high crime in Haifa. In my early teens, I struggled almost everywhere – in school, with my family and with my social environment. People made me think that I was weird or unwanted.
I was a quiet type and always preferred to gather my thoughts rather share them with others. I never tried to impress others too much. I always did the things I thought should be done and never looked at other people or copied them just to make me fit into their society.
This led to some difficult times at school, such as teachers not believing in me and being bullied by other kids. Fortunately, I had the courage to fight back and did not allow anyone to bully me for being different. As a result of my behavior, though, I was suspended from school and fought a lot with my parents. I felt that no one was listening to my side of story and everyone was trying to persuade me that I was wrong about a lot of things, but I refused to accept that since I knew I was in the right.
These events led me to isolate myself in my room and rethink my life. I started watching motivational videos on YouTube and continuously pushed myself forward as a teenager while developing an adult, powerful mindset. I’m so proud that I experienced those difficult years in my life, because they were a big factor in making me the type of man I am today. When I was 14, I decided to sign up for mixed martial arts fighting, thinking it might provide me with the calm and focus I needed – and it actually worked! MMA helped me focus on myself and my progress, which kept me away from trouble.
I trained for almost seven years and won a number trophies, including one for being Israel’s national champion. Unfortunately, I sustained a serious leg injury that kept me off training for around a year, and this is when I started my adventure as an entrepreneur and a social media influencer.
I couldn’t let myself sit all day and do nothing. I soon discovered the social media world and fell in love with the opportunity it provided me. Diving in headfirst, I learned all I could while growing my own following. I founded my own social media agency and we established ourselves as experts in the industry pretty quickly by offering free consultation calls and advertising to support small online businesses after the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
I did everything that I could to not only continue to serve my clients. Of course, not only the high-end ones, but also the small businesses that were struggling. During the months in which the lockdown was toughest and people were most worried about what the future held for them, I spent almost all my time ensuring that these people got the help they needed.
But the thing I am most proud of – my crowning achievement – is that I now run a motivational community named Crowns.
We help teenagers with the same issues I had while I was their age – and I do my best to provide them with support and advice, motivate them and so on. This is literally my happy spot. The feeling after helping someone and when you hear their kind words, that’s the kind of feeling I would like to live my life with.
I do my best to enlighten my followers and keep them motivated and disciplined about realizing their dreams. I do Q&A on our Instagram account every week to give them the opportunity to ask any kind of questions they have, and I respond publicly on the page.
This community has made me feel like a magician, some kind of superhero with special powers to help and encourage people. I had one follower who messaged me privately that he hates his life and is so depressed that he doesn’t feel like speaking to anyone.
I felt I had to pull this guy up from the deep hole he was in. I took him under my wing, mentored him without any fees, and we opened his first online e-commerce business together. I made him so busy with building and growing his business that he didn’t have any time left to be depressed! Two months after he launched his site, he had already reached a monthly revenue of $7,000, which is pretty crazy for someone that barely made $2,000 working his nine-to-five job. We became friends and he reaches out to me every week for a call, in which we talk about life and business.
I set myself some high goals for the next few years, such as taking care of my health and my family, retiring my parents, and starting another company. But my main goal is to continue sharing my motivational story around the world, and have it reach the people who need to hear it most. I also aim to boost Crowns to be the number 1 motivational community online, which will give me the opportunity to continue helping people as much as I can.
The writer’s personal website is orelshitrit.com. His Instagram accounts are instagram.com/orel and instagram.com/crowns