We recently connected with Paul Ronto and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Paul thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?
Type3Life is focused on men in an industry filled with opportunities and experiences designed for underserved populations like youth, women, trauma survivors, veterans, populations with challenging diagnoses, and the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, there’s very little focus on the everyday guy who is struggling to figure out his place in this world. The industry of ‘experience as a tool to overcome’ has always been focused on solving the niche need, and not those of the masses, as the struggles of those smaller groups are easily defined and challenging to ignore. However, we see a much larger group of people who are struggling today and don’t know where to look for guidance. Men as a population are underserved in this capacity and are brought up to avoid asking for help. Type3Life’s goal is to help guys see that community and support are a power worth investing in and that empowerment doesn’t have to only be for the culturally termed “underprivileged”. We can all use new tools to find purpose and meaning in our lives and we hope to encourage the guys out there looking for more to discover their community again and strive to live a better life.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Type3Life is a wilderness travel company that designed experiential adventure-based trips for men. Our goal is to build community through challenging and fun wilderness trips that help men build confidence by overcoming both the physical things in our way but also the mental ones we carry with us day in and day out.
This idea all started a decade ago. I was stuck on an ice-covered cliff face in pitch black. I was scared shitless, I was alone, and I didn’t know where I was going or how to turn around. At that moment I was not having fun. My hike had gone from exciting to terrifying.
Hours later, as my truck came into view, and the danger was behind me, I reflected on the fear, my abilities, and the situation I had put myself in. It was Type3fun. The type of adventure that’s challenging to the core but in the end, it enabled growth deep from within.
I realized that I was living life alone, in a world full of people. I was taking risks and pushing my limits without a support team, and eventually, I would pay the price. It wasn’t just in the mountains that I was living this way. My community had faded and I thought I had to do everything myself. I was stressed, overwhelmed, and stuck. I was paying a steep price for losing my team.
Through it all, I’ve learned that challenges and adversity are good for you when you have a community to share them with. The confidence to tackle that next obstacle comes from knowing there’s support all around you.
At Type3Life our aim is to harness a bit of what that kind of community can do for a man. The confidence of knowing you are supported is powerful.
Our trips use challenge and adversity as a tool to push men to rely on each other and build bonds. The trips can be hard, we won’t lie, but they are empowering and fun too.
Our goal is to build a community of confident men bonded through overcoming the challenges in front of them.
This is living a Type3Life, knowing you’re prepared for whatever’s next can help in just about every situation we find ourselves in every day.
As far as what I’m proud of, well I’m extremely proud of the guys that have put themselves out there to join one of our trips. A lot of guys are hesitant to work on themselves, to look inside and talk about the struggles they are facing. A lot of guys feel they need to bottle their problems up and just succeed without assistance. So seeing strong men being proactive about asking for more out of their life is encouraging and exciting for me. I’m proud of the lives we touched, and the perspective I think we’ve nurtured with the participants that have started their journey toward living a Type3Life. At the end of a trip nothing feels better than the “tough” guy coming up to thank you for adding something valuable to their lives. When they say they didn’t think they needed or wanted help but these last few days have totally opened their eyes to the power of community and support, that’s all I need to keep pushing every day to keep this company going.
Just because you are a guy doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to struggle or that you require help. We need to rewire the collective thinking around the idea that men have to go it alone. It’s hard in a day when everyone else’s struggles seem so much more important to focus on, we have #metoo and #blacklivematter and movements where the system has fundamentally broken down, and it can feel selfish in today’s culture as a man to say “I’m struggling too”. I think there’s a need for all people to be able to say I need help too, life is hard.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
I met my cofounder about a decade ago. He had just gone through a pretty hard divorce and when he came out of that and looked up he realized most of his friend group had dissolved. He needed to rejoin the community he’d lost and we invited him on a very challenging multi-day backcountry motorcycle trip. He was new to riding and didn’t have a ton of experience but was willing to try. The challenges we faced that week went from near death to totaling bikes, to a broken leg. In all accounts, it shouldn’t have been fun, but it was insanely meaningful for the guys out there toiling in the mud and rain. We bonded over the challenges and since then we’ve been best buddies.
A few years later, he’d gotten through his relationship struggles, remarried, and was really on the upswing. However, I was slipping. I had changed jobs a few times only to discover that these new roles were not fulfilling. I was struggling mentally with depression and anxiety about where I wanted my life to go. We were on a couples trip to Mexico, and I was comparing myself to the other guys in the group, they were lawyers, oil industry bigwigs, my co-founder (who’s a rocket scientist by the way), and I felt like I was falling behind. I was in a battle with keeping up with the Joneses and felt like everything was dark and gloomy. I was fighting with my partner a lot, struggling to see what was next for me, and losing motivation. Something happened and I spiraled one night into despair. I found myself on the beach by myself in the middle of the night contemplating walking into the ocean and never coming back. I felt at that moment that the trip, the people I loved, and my life, would all be better without me. And then my co-founder showed up, out of nowhere, miles from our rental, to literally save me. He talked me off the ledge and brought me back to reality. That cemented our friendship, he was there for me at a time when I thought no one cared. It showed me how powerful our support community is, that we can literally bring each other back from the edge, from downturns, from divorces, from literally wanting to die.
That’s where this partnership ultimately blossomed, and since then it’s been our goal to support our community of men that normally go it alone and in times of hardship tend to look inward rather than outward for support.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
I think the key to building a reputation is just to be 100% authentic.
What I’ve learned through helping guys overcome barriers is that we are not alone in our struggles. The second someone opens up about something that they internalize as them being the only person in the world to be dealing with that issue, another guy opens his mouth and says “yep I’ve been through that too” or “ya I have the same issue right now”.
I tell this anecdote because if you’re authentic there will always be others out there able to connect and understand what you are saying. And if your product is designed to help people like you, then you need to show the why behind what you are doing.
This is why the Vaynerchuks and the Rogans are successful, they say fuck it to the expected discourse that culture expects and put themselves out there and it connects with other people more deeply who feel the same way, rather than the politically correct messaging that feels fake and shallow.
For us, it’s about our experience personally, going on hard wilderness adventures with buddies has helped us find our meaning and purpose. We have seen the power of it and just want to get more guys to come to push themselves with us. There are no promises or fluff, it’s just about working hard, helping those around you, and feeling the surge of energy you get when you know you can confidently overcome something in front of you.
Our authenticity is that we’ve done it ourselves. We’ve been low in our lives, and will most likely be low again at some time in the future, but we’ve pulled ourselves out of it by leaning on our community of guys and now have the confidence that we can get past whatever stands in our way in the future.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://type3life.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/type3life/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/type3life
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/type3life/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/type3life
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHYH5gUJD-_-_yOO_q63H2w
Image Credits
Paul Ronto