About Me

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About Aaron Ross Owens

My name is Aaron, but my college fraternity had three “Aarons,” so I was dubbed “AO”. (I was also “dubbed” some other less-kind names over the years… but I digress… let’s just stick with Aaron or AO.)

What a wild ride life has been. Some of the highlights:

• Started my first business when I was 13, creating customized stationary and event invitations. Second business was when I was 14, doing IT consulting. Then I lost a bunch of money (and wasted lots of time) in network marketing.
• When I was 19-22, I was a registered lobbyist in the state of Wyoming, where we successfully raised the minimum age for the death penalty from 16 to 18, successfully protected the rights of medical patients (and their families) while providing mechanisms to prevent frivolous malpractice lawsuits, successfully removed the taxes on groceries, and unsuccessfully lobbied to establish an Alternative Energy Commission.
• When I was 20, I ran the most successful U.S. Congressional field campaign in Wyoming (at that time), and we launched the most successful Democratic Congressional campaign in 30 years! Two years later, as State Director of a third-party PAC, I helped blow that old record out of the water. Then two years later, I helped develop (along with two experienced Presidential campaign field experts) a national model for targeted Congressional field campaigns that destroyed our previous field campaign and financial records again.
• At the age of 21, I traveled the U.S. helping transform juvenile justice and human service agencies by putting intelligent technology at the center of their operations.
• At the age of 22, I ran for the Wyoming House of Representatives, losing by 25 votes to a popular young City Councilman.
• At the age of 24, I co-lead the Corporate Training department of a large 1,000-employee energy company. Two years later, I was put in charge of that company’s operations excellence / business optimization initiatives. Mostly, though, I was blessed to be able to learn from some of the brightest and most driven folks in the industry.

Along the way, though…

• I fought bouts of incredible depression.
• I experienced the excruciating pain of many failed romantic relationships.
• I put myself into debt, wrecked my credit, and squandered every windfall I received.
• I failed to follow-through on every business idea I had (and there were hundreds).
• I found myself in the EXACT kind of soul-draining desk job that I always promised myself I would avoid.
• I was consistently 30 pounds overweight, have suffered from life-numbing insomnia, and continued to feed myself toxic chemicals that I pretended was real food.

The recurring theme of my life was that I was convinced I could reach the pinnacles of success by relying on myself, by scratching and fighting my own way, and by pushing others down in order to meet my own needs. I kept thinking that the next big win would erase (or justify) the damage I left behind on the previous step.

I devoured every self-help book I could find, I swam in the New Age, I spent hundreds of dollars learning how to be a “pick-up artist”, I tried every get-rich-quick scheme I could find.

I didn’t just sell my soul… I borrowed against it and leveraged it to the hilt!

Finally… I had enough. I remember being alone in my apartment one night, telling God that I was tired of running the opposite direction. I had accepted Christ as my savior several years before, but I had left almost all of His offerings on the table; instead convinced that my own counterfeits worked even better. I was now willing to listen to Him. “Just lead me, Lord,” was my prayer.

Within a month of that prayer, I would meet the girl who would become my wife. Rachel’s story inspired me. She had stared her demons square in the eye… and won. All with the power of God. The more I learned about Rachel’s story, the more I recognized fragments of my own life, my own dependence on temporary things, and my own ignorant understanding. And the more I realized I was not alone.

ModernValor is a community of men who are committed to living in the full freedom of Christ. This is a community of men throwing off the chains of this world and our oppressive enemy. Success is within our reach, but we need to stop reaching the wrong direction.

Will you join me?