"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." – Albert Einstein

Kris Van Nest
Director / Executive Producer
THISLEARNING® & MAKE IT Series™ since 2010
makeitseries.com
thislearning.com

Love Doing

I love helping people realize their own superpower. There's something that we all have that we wanna share or that the world would benefit from hearing, and helping people not only realize that, but be able to share it – for me, it's through video – to be able to share that with others, even if it's just one person, but hopefully with many people, to me is, is just awesome. I absolutely love that.

Fun

What I love in life is bringing out the best in other people and being there to help them do that  is really what I love in life. And that comes across in so many different ways. There's, you know, adventures and there's interviews and like so many different ways to, to pull that out and to  experience. But to me, really it's the best when you see someone else light up and be able to share something that's important to them or valuable to them, to me is  is what I love in life.

Biggest Challenge

One of my biggest challenges in life was actually creating, selling, and then producing my first national television show. It was called Trekken TV on Dish Satellite Network. And it was challenging because right before that I was going through a phase where I had really passionate interests and skills, and at the same time was completely broke because I couldn't find a way to like translate those things into somebody that would make money. And so I put these ideas together and a lot of soul searching and kind of at the last minute created this television show around those things and then sold it and  pitched it, sold it at to Jeep down by Chrysler International Company. And it was on offroad driving and adventure racing. That was a challenge because you have to create everything  from scratch, but it's not really from scratch. It's based on all the things you've been doing and your experiences and knowledge and things that you love doing. But at the same time, I was probably the youngest person to actually pitch, probably I could say definitely the youngest person to pitch a show to Jeep and also probably the youngest person to host a TV show. So it was challenging to put all that together, especially at the last minute. I remember being on the phone with their attorney, who's the licenser for the commercial  side of things, which is based out of the commercial unit. And not knowing if they would sign and, you know, knowing that I didn't have money for bills and whatever else. And then not knowing what I'd be able to do after that if I didn't get this show. But that was definitely challenging.

Biggest Success

One of my biggest successes in life is that same television show because we went from totally zero to pitching, selling, producing, hosting, and launching a national television show.  And wow, that was epic. It's like dreamland. It's like everything that I had wanted to do and wanted to share with the world I was able to create and then get funding for it. So that was an amazing epic time and I got to involve my family, got to hire them as crew and, and production support and sales. My bro did a lot of sales on that which was awesome. Great job on that. It was just a really special but  amazing time, to be able to do that.

Who Would You Help?

If I could do anything to make a difference in the world, the people I would help are the people who  don't have help, that don't currently  think that they have a way to share  whatever they feel is their superpower, to share what the best of themselves is. I love, love helping those people. People who are already successful are already been there, right? But I in particular love helping the people that, you know, have potential but haven't realized it yet. So those would be the people and in particular, people who maybe want to be on TV or on video or on film, because that's the world I live in and that's one of my passions. So to be able to help people realize their dream of being on camera, and making it on camera, and succeeding on camera and sharing their message with the world – whoever they are, their truest selves and their best selves and  their loves and interests with the world is  who I would help.