Fresh off his world travels, Paul Victor is ready to take over Utah

Paul Victor leads me through the stalls and desks of iHub, Brigham Young University’s entrepreneurial student organization located in Provo. It’s been his second home for the past couple of days while he’s worked on launching his business — so add iHub to the list of 100-plus places at which he has worked or lived in during the last 15 months.

“This is a great place,” he tells me. “You should write an article about it.”

Maybe sometime. But iHub’s walls are not as interesting as the adventurous spirits it draws, especially 27-year-old Victor — world traveler, former BYU student body president, a Guinness world record breaker and humanitarian volunteer.

‘I imagined this kind of person I wanted to be’

Victor describes his anxious, shy childhood to me. But this is far from the person I know. I met him years ago on a whitewater rafting trip at BYU, where his relentless enthusiasm, kindness and off-kilter sense of humor secured my vote for him when he ran for university student body president.

He certainly doesn’t seem shy now. Victor just traveled to over 40 countries in 15 months. His confidence and faith shines through in the big plans he harbors as well as the remarkable experiences he shares with me — all of which he credits, first and foremost, to God.

As we talk, we trace a common thread through his life. Faith has colored his journey.

“I imagined this kind of person I wanted to be in college, so I prayed and I meditated for three days,” he said. “After meditating and just thinking about pros and cons, I just decided to pretend to be popular. I talked to everybody and shook their hands, introduced myself ... so I faked it until I made it.”

“Faith is like — you want something to happen, you have hope that this will occur, but you don’t know how to get there, but you take it step by step and you just take courage and hopefully you get there," he said.

Faith also marks the life of his family. His father, Samuel Victor, was an early Indian member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Samuel served a mission after immigrating to the United States, where his fellow missionaries gave him the moniker “Latter-day Hindu” because he rode his bike on the side of the road that Indians, not Americans, drive on.

Victor, like his father, served a mission. His mission was punctuated by extreme lows — including being bullied, going home early and developing depression — and extreme highs — including finding and teaching an Indian man in New York who he felt the Lord wanted him to teach. He described how he developed intentional faith in Jesus Christ throughout his mission, and when he returned to BYU, he held onto that faith.

He felt spiritually prompted to run for BYU student body president while on his mission and retained the feeling, with some confusion, until he finally decided to run for election in his junior year.

“I ran for fun,” he said. “I wasn’t really taking anything seriously because (of how good the other candidates were). So I would skate around, playing the ukulele, and I would leave my booth and go to my competitor’s booth, and I would just pretend I’m handing out their flyers.”

His platform was “No Strangers Among Us,” which he drew from his personal mantra, a quote oft-attributed to William Butler Yeats — “There are no strangers, just friends I haven’t met yet.”

“This kind of just became my life theme, this motto,” he said.

Victor won the election by a wide margin. He felt largely unprepared when he won, but told me that he recalled church President Thomas S. Monson’s counsel that “whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies” He credited his presidential team for helping him execute the massive responsibilities and initiatives that he undertook as student body president, including stocking Utah college bathrooms with free hygiene products for female students.

Victor’s outgoing personality earned him the brand of “best president ever” from students who loved how much time he spent getting to know them.

“You know, when I became a president, people are like, ‘oh, now he’s too busy' ... but for me, the length of my arm to reach to different programs or different people has just grown a little bit bigger and so I can help other people,” he said.

Faith lighting the way

Many students may have seen presidency of the student body as the pinnacle of their collegiate career. For Victor, it was a springboard.

He began having a recurring dream where he visited Washington, D.C. — so he booked a ticket over Thanksgiving weekend, flew there with no plans and came home having met with Utah Sens. Mitt Romney and Mike Lee. On another occasion he impersonated an ABC News anchor at Utah’s Silicon Slopes tech summit and finagled another meeting with Lee — after which he took an internship with him.

Then, came his decision to travel the world.

“I end up buying a plane ticket, and I just knew that if this was a prompting, the Lord will somehow make it happen. ... I couldn’t see the end goal, but I just knew somebody was always there to take care of me,” he told me. “Or somebody offered their car. Or somebody offered a place. And while traveling 40 countries, most of the places I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night or where I was going to eat. People would just be there in my life to give me shelter or give me food or directions or whatever I needed.”

“It’s just like a muscle you practice. Now ... if I have a prompting, I know how it feels, and as long as I’m doing everything I can, I know it’ll just work out in the end,” Victor said.

Victor is also a Guinness world record-breaker — but not for audacious stunts pulled or countries visited. Rather, it’s for a trick he practiced for long hours on his mission, when a fellow elder taught him how to spin a Book of Mormon on his finger. He translated his skills into beating the world record for spinning a plate on his finger for 2 hours, 10 minutes and 17 seconds.

Nevertheless, his greatest adventure to date lies far outside of Provo.

A one-way ticket across the ocean

A year and a half before he graduated from BYU, Victor had another prompting. “I needed to go travel the world,” he said. “I couldn’t even focus in school ... (the thought) never left me, and so right after I graduated ... I bought a one-way ticket to Taiwan with one backpack and never looked back.”

Victor traveled to 40 countries, including Ireland, South Korea, Afghanistan, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Albania, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand (his personal favorite). He lived as a digital nomad and ran a social media travel channel in the Philippines, studied muay thai in Thailand, hiked 23 hours over a mountain range from Slovakia into Ukraine and nearly froze while trying to sleep outside in an ammonia drum in Ireland.

The experiences that touched him most were not seeing the peak of Mount Fuji, climbing out of the ammonia drum to see the sunrise in Ireland or swimming in the salty water of the Pacific.

Rather, his favorite experiences included serving other people.

“I went to the front lines of Ukraine,” he recalled. “You hear the bombs going off or the drones.” He volunteered in relief efforts while there. “I volunteered on the front lines of ... Palestine and Israel ... in a school.” He made it to the front lines via hitchhiking. “I went to a leprosy colony in India.”

He recounted seeing resilience and happiness that defied his expectations of hard situations.

“I noticed that money is not really happiness,” he said. “(While traveling) I felt my mental health improved so much.”

“It was ... divine design, how (it) all worked out,” he said, “and it just kind of added to my faith and my testimony. Like I got a stronger testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ on this traveling trip than I did even on my mission.”

Victor is now happy to be home.

“I left everything on the table,” he said. “I satisfied that need to travel and see the world. I learned what I needed to learn. Now I can bring these experiences (home) ... Man, I still can’t believe I went to Albania or Bulgaria or Egypt. I still think about it. It gives me motivation.”

He told me that faith has animated his journey thus far and that it continues to guide his next steps.

“There are no coincidences in life,” he testified. “I don’t think I can do like even a fraction of the things I’ve done without divine design. ... There is a God and the church is true, too. I have a personal testimony of Jesus Christ. ... Looking back ... everything has led up to this moment of building my faith.

“I never thought I could imagine I’m this type of person now,” he says. “At the end of the day, I want people to know they can approach me and I ... (will) help them ... Those are the only two things that you really bring to the next life. Relationships and knowledge.”

His future plans include founding a travel social media platform and a leadership coaching company. Right now he’s back at BYU, spending time at iHub, counseling with professors and spending time building his clientele.

He’s also preparing to retake his title as the world’s longest plate-spinner — a Nepalese man beat his record at 4 hours and 4 minutes — so he’s practicing to repeat his stunt on April 27, with a goal of 5 hours.

I ask him how he could possibly spin for that long.

“Focus and practice,” he advises. “I’ll probably have some headphones in.”