Ep 583: One Leadership Principle You’re probably Ignoring: Self-Talk | Ian Koniak Episode Recap
[00:00:00] Anything that we want in life follows something that I called in my Take the [00:00:05] stairs book, the Creation Principle of integrity, which is that you [00:00:10] think it, then you speak it, then you act, and then it happens. And that the [00:00:15] premise here is that all of creation from this beautiful hotel behind [00:00:20] me to the, to the camera, I’m recording this on to the screen that you’re watching and to this, to this [00:00:25] chair that we are sitting in.
[00:00:27] Starts and follows the same creation [00:00:30] process. You think it, you speak it, you act, and it happens, which means that the [00:00:35] spoken word is the genesis. Of all creation. And [00:00:40] if that is true, that the, that the, the spoken word is the first time when I [00:00:45] say something, that’s the first moment that something exists. It can, it comes out of my [00:00:50] mind into the world or through the written word or the spoken world.
[00:00:53] And it, once it’s out there, now, it [00:00:55] can impact others. And, and it, and I, it can be adapted and edited and molded [00:01:00] and shaped and, and so the spoken word is really important. That’s where creation comes from. And. [00:01:05] And the life that you have, hopefully is one that you [00:01:10] have created, or at least the life that you’re going to have.
[00:01:14] [00:01:15] One day is one that you realize that you are creating now. And if at, if at least [00:01:20] that is true, that the life that you’re gonna have one day is what you are creating right now, then [00:01:25] your words matter tremendously because. They [00:01:30] mark the onset. The genesis of creation is the spoken word, and, and [00:01:35] so here’s the question and here’s the dilemma.
[00:01:38] What are you telling [00:01:40] yourself about yourself? What are [00:01:45] you, what are you saying to yourself about yourself? [00:01:50] I’m not even talking about or touching on or addressing all the things that other people [00:01:55] say about you or the movies that you watch and the music you listen to and, and, and the books [00:02:00] that you read, and how much that Im impacts you when I’m just talking about here is what do [00:02:05] you tell yourself to be true about who you are?[00:02:10]
[00:02:11] Because whether you realize it or not, you are creating [00:02:15] through your own words who you are. [00:02:20] And here’s the part that is so heartbreaking, [00:02:25] and this is something that we have found to be, be so true [00:02:30] for those of you that have kids, or for those of you that are [00:02:35] married, you have a spouse or you have a a, a, a, a partner, a boyfriend, or a girlfriend.[00:02:40]
[00:02:40] Most of you would never let someone talk about [00:02:45] your kids the way you allow yourself to talk [00:02:50] about you. Many of you would [00:02:55] never, ever accept someone talking about your spouse or your [00:03:00] partner the way that you allow yourself [00:03:05] to talk about you. I mean, [00:03:10] if there’s on on no day, would it be acceptable [00:03:15] for for you to allow someone to talk about your parents [00:03:20] the way that you talk to yourself every day?[00:03:25]
[00:03:26] That is heartbreaking and it’s, it’s taken me a long time to realize that for [00:03:30] a lot of us, we struggle with this of, of just the, the tape that’s going on [00:03:35] in our head. And, and sometimes it’s ’cause we don’t realize it and a lot of times it’s ’cause we think it’s [00:03:40] true. We think, gosh, I really am stupid or I really am, you know, gonna be poor.
[00:03:44] I [00:03:45] really, you know, my ideas really don’t matter or my voice is insignificant. And [00:03:50] why do we believe those things to be true? The reason that we believe those things to [00:03:55] be true is not because they’re true. We believe what we hear most [00:04:00] often. That’s it. You don’t believe what is true. [00:04:05] You believe what you hear most often and what you hear most often.
[00:04:09] [00:04:10] What you hear more than anything else about yourself is what [00:04:15] you tell yourself about yourself. So [00:04:20] if you would never let someone. Talk to your parents [00:04:25] that way, or you would never let someone talk about your partner or your [00:04:30] spouse in that way, or if you would never let someone [00:04:35] talk about your kids in that way, [00:04:40] then you better not allow yourself to talk about yourself [00:04:45] in that [00:04:50] way.
Ep 581: Choose Your Hard | Jamal Miller Recap
[00:00:00] [00:00:05] Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand [00:00:10] podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you [00:00:15] learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden [00:00:20] and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of Fame speaker, and New York Times [00:00:25] bestselling author.
[00:00:25] And this show is to help experts learn how to become more [00:00:30] wealthy and well-known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. [00:00:35] We all have a hard. We all have hard things in our life, and some of [00:00:40] us get simple things, but the point is, is no matter what our choices are, we have the [00:00:45] ability to choose.
[00:00:46] That was one of the great gifts that God gave to human beings. [00:00:50] He gave us the power and authority to choose. Now, sometimes, [00:00:55] uh, our choices lead to hard things. Sometimes they lead to easier things [00:01:00] and good things, but often the hard choices now are what lead to the [00:01:05] simpler, easier, better things later. But the point being is [00:01:10] that all of our choices can be hard.
[00:01:12] And hard isn’t a bad thing. [00:01:15] Uh, think about it like this. You get to choose your hard, [00:01:20] but think about the feeling that you have after you choose the [00:01:25] hard thing. Great example. Over the weekend, I have two choices. [00:01:30] Do I want to lay on the couch and binge the [00:01:35] house of David, which is awesome, or do I want to [00:01:40] go on a intense nature hike with my kids?
[00:01:44] Right? [00:01:45] Either one of those are not necessarily bad things. It’s how am I going to [00:01:50] feel at the end of those things? And often when we choose the more [00:01:55] challenging or the harder road, the harder path, we feel a greater sense of [00:02:00] satisfaction at its end. Not saying that I don’t love a good ending to an [00:02:05] episode of the House of David, but I’ll also tell you that the natural endorphins.[00:02:10]
[00:02:10] And being in nature and enjoying time with my kids, although it was seemingly the [00:02:15] harder choice in the moment to get my hiking shoes on, put my jacket on, [00:02:20] rally my two young kids get out in nature and and hustle. Seemingly that’s [00:02:25] hard, but the feeling that I get after completing the hard is. So much better [00:02:30] than completing the easy, right?
[00:02:32] Anytime that I do something exceptionally hard, [00:02:35] physically, mentally, emotionally, the, the depth of the [00:02:40] satisfaction is always greater than when I made the seemingly [00:02:45] easier, simpler choice in the beginning. Now we all have a hard to choose, [00:02:50] right? It’s hard to lack money. It’s hard to have too [00:02:55] much money, right?
[00:02:55] It’s hard to be overweight. It’s hard to be too thin, right? It’s [00:03:00] hard to be single. It can be hard to be married. It’s hard having kids. It’s [00:03:05] hard not having kids if you don’t have them, right? It’s hard to stay fit. [00:03:10] It’s hard if you’re not fit right? No matter what we do, there is a hard and we get to [00:03:15] choose it.
[00:03:16] I’m just encouraging and challenging that the [00:03:20] satisfaction and the sense of accomplishment is greater when we choose to do the hard [00:03:25] things. Not for the sake of doing hard things, but typically the hard [00:03:30] things is where we see growth. I. It’s where we get to experience a [00:03:35] change in our bodies and our minds and our souls and our spirits, right?
[00:03:39] Having a hard [00:03:40] conversation lends itself to stronger relationships. Not having the hard [00:03:45] conversation deteriorates existing relationships. It might [00:03:50] feel easier to just avoid it and to bury it deep down, but. That harbors [00:03:55] resentment and bitterness and it creates a divide in relationships. Yeah. It’s [00:04:00] harder to have hard conversations that are emotional and you’re gonna have hurt feelings, and they’re [00:04:05] gonna have hurt feelings, but by having hard conversations, you can restore what’s [00:04:10] broken.
[00:04:10] That is harder, but it is more satisfying to do it. I feel [00:04:15] the same way after. Choosing to eat healthy, which is hard. [00:04:20] In a world where everything is fast and convenient and packaged, it is hard [00:04:25] to go, no, I’m going to make fresh food and take the time. Not only [00:04:30] is it hard, it’s expensive, right? But it takes more time.
[00:04:32] It’s harder to do it, but the way that I [00:04:35] feel after a healthy meal versus a grab and go right [00:04:40] fast food meal is. Astronomically different, not even in [00:04:45] comparison, right? It is choosing the hard to go, it’s gonna take more time, it’s [00:04:50] gonna be a little bit more expensive. Uh, this is a commitment I’m making that is hard.[00:04:55]
[00:04:55] Choosing to eat on the go in your car with no rest and a bunch of fast processed food [00:05:00] that’s also hard on your body, and that’ll catch up at some point. The point to [00:05:05] all of this is there’s always choices to make, and it’s hard either way. [00:05:10] Right? Uh, that, that is the challenge of the, this side of heaven, the world that we live in [00:05:15] today.
[00:05:15] Like things are hard, but they’re also good, right? Good comes from [00:05:20] doing the hard thing, like it’s hard to plant and harvest. There is [00:05:25] good crop, good fruit that comes from hard work. And that’s not just an [00:05:30] agricultural farming analogy, that’s a life analogy. There is good fruit that [00:05:35] comes from hard work.
[00:05:36] So as you’re heading into your day, I’m just [00:05:40] encouraging you to choose your hard ’cause. It can be hard either way. You get to choose. Are [00:05:45] you gonna choose the good hard? Are you gonna choose the hard? That just continues to be hard [00:05:50] over the course of time? Choose your hard. You get to [00:05:55] [00:06:00] choose.
Ep 580: Don’t Chase Money—Chase Purpose: How Jamal Miller Built a 7-Figure Media Company from Rock Bottom
AJ Vaden (00:01.058)
Hey everybody, welcome to the influential personal brand, AJ Vadin here, and I’m super excited to introduce you guys to Jamal Miller. Jamal and I happen to be in a mastermind together, and we met on an elevator with his then, at the time, very pregnant wife in Colorado Springs. before I formally introduced him, I just wanted you guys to know, he’s one of those people that emanates joy.
He lights up the room, his energy is contagious, and even though some of you may be meeting him for the first time, I promise you, I ensure you, after this interview today, you’re gonna wanna follow him. I also wanna let you guys know who this episode is for. As you guys know, I always kinda tee this up so you know, like, hey, is this for me or not? Because if it’s for you, I’m telling you, it’s for you and you wanna stick around.
to the very, very end. There’s no skipping minutes. Don’t get off early. This is one of those episodes. So how do you know if this is for you? If you feel stuck or have ever felt stuck or stagnant or even uncertain about where you’re going, maybe you’re in a season of transition, maybe you were doing something and now you’re trying to do something new or you were known for something and you’re trying to be known for something else or
or maybe you’re in a season of successful transition and success isn’t really quite what you thought it would be. Or maybe you work with your spouse. Maybe you left corporate America to go all in on this entrepreneurial vision with your spouse and you’re going, I don’t think this is working. I think we might be in trouble here. If you fit in any of those categories, we’re gonna talk about all of those and then some. And I’ll tell you this real quick.
Jamal in the last 30 days, he and his wife just got done with a $3 million dollar launch. And so if you’re just curious how to pull that off, then this is an episode that you want to stick around for. So, okay, I know you’re done wanting to listen to me, so let me give you a quick formal bio of Jamal Miller, and then we’re gonna jump into this very awesome interview. All right, here we go.
AJ Vaden (02:14.754)
Jamal Miller is the founder of the multi-million dollar Miller Media Group. He is a pastor at heart, so don’t be surprised if you get some pastoring today. He is also a purpose-driven entrepreneur. And as Rory and I also work together, I also love that him and his beautiful bride share this business together. He’s gonna take us behind the scenes on his incredible transformation from
relying on food stamps just seven years ago to building one of America’s fastest growing media companies. And like I said, just came off last 30 days with a $3 million lunch, a launch, and also just 90 days ago had his fourth baby. So he’s got lots going on, but you’re going to hear about the heart and the mindset shift around strategic decisions that helped turn his side hustle into a scalable, impactful brand. And that
my friends is why he is on the show today. So Jamal, welcome.
Jamal Miller (03:14.428)
my gosh, AJ, that was such a cool intro. I am super excited to be here. Much love to you and Rory for all that you’re doing. This podcast is game changing and so I’m super honored to be here.
AJ Vaden (03:24.782)
Oh my gosh, well I’m just so excited for this interview and selfishly, I just wanna know all of this stuff. And so if I have a big desire to hear it, I know that a lot of our listeners do too. So here’s where I wanna start, because I literally have like 36 questions lined up on my sheet and I know we’re not gonna get to 36 questions today. But I really want our audience to know you a little bit. And so I’d love to just help everyone.
get to know you, like what’s your background, like how did you get to the point of food stamps, how did you all of a sudden get to this multi-million dollar business in seven years, like how did this all happen?
Jamal Miller (04:02.6)
Yeah, you I would say my story definitely is a story of…
Where you start is not where you finish And so where you will end up and I think for many people like you said when you first started You know you may be in a transition you may be trying to pivot you may be trying to get out of your nine-to-five and come to entrepreneurship Or maybe you are currently in a brand or you’re branding yourself as something that you’re like I don’t want to do this for a little long haul How do I see how do I pivot and keep going will I make it will I make it through it? Will I be successful again? You know I think it was miles more that says the most the biggest challenge to success
is having to overcome your last success, right? I think that’s the big thing that we’re all constantly looking at the last good thing we did, cannot do it again. And so that’s been our story.
That’s been our journey. Where we started or where I would begin, you know, I definitely would say I am an accidental entrepreneur. This was not a part of the plan. This is not what I had in store. I’m sure for many of you watching or listening, more than likely entrepreneurship was not something you saw yourself doing. And I would say we are accidental entrepreneurs.
It was about 12, 13 years ago. I was in Bible college, headed towards full time ministry, got my degree in theology. And I believe with all of me that the life that I was called to live ever since being a 16 year old that got just met by the love of God, the power of God met me in my bedroom. I did not grow up in a Christian home, but I felt I met God so early. And then in high school, I was a part of a Bible study that I helped create with a friend of mine.
Jamal Miller (05:38.688)
and for within two years, we were able to see 300 of our peers come to know Christ in those two years. And for me, it was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to help people meet the real Jesus. And I thought that was going to be in a church, right? I think most people think if you got a good preaching voice and you look good and you know how to stand in front of people, become a pastor, right? It was like, I fit the mold, right? And I was like, okay, I’m going be a pastor. guess that’s what it’s called. I guess that’s the career calling on my
And so I went to Bible college. Where do I go to get trained to be a pastor? I went to Bible college got my degree in theology and I thought this was it my pinnacle my You know height of success will be pastoring planning a church and pastoring thousands of people and I accepted at that point AJ I said hey as long as I’m in the middle of God’s will
and I’m making $40,000 for the rest of my life. As long as I’m doing what God is calling me to do, I am OK. Like I accepted a life of mediocrity in terms of finance and income in order to fulfill the call of God. But AJ, I’m grateful that God had other plans for me. so because, we ended up once I graduated Bible College, I.
moved to Chicago, Illinois. I was in Dallas at the time, moved to Chicago as a single man. At the time, you know, I was part of a church plant there in Chicago. And I remember within three months of being, you know, at this church, I was the first staff member. I was the youth pastor. That’s kind of where most guys start when they’re trying to get their, go in ministry. I was a youth pastor and I remember, you know, one day just coming home and my apartment was super quiet. And I was like, God,
this road is gonna be real lonely without my wife. You know, where is she? All right, I thought I would meet her in college, didn’t meet her there. I’ve been here for six months. Good Lord, I need you to show up because I am tired of being single. I’m tired of being alone. I’ve done everything I’ve known to do. Lord, where’s my wife? And AJ, the Lord said this to me. said, Jamal, you’re so focused on getting married. You have no idea what it takes to stay married.
AJ Vaden (07:46.158)
Mmmmm
Jamal Miller (07:47.022)
And I grew up in a home, my parents are still married, but they would not be an example of a happy, thriving marriage that I would want to say, hey, that’s exactly what I want when I grow up. And the Lord was right. And I said, well, God teach me how to be a successfully married man.
And for two years, I read marriage books. I went to marriage conferences. I adopted marriage mentors as a single man. I began to live like a married man and it changed everything for me. And eventually I ended up meeting Natasha on Facebook and I saw her post one day on Facebook and I had no idea who she was. This is the time whenever you actually knew everyone and you’re on your Facebook feed. And I said, man, how do I not know who this girl is? And so I ended up sending her a DM.
I had a lot of courage that day. And so yes, AJ, I slid in the DM. All right. And so.
in the DMs and she actually responded back. And so we started communicating back and forth. Mind you, complete stranger. I don’t even know at this point how we were on each other’s Facebook friends, no clue. And I ended up learning that she was in California and we just started chatting. It took about six months until one day my pastor comes to me and he’s like, hey, what’s going on with your love life? I’m like, man, what love life? I ain’t got no love life.
He’s like, so is there any potentials or anything? I said, man, no, there’s not. And he was like, well, what’s interesting is my wife, his wife, know, my pastor’s wife had a dream that I was gonna meet my wife in an unconventional way, right? And so he’s like, so is there, are you sure there’s no one that you were meeting or you’ve met? And I’m like, and soon as he said that, I’m like, well.
Jamal Miller (09:33.246)
There’s this girl that I met on Facebook. was like, nothing’s happened. Like we just been messaging back and forth. I’m like, but I mean, you know, she’s a really nice girl. And so he’s like, come over. He’s like, come over to the house. And I’m like, okay. So I go over to the house that night and I’m over at his house and he’s like, okay, so tell us what about this girl. And I’m like, well, I mean, I don’t know much. She lives in California. Da da da da da. And he’s like, well, show us a picture of her. And I’m like, okay. So I show him a picture on Facebook. He’s like, Jamal.
She’s gorgeous. What are you waiting for? Like what’s going on? And I’m like, okay, so here’s the deal. I was like, this girl is a complete stranger. She lives all the way in California. He’s like, what’s the real problem? I’m like, okay, let’s talk about it. The reality is I am five six. How am I supposed to find out about how tall this girl is and she’s on the internet? I said, what if she’s taller than me? This is a real moment.
AJ Vaden (10:05.834)
you
AJ Vaden (10:28.02)
my gosh
Jamal Miller (10:29.318)
And he’s like, are you serious? So he like calls his wife and he’s like, hey, come here. We found Jamal’s wife. And so like, and so she goes through every photo of her on Facebook to gauge her height. And she’s like, yeah, Jamal, she’s not taller than you. If anything, she’s right at your height. Right. And so she and he’s like, message her tonight.
AJ Vaden (10:35.534)
you
Jamal Miller (10:48.092)
And I’m like, okay, so I get home and I like draw up the best message I can. Hey, Natasha, it’s Jamal again. I know we haven’t chatted in a while, but I just wanted to tell you the time that we have chatted, it’s been really amazing. And I just got out came from my pastor’s house and we just had a conversation about you. And I got his permission to ask if we could get to know each other better. And I would love to know if you’re interested in that. And AJ that.
AJ Vaden (11:10.063)
my gosh, that’s the best story! I love this!
Jamal Miller (11:13.692)
And the rest is history, you know, so she meshes back and it all just, you know, there’s a lot more to the story, but where our business comes into play, you’d be wondering, okay, how did this work towards business? So once we did get married, you know, we put our story on YouTube because so many of our friends and family had no clue how we met. So it wasn’t even about branding ourselves or reaching an audience. Y’all, we were just literally just like, what’s the best way to create a video so we can send it to friends and family so they know the story.
Rory & AJ Vaden (11:33.215)
I’m out.
Rory & AJ Vaden (11:42.222)
Mm.
Jamal Miller (11:42.546)
So the night of our engagement, we filmed the story at my house and we called the Facebook love story.
put it on YouTube, send it to our friends and family. We go on our honeymoon. We come back from our honeymoon and the video is over 40,000 views. It was crazy. And we are seeing all these comments and people are just like engaging with the story. I can’t believe it happened for you guys. my God, this is so incredible. But there was one comment that said, Hey, is this real? Are y’all really married? And I told Natasha, I’m like, hey, like people are really hungry for relationship knowledge.
And we need to be a fresh inspiration to these people. This was not a business idea. It was just simply a passion play. And from there, we started our blog, Married and Young, about three months into marriage.
AJ Vaden (12:30.61)
Wow. You know what, out of everything you said, other than for everyone who’s listening, there’s still hope for you on Facebook, right? So that’s why I’m keeping it away. But what hits me the most out of everything you said is something that I feel like entrepreneurs forget, and it’s that the power hangs in the story. And I think at some point we get so caught up into the information.
Jamal Miller (12:38.41)
Hahaha!
Jamal Miller (12:51.4)
Yes.
Jamal Miller (12:58.526)
Yep.
AJ Vaden (12:58.966)
or the strategy or the insights or tips, tactics, you know, all of that, that we forget that no, like what people hang on, what they become involved in is the story.
Jamal Miller (13:14.761)
Yes, know 100 % AJ and you’re spot on because we ended up taking that story and turning it into our first seven figure brand, The One University and and how we ended up on food stamps was trying to build this business, you know.
time we, you know, when we first started Married and Young, it was just a blog, you know, and then a friend of mine saw that we had started the blog and we was doing really well, but I had no background in business, never sat in one marketing class, nothing at all for me. It was full-time industry, becoming a pastor. That was my tunnel vision.
So a friend of mine comes and he says, Hey Jamal, I saw you started his blog. How’s it going? I said, man, it’s going great. We’re getting about 40,000 page views a month. He’s like 40,000 visitors a month. I’m like, yeah, it’s pretty crazy. Like we were just doing everything right. And he’s like, are you paying for advertising or ads? I’m like, what is that? No, we’re just posting our content on Facebook and people are, they’re going to the website. He’s like, Jamal, you can be rich. And I was like, how did you get rich from blogging? Straight, I just, once again, super green.
So he says, Hey man, I’m gonna sit you down. I’ve gone from now being a minister to now I’m a personal brand online brand consultant. Never heard of anything like it before in my life. So he sits me down and he walks me through how to build an online business. And I will tell you in that moment, some, a light bulb went off that I was like, Oh my goodness, this may be a way to change the world outside of the local church. And it was like, I just immediately felt the Holy spirit just
Rory & AJ Vaden (14:42.199)
and
Jamal Miller (14:47.572)
that wind of peace to proceed. we, you know, so I said, well, man, where do I start? He’s like, you gotta, you gotta make a product. And I’m like, okay, make a product. What do I make? He’s like, write a book. So like, would not tell anybody right now. The first thing to do is write a book, right? But that’s what he literally said, write a book. And I was like, okay, I wrote my first book in 90 days, knocked it out, right? And knocked out the book. I thought we were about to be rich.
I’m like, okay, we’ve got 40,000 people coming to our website a month. I’m like, okay, I can expect 39,000 of these people, okay, are in love with us.
There’s probably a thousand of them that just don’t like us. There’s a thousand of them out of the 40. This is my math, right? Entrepreneur math. I’m like, there’s probably about a good thousand of them that are like, yeah, we don’t really want to deal with this guy. So I’m like, okay, let’s go back to the 39,000 that love us. Okay. 39,000 times 20. Okay. I told the times I said, listen, babe, we about to be rich, girl. We got to launch this book. All our problems about to go away.
AJ Vaden (15:40.142)
All
AJ Vaden (15:49.998)
You know what, I wish that was true math. I wish that was real math, Jamal.
Jamal Miller (15:55.572)
So we launched the book and I, the day before we launched it, I bought Natasha a brand new car to celebrate. Like this is so scary. I said, listen, I am no longer Jamal Miller. Okay. I am Dr. Jamal Miller. I need y’all to go ahead and change the name in the books because I got a book out. So we launched the book and the book literally made a thousand dollars. Wake up call. And my God, you talk about disappointment.
AJ Vaden (16:02.921)
no!
AJ Vaden (16:21.089)
yeah.
Jamal Miller (16:24.42)
But in the middle of disappointment, I saw a glimmer of light. I said, OK, this did not make the amount of money I thought it was going to make. But I looked at Natasha and I said, but Bay, look at what we just did. We literally just had a life experience that we put into a book. And we just made money. Yeah, it didn’t make the amount of money we want to make. I’m like, but if this is true and I can just figure out how to sell to more people.
we will never be broke a day in our life. And that was it for me. And I just said, I just gotta get better. The reality is, is I just suck at this. You know, like I’m just not good. Like.
AJ Vaden (17:03.95)
But at least you knew that. That self-awareness is always the first step, right? And I think that’s so, I think that’s, you know what I love about this and what I think, I want everyone who’s listening to hear this, is that you had an aha moment of two things that I think a lot of people in this space who are trying to become an expert or who are an expert and they’re trying to become more well-known. They have two things that they have not admitted to themselves.
Number one, I’m not good at this and I need help. Number two, I have to learn how to sell.
Those are two things that are required to be successful at anything in life. So I want to pause here and I want to talk about, so what did you do? Like, how did you go from, okay, I see the light, I know I’m not good, I know I need to figure out how to sell this stuff. How did you go from that to where you are today?
Jamal Miller (17:40.916)
Boom. Boom.
Jamal Miller (17:48.094)
period.
Jamal Miller (17:58.28)
Yep. That’s up. Yep.
Jamal Miller (18:06.494)
Well, first off, I quit, you know, I think, okay, I’m like, okay, I need to get a real job. This is being honest, right? I, know, the Bible talks about hope deferred makes the heart sick, you know, and when you put your hope into something and you believe in something and it doesn’t go the way you thought you have to, which is also another scripture, guard your heart for out of it flows a wellspring of life. Like you’ve got to guard your heart. And that disappointment set into my heart and
AJ Vaden (18:17.07)
Mmm.
Jamal Miller (18:34.1)
And it made my heart sick. And I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I need to get a real job. So I ended up quitting the online business, stopping the blog. And I went and got a real job. got my first. At the time I went to my pastor and I said, hey, can you increase me in my salary? And he’s like, hey, at the time we just can’t do it. So I ended up applying at another church, got a full time salary at another church, move my family. Well, it just me and Natasha. Move me and Natasha from Chicago to another city. And I get there.
And I realized, my goodness, this was, am, and you may think, how are you doing this Jamal in ministry? But the reality, here’s what I did. I chased money over purpose. And I think many of us do this all the time. And I’m not talking about security. All right. I think security is different than you got to, you got to secure yourself. So whatever it is, make the money you need to make. The reality was we were secure.
AJ Vaden (19:16.046)
Mmm.
Jamal Miller (19:30.64)
in Chicago, we just weren’t overflowing. We weren’t living in abundance. It wasn’t more than enough. And I’m like, I need more than enough. I need a salary that pays me what I’m worth and all those things in my church can’t. So let me go find a place that can. And so I sought satisfaction in money and not in purpose. And what I did was move to this new city, take this church on, and I was completely unhappy. Making good money, secure, but unhappy.
AJ Vaden (19:39.862)
I’m out of
Jamal Miller (20:00.892)
And it was the thing and here’s the thought and I think the question is, is what happens when we get the thing that we’ve always desired and it’s not what we actually want. And this is the stuff that I think you have to understand about how God has fashioned us is that our hearts are things that, and this is why I would say be careful following your heart. You need to lead your heart because a lot of times we follow our heart, but our heart is not fully
Connected to the heart of God because there are some flesh still in that heart There are some things in that heart some desires some selfishness You know some things in there that you cannot get out an only person that can deal with that is the Holy Spirit is God and I’m so grateful that God used this moment to draw those things out of my heart and he did use it for my good because once I got there I said this is the worst place ever I don’t want this anymore and I thought I wanted it, but I don’t and I said, okay God, how do I get out of here?
And I wish I could tell y’all the moment that we left that church that everything got better. No, it got worse. We left the church. We moved back to Chicago. I thought I had a job lined up. The job that was lined up when we got back to Chicago fell through. And this is when I looked at Natasha and I said, hey, babe, you are six months pregnant. I am driving Uber to make ends meet. We need help. And that’s whenever we had to go apply for food stamps. And I remember the first time us buying groceries with food stamps, Natasha’s like, babe,
We don’t look like we’re on food stamps. said, we may not look like we’re on food stamps, but baby, we own food stamps. All right, well, let’s get this chicken. Let’s get this steak and let’s get up out of here and go eat, you know? And it was a, it was a very humbling season. and when in that, in that moment, what I would say was, yeah, it was like, I’ve stopped the whole playing around with purpose and Jamal it’s time to bet on you again. So that’s when we picked up the online business again. And I said, okay, what do we know how to do that we can do quick?
And the thing that we came to mind was hosting an online conference. And so we hosted an online conference. And in that moment, when we did online conference, it made about thirteen thousand dollars. Right. And it was just enough to kind of like give us a little cushion, you know, into our next thing. But what ended up happening in that whole spin of time between the food stamps, picking the online business back up because before it was Plan B. Now it has to become Plan A. We pick it back up. We start trying to nurture it again.
Jamal Miller (22:27.444)
And here’s what ended up happening. Money became the control in our home. And the Bible talks about this. The Bible says that you can only serve two gods. You cannot serve both God and mammon. And mammon is the god of money. And I will tell you in our home, when we had money in the bank account, me and Natasha were happy. When there was no money in the bank account, we’re fighting, we’re arguing, we’re mad, we’re anxious, we’re, you know, money was the temperature.
the thermostat, I’m sorry, of how we felt about ourselves and the season of our life. And one day we’re at church. This is when things broke. We’re at church and the pastor begins to speak about the spirit of mammon. as you know, how you’re in church and you’re just hearing a message and you’re like, God. And he begins to talk about the spirit of mammon. And I believe there are some of you in this room right now. And I’m very careful. I know a lot of pastors, a lot of churches
AJ Vaden (23:13.502)
yeah.
Jamal Miller (23:22.088)
They can use money to manipulate and things like that. But in that moment, I could not shake it. I’m like, yeah, this ain’t a manipulative moment. Like, this is me. He is speaking to me because Mammon is running our life right now. And I said, Lord, how do I get you back in the driver’s seat of our finances? And for us, the first thing that came to my mind was just to sow a crazy seed. Just Jamal, just sow a seed and just make this like get put it on the altar.
and just give God your best. Right. And at the time, this is me just following Holy Spirit. I called Natasha and I’m like, babe, we need to sow a seed and I want to give something crazy, something radical. And at the time we had never given a thousand dollars. It was just just the number that came to my mind, my heart. I’m like, hey, I want to give a thousand. She’s like, babe, are you sure? And she said, I said, babe, I think we need to do it. I want to trust God and we get the money together. And this is what we prayed. I said, God,
I’m not sowing this thousand dollars for a in the mail. I’m not sowing this thousand dollars for a promotion at work. I’m not sowing this for you to be a genie and magically make all our money problems go away. I’m sowing this thousand dollars so that you can give me and Natasha the clarity that we need for the future and purpose that you have for us in this time. Clear my heart up.
from chasing money and help me align myself with chasing purpose again. So we sow that thousand dollar seed on that prayer. And it was probably maybe a month later that we were on a webinar. And on the webinar, are, because at the time we were all over the place in our business doing all whatever we could do to make money. We’re on this webinar and one of the people just says, and I go into a rant, you know, just talking and I’m like, yeah guys.
I’m so tired of y’all, you know, trying to keep figuring out how to find the one. You need to learn how to become the one. And when we said this thing, become the one, the chat just goes crazy. And I look at it I’m like, well, they’re like, we need to learn more about that. How do we become the one? How do we become the one? And I said, Natasha, I’m like, babe, there’s something on this become the one thing. And that was our breakthrough. And we ended up getting an idea for a membership.
AJ Vaden (25:42.348)
Okay.
Jamal Miller (25:46.942)
called The One University from that webinar. And we put our last bit of money to launching a membership to help singles become the one. And what I’ll tell you is our life has not been the same since launching The One University.
AJ Vaden (25:56.418)
Bye.
AJ Vaden (26:02.188)
You know, I think there’s something really important about this whole journey that you’ve gone through in this chasing purpose over money. And if you focus on purpose, if you focus on your divine calling, then money will come as a byproduct, right? But if you focus on the money, then it’s just work, work, work, work, work. also it’s never going to fulfill you, right? There’s that element of never enough-ness.
Jamal Miller (26:20.852)
You’re right.
AJ Vaden (26:31.158)
And so what I would love to hear from, and I think you said once, like don’t chase money, right? Chase purpose. How do you do that? Tactically speaking, like for the person who’s listening, who’s like, that’s great Jamal, I’m so glad you had all these breakthroughs and it’s all worked out. And cause I think what I hear so often is I think there’s a, an era of comparison. and I hear so many people in the brain builders group communities, like, well, it seems like memberships are the thing to do.
Jamal Miller (26:41.192)
Yeah.
Jamal Miller (26:45.844)
I know.
AJ Vaden (27:00.236)
Or it seems like one-on-one coaching is the thing to do. Or what I hear a lot of people say is, well, I don’t want to be trading time for money. I always ask, why not? And they’re like, well, I want to make money while asleep. And I’m like, who does that? Introduce me to these people. All they do is sleep and make money. I would like to meet them. So I would be curious to hear your thoughts, because you’ve been on both sides, right?
Jamal Miller (27:22.888)
Please, please.
Jamal Miller (27:27.922)
Yes.
AJ Vaden (27:29.102)
How do you reconcile those things to go, no, no, no, I’m just, I’m gonna do this thing that I feel called to do and also figure out a path of how do you turn this passion into something that can fulfill your needs and help you thrive?
Jamal Miller (27:49.3)
Absolutely. Such a great question. think it comes back down to understanding what purpose is. And I think when I say chase purpose, right, you may think I’m saying chase purpose, but I’m actually not. And let me explain in the Bible, the Bible says in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That’s what he did. But you must ask yourself, why did he do it? Well, if you keep reading, it goes on to say the earth was without void, which means that the earth was completely black, completely dark.
AJ Vaden (27:53.934)
Mm.
Jamal Miller (28:18.696)
God saw a problem, right? And when he said the earth was out void, he’s like, that’s a problem. I don’t like this place that’s black, that’s dark. This place needs life. This place needs me to come in and create something. And that’s when he took seven days to create the world that we are now living in today. God saw a problem.
And out of that problem, he found his purpose, which was to create the heavens and the earth in the world that we have today. And I think if you are going to chase purpose, the idea here is to not just chase purpose in itself, it’s to actually find a problem. And when you find a problem, my friend, you have found your purpose. Now, there are things I have a framework called the circle of purpose, you that I created to help people understand how do I
turn my purpose into a legitimate, viable, profitable business? Well, inside of purpose, number one is a problem, right? But then once you identify the problem, you must ask yourself a few questions. Number two, all right?
are there people who actually are struggling with this problem, right? Are there people who need this problem? Are there people who also have a connection to this being a problem that they’re facing? And who are those people? What are they? What’s their age? What’s their demographic? What’s their background? What’s their experience? And we’ve all said it, personal branding 101, the best person to serve is who you were three to four years ago. Like that’s easy, right? But then the next question you must ask yourself is, do I have proficiency? Do I have the skills, the abilities?
And I would even go as far as to that, because I didn’t have none of that, y’all. I didn’t have the skills. I didn’t have the abilities. My proficiency was a story. So when you look at the problem that we saw was, how you make, Jamal, what’s your circular purpose for this first brand? Well, the problem that we saw, number one, was singles struggling to get married. That was it. We recognized that there were singles that were struggling to get married. And that was the problem. Who were the people? Well, they were 30 to 40-year-old singles.
Jamal Miller (30:17.278)
that were either on their second marriage or they went through a traumatic relationship, a traumatic dating relationship that scarred them about marriage and they were having a hard time having successful relationships. All right, proficiency. Well, the next thing that we also saw was that they were having a hard time meeting people at their churches. Well, guess what? Our story was we didn’t meet at our church, we met online. So how do we help people now meet people in a digital way, right? That becomes…
That was our proficiency, our story of here’s how we did it. And now we took all of that and we packaged it up into a product that we could help people to get this problem solved in their life. And my friend, that framework, what I just gave you is a circle of purpose because what we just did was we took something that started off as a problem that we saw and we turned it into a viable, passion-driven, purpose-centered business.
AJ Vaden (31:11.129)
And I have rather successful one at that. And I think that’s a testament to it’s like when you, and I love what you said and that, know, ironically that’s so interconnected to what we call the brain positioning statement at Brain Builders Group. It’s like, what problem do you solve? What’s the call list of that problem? What’s your unique way of solving that problem? And ultimately, who do you solve it for and how do you make money solving it? Right? But it’s all problem centered, but
Jamal Miller (31:13.204)
Yep.
Jamal Miller (31:25.492)
Mm hmm. Yep.
AJ Vaden (31:37.42)
The goodness in all of that is like, if what you do really works, people talk about it. It spreads, right? It grows because it works. And that’s where the money comes. It’s like you solve a problem and you do it so well that it changes someone’s life. And when you do that, they go tell everyone they know.
Jamal Miller (31:43.39)
That’s it. It’s bright. Yes. Yes, it works. Yes.
Jamal Miller (31:54.612)
I’m on. Absolutely.
Jamal Miller (32:00.648)
Yep. And I think the piece that we have to be careful with is thinking that whatever we’re doing right now is what we’ll do forever. I think a lot of people think, if I start doing this, then I got to do this forever. What if I change my mind? What if I don’t lose passion here? Guys, and I am the testimony. We did that business, the one university for five years. It went from, you know, a brand new, the one university membership, right? And we learned how to do grow our membership. We grew up to four thousand via.
AJ Vaden (32:07.63)
Mmm, that’s good.
Jamal Miller (32:29.896)
product launches, which we’re talking about that. All right. So we got it to about 1.2 million. All right. And we are five years in with this business and there’s a whole lot of stuff that happens. Success ruined me and my wife. You know, we had to really remarry each other. Once we hit seven figures, you know, I lost my identity. She lost hers. Remember beginning of the story. I thought I was going to be a pastor. So now five years later, we’re seven figure business owners. And I’m like, what the heck is life? You know, what’s going on? And we had our marriage took a major hit.
AJ Vaden (32:30.477)
Amazing.
Jamal Miller (32:58.6)
But within that time frame, once we remarried each other, and it’s a real story, we really had to rededicate, like we are committed to the future of one another. And once we did that, we had to ask ourselves, do we want to serve singles forever? Is this, you know, we’re growing in marriage. We’re now five years, you know, at that point, we’re primarily married seven, eight years. I’m saying, babe, I don’t want to this forever. And she’s like, I don’t want to do this forever either. And I’m like, OK, well, we got to figure out what’s next. And I wish I could tell you that it was easy.
to figure out what was next. It was really hard, but we did it and we are in our next. And it took many years of us just kind of testing, experimenting with different things in order to figure out the next thing. And the beautiful part is at the end of the day, everything we’ve tested and experimented with, there was still a common thread of helping to transform people from the inside out. It was just us deciding on how we wanted to do it. And I wanna give you permission, whoever’s watching and listening.
to go experiment, test things out, try things out. Don’t feel like you’ve got to nail it the first time. We did nail it the first time, but my friend, we did not nail it the second, third, fourth time, okay? Like, I’m grateful we nailed it first, because that did give us some good cushion to experiment and fail. But if whatever you’re doing and you don’t like it, that’s okay. Try something else, do something else. But just remember your why. Make sure you, before you go experiment,
that you know what your why is. For us, no matter what I do, I want to transform people. I got to be in the middle of somehow, some way helping people to become a better version of themselves. I don’t care if it’s going to through helping somebody to learn how to be a speaker or launching a course or launching whatever we’re helping people do. I got to make sure that somehow I’m helping them become a better version of themselves that they can look like Jesus at the end of this. That was my common thread. So my encouragement would be find your why and just make sure that you center around that why with whatever you’re testing and experimenting with.
And so yeah, AJ, for us, we did the singles business for about five years. We grew the heck out of it, know, 4,000 members, 200,000 plus email lists, multiple launches a year. But then we lost passion for it. did. And so right now we’re in the process of actually partnering with someone else to hand that off to them. So we’re in that process now. But we, you know, took some soul searching, some journeying, and we try like two different businesses within like a three year run.
Jamal Miller (35:19.744)
And where we’ve landed today is on, we’ve built a new program called Call Coach Institute. And it is helping to certify life coaches who are infused what we call a spirit led coaching model where we’re helping life coaches, disciple people in their coaching sessions as life coaches. And we just completed a $3 million launch. It’s been incredible, fun ride. But once again, like I said, it wasn’t easy to get here.
AJ Vaden (35:47.608)
You know, I’d love to go back to two things that you said, because I think there’s so many interesting components of this. And although on the surface they could seem all seemingly disconnected, you you pointed out it’s like, but they’re not, because it’s all centered around personal transformation from the inside out. It was from singledness to coupledness. It was from where you were to who you were created to be. But there’s this transformation component. And if you look below the surface,
Jamal Miller (36:15.4)
Yes.
AJ Vaden (36:17.55)
So I want to come back to that but the first thing you said that I think we kind of skimmed over and I want to want to double back on this is success really really hurt you and so what did that look like and I think it would be good to also talk about like for everyone who’s listening who is successful who has been successful but yet They’re not happy and they’re not loving life and life isn’t going so well right now
Jamal Miller (36:43.444)
Yeah.
AJ Vaden (36:46.562)
Like what are some of the things that you noticed where money had kind of taken over or success had taken over and how did y’all catch that? What did you do to rectify that? Because I think there’s a lot of people that I know personally in my business life and my personal life that materialistically speaking, they got it all. They’ve sold businesses, they have the house, the cars, the trips, the travel, the things, and they are not happy.
Jamal Miller (37:07.572)
Got it all.
Jamal Miller (37:17.192)
Yeah. Yep, we experience both sides, right? I think it’s hard to be broke and it’s hard to be rich. You choose your heart. If you choose the heart of being rich, just know that here’s the reality. Money only solves money problems. And I think that’s what you are getting at, right? Money only solves money problems. And so once you do have money and that problem is solved,
AJ Vaden (37:17.389)
at all.
AJ Vaden (37:23.148)
Hmm. Hmph. That’s right.
Jamal Miller (37:40.46)
Now you have to realize that there are a lot of other problems in your life, right? Your problem with yourself, problem with friends, problem with relationships, things that money can’t buy. And that’s what we ran into. And it was a wake-up call. When I say success ruined us, it’s because it revealed that that’s all that we were going after. It revealed that that was all that. And it also revealed that we had a definition of success that wasn’t sustainable.
Right? And I think that’s the other part. If you’re going to.
be successful, you’ve got to understand that you don’t own success. Success is rented, and I think many of you heard this quote, success is rented and rent is due every single day. So what does that mean for me? What that means is that every point of success, I’ve got to reevaluate. What does success for me mean now? Right? And I think that was the thing that we just were failing to do. Some of the fundamental things we were failing to do at every new level of success, which was come back and reevaluate. All right, what do we want out of our life?
now and for me and Natasha, we got to a place where our marriage just became a second thought. It became, we were actually using our marriage for success versus actually like.
being married, like, because we were in the marriage business. So we were literally using our story, using each other, using it. So we were drawing from the marriage versus feeding the marriage. And we kept drawing from it, drawing from it, drawing from it. And you’ve got to realize your marriage is like a third person. You you’ve got your wife, you’ve got yourself, and you’ve got your marriage. And you’ve got to treat that.
AJ Vaden (38:57.218)
man.
AJ Vaden (39:06.828)
Mmm.
Jamal Miller (39:17.672)
thing with dignity and respect. And for us, we stopped doing that. We were not treating our marriage like a person. We were treating it like it was just, will always be there. It will always be whatever it is. And that’s when you end up looking at each other and realizing, I don’t know you. I don’t even know if I like you right now. And I don’t know if we are what we thought we were going to be at this point in our juncture. And most people at that point just decide to change and remarry and get a divorce. But what I told Natasha, I said, I said, no, we, I,
AJ Vaden (39:18.466)
good.
Jamal Miller (39:46.622)
That’s not for us. Like we need to buckle down and we need to recommit because when I said in my vows to you, I said yes to your past, your present and your future. And that’s when we had to remarry one another. So yeah, was a, was, I think I kind of gave a good bit there, but when I say success ruined us, what I mean by it is that it revealed who we really were and we had to make a decision. I don’t like this person that I’m being and it’s time to make a change.
AJ Vaden (40:13.198)
You
No, I think that’s really good. And I love that concept of you have to reevaluate and redefine success at every new level of success. And I don’t think people do that. I think they do it here, they do it there, but it’s like, once you’ve reached this, got to reevaluate, reset it, redefine it. I think that’s really good advice for all of us to make sure that keeping the main thing the main thing, and the main thing ain’t the money, right? It’s not the success.
Jamal Miller (40:23.474)
at every level. Yes. Now.
I did just keep calling it.
Jamal Miller (40:42.992)
No. No.
Rory & AJ Vaden (40:45.206)
I love that. Now you have transitioned. You guys have been so good at so many things that you guys have done. Before we wrap up and go offline, I have like a real quick list of questions that I would really love for our audience to hear from you. So here’s the first thing that I would love for everyone to hear from you is what’s your number one piece of advice or at least top one or two that you would give to the entrepreneur who feels stuck at their current level?
Jamal Miller (41:00.798)
to a fire.
Rory & AJ Vaden (41:14.272)
and who also wants to go faster, right? Because everyone wants to go faster, but they don’t know what to do.
Jamal Miller (41:21.268)
So I think most entrepreneurs that feel stuck, the first thing they think is, what am I doing wrong? Or what should I be doing next? And I will tell you that’s the wrong way to think. It’s who should I be talking to? All right, don’t go to what, go to who.
Rory & AJ Vaden (41:32.142)
you
Jamal Miller (41:34.578)
because if you’re asking yourself what you should be doing, you’re asking yourself what, what, you don’t know. So stop wasting time trying to figure out what to do and go do whatever you got to do to find the right who to talk to. Because I can tell you my journey of success at every level. I can point back to a person that catapulted me to my next level. I can point back to a coach. I can point back to a mentor. I can point back to a specialist that was able to look right at my season, right at my problem and tell me exactly
me to do to get to the next level. And I’m telling you that to me has been my cheat code, my cheat code. And I also would say, be careful expecting one person to solve all your problems. is not, nobody is Jesus. Nobody can solve all your problems. So whenever you do link up to a coach, just know you need to already know what problem you need them to solve so that you can move on whenever they solve that problem and not hang on to them or think they’re going to be there forever for you or be the person forever, or they’re going to help all the parts of your business. What I found is that each coach come in my life came
Rory & AJ Vaden (42:05.398)
Mmm, that’s so good.
Jamal Miller (42:34.442)
in my life had a very unique specialty. And it was primarily the thing that was best for them, right? Whatever I saw that they were doing really well was the thing that I said, I want that. Why do you go to a coach that isn’t doing something well and expecting to help you with that, right? Don’t waste your time, waste your money. So I will tell you, if you want to get to the next level, it’s not about what to do. It’s about who should I be talking to?
Rory & AJ Vaden (42:50.239)
That’s good.
Rory & AJ Vaden (42:57.064)
That’s so good. I mean that is the power of, hey you don’t have to make the same mistakes. Go learn from the people who’ve made them who can help you expedite the process. Now you said something in there that I want you to double down on because you said, hey your job is to know the problem you have so you can go get the help you need. What if you don’t know the problem?
Jamal Miller (43:20.104)
That’s a good question. know, that’s a good one. You kind of got me stumped there because I would say, don’t know at any point in my business that I didn’t at least know, or if you don’t know the problem, I would probably say, well, what do you want?
Right? At least coming in and that’s another big one that a lot of entrepreneurs, don’t know what they want. it, is it, even if whatever you want is maybe the wrong thing, you know, at least coming to a coach or coming to someone and saying, Hey, here’s what I want. Right? You know, like for me in this season of my business, you know, I want, um,
Rory & AJ Vaden (43:53.325)
and
Jamal Miller (43:58.312)
It’s not autonomy. I kind of want to have something that is just not requiring 15, 20 people to run it, right? Like I have a business right now that has 15 employees that require that is required to run it. And I love it because I love having a team, but I also want to have something that just I can do with maybe one person and it just, I can be, I can still be that, I don’t know, on the ground entrepreneur that’s just like in the weeds and still I can get messy with it. And not all my team are looking at me like, why is Jamal doing that? Why is he doing this? Why are you doing that?
Rory & AJ Vaden (44:04.622)
Mm-hmm.
Rory & AJ Vaden (44:27.022)
You
Jamal Miller (44:28.166)
And that’s just, and that’s what I want. So I have an entrepreneur coach that’s in the same season where he’s pivoted from a $20 million business to a $2 million business with two team members. And I’m working with him to help me figure out how to do both. Well, how do I have a 20, know, 15, $20 million thing that I can be the founder CEO. And there’s a whole suite of leaders that runs it. And it keeps me sharp because once you become a high level leader like that, like you’re
Your operations is just different. And I’ll be honest, I don’t want to do that 100 % of the time. really, doesn’t give me that much life, but I do have this other idea that I would love to build into a one to $2 million thing. And I need to know how to manage and do both well. And so I want to find someone that is doing that. And so that, or has done it. And so that’s kind of where I’m at. That’s my desire. So at least if you don’t know what the problem is, at least be clear about what you want.
Rory & AJ Vaden (45:18.574)
That’s good. I love that. And it’s like, if you don’t know what the problem is, you at least have to know what you want. And sometimes that takes some serious time and reflection because people can’t help you if you can’t tell them what you need help with. Right? That’s the gist of it. Now, I love that you said something else too about growth and scale. I would love to also know it’s like, in your opinion, like how do you stay aligned with purpose while scaling?
Jamal Miller (45:27.683)
self-discovery.
Jamal Miller (45:47.282)
You know, we are going through that right now. And I just got done, I’m not sure if you’ve ever read the book by Cameron Harrell, Vivid Vision.
It’s a great book and we just, you know, put this into practice. Just every single brand that we build, we I take the time to go do a 15, 20 page vivid vision around it. And what that does is just forces me to think three to five years down the road of like, what is the thing? How is this brand tying back to the overall vision that the Lord has given us? And for me, the conviction that I have is that I know that we’ve been called to pastor the Internet. And I think that’s just comes right back down
to your why. And so as you grow in scale, I have to have clarity on what is the through line. As long as we’re pointing back, what is our North Star? It can’t be money because you’re going to always. But what is something that you will never, ever run out of being able to accomplish and do? And for us, when the Bible gave us the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations, that I take very serious. And that’s my why.
How do we make disciples of all nations? Because that is the thing that will forever be the problem that we are facing. More and more people looking like him. You may have a different one. Like within that big idea or that why, there are so many things that can break out of it that I can solve. And so that keeps me aligned. And so, but at the same time, I’m also still, I’m obsessed with my own limitations.
And I think you have to know yourself, right? I am obsessed with what are my limits and I’m obsessed with my own potential, you know? And so I think those are the things that kind of drive me as well. Like, can I do this? Can I go this far? Can I, you know, at what point will I not like it? You know, and those are the things, right? And so as long as it’s not impacting my marriage or my relationship with God, I go after it.
Rory & AJ Vaden (47:46.158)
Yeah, but I think that’s back to it’s like 15 to 20 pages. Ain’t no, you know, paragraph, y’all. Like if you think you’ve written yourself a couple of lines of what my vision is, that’s a whole different, that’s a whole nother level of do you really know? Right? Have you really dug deep? Is there real clarity versus, you know, there’s so many vision statement exercises. Oh, got my sentence. We’re good. Got it. But that’s, I love that of like, I mean, I’m just sitting here going like, where do I have 15 or even 10 or even five pages?
Jamal Miller (47:57.576)
Yeah. Do you really?
Rory & AJ Vaden (48:16.046)
of a detailed vision capturing what my purpose is and what the centered why is to keep me aligned. Because I think when you get that deep, it’s like that’s something to go back to again and again. I love that. Okay, last question because I promise I won’t keep you much longer. I told you I had like 36 questions over here. So here’s my last question.
Jamal Miller (48:23.646)
Amen.
Jamal Miller (48:33.714)
No, this is good. I’m having fun.
mean, just going back to the vision piece, without vision, people perish. Right?
Rory & AJ Vaden (48:43.374)
Well, yeah, and I love that. And I think it is one of those things that people don’t spend near enough time. Or if they do, they did it one time, right? One time. it’s like, no, I mean, you got to do that all the time, all the time. Somebody asked me because I’m my fourth year in the row. And I will admit it took me 36 years as a believing Christian.
Jamal Miller (48:53.426)
One time.
Rory & AJ Vaden (49:12.504)
to read the Bible in its entirety. What an embarrassing statement. But I’m on the fourth year in a row where I’m reading the Bible word for word, page to page, cover to cover, and somebody asked me, like, why do you keep reading the same thing again and again, like every year? And it’s like, because I have to read it every day to stay connected to it, right? Every day, it’s like.
Jamal Miller (49:14.654)
Wow, I love that. It’s okay, you did it. Come on.
Jamal Miller (49:35.092)
Every time. Come on. Every time you see something.
Rory & AJ Vaden (49:40.27)
you why do I say I love you to my husband every day? Right? And it’s like, why do I eat every day? Right? It’s like, I got to stay connected to my source. Right? And it’s like, same thing with your vision statement, like, or your goals or whatever. It’s like, when’s the last time you pulled that thing up and read it? Actually stayed connected to it. Like it’s a thing. It’s a living, breathing document. Okay. Next question. Actually, I’m going ask you three questions rapid fire, and you can answer them as quickly as you want. So,
Jamal Miller (49:53.844)
every day.
Jamal Miller (50:04.532)
Let’s go.
Rory & AJ Vaden (50:08.27)
investment you’ve ever made in your personal growth? What would you say it is?
Jamal Miller (50:15.146)
it was, was a mastermind. yeah, a $30,000 mastermind where the coach said, Hey, I’m gonna hold your hand to a million dollars. And I was on that call every single week until we got to a million dollars. And we did, and we haven’t made less than a million dollars since that mastermind. Now, not all masterminds are credit equal. So be careful. Don’t just go and run to any mastermind. Like here’s my, here’s my money. Jamal Miller said he made a million dollars after his. but I would say that was the best investment I ever made. when I fully betted on myself on an amount of money that absolutely seemed ludicrous at the time.
Rory & AJ Vaden (50:44.302)
I love that. One book that every purpose-driven entrepreneur should read.
Jamal Miller (50:51.412)
Man oh man oh man oh every purpose driven entrepreneur should read. Can I give two? I’ll give one that’s a spiritual and one that’s a business book. The spiritual book is Drawing Near to God by John Bevere. Best book on truly understanding intimacy and that God just wants you. You can bring him the money, bring him souls, bring him businesses, bring him all the
Rory & AJ Vaden (51:02.243)
Do it.
Jamal Miller (51:20.638)
things that you are going to do on this earth because you are a world changer. But I’m telling you, the thing that makes him most proud is you with nothing else. So drawing near taught me that. In terms of business, I’m looking through my deck right here. I would say the book that probably had the biggest impact on my business that every entrepreneur should read, my
Rory & AJ Vaden (51:28.533)
Mmm, I love that.
Jamal Miller (51:45.81)
Gosh, it is so hard to choose, but I am going to go with, my goodness, I know what it is. The Road Less Traveled. Do you know I’m talking about? I actually read it like once a month, but the name is, it’s like The Road Less Traveled, The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. Keith Cunningham, yeah, he is the business coach for Tony Robbins and The Road Less Stupid. That book teaches you how to think.
Rory & AJ Vaden (51:56.802)
No.
Rory & AJ Vaden (52:06.294)
Yes.
Jamal Miller (52:13.81)
And if there’s anything that you need to learn how to do as an entrepreneur is to learn how to think. And so literally I have a thinking chair. I wish I could pull my camera over here. I bought my thinking chair because of that book. That’s what he said. He said, Hey, you need to get a chair that becomes your thinking chair. And every Sunday I do something that this is my framework, right? I believe prayer is getting the heart of God, but my think time is to get the mind of God. So when I get in my think chair, I say, God, we act like we’re in a boardroom.
Rory & AJ Vaden (52:19.662)
Yeah.
Rory & AJ Vaden (52:38.46)
and
Jamal Miller (52:42.332)
You are the CEO of my business. What are you thinking right now? How are you thinking about this? How are you thinking about that? And it’s not prayer. It’s me engaging God as the intelligent God that he is, that knows my future, knows the future of this world, help me align. Now I don’t get it right every single time because I’m human, but I do my very best to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, to get that think time, to get the mind of God into my mind so I can run my company accordingly. And so you need to have prayer time where it’s worship.
confessing, venting, crying, whatever you got to do to get the heart of God. But then you got your think time where you engage God in his mind. The role as stupid is what helped me to get that revelation.
Rory & AJ Vaden (53:20.664)
Mm.
Rory & AJ Vaden (53:25.972)
I love that. I spent four days at the four-day MBA with Keith Cunningham, and what I love about him is that he don’t sugarcoat it. Right? It’s a straightforward, clear path. And I love John Bevere and all the things. Those are great books. All right, last question. What does influential mean to you?
Jamal Miller (53:33.576)
No.
Jamal Miller (53:49.126)
Influential to me, I’m getting a picture before I got a word. Influential to me means ripple effect, ripple, right? Like it’s a ripple. And when I say a ripple, when you throw a rock in a water, it creates ripples. And I believe influence creates ripples. To where when you do one thing, and if you’re influential, it should create ripples. There should be impact that goes beyond you, from your books.
to your content that you create, to your social media, to the people you help, to the employees you hire, everything you do as an influencer, there should be ripples. It goes beyond you.
Rory & AJ Vaden (54:28.998)
Mmm, that’s a good word Jamal. That is so good. Y’all, this is the tip of the iceberg of what I would like to cover with Jamal, but that would be like a full half-day interview. And we ain’t got time for that today, unfortunately. We’re gonna have to come back and do part two and part three at some point. But y’all, I would just so encourage you to, after this episode, go follow Jamal and…
Jamal Miller (54:36.25)
No.
Yeah
Rory & AJ Vaden (54:54.61)
his beautiful wife, but I mean, there’s a couple of things that I’m gonna just, I’m gonna spread one. Go to jamalmiller.com, right? You can connect with him on all the socials from there, but that would be one place just to connect and also with Natasha. Where should people go to connect with Natasha?
Jamal Miller (55:11.432)
Yeah, so her Instagram is the best place. You can also, if you’re a woman who wants to kind of learn more about the brand that we’re building right now, you can go to calledwomen.com and we have a plethora of resources there. If you are a woman that, you know, wants to follow her, follow what she’s up to, go to her Instagram at Natasha Miller. yeah, those are, you know, and then as well, we have a YouTube channel called at called women where she has a bunch of podcasts and content that you can check out.
Rory & AJ Vaden (55:37.166)
We’ll have have Natasha on next. She’s in baby mode right now when she gets out, when she’s back in the land of the living. But then also, y’all, really awesome free resource. Jamal and Natasha have been so generous to give. So if y’all want to grab the seven-figure launch template, this is free. I want you to write this down. Go to profitnpurpose.com forward slash LLV.
Jamal Miller (55:39.004)
Yeah, that’ll be fun.
Rory & AJ Vaden (56:04.782)
Profitinpurpose.com forward slash LLV and just use the code brand, B-R-A-N-D at checkout. You get those for free. I will put those in the show notes. This has been a fantastic interview with so many insights and before we bounce, I just wanted to share with you, Jamal, these are the three things that I wrote down that I’m gonna go back and share with our company. gonna, I literally am gonna write these down and put them on sticky notes.
and put them in my office so if they meant something to me then maybe these will resonate with you guys who are listening. Number one, money only solves money problems. That’s so good, right? If you don’t have these like and highlighted excerpts you need to write these down Jamal. But that was the first one that really stuck out to me. The second one is that when you find a problem you can solve. You have found your purpose. Right?
Jamal Miller (56:58.58)
Come on, that’s simple.
Rory & AJ Vaden (57:00.3)
It’s so, so good. So, so good. And then the third one that I’m going to write down and actually start putting into practice is the re-evaluating success at every new level of success. And it’s like that didn’t happen one time. That happens all the time. And those are three things that I’m going to walk away of going, hey, like I’m going to put these into practice after this interview. This is going to make a difference in my life, my family, and my business. And so Jamal, thank you for your time today. Absolutely phenomenal.
Love this. I cannot wait to share it with our audience.
Jamal Miller (57:29.652)
I love it. Come on with thank you AJ. Thank you to you Roy for continuing to plow to helping entrepreneurs build their personal brands. I do believe that personal brand is the best investment you can make in today’s society. I believe you build your personal brand. We didn’t get into this, but I would say the biggest mistake that we made in building our business brands was not building our personal brands alongside them. And so please, as you guys are investing or in considering investing,
Rory & AJ Vaden (57:54.392)
Mmm.
Jamal Miller (57:58.44)
do the work you gotta do or whatever you gotta do to build your personal brand, your name. And there’s no one better in the industry that’s helping people do that than Rory and AJ. So jump in there, get the help you need so you can build your name into a cash money machine because that’s what happens when you build a good name. And so they’re the best at it. So thank you guys for doing the work that you’re doing. I love you guys. I’m so grateful for just the relationship that we have.
Rory & AJ Vaden (58:14.03)
You
Rory & AJ Vaden (58:21.494)
love that and thank you and listen to Jamal. Do what he says, do what he says, right? Build that personal brand, y’all. I love you guys. Thank you for sticking around all the way to the end of this awesome episode. Be sure to follow Jamal and we will catch you next time on the influential personal brand. See you later.
Ep 577: The #1 Thing That’s Holding You Back from What You Want | Jason Stacy Episode Recap
AJ (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden, and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well-known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started.
AJ(00:34):
You wanna know what the number one thing is that’s holding you back from what you want most? Well, I know what it is, uh, because it’s no different for you than it is for me or anyone else in the world. And the number one thing for all of us that is holding us back from success, and that could be success in business or finance or health or, uh, relationships, uh, we’ll just call it success in general, however you wanna define success. If you, if you don’t have what you consider successful or if you’re not where you thought you would be or if you’re not doing what you wanna be doing. For most of us, it’s just one thing. There’s just this one thing that’s in the way and not one thing is fear. Not one thing for all of us is an emotion. It’s fear, right?
AJ (01:28):
It’s, it’s telling yourself this won’t work and, uh, I’m not capable. Um, it’s, well, I can’t do this because what if it doesn’t work out and I wasted all this time or money or effort or resources, or, um, you know what, what if I do this and, and I do fail? Like, what are people gonna think about me? Or, uh, it’s, you know, what if I, I try to do it and I lose all this money, or I lose all my friends, or I lose my business, or I lose my marriage, or what they, it could be a hundred different things and I could go through and list out all the reasons why, but ultimately, they could all be summed up into one four letter word fear. If we don’t have what we want most often, it’s because we didn’t take the chance on ourselves.
AJ (02:15):
We didn’t take that leap of faith. We didn’t believe in ourselves enough to do the thing. We didn’t believe that we’d have the, the courage or the endurance, or the persistence or persistence or the resources, um, or we just didn’t even believe in our own ability to go out and learn and do the thing. There is a fear element to all of us that is holding us back from where we are to where we wanna be and from what we have versus what we want most. And it’s like, relationally speaking, it’s perhaps it’s like you’re too afraid to be fully known, and so you don’t have the marriage, um, that you want because well, you, you won’t be real and honest because you think to yourself, well, if I was really honest about who I, I really am, but they really love me. Like, if they knew who I really was, deep down, if they knew these crazy thoughts I really had, but they actually still love me.
AJ03:10):
And I, I bet that for many of us, we don’t have the health and the, you know, longevity plan that we really want because there’s some fear of, uh, missing out of like, man, if I really decided to give up alcohol and get healthy, like, would I even be any fun
AJ (03:56):
It’s like there’s all these things and it’s like, man, it’s like I really wanna, I really wanna try to write this book, but what if it sucks? Like, what if no one buys it? What if I do all this? And it’s, it’s not for anything, right? Fear, fear is the thing that is holding almost all of us back from whatever it is that we want. And I think there’s a couple of things I just wanna mention about this. I just finished reading a book called Living Fearless. And, um, Jamie Winship is the author, living Fearless is the book. And one of the things that he says in the book, and it’s probably not my only takeaway, but it’s my biggest takeaway, I know it’s not my only takeaway, but what I loved, and he said, this was towards the very end of the book, he said, you can only become fearless when you walk through fear filled situations.
Ep 576: Managing Your Emotions, Energy and Environment for Long Term Success with Jason Stacy
AJV (00:01):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. And I am, uh, going to be having an amazing conversation with a new friend of mine, Jason Stacy. And, um, before I formally introduce him, as I always do, I wanna kind of let you guys know what this episode is all about and why you should stick around. Sometimes I have hyper-specific episodes that are really for those of you who are trying to write a book or launch a book, others who are building their speaking career, or, you know, you’re trying to build a coaching community. This is not one of those episodes. This is one of those episodes that is about how to succeed at life
AJV (00:56):
So I wanted to let you guys know upfront that, uh, occasionally we have these universal kind of conversations. It just applies to everything. Um, but I think this is a really great and important topic about managing your energy, emotions, and environment, and how being the master of those things helps you succeed at life. So that is why you need to stick around. Now, before we get into this amazing conversation about all these things, uh, let me introduce you to Jason. Stacy. We are gonna talk about his journey from homelessness to high performance coaching. Uh, and I think all I really, really, it’s gonna be, it’s God conversation about his testaments, uh, to resilience, adaptability, and unshakeable foundations, and how we can all build those from learning about these things. Now, over the last 20 years, he has worked with elite athletes, business leaders, and high stakes professionals, helping them not just reach the top, but more importantly, sustain their success once they get there. And his philosophy centers on mastering energy, emotions, and environment, because true success isn’t just about achieving greatness, it’s about sustaining an growing it wrong term. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Stacy (02:11):
Well, good morning everybody.
AJV (02:16):
Well, you know, I think it’s one of these, and why I thought you were gonna be so great for this show, um, is I think a lot of people talk about how to get success. How do we reach the top? How do we do all these things? But very few people actually talk about what do you do when you get there and how do you keep it, and how do, how do you sustain it? It’s one thing to do all the work to achieve these things, but is it really what it’s all cracked up to be when you get there? And what do you, what do you do to maintain and sustain when you get there? Um, so I thought this was gonna be an, an amazing just topic for our particular audience. Uh, but before we get into that, uh, I have a burning question,
Jason Stacy (03:17):
Wow. So to start off with a small question, I see
AJV (04:00):
Oh, wow.
Jason Stacy (04:02):
So weird.
AJV (04:11):
So what, you went home from a babysitting gig
Jason Stacy (04:13):
And how Yeah, that’s where I was staying. I was for a few weeks. I was like there for a while, like for a few weeks, like with these people. And these people were messed up too, as it was a, it was a terrible environment. It was, it was. Yeah. I can’t even believe some of the things, if I would ex explain to you or tell you some stories, like you wouldn’t believe it. It was just blowing my mind. But anyway, so yeah, I like, look, I ended up being, you know, homeless and I was by myself for a few years there for most of that part, finding ways to survive, to just all kinds of different things. And, you know, I was, I did try to go back to school. I officially, I finished eighth grade was the last grade that I finished, you know, like, you know, as far as school, school goes.
Jason Stacy (04:45):
But wow, I was trying to go back to school. I was having people, I was like doing things for, to help pretend like my parents to sign things and just doing stuff like this. But anyway, how I ended up getting back off the streets was in this neighborhood, which was a pretty crappy neighborhood really. It was, um, a, uh, martial arts school, like a, it was in between like an adult bookstore and like a old tavern, you know, it was like a, in a pawn shop. It was just a, it was a crappy little place, right. Um, you know, the area itself. And I used to walk by this martial arts because I was, I was born in Japan actually, and I, as a young child, I started martial arts from when I was a little kid. And I was just always a big part of my, like, identity in my life, you know, before all this, you know, sort of mess happened. And, um, I, uh, I mean, I would go in there sometimes and just watch and sit and watch and, you know, eventually the owners, but there was like a lot of like police officers and military guys kind of training there. And, um, they, uh, uh, eventually let me train there, even though I had no parent to like sign things, this and that. And
Jason Stacy (05:41):
I would say that’s probably, uh, geez,
AJV (05:51):
Wow.
Jason Stacy (05:52):
So I haven’t talked about that much in a while. So,
AJV (05:56):
You know, um, my, my good friend Ben Klarik always says that tears are truth tellers.
Jason Stacy (06:02):
Jason Stacy (06:39):
It was a big part of that, obviously, you know. And then obviously the actual training, you’ll learn how to manage your emotions, about managing your mind, about being more aware of yourself, about your surroundings. And it was very, for me, just, I just got obsessed with that. And I got really like, hyper, you know, focused on being curious, asking lots of questions, wanting to understand how and why people work and the way they work. And I, I learned a lot about coaching, a lot about humans, a lot about people. You know, I was pretty young at that time. I was probably 19 or 20 years old, and I was like teaching guys twice my age, you know, about, about certain things. And, you know, I just, uh, the, my coaches and senses, they, you know, probably from my other experiences, you know, I had like a good sort of sense of, of these things.
Jason Stacy (07:17):
They just sort of naturally kind of went with that. And now, you know, from there I had some, we had some students who were like physiotherapists and massage therapist, and I would talk to them at night. I had a roommate. She was, you know, her and I, uh, got a place together as a roommate and she was a therapist, you a massage therapist and physio. And I’m talking about all these things about how the body works. And that’s, and she’s like, how do you know all this stuff? She’s like, you know, more than like, my teachers do, but you just don’t know the words of it. Like, you don’t know how to describe it. So it kind of like got me interested, like, Hey, you know, maybe I’ll go learn how to do this as a, as a career or a job. ’cause you know, I was still kind of floating around.
Jason Stacy (07:49):
So I put myself through like massage school and then sports therapies. And then I became a personal trainer, then a strength coach, and then athletic trainer, you know, the guys that kind of run on the field and do all that, you know, emergency care stuff in sport. And I did sort of just built up my own education from there, you know, and the one thing I, I noticed though, as I was doing that, a lot of the physical stuff just came natural for me. Like my kinesiology, all this stuff, I graduated honors, all this, I, it was, it just sort of came natural maybe from all the martial art training and understand human body and all that and the mechanics. Um, but one thing I noticed when I started working more, whether it was in gyms or clinics or, or on the field, is that there was a lot of very knowledgeable people, right.
Jason Stacy (08:27):
A lot around me. Most of ’em had much more experience. They had all their degrees and I had none of these things, you know, I just worked my way through it, sort of very non-traditional ways of getting educated. A lot of it was self-educated, which is I guess a bigger thing now, but back then not as much. So I had to really dig deep and figure out, find a way to learn these things and be in the right environment around the right people to, you know, be able to have access to this information. But one of the things that I did notice that people just didn’t quite get was the people part. Hmm. The building trust, the communicating, the connecting with people to get them to, you know, one of the biggest things that I really push and talk about with my coaches and other trainers and whatnot is, is, and even my clients, it, it’s, it’s that difference between people doing things because they have to versus because they want to.
Jason Stacy (09:12):
Hmm. So like a commitment over compliance type of thing, right? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (09:47):
But a lot of it was just like, I was just curious. I asked lots of questions, not in a disrespectful way, but to understand like, Hey, why are we doing this or that and this way, or what, why don’t we try this instead of that? And really just understanding these things. But the biggest part was, you know, everyone I worked with knew that I’d always give a hundred percent no matter what I was doing, where I was at, I was always a hundred percent engaged. And I never pretended I knew something I didn’t know. I didn’t have to be the one with all. So lemme
AJV (10:13):
Ask, I ask you a question about that really quickly because this whole concept of are you doing it because you have to versus you want to, I love that you said that, you know, is this a compliance thing or is this a commitment thing? Uh, I think it’s really important to something you just said is, you know, no matter what I did, I always gave it a hundred percent, right? Yes. Um, and I don’t think a lot of people do that.
Jason Stacy (10:37):
I agree.
AJV (10:39):
I tell you this, hear your take on, I’d love to just hear you. ’cause I think a lot of people are listening of going like, am I really good giving what I, whatever I’m doing 110% and is my team, or, you know, are people like missing their potential? And how do we get ourselves to give that level of commitment? How do we get our teams to do that?
Jason Stacy (10:58):
Yes. Well, I, I mean, I can answer, there’s a lot of, uh, answers to that question. I mean, one of the first things I would say is, you know what, if you’re asking that question more times than not, not always, but most of the time you already know the answer. You know what I mean? Like, if you’re asking, I go, am I really doing the what I could do? I mean, again, this is the same thing I see over and over again as everyone likes to lie to themselves. Mm. Kind of pretend, you know, we don’t have to just have that look in the mirror and go, Hey, you know, and, and I would say, um, how, how we go about doing that. Obviously, my, my first step is always looking at yourself. You know, yes, you’re right, your team, all these different things. But, you know, one of the biggest things about are you really, you know, doing it because you have to or because you want to.
Jason Stacy (11:35):
I mean, there’s so many variables there. There’s something you said that made me think of something. I, I forgot what you were saying, but, um, you know, for me, the biggest starting point is looking at yourself. You know, if you’re asking yourself that question, obviously, you know, there’s something missing, right? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (12:22):
Because sometimes we kinda like bring ourselves down and we end up not getting anything. We kinda get stuck. So I think there’s this, this, this process of you kinda need to have some vulnerability to be open for these things. Have that balance of being so, you know, being honest with yourself and being direct with yourself while still having some sort of self-compassion, knowing that you are, you know, doing what you need to do. And then that kinda leads into being a bit more mature, a bit of maturity of understanding. Maybe that comes with the experience of doing that, because it does take, it does take work to get there, you know what I mean? And, and I mean, I suppose there’s a lot of different layers here. You know, it’s kind of a big thing to
Jason Stacy (12:56):
But I, I, I think the biggest part for me, I always to try to help coaches understand and, and, you know, people I work with, understand is it’s, it, it’s really about you. I can’t tell you, you know, this is how it is or not how it is. You have to know, you have to find a way to stop lying to yourself and stop sort of like pretending to hide behind some facade of like, oh, you have a system that you follow, or here’s my 10 steps to this, or here’s, you know, we all get busy doing that. We all like, you know, we’re like trying to sell ourselves constantly, you know? So I think we have to always kinda have one foot in, one foot out, you know? And then that kinda also leads to the people around you, you know, are they feeding you? Are they a little yes. Men kind of thing? Are they feeding you, you know, bs are they being honest with you? Are they, you know, are they doing the best that they can? There’s a lot of layers here. So I’m not sure what part that you wanted me to break down, but, you know,
AJV (13:42):
Think, I think the biggest part that I think a lot of people really struggle with, and I am, you know, thinking a lot about, you know, the old saying is like, they’re just not quite reaching their potential. Sure. And I guess my, my real question is, you know, and we forget the teams for a second, and if we looked at, you know, all of us in the mirror and says like, yeah, I know I’m not giving it a hundred percent. I know I’m not doing my best. Why, from your experience, why do you think that is? And what, what would be some like tactical, tangible steps of going, Hey, this, this is what I have to do to be better. Right? And I think, I think there’s a lot of that just out there. And I don’t think this is new, right? I think everyone wants the easy road to success, right? It’s like, we all want it right now. We don’t wanna do the hard work to be fit, to be, you know, have healthy financials or healthy relationships or to be successful. It’s like, like, what’s the quickest way I can get there? And true success doesn’t happen like that. Yeah. But that’s, that’s the truth. No one really likes to talk about
Jason Stacy (14:51):
Sure. Look, I I would say, you know, when you first started speaking, uh, somebody go back earlier, I think one of the biggest problems we have is there’s too many distractions as well. So it’s very easy to kind of think, you’re know, being busy doing all this and that, being very distracted. So you have to learn how to focus. So I would go to take a little step back. The, the how do you, how do you do what you need to do and be committed to it is that you have to learn now. And I, I don’t remember why I learned this, but I know it’s from someone else. I’m stealing this for sure. I just can’t remember where it was a long time ago, but I’ve been using it for decades now, is that, you know, the definition of focus, right? Focus is making the most important thing, the most important thing.
Jason Stacy (15:26):
Mm. And what is the most important thing is whatever I’m doing right now, like, you and I are having this conversation, and I just look at it as like, you and I, you and aj, Jason and AJ we’re just chatting, catching up, getting to know each other a little bit better. You know, I’m not worried or thinking about what I have to do after this. What just happened before I got on the call? What, you know, what my kids are doing, what arenas doing what this, none of that matters. Like right now I’m here like nothing else matters, period. And I’ve trained and conditioned myself to make sure that like, this is where I am, and if I ever catch myself slipping, I pull myself right back in, straight away. Right? So I think that’s a big part of being able to like, develop that skill.
Jason Stacy (15:59):
Now, what keeps people from d doing this? I think, you know, like you said, looking in the mirror and saying these things and you, you know, that you’re not really what’s, what’s stopping people? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (16:44):
Like go out there and put yourself out there and it fail. Obviously we don’t want that. You know what I mean? We don’t want to see like, we’re trying our best and it doesn’t work. ’cause then it hurts our identity. So people lock in too much of, you know, their identity with what they’re, you know, they’re doing, whether it’s success or failure. There’s, nowadays it’s even harder because everything on social media and online is about, everyone’s so successful, it’s so easy. And here’s your, I did these three steps and now I have everything and all this kind of, you know, this facade of, of how things work. So I really think there’s this fear, and, and the, and the issue is, and this is something with arena, you know, the, the tennis squad I’ve been working for years now is, and a lot of them actually is, is the, the thing that gets them past.
Jason Stacy (17:20):
And that next level is them realizing that it is fear that’s stopping them, right? There’s this threat, this fear, right? Versus, you know, that kind of threat versus challenge kind of concept, right? So most people are in this, in this threat state where their, their fear of whether it’s fear of failure, whether being seen a certain way, whether of, you know, it is a bit scary to do something new. You know, there’s a lot of layers of fear. The, the, the main part is you have to learn how to deal with fear, right? You have to face fear. You can’t wait for it to go away. You can’t, um, you know, get busy doing other things to think it’s gonna get, you know, kind of work your way around it. There is something that all of us know, all of us know that’s holding us back, right?
Jason Stacy (17:59):
Everyone knows may, maybe it’s hard for them to see it right now, but deep down inside, if they really be honest with themselves, they know what’s holding them back. What are they worried about? What are they scared about? And if they’re having trouble doing that, find people around them to help them realize what those things are. And then they need to face those things. They need to turn around, open their eyes and go through it. The only way to get through fear and to get to that next level is to go through it. There’s no going around it. There’s no waiting, there’s no, you know, buying a bunch of little mini courses or doing this little thing or doing a little of that. You know what I mean? Like, that doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Just like you said, you’re talking about getting fit and healthy and diets.
Jason Stacy (18:33):
I mean, how many seven step programs to making a million dollars or your bestselling book, or your diet or your work app, there’s thousands of them. And if they all worked, and then why are there thousands of them? Why do we keep buying more and more every year? Well, because they don’t work. And I mean, they might work, but they don’t work because people are missing first this element we’re talking about, like, are they really being honest with themselves, that commitment to doing and committing to doing these things? The other is those three elements that you mentioned about, what I really focus on is managing your energy, your environment, and your emotions. Like for me, those are the things that, that’s the glue that holds all that together. That’s the fundamental stuff that people don’t work on, right? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (19:12):
Like commitment over compliance, you know, that vulnerability, maturity that, you know, understanding, you know, how you work that self-awareness, those three elements, without those you can buy and do every course you want. You could do all the steps and you might get some success, but you’re never gonna sustain it. You’re gonna be a one hit wonder, right? And that one hit isn’t gonna hit what it should have. And it could have because you’re just copy and pasting, you know, you’re just typing into something, see what chat GPT told you, and you’re just gonna follow the steps and hey, ta-da. It’s all magic. And again, some people might get a little bit further on, but they’re just gonna go right back to where they were. They’re not gonna keep growing. They’re not gonna keep going through this because it’s just, it’s not real. It’s not coming from inside from them.
Jason Stacy (19:51):
You know? It’s that, that analogy of like, you know, before you ever drive a stick, a manual, right? You, you know, you have the knowledge of what you’re supposed to do, right? You know, pushing the clutch, you know, the gears and all that stuff. But it doesn’t matter how much you memorize it, you know, it, you can recite it, you can explain it a hundred different ways to like 10 different languages. As soon as you get behind the car, the first time you’re jerk and stalling, you know, and you’re, you’re killing the engine and you’re, you know, ’cause that’s a different level of understanding. That’s experience and understanding. And so that’s the part that gets missing. And, and though I honestly believe over my own personal experience, my professional experience and all the different people I’ve helped become, you know, world champions in sport who’ve, you know, started businesses and became successful, all them, the main focus wasn’t here’s the details system that you need to follow.
Jason Stacy (20:33):
Like we find some that fits you, right. Find a system that fits you and your environment and where you are right now, right. And your resources and things that connect with you. That’s great. Find that. But that system’s only gonna go so far if you don’t know how to manage your emotions. Mm-hmm. Because that’s part of that commitment over compliance part, isn’t it? Right. That resistance, that fear that whatever the hesitation that you have or maybe that like, you know, oblivious thing that you think everything’s perfect and you’re amazing and you’re not really Right.
AJV (21:21):
Yes. I have a question about that. So, because I think this is a really big topic in a lot of different, uh, circles right now. Sure. What would you say are the best things that you’ve seen work to help people manage their energy?
Jason Stacy (21:36):
Sure. I think, I think the first thing, I mean, the first thing is obvious, always acknowledging it. Like it’s actually a key thing. You know, more than your, your systems and your time. I, I would say I always start with the physical things, right? Because the thing about doing something that’s more tangible and physical that is in your control, no matter what your mood is, right? No matter how you’re feeling right now. So I’ll give you an example. Like, let’s say it’s a very simple example, how I breathe mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (22:15):
I, I can explain how that works later if you want. But, you know, having like longer exhales, it becomes more parasympathetic. You’re more in that rest, relax, you know, digest, you know, you’re more sort of aware of where you are. You’re more aware of your body or your surroundings. So we can spend five minutes just breathing nice and slow. Now how are you gonna feel at after we, if we do this breathing for real, you know, if you just switch off everything, no noise, no distraction, and you just breathe real slowly, how you gonna feel? Are you gonna feel fired up? Like you’re ready to go? Like, fight Dante on the world? You jumping up and down screaming, of course not right? You gonna be like, just calm and relaxed. Ah, and that was just from changing how you breathe. If I get you breathing really, really fast right now, just even just on your own, just breathing really fast and all crazy, are you gonna feel all relaxed and calm?
Jason Stacy (22:57):
Of course you will. Yep. Yeah. Right. If I have you take a deep exhale everything and hold your breath as long as you can, and keep it, keep holding as long as you, as long as you can, you’re gonna be calm and relaxed, you’re gonna be stressing out. So just by some physical thing, simple as breathing, it’s gonna change how you’re feeling. This makes sense. Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (23:33):
Afterward, right. My state, my energy, my focus, my intention is all gonna be in a different place based on how I just, what I did with my body. And, and the reason I like to talk more about that is that is again, like how I feel doesn’t matter, right? I need to get something done. Mm-hmm
AJV (24:18):
Good. Yeah.
Jason Stacy (24:19):
So it just takes a little bit of discipline to do what you need to do regardless how you’re feeling. So I would say the managing energy part is just being aware. There’s a lot of things. I mean that I, I, I know I harped on that for a while, but, you know, the breathing’s a big part. So at the end of the day, I do a thing called legs up breathing. So with all my athletes, all my people, at the end of the day or end of a match or after end of like a, maybe you have an intense session of like some new thing with your business and you guys have just been going for hours and you’re just, you know about to your, your head’s about to explode and you’re exhausted. Just go lay down, throw your legs up on the couch, you know, or up on a wall and just breathe and just, just try to let your head and relax your neck, relax, get it sink into the floor and focus on having really slow long exhales.
Jason Stacy (24:57):
Just sit there and anything goes in your head, just let it come, come and go. Don’t try to think about anything. Don’t not think about anything. Just let it happen. Whatever happens, and just sit there for four or five minutes, two minutes if that’s all you have, right? And that just resets a lot of things in your body. Gives you a moment because it works and kind of recharge one with your legs up. It takes a lot of stress off your heart, off your system. You getting on that blood flow back. You know, two, that breathing, that, that slower exhale for example, is, that’s one example. Is it you become more parasympathetic. So you know, that sort of more relaxed and calm sort of state versus fight, fight fear, which is probably what you’ve just been doing for the last two hours. You know? So you’re kinda resetting your nervous system kind of going, okay, let’s just reset for a moment. And if you do those little mini breaks throughout the day, those things add up. So if you have those little, whether you can pull your legs up or not, but even just take that time out to breathe, to slow yourself down, to get off your phone, to switch off your head. Even if it’s two minutes, you know, I’ll, I’ll tell you a quick story. Um, if I’m going too fast, lemme know. ’cause I get very excited about this stuff.
AJV (25:58):
I think this is great. I think, you know, I think with the, the biggest kind of takeaway that I’m pulling from this, and then I want you to share, uh, the quick story. But it’s like, so much of this requires you to pay attention to yourself.
Jason Stacy (26:09):
A hundred percent. Thank you. Oh my God, that is so amazing. Exactly. All of everything that we have to do, and everything I talk about it starts with you or looking at yourself in the mirror, you know, like that, that self-awareness and there’s ways of developing your body tells you a lot of things before you realize it. There’s even studies now that have shown that our brain is reacting to something before it actually happens, right? Before it actually happens. Almost like we’re in this like weird live TV delay thing where our brain is just, just a moment before something happens, it’s a responding to it. So you know what, the more aware you can become of what your body’s telling you the be and, and, and, and of your environment, which we haven’t even broken down that at all. But like, the environment’s a huge part, you know, of being able to know how to manage your energy.
Jason Stacy (26:49):
So managing energy, I think is start with the physical, tangible things. You know, you understand that how you move your body and how you breathe is going to either use energy or restore energy, right? It’s gonna recharge you or it’s gonna drain you. It’s gonna put you in a state of alertness and hyper, you know, readiness or it’s gonna be calm and more relaxed. Like all these different, I mean, go on and on and on. And so again, you have control of that. And so the quick story I have is, I, I remember I had this space for a couple years. I was teaching a couple different schools and universities. I was coaching on the side, I was doing mentoring, I was teaching juujitsu, I was doing all these different things. And um, plus I had all my kids and they’re all very busy. I’m always very, very engaged with those guys.
Jason Stacy (27:24):
And, um, you know, I would, I had this little thing, and I have this issue with sleeping. I sleep a couple hours a night, you know, like sometimes even when I go to sleep, my body doesn’t like switch off. I have some things I have to work on with that. ’cause it’s, it’s not great, but been that way for a very long time. And I would do something instead of having like this monophasic bit of sleep. So like one big block of sleep and every, you know, we all do, like the nighttime we have our seven to nine hours is I wasn’t getting any sleep. So throughout the day I’d have these little mini breaks. Hmm. So let’s add like four different places to go to that, you know, for work, for teaching, coaching, et cetera. And before I got there, I’d say I’d drive to the plates, I’d sit in my car for, I’d turn everything off.
Jason Stacy (28:00):
So it’s just quiet. And I’d sit there for however much every time I have two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, and I would just chill, just breathe. And I try not to think about anything. And if I do, I just let it kind of float in and outta my head. And then I, and I, I had this visualization in my head, like, okay, whether I had an alarm on in case I fell, fell asleep. I, i soon as I had to get outta the car, I opened the door. As soon as I closed the door, it was like a light switch in my mind. I go, boom, boom, and I’m ready. As soon as I walk in the door, I’m just so on fire, so focused. I’m just, I’m a hundred percent just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I get to my car afterward and I sit there, I’m like, oh my God.
Jason Stacy (28:29):
I’m just, I’m just done. I’m exhausted. And I, I’ll spend two minutes there before I drive, and then I drive to the next place and I do the exact same thing before I get outta my car. I reset, I breathe, I chill, I have a, a nap. If I had 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever. And then as soon as I walk in the door truck, close my car door, it’s like a light switch, a click, everything turns off and I go, Hmm. Because again, nothing else matters except for what I’m doing right now. If you like, you and aj, you’re spending your time to, you know, let me come and talk and share and all this stuff. Like how could I not be 100000% here for you right now? Like, how disrespectful is that to myself and to you and to everyone else. Like, it has to be that way. And so for me to have the energy, I had to find a way to fit in those little gaps to like kind of reset, recharge so that way I was a hundred percent engaged with whatever I needed to do. You know,
AJV (29:12):
Sorry for you really quick. Something just dawned on me. Sure. Um, because there is such a systemic problem, I think, in life. Sure. ’cause it doesn’t matter if it’s at home or at work
Jason Stacy (29:27):
Yes. Yeah, yeah.
AJV (29:28):
Right. It’s like we’re so busy that you can’t just do one thing. Sure. And I’m just curious like how much of that is what’s draining our imagery? Because it’s like if you, if you really had the ability to only be like, Hey, what’s the most important thing? It’s the thing I’m doing right now, and it gets all my focus. Sure. And it seems like your entire body, your entire being can go in one direction. But if you’re trying to do this, like, I was just thinking of like some of my days where it’s like, I have the kids in the back, right? I’m doing business calls on the phone, I’m driving, like I’m, I’m doing a hundred things at the same time. And then it’s like, I’m like, huh, I’m so tired
Jason Stacy (30:06):
AJV (30:07):
So much of that is because it’s like I’m not doing any one thing at the same time. And I’m just curious, like how much of that is a, a real stressor for your energetic being?
Jason Stacy (30:20):
I think all the above. I, I, I think, you know, look, the reality is, especially when we have families and businesses and, you know, obligations and all these different things, I think the, the first part is just to understand like, there’s obviously gonna be times where that’s how it is. You know, you gotta call, you have to take, and you just pick the kids up from school and there’s this sport thing and there’s this and that. And like, you know, sometimes it, it’s gonna happen. So I think that’s a big part of just being able to manage your energy is understanding like, look, that’s how it’s gonna be that way sometimes. And, and this, there’s gonna be these moments where it is gonna be a bit more chaotic. There’s gonna be things that’ll come up that weren’t in your control. The timing was off. And so instead of, you know, having that be like a burden, you know, and it’s a weight, you know, you can save some of that energy and that resource by not stressing that you’re stressing, right?
Jason Stacy (31:01):
Mm-hmm. Not stressing about the fact that you’re doing this thing. Because that often I think is the worst part is, is the, the thought that we know that we’re doing something or that we know that it’s too much or that, you know, we overthink this a little bit. So I think that’s a big step of managing your energy in that sense, is just accepting the fact, look, sometimes it’s gonna be this way. Yeah. Now the next thing though is going okay, it doesn’t mean you just allow it to happen and don’t have control over that and don’t, you know, create the environment where you can have your moments at least, right? Where that is your time to, to be able to switch off again, it takes practice. You have to learn how to do that, right? And, and, and so, you know, if you go and say multitasking, we have to do all the a hundred different things, that’s great.
Jason Stacy (31:38):
But I’m sure you’ve heard this before, it’s like, well, are you looking to just get something done, like half as it get it out, tick a box like everybody else, right? Or are you trying to be the best at what you do? Are you trying to get really good at what it is you’re trying to learn? Or what you’re trying to get to? Are you wanting to really be seen as like, you know, and even the thing is, this goes back to lying to yourself. If I’m just half-assing on a bunch of different things, right? And I kind of glued it together really quick, right? When it comes down to the, the big moments, right? Of, of knowing and believing in yourself. Like you already know you’re full of. Excuse my language. Like you already know, right? Because you know, you’ve can, you know, you’ve kind of half-assed in this.
Jason Stacy (32:16):
You kind of put that together, you know, you didn’t give it your best, right? Mm-hmm
Ep 569: Redefining Work for the Long Term | Caleb Guilliams Episode Recap
AJV (00:01):
Are you working just to retire? Now, the reason I ask is I think it’s important to share the actual definition of retirement. The actual definition of retirement is to be taken out of service. So knowing that that retirement means to be taken out of service. Let me ask that first question again. Are you working just to retire? Now, if I had asked you that the first time, you would say, yes, I totally plan on retiring. I think most people in the United States plan on retirement at some point. But do any of us plan to be taken out of service? Are we saving all of our money so that we can just no longer be useful one day? I don’t, I don’t think that we would say yes if we were asked in that way. When people go, Hey, are you saving for retirement? What if we were actually asking people, are you saving so that you can no longer be of service to your community,
AJV (01:09):
I don’t think most of us would say yes to that. I don’t think most of us are planning and saving to no longer be of service at age, whatever. And so I thought it would be important to talk about where did this concept of retirement come in? And there’s no judgment being passed here. If you’re retired or you’re about to retire, or you do wanna retire one day, this is not a judgment call. This is a redefining what work means and redefining retirement. So it’s not this thing that we work for and work towards one day to be taken out of service, but it’s, it’s a rea, it’s a reallocation of our knowledge, our skills, and our time. But I think some of the, the hardest walks that I have walked through with friends and family are the people who have lost themselves, lost their identity, lost their purpose, lost their passion lost their excitement and life after they retired, or post-business sale.
AJV (02:15):
Now, I think that that is a dangerous thing that I’m not I’m not promoting that your identity should be tied to your work. I’m most certainly not saying that your identity is not what you do, but I think there’s another component of it that we as human beings, were created to create. We were created to work. Now we were not necessarily created to toil. And in my beliefs as a Christian, that happened after the fall, right? That happened when sin entered the world that we would toil for the rest of the days of our life in this current earth. I don’t believe that’s how it was meant to be. I don’t believe that’s how it will be one day. I do, however, recognize that is how it is today, but that’s not how it was meant to be. We were built to create and cultivate and to rule.
AJV (03:07):
That is, that is what our job is. We were created to be of service to one another and to the planet, right? So this concept of retirement has always been a little foreign to me. I, I, I think I was very fortunate. I, I consider myself very privileged to have been raised by several generations of entrepreneurs. My grandfather worked into his eighties and as soon as he did retire in his eighties, it was a sharp decline in his health. And I, I think it very much had to do with he lost touch with service and serving his company and his team, and his employees and his family. My dad is now in his mid seventies, and I, I hope that he never retires fully. His workload definitely looks different today than it did 20 years ago. He might disagree with that, but I think it’s really important that he has purpose and enjoyment in his work.
AJV (04:03):
And that is the purpose of this email is to, to enjoy what you do so that it doesn’t always feel like work, is that you’re living into what you were created to be and to do and to provide for this world. And I just, I come from an upbringing where I got to see my family of business owners actually contribute to the community and to our team members and to each other, and doing it in a way that was life giving, not life taking. I know not all jobs can be life giving all the time, but I do also believe that that’s a decided choice that we make. We get to make the choice to be excellent at what we’re doing no matter what that job is. And I have had jobs and the hospitality and restaurant industry to you know, pay commission, only pay cold calling, selling tickets, traveling full time to leadership roles and sales management roles, and you know, being paid to speak.
AJV (05:04):
There’s a large variety of roles that I’ve had over the course of time. And it doesn’t matter what your role is. It’s a decision that we all get to make, to go regardless of what I’m doing. I choose to be the best at what I’m doing right now. It’s a decided decision of excellence, of being good at what it is for the sake of giving it your best. Because we can learn something and grow in every season and in every role that we have in our life. Now, I also wanna get back to what I started with is this concept of retirement and where did it come from and how has it snuck into our culture that gives people an out to no longer create and cultivate in the way that we were actually created to do. And so I thought this would be a really interesting history lesson super quickly.
AJV (05:58):
But in the pre-industrial area pre-industrial era, most Americans worked as long as they were physically able. There was no formal retirement. A lot of that was physical labor, right? And so maybe those years were shorter
AJV (06:50):
Depression, and it established a government funded pension to provide social security for older Americans, right? Much of that due to the, you know, time of life that we were in with a great depression and needing more ways to support those in their older age. Not a bad thing. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, that’s a good thing. Then we get into the 1950s and sixties and company pensions became way more common. Not as common today, but very then, but this is where the whole idea of retirement and no longer having full-time, working hours began to really kick in. And retirement was really seen at age 65, right? Then we get into the 1970s and the 1980s that is when 401k started to come on the scene. That wasn’t until the eighties, like that’s when I was born. Like this is not something that has been around for, for a very long time.
AJV (07:47):
And I think this is really important because if you just high level, go back, it was not until the fifties and the sixties that retirement was even a thing, right? That’s not even a full generation ago, right? That’s my dad’s age. My dad was born in 1951, so at the time of him being born, IE that’s why my grandfather worked until he was 80. Retirement wasn’t a thing, right? You worked until you were no longer physically able. And one of the things that has been coming up a lot in our family, and we have aging parents and friends and who have aging parents, and a lot of talk about retirement. And here’s the thing that I just wanted to share with you guys in a long about way to be honest, is find something that you can do for the rest of your life.
AJV (08:37):
Find a way to be in service to a group of people for the rest of your life. And retiring from a, for a formal nine to five is one thing, but retiring in general so that you can golf and play video games that, that, that’s not being of service. That’s, that’s not the goal of retirement. The goal is not to work your whole life and not give back. The goal is to work until you can find more time to give back to the younger people, and to develop the next generation, and to create new leaders and to use your skills and experience to educate and inform and help develop an entirely new generation of people who will come after you. I find it odd that our most experienced workers, leaders, employees, the ones who are retiring, are the people we have the most to learn from.
AJV (09:27):
They’ve seen it all. They’ve been around the block. They’ve been through different economies and market conditions and recessions and depressions and life and death and marriage and babies. And they, they have so much to give. These are not the people we want leaving our workforce. Y’all. these are wildly experienced and important people in our job force. This is an very important part of our workforce. Now, the working hours look different. Can they look different? Should they work different? Sure. Those are all things that are good and fine. I’m just encouraging you to not work for retirement, but find a work that you can do for the rest of your life so that you are never taken outta service.
Ep 568: Building Better Wealth with Caleb Guilliams
AJV (00:00):
AJV (00:56):
So I invited my friend Caleb, onto the show to talk about money today because I think he’s got a really unique perspective, a young, fresh perspective on something that I would say most of us are looking for the gray hairs in the industry to learn about financial peace and financial wisdom. And Caleb is not that in fact, let me give you a little bit of his background. Caleb Williams is the founder of Better Wealth, and not only is he the founder of that he founded it at 21, the Age of 21, right? So, again, when I say Young, fresh Perspective, he’s not 21 today, but he started it at a really young age, and I think that’s a really important component of the conversation of how do we look at it in a new and fresh way, which is what you’re gonna get today. He’s also the author of the bestselling Bug, the And Asset. He hosts the Better Wealth Podcast and The Better Wealth YouTube channel. He also speaks to thousands around the world on how they can be more efficient with money and have more intentionality in doing it. So, Caleb, welcome to the show.
CG (02:07):
Hey, it is a pleasure to be on here, and I’m just so grateful to spend these next couple minutes with you and your audience, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun today.
AJV (02:15):
It’s gonna be great. And I have to tell you too, it’s like, as you, you know, we’re really big on titles at Brand Builders Group and Better Wealth is such a great title, right? One of the things we talk about all the time is, does it pass the I Want test and back to this importance of this universally applicable episode of, I think we all want better wealth, not always more wealth, but better wealth. And that’s it. The huge, honestly, it was one of the key foundations of why I wanted you to come on the show today is, you know, I think, I think sometimes we think about wealth and money as how do I get more of it? Yeah. And I’d love to kind of reframe some of that today for our audience, audience. But before we do that, I do wanna help everyone get to know you just a little bit. And as I mentioned you got into the financial world at a really young age, then you founded Better Wealth at 21. Yep. How, how, how did you do that?
CG (03:13):
I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make this quick, I’ll make this quick, but I, I think context is key. So I’m the oldest of six kids, grew up in central Wisconsin. My dad’s a PhD molecular biologist. My mom was a nurse. Talk about opposites of attract. My dad has no friends, very smart. My mom loves people. I, and she’s also smart, but in her own way. And I grew up homeschooled and, and, you know, grew up dyslexic and like, wasn’t sure what I was gonna do, but I was always fascinated around business and money. I got a job at a, at a chicken farm when I’m 15 years old, I apologize to all the vegans. So if you’re a vegan and you get offended, get off right now. But I, I literally gutted chickens. Oh my. And I made a dollar for every chicken that I processed.
CG (03:56):
And 15-year-old Caleb was given two books, good To Great by Jim Collins and The Richest Man in Babylon. Hmm. And those two books, especially being someone that reading was really tough. I forced myself to be a student of those concepts. One of the books is about level, level five leadership and like this idea of like, rallying people. And if you get the right people on the bus, you’ll be able to go to new heights. And at 15 years old, I’m like, I love this. And then the Richest Man in Babylon is like a parables of how anyone can be wealthy. And just going back to the basics of you gotta pay yourself first and all that good stuff. And so I remember, you know, being 15 years old and being like, I wanna do something in the money space, which led me to get a job at a bank when I was 17 years old.
CG (04:37):
Now, one thing you gotta know about me is I look young today, but if you’re not watching on YouTube, like I have kind of what you could maybe call a beard. But you know, when I was 17 years old, I’m the oldest of six kids. My younger sister was taller than me and looked way older than me. And, and again, like I looked like I was 12 or 13. So working at, at a bank was, had its own challenges to begin with. But what I did and what I committed to, and maybe as the first writer downer, is like I wanted to defer on money and learn as much as possible. And working at a community bank I became an HR nightmare because I would sit in on meetings, they gave the 17-year-old the, the ability to open the bank and close the bank.
CG (05:15):
‘Cause I would, after clocking out, I would just stick around and work and go to networking events. I would talk to the CEO of the bank about how we could be more profitable. And so I was definitely, I took that opportunity and ran with it and learned a ton about money. At the age of 18, I got to work in our investment department. And then at 19 years old, the person I was running our inve investment department at Community First Bank took, took another job. At 19 years old, I became the youngest person to step into the corner office and to many people’s horror
CG (05:58):
And people, for better or worse, saw me grow up at this bank. And they knew that maybe I wasn’t the smartest kid, but I would work my butt off to serve them. And so there’s a lot more to unpack. Stephen Covey, I’ve been indirectly impacted by him so much, made a mission statement, which simply read to help people see and reach their highest potential. I realize that money is not the number one reason why people get divorced. It’s up there though. But it is, it is the thing that if you don’t master, if you don’t understand it is, it’s a tool. And most people are using the tool not properly, and they’re living to a fraction of what their God-given potential is. And I think that’s a shame. And so it was like, I wanna do everything that I can to help people with that.
CG (06:39):
And so through that journey, learned from a ton of people. A big blessing in disguise was I didn’t have a direct mentor. So I didn’t learn like, maybe like an average way to think about money. I really got to stretch and be stretched. And through that process, I realized that I’m gonna die someday.
CG (07:22):
And people thought I was crazy. It’s like, you look like you’re 15 years old who’s gonna meet with you on the internet. And ignorance is bliss. And now we are, we’re, we have clients in all 50 states, and we have coaches in every time zone. We, we do insurance, we do invest, we have an investment arm, we do tax planning, and we have a fractional family office arm that helps six and seven figure entrepreneurs be more efficient with their money. And that’s the story in a nutshell. And there’s a lot of lessons that we’ve learned. We can talk about anything that you want, but there’s a lot of lessons. I currently now live in Nashville, Tennessee, and so grateful to be neighbors with you.
AJV (07:55):
You know, I love that story for so many different reasons, but what I love it most is it just feels like you found your calling in life at a really exceptionally young age, which gives you such an amazing opportunity to make a profound impact on the space that you’ve decided to be in. That’s, that, that’s like such a, that’s such a gift, right? Yeah. And I also love that you’ve done some really hard sucky jobs. Like, I don’t know, gutting chickens for a dollar chicken might be the worst job of all time. It might, it might be. I
CG (08:34):
Loved it. That’s the weird thing. I loved it. And I would go back to it tomorrow if I had to because it, I have so many memories, and actually some of the ways I think about money are going back to those jobs of like trying to be efficient. Yeah. And realizing that some of those universal principles are, are how we use money. But I, I’m with you. I’m, I’m, I’m not complaining about doing what I’m doing now,
AJV (08:57):
But, but I love, I, I think, and genuinely speaking, I’m a mom of two little boys who are five and seven, and we’re constantly talking about like, how do we ensure that our kids know the value of hard work? And, and I think it’s just so important. So I love that you kind of have that background and history. And then also just like the importance of reading and books and learning and all of the things. There’s so many things I love about your story, but one of the things that you said in there, and this is where I wanna start our conversation today, is you said money is a tool and most people just aren’t using a properly. So I would love to start there, like, what do you mean by money as a tool and how are people using it improperly?
CG (09:42):
Yep. We’re gonna, we’re gonna start with two words. I’m a big framework person and it’s wealth efficiency. And so when I, when I get the opportunity to speak to people, a lot of, a lot of times, you know, having a company called Better Wealth, a lot of people have mental thoughts on what wealth is. Usually when I say wealth you think of net worth being rich, having money in the bank account. And one of the, one of the different reframes that I try to encourage is asking the audience, how do you define wealth? Because if you, if your definition of wealth is foggy or not clear, then how in the world are we supposed to accomplish something that we’re not really clear on? And so the, the story that I used and I ask is, would you trade places with Warren Buffet? Warren Buffet at the time of this recording is worth over a hundred billion dollars.
CG (10:27):
And he’s one of the world’s wealthiest on paper, if we’re gonna use that definition. Men. And yet majority of the people watching and listening to this podcast, do you really think about it, wouldn’t even think about trading places with Warren Buffett because he’s also over 90 years old and not gonna live that much longer. And so there are things in our life that we value potentially more than money in a bank account. And so on a macro level, we get it on a micro level, if you actually believe that you’re disrespecting or, or not being true to that definition of wealth. And so our definition of wealth at Better Wealth is intentional living. You, you cannot be wealthy if you’re not intentional about your life. And the way that I think of Intentional Living is a couple categories. It’s your God-given skill sets. It’s how you use your time, it’s your relationships and how you use your resources.
CG (11:17):
There’s obviously more to that, but at the end of the day, those are like the four categories that we look at. And we, and we really try to identify like, what does an intentional life look like? And, and that’s where we start. And so you can’t be wealthy if you don’t live intentionally. The beautiful thing is it, an intentional living looks different for me than it looks like for you, but my encouragement to you is, is get really clear about like what what brings you a lot of joy in what you get to do. Like, you’re totally right. I have found something that I love. I don’t love all the aspects of my job, but I love the mission that we’re on and that I, I wake up excited and I want that for everybody. And so that, and then the, the, the relationships that you have and how you use your resources and how you use your time, super key.
CG (12:01):
So wealth is really key and, and we wanna make sure that we wanna lean into that intentional life. The second word is efficiency. It’s interesting because efficiency sometimes gets a bad rap. Even your husband who has a, a TED talk, that with five million views uses efficiency. And a lot of times people, sometimes the efficient thing is not what you should do because we are maybe not, not figuring out the right end goal. But the way that I define efficiency is, is something like this. It’s getting to your desired result by removing all the friction. And so to be efficient, you need to get really clear about that desired result. I would agree that if without the desired result, just removing friction to remove friction is, is not gonna help anyone. And that’s what a lot of people look at when it comes to money.
CG (12:45):
You should do this, you should do that. But it’s like, why? And so when we are trying to be efficient, we have to get clear about what we’re going or what our desired result is, and then removing any of the friction that’s getting in the way of that. And so what is the desired result? It’s that tangible, intentional life. And so the example is, I, I live in Nashville, but if I wanna get to California, I’m really clear about where I want to go. I could walk there and it would take me like a long time
CG (13:38):
And let’s eliminate that because the intentional life becomes the standard, becomes the metric that I reverse engineer everything by. And I think that is the first thing that I wanna encourage every, everyone to, to have the freedom to do is don’t let a financial advisor, don’t let me, don’t let someone on TV tell you the most important thing. Get really clear about what that looks like for you. Retirement is not biblical. It’s actually, it’s the definition of retirement is to be taken out of service. I don’t know why retirement’s even a goal for any, I don’t think any of your audience wants to be inspired to like retire someday. And so let’s get that out of our vocabulary. Let’s figure out what we want, like what that God-given calling is for our life. And then let, let’s that be the thing that we’re reverse engineer everything else by, and we can get into some of the other frameworks, but like that is a key deal, is like intentional living and then removing friction so that we can live intentional and making sure that that intentional standard is a thing that trumps cash flow, net worth good debt versus bad debt.
CG (14:36):
All of those are many frameworks, but should elevate your ability to live your one life. Well,
AJV (14:42):
Okay, well first of all, that is the most impactful
AJV (15:31):
So I love that. I love that. I also loved your side comment on retirement. I don’t know if I talk a lot about this on the show, but I know I talk a lot about it in my Instagram stories. But we don’t believe in retirement in our house. Like people say all the time, like, Hey, what’s, what’s the end goal with Brand Builders Group? And I’m like, I don’t know. We don’t have one. Like we don’t, we there is, there’s not some event that we’re working towards. We’re not planning on selling it or we don’t wanna retire. And it’s like until, until the Lord takes me home or my business is my ministry.
CG (16:05):
That’s right.
AJV (16:06):
And I think I, so I love just that, that whole concept of like, okay, first of all, retirement is not the end goal. Yeah. So let’s, let’s reframe that and now let’s start from there. So I love that. So I love that. So I’m curious to hear from you then it’s like it with this concept of wealth efficiency, right? Defining wealth, defining efficiency what is it that you see that is causing friction? Like what are the things that are causing people to not use money properly? Or where is the friction in this wealth concept?
CG (16:41):
Love it. And I’m gonna go through the next framework, which is the, the wealth framework. And stop me at any time. ’cause As you can see, I get really excited about this, but, okay, so now if we understand wealth efficiency, okay, now, now let’s get into like what that actually means. I, I have a problem with people that just stay in the clouds and don’t actually get tactical. And so this is, this is the way from a dyslexic mind, how you can understand this. And hopefully you can draw a picture in your mind as I speak. And so when I am speaking with someone on a whiteboard, I’m drawing a, a, an individual of a stick, a stick figure. And this stick figure represents you. And so we’ve already identified that it’s clear that you should get clear about what you want. If you don’t know where you wanna go, it’s like the Alice in Wonderland at the fork in the road.
CG (17:26):
Any road will get you there. Welcome to America. And, and if you’re Canadian, welcome to Canada
CG (18:10):
And in fact, your number one asset, which is your ability to create, doesn’t even show up on a traditional balance sheet. That’s how messed up that is. And so once you get clear about what, what you want, the next, the next conversation that I’m always looking for is how are you creating this thing called currency or cash? We’ll talk about that in a second. But a lot of times we divorce ourself from like cash from value. And, and you, you can really only create two fundamental things, a service or a product. Those are, and if there’s a third, please, please let me know. But someone can fundamentally create a service or a product. And just because you exist doesn’t make that service or product more or less valuable. We, we, we all know people that do the same thing on paper, but one gets paid a lot more.
CG (18:55):
An iPhone and an Android are not the same, right? So there maybe someone could charge more for one of those products. And so the idea is to get hyper-focused on am I creating the most value and really focusing on that. And what I find is a lot of people ask me, like, Caleb, what should I invest in? Should I do this Roth and other things? And I look at their financial situation, I say you should invest in nothing until you triple your income because you’re, if you wanna look at me with a straight face and say that what you’re making is, is optimized for your, for your situation. And a lot of times that’s, that’s just giving them the permission to quote unquote invest in themselves. But I can’t think of a better investment early on than making sure that you’re, you’re maximizing, this goes to our business owners.
CG (19:38):
If you’re, if you’re in business and you’re not reaching the heights that you know deep down that you can, it may, you may not want to tie up your money in other things until you’re really making sure that your printing machine is able to print out money. I’ll stop there. But then I, I wanna share what you do when you get money, but I find that so many people skip that step. They go, they wanna know where they should invest their money. Should I pay off debt? And all these things, we’ll, we’ll get to in a second, but I’m telling you, majority of the people listening to this probably need to hit pause and figure out ways that they can be more valuable, create more valuable services, or more valuable products to the marketplace. And cash flow or currency will reward value creation.
AJV (20:18):
You know, I love that you said this because we literally had this conversation a couple years ago and it was like, you know, we started Brain Builders Group, what, six years ago? And it was a couple of years ago, and we were, you know, deciding how we wanted to grow it and did we wanna grow it, and what, what, what did we wanna do with the money? And we were actually sitting down with our financial advisor, and this was like, again, like three years ago. And this was the conversation. And at that time, this was rates were still pretty good in a couple of different places and you know, better than they were in the last 12 months. And it was such a fascinating conversation. We were sitting here, we were listening and also doing math in our head mental math, and then we pulled out a calculator and we were looking at each other and we were like, literally the, and if you just think about this in really tactical forms, it’s like the rate of returns on any of the investments that we were talking about were half of our own profit margin.
CG (21:17):
Yeah.
AJV (21:17):
And we were just thinking, why would we put all of our money into these funds that are getting half of the return that we would be getting if we just reinvested into ourselves and reinvested into our people and reinvested into our business? Because our profit margins were double what any of the rate of return turns were even at that time period. And I think it’s a fascinating concept to what you’re saying. It’s like, like how often are financial advisors actually saying, well, hey, let’s talk about your profit margins. Let’s talk about how, how good you are doing versus where should we put your, your money in terms of funds or, you know, the market or whatever. But it was, it is literally what you were just saying. And it’s like, Roy and I recapped after the meeting and we were like, yeah, actually I think that BBG is the best investment that we can invest into right now. So we’re gonna, and it’s almost exactly this conversation you’re having, but realizing you are your number one asset. You are your best investment, and at least you can have some influence and control over what you do versus anything else that’s happening.
CG (22:23):
I I, I even, I’m, I’m writing, I’m writing a lot right now. I’m forcing myself to write some of these concepts down. And I was doing the math around just someone getting a $5,000 raise versus like investing and like breaking down the math and showing, okay, 8% compounded over a period of time, like, awesome. And then just like what a $5,000 raise would look like. And just showing them on paper of like, even if you’re not an entrepreneur watching or listening to this, like just by figuring out a way to make yourself more valuable to the marketplace, which is your employer is just something that I believe every single person going into college, going outta college, we gotta understand how this works. And I think it’s one of the things that we don’t talk enough about, but if, if, if people can be, if people can really maximize and optimize that space in their life, everything gets easier as, you know, making more money, just life gets a lot easier. It, it also covers up for a lot of mistakes that we make on the back end, and we can afford to make, quote, unquote, more mistakes. I say that tongue in cheek because we’ve really are are em, we’re creating emphasis on creating more cash and the person that’s creating more cash in the long run has just more options. And so that’s so yeah, I think you said it perfectly.
AJV (23:36):
No, I love that. And I think that’s a really important just reminder to all of us. It’s like, before you start investing elsewhere, just take a really good hard look at where are you investing in yourself? How are you helping yourself become more valuable? Because that’s, that’s the number one place to start. Awesome. That, that whole concept, I love that. That’s so good. Okay.
CG (23:57):
All right. You’re gonna love this next piece. ’cause I, I think what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna simplify this so dang easy where people will be able to get, ’cause a lot of financial, the financial side gets really complicated and they almost, people wanna make it complicated so that you trust advisors, you know,
CG (24:37):
Okay? Hear me out here. It can either be consumed or it can be saved, can be consumed. So I, I already know the Christians that are listening to this. Well, what about tithing? And I’ll, I’ll get to that. Okay. When you make money, there’s only two categories that can go consumption, which I’ll, I’ll talk about lifestyle. Think of lifestyle or saving, which is a verb to hopefully invest and multiply. Okay, we’re gonna talk about consumption first. When I make money, my dollar’s only capable of doing one of two things. Lifestyle or saving. Let’s talk about lifestyle. Lifestyle could look like taxes. Well, Caleb, I don’t like, taxes doesn’t affect my lifestyle. Well, if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re going jail. So taxes is a cost of living your life. It’s just the cost of living your life. Jail free paying debt is a, is a form.
CG (25:27):
Your, your debt service, your, that’s part of lifestyle. Your coffees, your intentional decisions that you make, intentional or unintentional. That’s the cost of living your life. And so really the three categories are spending debt and taxes are like the three categories we could get. We could get a bunch more nuance, but at the end of the day, the hacks here are track your money. It’s amazing when you start being intentional about like, why am I spending money and just like tracking it and then start asking the question like, am I actually spending the money on like what I care about? And what a lot of times we’ll find is we’re spending money to impress people for maybe some trauma re like, as a kid, like we can get really deep here, but a lot of times we’re spending money on things that aren’t actually helping us live more intentionally, but doing it for other reasons.
CG (26:21):
And so when we track that money, we just start having just better conversations. One of the best things that we do for clients is just help them track their money, because most people won’t do it. But if you’re, like, if you get a spending report every single month it could be painful, but it’s, it’s hard to hide when you start categorizing where your money’s going. Second thing is taxes. Nine outta 10 business owners are overpaying on their taxes. And I don’t know about you, but I want to legally pay as little tax as possible. I’m all about paying the government, but I’m all about paying the government as little as possible. And so without getting super in depth, there’s, there’s, you know, deductions, credits, things like depreciation, different tax strategies that you can go down. For any of your audience that reaches out to me, I can, we have a one page tax checklist with five categories. And within those categories, there’s a bunch of areas like in deductions and credits that you can take to your CPA and make sure that you have this checklist to see if there’s areas that you can save more money. That alone AJ is fun because on average a business owner is able to save 20 to $30,000 with that checklist just by taking it to their CPA and, and maybe asking certain questions or doing certain things that help you pay less in taxes. So that’s fun. Let’s pause right there. The
AJV (27:39):
Last, I wanna make sure that people hear this right, there is a one page checklist that Caleb is happy to give to you. And so if you wanna get that, then Caleb tell them where they should DM you.
CG (27:52):
You can, you can email me at [email protected] or go on to my Instagram at Caleb Williams and the, just trust the last name. Hopefully it’ll be in the title of this, of this podcast. I’ll put it on the, and if, yeah, it’ll be in the show notes. And so just if you reach out, I’d be more than happy to give you that. And we have a wealth efficiency packet, which is every framework that I’m talking about, whether it’s debt and other investments, like all these, I’ll give you the whole packet just to help you be more efficient, remove friction to get to your desired result. So yeah, we
AJV (28:24):
Did kind of recap that, right? Taxes, we, we all believe pay your fair share and not 1 cent more. So That’s right. How do you tighten that up?
CG (28:33):
Yeah, I, the, I I should go on a rampage here, but one of my good friends, Tom Wheelwright, who’s the CPA for Robert Kiyosaki, wrote the book Tax Free Wealth. He has a, a perfect analogy of this. He’s like the tax code, which is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages long. It’s like two or three pages of like what you owe. And then the rest is like a treasure map of finding incentives on how to not pay that. And so it’s just, it’s one of those things where you, you wanna start becoming treasure hunters and figuring out, Hey, how can I partner with the government essentially and create more value for the government? And oh, by the way, if I create more value for the government, they’ll, I’ll pay less. And so it’s just really, really cool and incentives work.
CG (29:13):
So, and then the, then the last thing when it comes to consumption is looking at debt. I have a, I have a non Dave Ramsey approach to debt. But I, I think about it this way is, I think when we’re, when we’re talking about debt, we really need to separate it debt and what you’re doing. A lot of times people marry those things together, but debt is just a tool in itself, and a lot of times it, it can be an enabler to make you make bad decisions. So I just wanna acknowledge that if I was talking to someone that was really pro Dave Ramsey, I agree personally debt can enable bad decisions. But when I’m looking at just for my personal life, I’m, I’m asking two questions. Should you buy these things? And then if I answer yes, then the next question is, what’s the best way to purchase those things?
CG (29:58):
And so for me, I look at cash flow and I just go to, if I’m already gonna determine to buy this home or this car, I don’t ever want debt to be an enabler. I don’t wanna buy this car because I can get it with debt. I wanna make the decision. And that that’s a, maybe a different podcast in itself because it’s like, how can you know what to afford? But once you make that decision, then I go back to what’s the best way to purchase that thing? And you can either use debt or use cash. And by the way, cash on the, on the top of your dollar bills says federal reserve note. So if you really wanna go down the rabbit hole, like cash itself is a form of debt because once we went off the gold current standard, every, all the, the, the dollar bills are just a form of debt.
CG (30:42):
So I get less emotional about whether I’m using a mortgage or not. And, and I just look at from a cashflow perspective, what gives me more control, what allows me to have greater cashflow that I can save and what limits risk? And in a lot of cases actually a 30 year mortgage and debt can, can actually be that thing that checks a box for a lot of people. Again, I I maybe I’m, hopefully I’m not confusing people more in saying that. I just wanna give you permission when you look at the lens through efficiency versus being debt free or not, it just allows us to be like, okay, what gives us more control? What allows us to be more efficient? Sometimes debt is that tool that we use on the saving side and the consumption side, but sometimes you can have toxic debt that’s just killing you, and you need to eliminate that, and that will free up a ton of cash flow in itself. So cashflow is what we really optimize for, or not, not something arbitrary like being debt free or not.
AJV (31:38):
Yeah, I know. I love that. And I think that’s, again, it’s using debt with guardrails, right? Yeah. And it’s like,
CG (31:44):
It’s using it as a tool.
AJV (31:45):
Yeah. It’s like making sure it’s a tool and you’re not flying off the cliff, right? And I think that’s true, you know, sometimes with cash too, it’s like, you know, it’s like, you know, sometimes if you’re just all cash, right? If everyone, if you know, it’s like we were all just hiding a bunch of cash and, you know, boxes under our beds. It’s like, is that really the best utilization of that? Right? So you can kind of go both ways, but I love that. So these consumption things, taxes, debt spending. What about saving?
CG (32:12):
All right, so, so, okay, so your dollar can only do one of one of two things. It can either be consumed and part of consumption is tithing, by the way, because that is the choice that you’re living your life. So if I decide I’m going to ti 10% in a way, I am voluntarily choosing a 10% tax as a part of my rich life, that’s just like, just something I want to be upfront with. But that’s a, that’s a lifestyle decision. Okay? So, so the beautiful thing is if you, if you make money and I figure out, I only need to know one thing, I either need to know how much you save or how much you spend, and I can determine, I can essentially model out your entire financial life. So if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you save 10,000, what are, what’s your lifestyle?
CG (32:56):
$90,000. We don’t have to do a whole budget to figure that out. It’s really quick. So that’s what, that’s a a life hack because part of that we can model out and say, okay, $90,000 today, this thing called inflation. Like what, in 30 years, what do you need to be having coming in to just maintain your current lifestyle? So that’s, that’s something that’s valuable. And understanding that your money’s only capable of doing two things, but okay, if we want to save money, going back to the richest man in Babylon, pay yourself first. Pay yourself first. There’s, there’s something really, really incredible about forcing yourself to, to save money. Saving is a verb. And so a lot of times a huge focus of ours is helping people be more efficient and then taking those inefficiencies from lifestyle and transferring them into savings category because majority of people are saving a fraction of what they need to.
CG (33:45):
But saving is, is a verb. And then what are we saving for? And, and we’re saving for investing and investing is a, is a multiplier effect. And one of the things that we, we try to determine is a lot of times people say like, what should I invest in? Should I invest in real estate? Should I invest in stock? Should I invest in myself? Should I invest in the stock market? And it, and there’s no right or wrong to this I wish I could tell you, like, do this thing, but it really comes down to everyone’s individual, you know, goals. And some people come to us and they, they realize like, I need to reinvest in my business. And so they, they’re in business, like for your example is like, that is helping me live more intentionally and oh, by the way, is gonna outperform any real estate or stock portfolio that I’m doing.
CG (34:33):
We have clients that are day traders, they really understand the stock market. Amazing. We have people that love real estate. Amazing. So it’s really identifying going deeper and saying, okay, what is this asset? It not only is gonna help me be more intentional, but it’s gonna create more cash flow. What’s the best way to be able to do that? And I’m not a fan of retirement, but I do think we need to be planning towards areas where our, our assets, whether it’s our business, whether it’s our stock portfolio, real estate portfolio, is creating enough cash that gives us the ability to do really whatever we want. Some people call this financial independence, some people call this financial freedom. But it, it’s just this idea of like, I have a system set up where I am able to live on my terms and to be able to make choices the way that I wanna make them, and I don’t necessarily have to go to work.
CG (35:24):
So that would look like in a business, having an operator do your thing. Or that could, and, but that’s ultimately you making the choice to continue to live intentionally, which a lot of our friends, aj, continue to work because work, they don’t work for money. They literally, literally are working because that’s what their God-given purposes for. And so all that to say, the saving is a verb to invest what you invest in. You can go through a process called investor DNA, which is something that I didn’t necessarily come up with, but it’s the idea of like, we’re all built a little different. And so instead of saying, is this good or bad, look at you and figure out where should I be spending my time and money? And then that will start highlighting where you should focus on. And then the last thing in this whole framework is risk, a risk management umbrella.
CG (36:09):
We could have, we could be crushing it, making money. We could be being super efficient in how we spend our money. We could be saving a ton, but if something medically happens or if something like a hurricane or a tornado comes and, and wipes out our business or on our, or our home and we don’t have it properly insured or having special risk management, like everything could be wiped out. And so as unsexy as it sounds like, you really do need to make sure that you are creating a, a moat and an umbrella around the life that you’re, that you’re living. And, and again, I don’t necessarily need to go into any more than that other than the checklist. I can give you a checklist to make sure that whenever you’re meeting with someone to help you, you, you can go through and make sure that you have all the risk management areas in your life checked. And, and then we’re, we’re cooking with gas. When you’re, when you understand that you’re your greatest asset, you really get clear about how you create money. Understand, once you create money, your dollars are only capable of doing two things. We can focus on optimizing or we can focus on multiplying. And then at the end of the day make sure that you’re creating a, a, a moat, a fence on umbrella around what you’re doing. So to, so that not one disaster can wipe it all out.
AJV (37:25):
This is so good, and I’m taking so many notes,
CG (37:56):
Yep. I, so, so any
AJV (38:00):
Personal recommendations?
CG (38:01):
Yeah. Okay. So the answer is you can actually, you, I could actually tell your audience exactly what they should be setting aside if I got, if I figured out how much money they’re making, how much money they’re spending, and then we could model out their situation. And not to depress anybody, but most people, 95% of people that model that are there, it doesn’t work. And so that it, it makes them realize like, oh, I either need to save more or spend less. So that’s just something that like, we can scientifically show what that in doing, hundreds and thousands of those models shows around 20 to 30%. That might sound extreme. Oh yeah. I, I I’m telling you, I’m not necessarily your biggest fan by saying like, you should save 20 to 30%, but I’m telling you, majority of people need to save 20 to 30% if they want to maintain their lifestyle.
CG (38:55):
And so a lot of times you, you can’t just strive harder. A lot of times people try to like, I need to just try harder. And that doesn’t work in most cases. And you, you, that’s where, again, not to, to pitch our business, but that’s where working with somebody that can be unemotional about your situation and help you free up cash and then also help you create a, a roadmap to say, okay, what does the next five to 10 years look like? And as we’re starting to make more money, let’s not spend dollar for dollar of what we make. Like, shocker. But there’s like anyone that’s listening or watching, and you are a value creator, there’s so much hope for you. You just wanna make sure that you could be your greatest asset, but you could also be your greatest liability. Most of the time it goes hand in hand. And so if you can get out of your own way 20, 20 to 30%, it should be the target. And it’s very doable if if you can get some of those pieces all working together.
AJV (39:45):
Yeah, and it’s interesting if you just sit here and do some, you know, personal calculations it’s like, let’s just say it’s like, yeah, the target is like, you really do need to be setting aside 30% of every dollar that comes in. And let’s just hypothetically say that tithing is something that you commit to. And even if you know, you’re not, you know, you know, doing that to the church, but maybe it’s like, Hey, I wanna give it to charitable causes or, you know, things I believe in, let’s just call it 30% savings, 10% tithing or charitable givings. Right? That’s 40% right there. And then assuming you are making over a hundred thousand, regardless if you’re an entrepreneur or in an, an employee job where you’ve got a salary, right? Let’s just call it’s a good healthy amount would be 30% in taxes. That means you’ve got to live on 30% of what you have coming in the door just there.
CG (40:38):
And yeah, it’s a, it’s, yeah, it’s a good, it’s a good framework to start at. And I, I don’t want that to be depressing for people to hear. And 30%, while it could be the target doesn’t mean you have to do that overnight, right? But it, it ideally for the people that are financially free, they are saving and investing in their unique ability. And, and it’s one of those things where they’re able to crush and it’s usually people that are able to save at least more than 20% of what they make are the people that can get on that road. And we’ve just seen a lot of success in that.
AJV (41:14):
Yeah. And I think that’s good. And it’s like as, and I don’t think it’s depressing as much as it should be a reflection moment of I wonder what I’m actually doing. Right? If you’re not sitting there thinking, huh, I wonder if I’m spending more than 30%. And I would assume that most people
CG (41:45):
Yeah. And, and just so you know, like that would just be a friction area. You don’t need to remove all the friction overnight. But the beautiful thing is if most people that come to us have friction all over the place, and what we try to do is, like, for example, taxes is a good example. If you’re overpaying on taxes and we free up some of that money, you’re already used to that lifestyle of paying the government. Why can’t we just pay you the difference? So it’s those kind of things that are like I, I don’t wanna make sound saving 30% sound easy. It’s not, but it’s not as painful as it might sound because you might be way over efficient. And this is where I’ll give Dave Ramsey his flowers. A lot of people are enabling themselves with that to buy things that they shouldn’t buy.
CG (42:27):
And sometimes the conversation needs to be, I should not be driving a hundred thousand dollars car, or I should not be living in this type of house. And oh, by the way, debt was an enabler. And that’s where, in a way, I 100% agree with what Dave Ramsey and the Ramsey court company teaches. Because majority of people, if you look at statistics, are over consuming. And that is made possible because of credit cards, because of debt. And so it’s not a cut and dry, black and white, but a lot of times we just need to wake up and say, especially if you’re listening to this or watching this and have something that God’s put on your heart to like go out and do and you have a mission that’s bigger than yourself. You, you have to realize that you could be the greatest liability to get that gets in your way. And that liability could be your lifestyle. So I don’t wanna sound like rice and beans, but sometimes math will just tell us like, what you’re doing is not gonna compound. Well, yeah.
AJV (43:22):
But I think that’s wise, and I think like for so many things in life, awareness is the first step, right? Awareness is the first step. Now I do have, I have a another quick personal question for you kind of on this, you know, concept of saving investing. Now this is this does not have to be formal, but since so many people are talking about it, I am curious to hear what’s your take on cryptocurrency, bitcoin? What’s your stance on that?
CG (43:54):
I, I ha have 5% of my investment portfolio, majority of my portfolios in, in our businesses and other businesses that I’m acquiring. I think crypto is not something that I am going like head over heels for, but I think there’s interesting, there’s, there’s interesting arguments to be made about it. And I, I think of it as a hedge to the American dollar and the hedge to maybe, maybe the stock market. I say that it’s a lot more volatile, but there’s some pe sometimes I talk to people that are like, the American dollar’s going away and we’re going all crypto. And, and, and my caution is this is how I, I think through things, if we did something like that, there’s gonna be a t it’s talk about a major shakeup. And so the thing that I always do is like, okay, if that happens, if over 90% of people in the population are gonna be like on their heels, there’s a really good chance that, like, I don’t ever wanna make like a decision based on fear.
CG (44:59):
And I find that a lot of people are going to crypto because of a fomo, like a fear of missing out. And I would not do that. But I do believe that that technology of blockchain is going to be something that is gonna continue to be more valuable. And so I’m giving you like a very political answer. I am keeping my eyes on it, but I’m not, I have less than 5% of my portfolio in it. And I would heavily caution you not to go all in on any one thing maybe other than your value yourself, making yourself more valuable. But I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of people lose a ton of money on, on crypto, and they’re, they’re, it’s really greed that clouded their judgment.
AJV (45:42):
No, I think that the good wise discerning statement around crypto, and I ask because I do think that, you know, in, as we have, you know, kind of just come out of an election season, there’s lots of talks of, you know the economy and market and the value of the dollar and exchange of presidents, which will be coming next year. So I think it’s always good to have some, you know,
AJV (46:33):
And so we’ve spent me personally a lot of time reading and listening, trying to understand the foundation of it, where it came from, how it was created, the future of it, the trends of it, the history of it. And you know what, that’s a commitment, right? That’s a learning commitment. And that, that’s our personal stance is I cannot give my money to something that I do not have my head wrapped around. And so we took a, a long sweet time to go, okay, now we have a little bit more of a better understanding, so we feel more comfortable doing it. But I will tell you, like back to investing in yourself, it’s like that was like, that was like, I was like, I gotta invest in myself and my own awareness and my own knowledge of what I’m investing in before I give my money to it. That’s
CG (47:20):
Right. That’s right. And yeah, and, and you also mentioned it’s like there gets, you get to a place where your dollar reinvesting in your business is not the right answer. And profit margin is what you look at. And so at the end of the day, there, there will get to a point where you’re crushing it in business and you don’t necessarily, you might not even need more money to make more like, so you’re getting to a place where your business is mature and then there’s so much wisdom in diversifying and, but you just wanna make sure that di you’re not diversifying your ability to make an impact and, and make money. And a lot of people AJ, are doing investing too early. Yeah. Like they, if you’re, if you’re asking me like, where you should put $5,000 a year, you’re probably investing too early. Mm.
CG (48:04):
Like, you’re probably need to go back to the drawing board and say, how, how can I have $50,000 a year to invest? And again, I say that outta love, but like that is the number one hack if I could give you anything, is like majority of people are, have the ability to create so much more value than what, what they’re showing up on paper right now. And so look as yourself as that asset and figure out ways that you can generate more value and like literally everything else, your ability to give, your ability to live your dream life, your ability to save 30% or more, all will get a lot easier when you, when you are optimizing and maximizing your ability to show up.
AJV (48:41):
That’s so good. And there’s so much wisdom in this conversation. And there’s honestly, there’s just so many like good reminders of not even just some of the, the more tactical frameworks and understanding of money, but also just how we view money in comparison to ourselves and why we’re spending money. Are you tracking money? Do we even know, right? And I think those are some of the things that, you know, as we approach kind of the end of year when this podcast is being released and as many of us are, you know, emotionally and mentally preparing for a new year it’s just a such a great time to have these conversations of going whatever you’ve done, you don’t have to do moving forward. Right? You can make a change at any, any time to reevaluate how you look at money, how you spend money, how you save money, how you invest money.
AJV (49:30):
And this is just kind of like a kickstart conversation that I would encourage everyone to lean into. And I would also encourage you to take him up, take Caleb up on getting those checklists. Like, if you’re like, I have no idea, well, great. That’s why we have interviews like this. This is why you come to podcasts like this. So take him up on grabbing those checklists, DM him, send him an email, both of which I will put in the show notes and make some, you know, minor changes to change the way that, you know, you’re reacting and you know, your relationship to money as we approach the new year. Caleb, such a great interview. So much wisdom. So many good golden nuggets. Love this so much. One last quick question for you, and then I will let you go. For everyone who is listening, if there was one thing that you would say, out of all the research, all the books, all the time, time in the bank, time, working with people, time in my own, you know, finances, if there was one thing, if you could look over, look back over everything that you’ve learned, what would you say is the number one most significant thing that you have learned about money?
CG (50:49):
I, I think the more I learned about money, the more I realize that it, it, it’s all, it’s all meaningless. And to really, I lean into what does your one life look like? I have a sign behind me that says one life. And it’s like a constant reminder that our life is, it’s, we’re a walking miracle. If you start realizing the odds of just being born and then like being, like listening to this, if you’re listening to this, you’re one of the world’s already wealthiest people. And so like really identifying that and realizing it would be a shame to spend your entire life chasing something that doesn’t have any meaning and money in itself. If you look at just paper currency, there’s no meaning in paper currency unless you give it. And so the big takeaway is like, live a life that gives meaning and then everything else will, will follow. And hopefully I didn’t just kill credibility of the entire, but I just like, I love this stuff, but I, I, the more I, the more I learn, it’s, I realize that we elevate all of these money conversations maybe more than the real conversation, which is how should I live my one life and living it with zero regrets and living it for a greater purpose?
AJV (52:02):
Hmm. No, and I think that’s actually the perfect answer. And I hope what everyone hears in that is from someone who has spent his entire professional career learning and teaching money, that at the end of the day, money is not what it’s all about. And it shouldn’t be what we’re all about, right? But back to where you started, money is a tool to learn how to use the tool. All right. Don’t let the tool use you, Caleb. So good. Y’all, thank you for sticking around. And don’t forget the recap episode will be coming up next. Thank you guys so much. We will see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. I’ll see you later.
Ep 565: My Favorite Books from Last Year That You Need to Read This Year | AJ Vaden Episode Recap
AJV (00:01):
Hello and Happy New Year. We are in 2025. I don’t know exactly when you are listening to this, but this is being recorded in Q1 of 2025. And a part of what I wanted to do to help start the new year is share my top personal five most influential books that I read in 2024. And I did a full bulk recap episode, if you wanna go listen to this on the influential personal Brand podcast. But this is gonna be like a five minute Cliff notes version of what was the book, who was the author, and what was my favorite quote from the book, right? I did like a full 40 minute solo episode on why these books and why they were selected as the most influential books that I read in 2024. But today, what we’re gonna do to help start the new year, is to give you five of what I think are some of the most powerful books that you can read this year.
AJV (01:06):
And I’m gonna share the book, the author, and the most significant and impactful quote that I pulled out of the book after finishing it. So this will be short and sweet, but if you’re looking for a good new read or a good old read to put on your queue for 2025, then this is a very awesome list of five. I feel like life changing, business changing books that should be on every person’s read list. And if you’ve read them before, like I had for some of these, they need to be on your reread list. So here we go. First one, what got you Here won’t get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. And here was the pullout quote that I picked. No one changes by learning things they change by doing the things they’ve learned. And I feel like if we just take it up a level this entire book is about how to be better, how to be better as a person how to be better as a communicator as a leader.
AJV (02:11):
But it’s how to be better. And realizing that many of us find success by accident
AJV (03:12):
So that was pick number one. Pick number two was Take the Stairs by Rory Vaden. I know it’s a bias pick, but I had not read this book in 10 years, and I was so reminded of why this is a timeless should read every few years book for me and for you, right? So take the Terrace by Rory Vaden. This is not one of his pullout quotes that he would ever share, but this is what I took from this book. And this particular read, frustration happens in the absence of perspective, frustration happens in the absence of perspective. Now, this entire book is learning what makes you successful in life, right? It’s, it’s all about the things that you can do to be successful in life. And one of the things that I find is that perspective is one of the most important things that you need to be successful in life.
AJV (04:07):
It’s a perspective of do I have enough or is it never enough? Is it a perspective of my glass is half full or my glass is half empty, right? This is, this is a great reread for me about remembering that I get frustrated when I forget to look at how far I’ve come. I forget to be grateful for the people around me and for the gifts in my life. And if I can focus on the good, then the frustration seems to dissipate. And so that was why it was my pick is this, it’s an overall mindset. Reshift re not that re reset book a reshift of making sure that I start this new year. That you start this new year with a glass half full mentality because there is so much good. Yes, there’s hard, but there’s so much good. So that was a perspective shift book of why I recommended this one.
AJV (05:04):
The third one was a personal pick. It’s a Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. And my pullout quote from this book was, A good Marriage is not something you find, but something you work for, right? A lot of the books that I read are business or professional. But every so often, probably every couple months, I pick a really deeply personal one. And sacred Marriage is single handedly the best book on marriage I’ve ever read. I think every single person who is married or who’s about to be married, it should be a prerequisite for your relationship. But this was just a great reminder. To me it’s like great marriages, good marriages don’t just happen. They happen to have two people who are willing to work for it. And yes, it is work, and that’s okay. We don’t have to be afraid of hard work in any area of our life.
AJV (05:55):
Great rewards come from hard work. Like, think about it, it’s like, do you feel the best after you just had like a, I think about this all the time. Like, I feel so good after like a really hard workout, right? And it’s like, it’s like this hurt. So good feeling of like, man, like I could do that. Like, my goodness. Like look what I accomplished. The same thing happens in, in any victory, right? The harder it is, the sweeter it becomes. And I think marriage is a lot like that. Fourth book is the Go-Giver by Bob Berg, and here was my pullout quote, greatness is tied to service and anyone can be great because anyone can serve. And I love the Go-Giver because it is a book about the heart of service. It’s about how many people can you help versus how much money can you make.
AJV (06:49):
And the more people you can help, the more people you can impact, the more income you will have. But it’s a byproduct of loving people, well, serving people well and focusing on people not dollars, right? And so that was my, I guess, business motivation. I love it because it’s in that very story like setting. And I just, I think those are simple, easy reads that illustrate really important parts. And this particular book is a very easy audio read, 90 minutes. But one of those that it’s a complete shift of are you focused on people or are you focused on yourself? And highly recommend it. It’s one of those two that it is so short and it is so good. It could be a every year read. And then my last pick for 2024, these were, these were my five highlights of 2024 I’m recommending to you was Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guera.
AJV (07:46):
And my pullout quote from him is one that I have said probably 1000 times since I read this book, which is, nobody knows what they’re doing until they do it, right? I hear so often in personal and professional settings like, well, I’ve just never done that before. Well, great, go learn how to do it. I actually had this conversation this morning with a team member and they’re like, well, you’re just gonna have to walk me through it. I’ve never done it before. And I’m like, well, guess what? I’ve never done it either. So we’re just gonna have to figure it out. And that’s the truth about so many things in business. Nobody knows what they’re doing until they do it right. It’s the first time for so many people that are successful. It’s like, you know, it’s like you’ve never been a seven figure entrepreneur before until you’ve done it. It’s like you don’t know what to do. Or like, you know, it’s like nobody knows what they’re doing until they’ve done it. And that’s okay. That’s called learning. That’s called growth. But this whole idea of like, you have to know what you’re doing to go and do it. Like, if you really think about it, it’s like, how would you know what you’re doing until you actually did it? Like it, it actually doesn’t even make sense if you just sit there and have like a
AJV (08:54):
Very philosophical conversation of, of course you don’t know how to do it. You’ve never done it before and you won’t know how to do it until you go do it. You can only read so much and watch so much and shadow so much and listen so much. There’s only so much of that that you can actually learn. The best and fastest way to learn anything is to go and do it. It’s to stop the studying and just go do the thing. Now that’s different if you know, like you’re a brain surgeon, and I’m not saying that for everything, but in general business, it’s like, just go do it. You learn by doing it. Don’t be afraid to just put it out there and learn as you go. And I think that was, oh my gosh, probably the most repeated thing that I’ve said this year is like, well, nobody knows what they’re doing until they do it.
AJV (09:34):
Of course, you don’t know what you’re doing. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it. Right? And then I’m also gonna share a bonus quote from Will from this book, unreasonable Hospitality, because I think it’s gonna be like, one of my personal mantras in my family is make it cool to care. It’s cool to care like that should be on a t-shirt will you need bumper stickers and t-shirts. Make it cool to care, care about people, care about your team, care about your colleagues, care about your clients. Care about the stranger on the street. Care about the person who’s having a hard day care about the person who can’t pay for their coffee in front of you. Like care about people. Like if we just did that, like if it was our job to make caring, cool, think about how things would be different. Like think about how your business would be different.
AJV (10:22):
Like what if you said every single day, it’s like, how can I care for someone today? How many people can I care for today? And how can I make it the cool thing to do so that everyone that comes after me does it too? Right? Coolness is contagious. And if we can make caring, cool, then that makes caring contagious, right? So make it cool to care. Those are my five books, five authors, five pullout quotes from my favorite books that I read in 2024. Grab these, check them out and put ’em on your list for 2025.
Ep 564: My Most Influential Books from 2024 with AJ Vaden
AJV (00:01):
So for the last three years, one of the personal goals or commitments that I have made to myself was to read two books every month of the year. And I initially made that goal so that I had some accountability and deadlines. I’m a a highly deadline oriented person but one of the things that I really wanted to do is go, Hey, if I have extra time, I wanna be filling my mind with things that challenge me, grow me, make me think, make me better, versus potentially getting sucked into watching tv. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying it’s good to limit it. But I really wanted to kind of set these things of going like, Hey, if I have the time, this is what I wanna be doing. So 2024 was my third year doing this the first year I said, let’s, let’s just commit to reading one book a month.
AJV (00:54):
And then in 2023, I did two books a month. And then 2024, I did two books a month. And one of the things that I have found is at the end of the year, I do a reflection of, of all the books, 24 books that I read last year plus the Bible. So technically 25 what were the most influential books that had the biggest impact on me, the ones that I have found that I have put into daily practice the most, and ultimately the ones that become my evergreen recommendation. So when someone says, Hey, what’s a good book that you’ve read here lately? I pull up the note on my phone, I literally keep it right here, and I keep the list of all the books that I’ve read and why I think they’re so significant. And I go, okay, well, let me tell you the five most influential books that I read last year, and here’s why.
AJV (01:40):
So that’s what I’m gonna do for you today on this particular episode. So these were all books that I read in 2024. And these are gonna be my top picks. I think I, I think I’ve highlighted six. But these are my top books and why, and this is a great thing to be doing as we enter in a new year, as we’re kind of like in Q1 of 2025. So I know if this, that you’re listening to this sometime in the future, this is when we’re recording this for context, right, Q1 of 2025. But it would be good for you to go, man, what’s my reading goal this year? Like, what challenge do I wanna set out for myself? And what are the books that are out there that I wanna read? And I’ll tell you one other quick thing before we get started is that there are tens of thousands of books that are printed every single year, new books.
AJV (02:29):
There is so many opportunities to read amazing books and not so amazing books. And one of the policies that I have put in place is I only read a book once I have rather heard the author speak, I’ve listened to several of their podcasts, and I’m like, man, like that is someone I wanna learn from. Or they have just been so consistently referred to me that I’m like, okay, at this point how have I not read this book? And so I would would just say, for whatever it’s worth, not only do I recommend these books, but these are books that had been repeatedly recommended to me at the point of like, well, I have to put it on the list. I have heard these authors speak in person. I have read other pieces of their work. I have listened to countless interviews with them.
AJV (03:18):
But these were not first time introductions where I just went through Amazon or walked through Barnes and Noble and was like, you know, any mey mighty move that one. That is not how this happened. So these were already pretty pre-vetted before I put them on my queue. Right? So with all of that said let me get through this so that I don’t keep you here for the next three hours. The first one is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guera. And we were fortunate enough to have Will Guera on our podcast, the Influential Personal Brand podcast. And so if you have not yet listened to that particular episode, Rory interviewed Will about a year ago and a phenomenal, phenomenal episode. And I, let me just kind of tell you why I picked Unreasonable Hospitality. And although Will comes from the hospitality industry, this is not a book for the hospitality industry.
AJV (04:15):
This is a book about how to bring hospitality into your industry no matter what you do. And I love it because it approaches hospitality on an individual level, like a personal level, as a leader, as a business owner, as a, a frontline employee, as someone who interacts with customers on a customer service, a sales, a a experiential level. But more importantly, what I love about this particular book is it is back to the roots of what does it mean to serve people well, whatever your job may be. And I love that it took the approach of the hospitality industry in this particular case a restaurant. ’cause It’s like, it does not matter if you’re the one busting tables taking phone calls and seeding people. You’re the one serving the food, cooking the food washing the dishes. Like there is a very interconnected, intertwined element of every restaurant, thus every business, thus every relationship where every role matters and one is not above the other.
AJV (05:22):
And they all connect into what is the client experience? What is the customer experience, and what is the employee experience? Right? I think on average, most adults are gonna spend 60% of their waking hours at work. Think about that for a second. Post school in your adult life, 60% of your time in going to be at your job with your colleagues, with your boss, you better pick something that you love and enjoy and do it with people that are more like friends and family than, you know, coworkers and colleagues. And I think that’s about the heart of this is, and how do you bring service into every element of what you do? How do you take pride and excellence in your role regardless of what your role is? It’s like it, you are the one taking out the trash. How can you be the best trash taker outer on the planet?
AJV (06:21):
I often get to play the role as trash taker outer at Brand Builders Group. We have a lot of live events, and it’s all hands on deck. And one of the things that I love about our team, it’s like, no one’s above taking out the trash. We’re gonna do it with a smile on our face. We’re gonna make sure it’s swift, we’re gonna make sure it’s clean, we’re gonna make sure it’s quiet. And it’s, and I think that is back to the heart of service. It’s like, how do we welcome people so that they feel invited and cared for? And this is an experiential book with so many tactical takeaways of how to do that as a leader, as a business owner as a, as a frontline employee of how do you go above and beyond? How do you just pay attention to your customers and your employees to do things that make them feel welcome, unreasonably welcome, right?
AJV (07:12):
And so that is why that was my first pick of 2024. In fact, we loved this book so much that we made it our mandatory book of the quarter in Q2 for our entire company to read. One of the things that we do at BBG is we have a Book of the Quarter Club. And out of all the books that Rory and I have read, we go through and say, which ones do we think are so important? They need to be, you know, more cemented into the cultural language that we talk about. And Unreasonable Hospitality was one of those books for us in 2024. So that was my first put my first pick and my first recap for you Will Gera Unreasonable Hospitality. It’s the art of bringing service back to your work. And it’s so, so good. I would also say, if you are are an audio listener, this is a great audio book, will has an amazing voice.
AJV (08:00):
But he’s got so much personality and charisma in his storytelling. It’s like, I found it very hard to want to hit pause because it was, it was one of those books where it’s like what’s gonna happen? Like, what’s, what’s next? Like, don’t leave me hanging. I wanna know what you did for that customer. I, I wanna know what they said. So it is also one of those books that I would just say, if you love audios, this is a great audio. Not all of my books are, I think great on audio, but this particular one was great. My second pick is a personal pick. I have read a lot of books on relationships and marriage. Rory and I are about to celebrate 15 years of marriage this year in 2025, which is so awesome. And I love him more today than I did the day we got married, which I think is the biggest win.
AJV (08:48):
But this by far was the best book on marriage that I have ever read. And it’s rare that Rory gets on the bandwagon and reads a book with me. But I was talking about this book so incessantly that he was like, okay, okay, I think I’m gonna read this too. Now he also read Unreasonable Hospitality, but this is one of those personal pics that he was like, man, like I need to read that. So here it is, sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. And here is why I think this book is really important now. Yes. Is it about the, the, the marriage covenant? Is it about husband and wife? Yes. but I would just say for anyone who is married, who is engaged to be married, who wants to be married one day this, this is a great book for the context of what is marriage?
AJV (09:40):
What does it mean to be a good partner in marriage? What are ways to uphold the relationship in a way that, you know, similar to unusable hospitality in a way that serves your spouse? And I think this was a really good book an inner look at what is the point of marriage. Now, for those of you listening to me that know me, like, you know, my background is very faith heavy. I am a, a strong believer. And I do believe that like marriage is like the marriage covenant under God. And one of the things that I found was really amazing is that what I loved about this book that was different than every other book was this is not a communication book. This is not a, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Let’s talk about our differences.
AJV (10:26):
Even though clearly there are lots of personality, inherent traits, differences biological, cultural, all the things, right? Clearly men and women are extremely different. But what I loved about this book is the whole point is like, marriage is not meant to make you happy. Marriage is meant to make you holy. And through the lens of that, it’s like how do you look at the context of your marriage as this relationship with another human being? Right? My husband of going, this isn’t like about me de my happiness depending on what he does for the marriage or what even I do. It’s like, how is this relationship making me a better human being in light of God? Right? So it is a faith heavy book. I’ll put that up there for all of you who, who are like, no, that’s not for me. Totally right. Fine. Just want to let you know upfront.
AJV (11:19):
But in terms of where, I think this was one of the strongest marriage books I’ve ever read, was the inherent focus on what is the goal and purpose of marriage. And I think that, at least for me and my upbringing of how, like even how I went through premarital counseling and getting married, being married, I have never ever heard anyone talk about it this way of like, the challenges are not meant to separate you. It’s to grow. You and I, I’ve heard this a million times and I do believe it to be inherently true. It’s like growth happens in the challenges and that’s no different in marriage. I’ve heard people say to me before, man, it’s just not supposed to be this hard. Says who?
AJV (12:09):
Parenting is hard. Being in business is hard. Sales is hard. Like there are hard things, but we can do hard things. I think it’s the attitude and the commitment and the loyalty and the pro we take to doing hard things. And marriage is a, it’s a, an act of obedience and discipline. And I had never looked at it that way before. And it was a very good thing to go like, how do I keep myself in check of not putting my happiness on Roy’s to-do list? But it’s like, no, like this, this is, this is more of a test of my own endurance of like, can I run the race that’s been given to me with who I chose to run the race, which was my husband? And that doesn’t mean every day is perfect most certainly is not. But at the end of every day, it’s like I can genuinely through a new lens, look at my marriage and look at my husband and go, man, I’m so grateful that you are mine and that I am yours.
AJV (13:07):
And I think a lot of that self-talk and that appreciation came through the lens of this book. And that by itself has strengthened our marriage and my per my personal take on marriage and the way I approach disagreements or household tasks or anything like that really shifted through the pages of this book. So that, that was my second pick, A personal pick for the year, but Sacred Ga Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. All right. Next one, I have I have my little list here of all the ones that I picked out. The next one I picked, sorry, I’m looking through all of these this is an oldie but a goodie, which was the Go-Giver by Bob Berg. Again, super great audio read, you can knock it out and probably a daily commute. It’s about a 90 minute read.
AJV (14:02):
It is extremely short, and it is very what I would say anecdotal in its nature. It’s very like chocked for chocked full of a story. And here’s what I love about this book, and it’s actually one of the books that we’ve picked to be one of our books of the Quarter for 2025 for our team at Brand Builders Group is the Go Giver is all about the lessons you learn through relationships and removing perceptions removing what I would say would be expectations that you have on other people. And there are five laws that you learn in this book, and I’m gonna give them to you in a quick recap. It’s the law of value, which is what you give versus what you take. It’s the law of compensation, which is all about how well can you serve.
AJV (14:52):
It’s about the law of influence with putting others above you and ahead of you. It’s about the law of authenticity being true, being true, honest to yourself. And it’s the law of receptivity. How open are you to accepting what people have to give to you? And it was through these five laws, and they each come with a different encounter and a different individual and a different anecdotal story all through, like the same main character. And I loved this book so much for two main reasons. One, if you’re listening to this, have you ever had the thought, what’s in it for me? And let’s just be honest. We’ve all had that thought. Likely by the time that you listen to this today, you have already had that thought. I have already actually even said those words, I think to my husband. He was telling me about something he was gonna do, and I was like, well, what’s in it for you?
AJV (15:48):
And I literally like, had to bite my tongue and catch myself and be like, oh my gosh. Like, it doesn’t have to be, there doesn’t have to be anything in it for you to do it, right? And I think that’s the, the heart of this book. It’s like, are you doing it to be of service? Are you doing it to get something in return? And that approach to relationships and to business is absolutely vital. And at some point, it’s the, the truth of it sneaks through, right? And I think it’s a really important book and approach of how people do business and how they build business relationships, right? And I I love what the book talks about. I said, the three fundamentals of why you work are to survive, to save and to serve, right? Those are the three fundamentals of work, right?
AJV (16:37):
Survival, right? You gotta pay your bills, buy food, pay for shelter, right? But then it’s to save so that you have some surplus for retirement or for vacations, or whatever you’re gonna use it for. But then it’s to serve like we work to serve people. That is a part of what we do, regardless if we view it that way or not. And I think this was a really great book on each one of those elements. And one of the things that I love is this entire book back to the, the Law of Compensation is your income is directly tied to how many people that you can touch, how many people you can impact, right? And if you look at it through the lens of that, it’s like, if you go, how many people can I serve today? How many people can I help?
AJV (17:21):
How many people can I impact? Not how much money can I make, right? Not as well. What can I, you know, make in a salary or a bonus or a commission, or how do I make more money? It’s how do I serve more people? How can I impact more people? How can I help more people? And if you just went through every single day of like, all right, here’s my goal of helping this many people today. If you just shifted from, man, I need to make this much money to, I need to help this many people, how much money, how much more money would you make in 2025? And that is why it’s one of my recommendations for 2025, is it’s a perspective shift of not how much money can I make or how much money can I save? It’s how many people can you help?
AJV (18:07):
And if you focus on helping people, I have no doubt you will make more money. But if you always focus on making more money and not helping people, it, at some point, it’s just going to burn you out. It’s exhausting. And you’ll likely not hit those goals at the speed that you would like, but if you focus on helping people, you’ll likely hit them faster and you’ll hit, you’ll exceed them faster as well. So Go-Giver by Bob Berg. That is my third recommendation from books that I read last year. Alright, the fourth one. And listen yes, I’m aware that this might be biased, but this was also one of our books of the quarter in 2024. And it, again, it’s an oldie, but it’s a goodie. This particular book has been out for more than 10 years. And it’s Take the Stairs and it was written by the one and only Rory Vaden.
AJV (19:04):
But here’s why it made my list. You know, I’m just gonna be honest, it’s been about 10 years since I read this book, right? I read it, helped edit it clearly read it again when the book came out, and my husband wrote it. But it also has been a decade. And we picked this book to read because we are embarking on our new book that Rory and I have written together that we are launching later this year, this, this summer. And one of the things that we wanted our team to do is go back and read the very first book that Rory wrote in preparation to be like, okay, what’s it gonna be like for this entire team to do a new book launch this year? And I reread it, and I was reminded of how good this book is and how timeless the principles are, and how evergreen the truths are.
AJV (19:57):
And I actually listened to most of this book with my kids in the backseat. So they could listen to their daddy talk about discipline and success and time and faith and action. And it’s, it was fascinating for my kids to pick up on these little things. And it just was such a great reminder to me that not only is this a great book, it it’s a book for all ages. Like, there is nothing about this book that did not apply to my 5-year-old and 7-year-old, that what doesn’t also apply to me in my life. It’s do I have faith? Do I believe that things will eventually work out for my good, right? Regardless of how hard today is do I believe that discipline is important and necessary for my success and my personal and professional life? And what does discipline mean?
AJV (20:53):
Do I believe that there is a there’s an onus on me to take action and not wait around for other people to do things for me, not wait around for it to show up on my doorstep on a silver platter before I go and do something, right? Am I willing to take action and do something before I’m ready to do it? And is there reward in the action versus being perfectly ready? Right? Those are, those are some of the things. But also what my kids really latched onto was this story that my husband talked about called Mr. M, which is a little guy who sits on your shoulder and m stands for mediocrity mediocrity. And this, this little guy who sits on your shoulder, Mr. M is the one who whispers in your ear. You can’t do that.
AJV (21:38):
You’re not smart enough for that. You, you don’t have enough experience. You’re too young, you’re too old. You’ve never done that before. It’s that little mediocrity monger who whispers in your wi your ear. You can’t, you’re not enough. This isn’t for you. This is for somebody better than you. And that’s what my kids latched onto. And quite honestly, it’s what I latched onto. And it was the power of do you have a management system over your words and your thoughts? And this is where I spent most of my time reminiscing about the book and talking about this book with my kids. I ended up also talking a lot about this with our team of how often do we hear it’s like, well, I just don’t have time for that. I just can’t take that on. Like, there’s not enough hours in the day to do that.
AJV (22:29):
Like, that’s too much for me. And here’s what I keep telling my kids, and here’s what I tell our team, and here’s what I’m gonna tell you. Whatever you believe is true, and whatever you tell yourself the most is what you believe. I’m gonna say that again. Whatever you tell yourself the most is what you believe. And whatever you believe is true, if you believe that you can’t because you’ve been telling yourself I can’t for the last 10 years, then magically you can’t. Right? For some reason, other people can, but you can’t. That that is not because that’s true. No one else has more minutes in the hour or hours in the day than you do. We all have the same, some of us have just said, I can do it anyway. Right? We all have things vying for our tension and more than we can manage in most cases, between the different social platforms and family commitments and work commitments and technology distracting us from our, like distracting us and taking our attention. Like we could all sit here and go, there’s just too much to be done in a day. Or there, there’s a difference saying, which is, I choose where I spend my time.
AJV (23:59):
I mean, that’s it, right? It’s, it’s, it is a difference in going, this is where I choose to spend my time, versus, oh, I just can’t fit it all in, right? It, it, it’s the exact same thing. It’s like, no, that just means you have to say no to some things because you have chosen that other things are of more significance at this time, at this season of your life. And those are all mental choices that we get to make. That’s a discipline, that’s an obedience. That that’s also a faith element of going, I believe that this thing is right for me. But I just thought it was just so important in this particular book to go back and, and re harness the power of our thoughts and our words and what we say to ourself, and how that becomes our actions and our beliefs and ultimately our reality.
AJV (24:45):
And now, that’s not the whole essence of take the stairs, but it’s why it made the list. And my favorite quote that I don’t even remember reading in this book, I don’t even recall Rory ever mentioning this in a keynote, which I have heard hundreds of times over the years, but this was the number one quote that stuck out in this particular time, reading the book, right? Different season of life, different season of business. But this was the quote that stuck out to me that I’m gonna share with you. Frustration only happens in the absence of perspective. Frustration only happens in the absence of perspective. Now, perhaps this stuck out to me at the season of life because I say the words, I’m so frustrated on a daily basis with everything going on or perhaps that that was just the message that I needed to hear in this particular book.
AJV (25:40):
But that was something that I thought was really powerful because I think I hear a lot of people say, I’m just frustrated that I’m not where I thought I would be. I’m, I’m frustrated. Things aren’t going faster. I’m frustrating. This isn’t working the way that I want to, or it didn’t happen this way. I’m just frustrated and I hear those words so often. And I think that that also ties into that is Mr. M, Mr. Mediocrity, Mr. Mediocrity, that sits on your shoulder telling you the untruths, right? Being frustrated is a, a choice. When we don’t have perspective, it’s the other option to going. No. Like, there’s perspective here of like, and, and maybe it’s not going as fast as you want, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t progressed. And it’s a choice of going, am I, am I happy with progress?
AJV (26:30):
Am or am I dissatisfied with the lack of speed? And those are just, those are perspective shifts. And I think it was a really good review for me at least to go. It’s like, where am I missing perspective? Like, where am I not paying attention to all the progress and all the good, and I’m only focused on all the lack of progress and all the bad, right? So all of those things combined was really that internal mindset general inspiration book that made my number four pick for 2024, which was Take the Stairs by Rory Vaden. And then not well, I mean, gosh, if I’m going through these, there’s, there’s like five more that I probably could pick. But this is, this is the last one that I’m gonna pick and I’m gonna share with you. I forgot I had highlighted so many as I’m reading back here,
AJV (27:32):
I think this is one of those timeless reads that I will probably make a habit to go back and read if not every year, every couple of years. I think that this is a, a really important read for anyone who has gotten to a point where they’re like, okay, I know what got me here won’t get me there. And that could be a personal or professional endeavors. But I think that at some point, whether it’s one year, three year, five year, 10 years doing something, the things that you started with eventually have to change and evolve and elevate. That includes systems, processes, people business models, prices. At some point, things have to change for you to keep growing, right? And I, I think it’s a really, really important book as people are stepping into what I would say a level up kind of mentality.
AJV (28:29):
Like they’re ready to up level, they’re ready to take it to the next level, whatever, you know, phrase you wanna use there. But this was a, this was a book that I thought was really, really important because it focuses on the things that you can do that are super simple. And I, and I loved so much of that. Like, I thought it was so important, just the importance of listening and, and, and gratitude and, and some of those best practices. And I think it was also really important to talk so much as I think in business we talk so much about what we should do, and we don’t talk enough about what we shouldn’t do, right? And I, I love this in this book, is that we have to talk about what we have to stop doing as much as we have to talk about what we need to start doing.
AJV (29:20):
And I think that as an organization and, and being, you know, my previous life, a consultant to a lot of organizations, there’s a lot of talk around, well, this is what we’re going to do. There’s not a lot of talk about, this is what we’re not going to do. This is what we need to stop doing as an organization or as an individual. But that’s a really important part of this, right? If we’re only talking about all the things that we’re gonna start doing or all the things that we are doing, then we’re leaving out a huge category of things. And hey, there’s also some things that organizationally speaking, categorically speaking, we don’t do. And I feel like that is a missing part of the puzzle. That if you are listening to this and you’re going, man, I wonder if we have a culture problem or a communication problem or a collaboration part problem, or if you’ve ever said, it feels like the right hand and the left hand don’t know what they’re doing, it’s probably because you’ve been focusing on just one part of that.
AJV (30:15):
Maybe you’re a part of a, a team that only talks about what we’re not gonna do, and you need to spend more time talking about what you are gonna do. But I find more often, specifically in the newer parts of the year and the early parts of the year, it’s a lot more conversation around, these are all the things we’re gonna do this year, and there’s not a lot of talk about, and this is what we’re not gonna do this year. Both are equally important for clarity, communication, collaboration, and culture, the four C’s, right? Clarity, communication, collaboration and culture. And you need to both know what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do as an individual, a team, a company, you know, whatever it is that you wanna be. But I think that’s a, a really, really, really important thing.
AJV (31:02):
So there’s a feedback matrix that they share and that Marshall shares in the book, and it’s like, what do you stop doing? What do you start doing? What do you need to do less of? And what do you need to do more of? Right? So high level, that would be a very quick thing that you can just go back is a feedback perspective on, man, what are we doing as an organization? It’s like, what do you need to stop doing? What do you need to start doing? What do you need to do less of? And what do you need to do more of very simple components to help you take like a holistic perspective. I mentioned earlier that I loved that there was such a huge part of this book about listening. One of the things that I discovered about myself in this book is that I need to be a better listener.
AJV (31:47):
If you would’ve asked me before this book, aj, are you a are you a good listener? I would’ve said, yeah, I’m a great listener. I listen all the time. After reading this book, I’d be like, Ooh, that might be an area of weakness for me. And he goes through this entire checklist of, are you constantly thinking in your mind what you’re gonna say as the other person is talking? If so, you’re not such a great listener. Are you constantly interrupting to get your thought in? If so, you’re not such a great listener. Are you constantly counteracting like, well, that’s not true in your mind. You’re not such a great listener, and then this is the one that hit me. Are you constantly finishing other people’s sentences? And if so, maybe you’re not the great listener that you thought you were. And I caught myself going, man, I, I think I do interrupt too often.
AJV (32:37):
I, I think I do try to finish sentences too much. And I went through and I shared this with Rory, and he just laughed out loud. And I was like, okay, well, that was probably the confirmation that I needed there. Like, this is, this is an actual goal of mine this year. This is a commitment to myself as I’m going to be a better listener. And again, we’ve probably all been taught this before, but I thought this was a really important skillset to get back to, which is simply think before you speak. Like, and so, like one of the goals that I’ve had for myself, as soon as someone’s done talking, I’m gonna let there be a nice pause before I speak. And I practiced this yesterday in a conversation, and after this individual was done sharing their thoughts I just paused and I said, is there anything else? And they said, no. And I said, okay.
AJV (33:33):
And then I said, okay, let, let me share my response. That is not typically my mo in that, but it was so helpful to them to be like, wait, is there anything else? No, I’m not that. I had a little pause because I needed to, to get my thoughts. Then I proceeded. And I have found that that’s so easy. It’s easier for me to do in, in-person conversations, but I’m trying to do the exact same thing in written communication. And if I don’t have a good clear response during some written communication, I’m just saying, Hey, I, I’ve seen this and I’ll get back to you. This was actually some feedback that was given to me because I didn’t do that. I saw the message. I knew I wasn’t ready to respond to it, so I just didn’t respond. And the feedback I got was, Hey, that was, felt really inconsiderate.
AJV (34:24):
That was like a really important message I sent. And then you just didn’t respond. And I was like, yeah, I was gathering my thoughts. They said, well, that would’ve been just good to know. And I said, oh, good, good feedback there. So now I’m just saying, Hey, I have received your message. I’ll be back to a response in the next couple of days. And it’s because I actually need the time to sit and listen. And even though they weren’t talking, it was in writing, I was still listening. And I think that these are just little things that make communication and collaboration and culture so much better because you have more clarity. So if you have never read this book, I highly recommend what got you here won’t get you there. Again, doesn’t matter if you are in any position in a company leader frontline, employee, owner, it doesn’t matter.
AJV (35:15):
It is for you. And I also think that this is one of those books where it hits some of the most practical things, like listening and saying thank you and giving feedback and receiving feedback but then also brings it up on a higher level as well. So it’s, it’s very into the weeds with like, here are things you can do, here are checklists, here are reminders, here are best practices, as well as some of the higher overview stuff that I think is really, really, really important. Here’s, and here’s again, I’m trying to like do some pull out quotes from each of these. And here’s what I would say this is one of my favorite quotes from this book. No one, and this is not a direct quote, this is my interpretation of the quote, so don’t cite me. No one changes by learning things.
AJV (36:07):
They only change by doing the things they’ve learned. And I think that’s also a great quote to end my book recap for 2024. Because here’s what I have found about people who do read and go to a lot of classes and seminars and sign up for courses and programs. And I think all of those things are good. The question is, but are you doing anything with what you’ve learned? It’s one thing to say, Hey, I read 24 books last year. It’s another thing to go in. Here’s what I learned and I’ve implemented from every single book that I’ve read now, I’m not gonna be able to implement every single thing that I jotted down in my notes from every single book. What my goal has been in this process in the last few years is what’s the one thing that I need to take from this particular book and put into action in my life?
AJV (37:00):
What is the one thing? And so for this book, right, what got you here won’t get you there. It was listening. Like, I took that to heart and said like, I have had an aha moment. I need to improve my listening skills in a, in a very important way to be a better communicator, a better leader, a better friend, a better spouse. But that was like my one thing I took away. And one of the things that I find is that if, if you as a reader can just take a moment of reflection at the end of every book and go out of everything that I’ve read, all the quotes, all the things, what’s the one thing that I’m gonna put into practice? And really try to make it one, that doesn’t mean you can’t do more, just highlight one. Then you’re not just learning things, you’re actually doing things. And that’s what creates change. Learning things does not create change. Doing the things that you’ve learned is what creates change. So regardless, if you go and read any of these books that I read last year I would say whatever books or whatever podcasts that you listen to or read this year or whatever coaching programs or courses that you participate in, ask yourself, what’s the one thing that I can actually start doing to create real change in my life?
Ep 561: Choose Your Hard | Chris Janssen Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Choose your hard. That’s the conversation that I would like to have today. I just got off of an amazing conversation with author and coach Chris Janssen. She’s the author of a new book called Grace Yourself, how to Show Up for the Sober Life You Want. And our conversation was about choose your hard and whatever, whatever we choose in life can be hard. Like I heard somebody say the other day, it’s like, life is hard. It’s, it’s just hard. And so it’s up to us to choose our hard. And in this conversation that I had with Chris Jansen, we were talking about very specifically choosing a sober life versus a, a life where something has a stronghold over you. Not necessarily just alcohol, but in this quote I saw the other day, it was like, you know, choose to be fit. That’s hard.
AJV (00:55):
Choose to be fat. That’s hard. Choose to save your money. That’s hard. Choose to go in debt. That’s hard, right? Choose to focus and work on your marriage. That’s hard. Choose not to and get a divorce that’s hard. Choose to prioritize your time and spending time with your kids while you’re young. That, that can be hard. Choose not to do that and miss out on knowing your kids while they’re young. That’s hard. It’s like, regardless of what we choose, there is going to be hard parts to it. It’s just what hard are you going to choose? Right? And it doesn’t matter if it’s a health journey or a money journey or a relationship journey, or it’s a sobriety journey, right? Either way you go, it can be hard and there’s going to be hard parts of whatever it is that you choose.
AJV (01:49):
The differences is, do you want to, you know, choose the salad and be healthy or, you know, choose the dessert and have a temporary indulgence. And I’m not saying having a dessert is bad and having salad every meal is good. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying the repetitive nature of those choices lead to rewards and consequences. Not all that different than, you know, spending money or investing in relationships or anything else. Our choices are what lead to the rewards or the consequences. And there’s going to be hard parts about either there’s gonna be hard long days lots of extra work. There’s going to be discipline and obedience. There’s going to be missing out on some things to get something else later. Like they’re, they’re just hard things. But we each get to choose our hard, and this conversation with Chris was about, you know, you, you could choose right? To, you know, have that quick fix and have that drink in the moment, or you can choose to make a better, healthy choice for your life and
AJV (02:58):
Not do that. And again, not saying having a drink is bad. I’m not saying that. But for some of us, it is for some people it is. And it’s for each of us. We just gotta choose our hard ’cause it’s gonna be hard either way. And so as you’re, as you’re sitting here and listening to this, I just wanted to pose a couple of quick questions. One, what’s the hard that you need to choose in 2025? And it could be, it’s like, I’m gonna choose the hard of getting up at 5:00 AM to get in early morning reading time or time with the Lord, or going on a walk or going to the gym, right? Could it be that it’s like I’m gonna choose the heart of missing out on seemingly a lot of fun stuff because I’m committing to getting in bed by, you know, 9:00 PM it, I don’t know what your heart is.
AJV (03:49):
I’m just saying what is the hard that you need to choose for 2025? Because they can go both ways. There’s the good hard and the bad. Hard, but there’s hard either way. So that’s my first question is, you know, what is the hard that you need to choose for 2025? My second question to you is, what are gonna be the rewards of choosing that hard and the consequences of not choosing that hard in 2025? Because with any choice, right? There comes an opportunity for reward or for consequence. And if you know that there is a hard that you need to choose, and I can just tell you personally for me almost two years ago, it was, I had to give up alcohol. I knew that it had created a default mechanism in my life and my choices. It had a strong hold on the way that I was decompressing.
AJV (04:45):
And I had to give it up. And it was hard. And then it wasn’t