Mike Rowe
Appearances
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1126: Richard Reeves | Rethinking the Purpose of Modern Masculinity
Follow your passion as a bromide is precisely what 98% of the people do who audition for American Idol. And they're lined up. Thousands of people who have been told, if you believe something deeply enough, and if you want something bad enough, and if you truly embrace the essence of persistence and your passion, if you let your passion lead you, stick with it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1126: Richard Reeves | Rethinking the Purpose of Modern Masculinity
Well, following your passion is terrific advice. If the passion is taking you to a place where opportunity and your own set of skills will be able to coexist. Passion is something that all of the dirty jobbers that I met possessed in spades. They just weren't doing anything that looked aspirational. So it was confusing. It's like a guy in a plaid shirt sipping a cappuccino.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1126: Richard Reeves | Rethinking the Purpose of Modern Masculinity
That doesn't make sense. Well, guess what? Neither does a septic tank cleaner worth a million dollars. That guy had a million dollar business. I actually counted them up once. I could be wrong by a couple, but I put over 40 people that we featured on Dirty Jobs as multimillionaires. Passion isn't the enemy. It's just not the thing you want pulling the train.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1126: Richard Reeves | Rethinking the Purpose of Modern Masculinity
But look, I don't say don't follow your passion. I say never follow your passion, but always bring it with you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
People just don't believe you can make six figures working with your hands. There are 8.7 million open jobs. Most of them don't require a four-year degree. What they require is training and the mastery of a skill that's in demand.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It wasn't thumbs up or thumbs down. That didn't matter. It was like, hey, come and let me show you what I do. And that was the moment for me. I thought, man, there's something here. And even though CBS let me go. They let me take the tape with me, and I got their permission to try and sell a show. I called it Somebody's Gotta Do It back then, but everybody said no.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I took it to every network, every place you can take a show to sell it. The only people who didn't say no were Discovery, and they didn't say yes. They just said, look, we'll let you do a pilot, like three episodes. They hired me to be sort of the Discovery guy. They wanted me to go on expeditions around the world and
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
see the titanic and climb kilimanjaro with experts and i was totally into that and they let me narrate pretty much everything they did for about 15 years there but this thing we call dirty jobs was not supposed to be a hit it wasn't supposed to be a series it certainly wasn't supposed to be a franchise and it sure as hell wasn't supposed to launch 38 different shows it did all those things happened
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And as they started to happen, I realized for the first time in my life that I was actually working on something that I did care about. That's when I went to work in earnest, truly, for the first time in my life, when that thing went on discovery and hit, and we were overwhelmed again with the same response, only this time it was thousands of letters.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's when everything changed, because my mom called and told me to do something that looked like work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So much of what eventually came out of Dirty Jobs was an alternate compendium for living. And it was somewhat contrarian. I had seen, and I'm sure you and all your viewers have too, these successories, right? They hang on walls everywhere. They say things like, stay the course. And it'll be a picture of some guys maybe rowing in a shell or kayaking.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And at some point during Dirty Jobs, when it really blew up, I started to realize that the people I was working with almost always had a different take on conventional wisdom. So stay the course is a great example. It makes great sense to tell somebody to stay the course if they're going in the right direction. If they're not, it's probably the worst thing in the world you can tell them to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Dirty Jobs became a hit in 2006. By 2008, it was the number one show on cable. There were 12 million people looking for jobs. But the crazy thing was on Dirty Jobs, everywhere we went, we saw help wanted signs. Those jobs are real. They're not vocational consolation prizes for people who can't do the other thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Never quit. Never give up. So to answer your question, if the subject is passion and the topic is your dream, then Well, I'd wager most people listening right now have been told from an early age, just as I was growing up, to follow your dream, and to never give up on your passion, and to be resilient, and to be stubborn in this regard.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And boy, sometimes that is great advice, but my God, the evidence to the contrary is voluminous. We've all seen American Idol, and we've all heard, you know, Beyonce, Lesnar, Lady Gaga and Cher and all the rock stars of our day say, look, never give up on that dream. I've heard them say it when they're standing there clutching their Grammys. And yet, what's the real lesson from American Idol?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The real lesson isn't the winner. It's the thousands of people who audition. And it's the many, many, many hundreds of those people many of whom are in their early 20s, who realize that, incredibly, they're not going to be the American Idol. In fact, many of them realize, to their wonder and horror, that they can't sing at all. And they realize it on national television.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
As they're standing there, watching their dreams crumble around them, watching their passion drain out of them when they realize, like I said earlier, just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. And conversely, just because you don't feel passionate about a thing doesn't mean you can't change the way you feel about something.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I get a lot of pushback in this conversation, Hala, because it sounds like what I'm saying is screw your dreams. I don't care about your dreams. Don't follow your dreams. And then it's true. I am saying all those things. And I say them every day, many times to people who apply to our scholarship program. But I'm not saying your dreams aren't important.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
What I'm saying is your dreams are way too important. Your passion is way too important to follow. You don't follow a thing that's important. If you identify a thing that's important, you take it with you. You put it in your pocket.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
and you say, okay, I'm a passionate person, and I'm passionate about learning how to build homes, but if I can't crack that nut, am I really going to spend 50 years beating my head against the wall, or am I going to change my course?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So look, it's a hard thing to do on your own, and that's why friends are important, and that's why books are important, and that's why the unexamined life is a tragedy. You You have to kick your own tires. And sometimes you just have to pick up the phone in your cubicle so your mom can tell you, no, not that way, this way. Try this instead.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Wouldn't it be fun if your pop could see you doing something that looked like work? She didn't call and say, hey, you know what you should think about doing is maybe changing the topography of the Discovery Channel by taking reality TV at its literal definition and reimagining yourself as a guest instead of a host.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And she said that I would have hung up on her and told her to stop drinking so early in the day. But all she said was, do something that looks like work. And it was just the right thing for her to say and just the right time for me to hear it. At 42, had this happened to me 10 years earlier, I would not have been able to handle the success of a show like Dirty Jobs.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I just wasn't mentally prepared for it. So you never know.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. Follow your dreams. Follow your passion. The trap with that is...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I'm just sitting here nodding in violent agreement. It's back to cookie cutter advice, unfortunately. We all need to hear exactly what you just said at some point in our life, but we don't all need to hear that at the same time because we're on a trip. This is a journey. I just had this conversation with my mom again, not to drag her back into it, but it's really apropos.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
This woman wrote every day for 60 years. I'm not even kidding. Her dream was to become a published writer. And she gave up on that dream after 40 years of beating her head against the wall. But she never stopped writing. She kept doing it because she knew the work. She found a passion in the work. Her dream of being a bestselling author was out the window until she turned 80.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Then she sold a manuscript and it went to number four on the New York Times bestseller list.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And then two years later, she freaking did it again. I mean, if you want the persistence rap, this is the story. She's 80 and she writes a book called About My Mother. She's 82 and she writes About Your Father. That thing also top 10. Then she writes Vacuuming in the Nude and Other Ways to Get Attention, which goes to number one.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And then she just wrote her fourth, Oh No, Not the Home, True Stories About Life in this Retirement Community. I don't mean to turn this into a commercial for her books. What I mean to say is, what are we to learn from a woman who wrote every day for 60 years before she got what she wanted? It actually contradicts and makes my point at the same time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Based on that, I said, Mom, so what do you tell a writer who comes to you and says, do you have any advice? Because it's a very heavy thing. If you encourage somebody to do what you did, the odds are very good they're never going to get published. And they're going to spend 60 years making little rocks out of big rocks.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
But if you discourage them, then you're this sweet little America's grandmother who's going around killing people's dreams. How do you square that? And she said, oh, Michael, you know what I do? I tell them that I encourage them the way somebody in the crowd of a marathon does. might encourage a runner. I just stand there and I applaud as they go by.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And maybe I offer them a sip of cool water to make their journey a little more pleasant in that moment. But that's all I can do as somebody who finally got to do what she wanted to do at 87. All I can do is encourage you at whatever point you are in your race that you better be enjoying the race because there is no guarantee that you're going to hit the finish line.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, in a lot of ways, I think one way is exactly what we've been talking about. We've told kids that job satisfaction is a result of their ability to make their dreams a reality. It kind of starts with that. And so you put this incredible burden on a kid to say, look, if you want to be happy with your life, you need to identify right now the thing that's going to make you happy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
and then we'll embark upon a plan to borrow vast sums of money in order to get you the proper credentials that will permit you to pursue this goal. That's baked in. It's kind of like, not to digress, but it's like a soulmate. If you're out there looking for your soulmate, That's like looking for your dream job. It's really hard to find.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Better to find a job and then craft it into the thing you want. Better to find a good and decent person you can trust and then find a way to love him or her. I know I'm saying the same thing in a slightly different way, but we've got it so inculcated in the minds of this generation that they could be the next American Idol. All you have to do is want it bad enough.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Thank you. Do I still qualify as young? I mean, profiting, I understand, but I'm not sure the young thing still applies, but I'll take it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So yeah, to that, I do say bullshit. I'm sorry, but wanting a thing is not enough. So the first order of business is to get a more realistic set of expectations. Then you have to take an honest look at the opportunities that exist. Again, I'm not saying ignore your dreams.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I'm just saying take a breath and just push them aside for a minute and look around to where the opportunities really and truly are. Right now, there are 8.7 million open jobs. Most of them don't require a four-year degree. What they require is training and the mastery of a skill that's in demand. That's not my opinion. That's just the way it is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Other facts worth thinking about are the $1.7 trillion in student loans that are currently on the books. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. . . . . . ., the, P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a in in companies are beginning to realize they need to make a more persuasive case for a whole bunch of good jobs that are really important to all of us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Yeah, guilty as charged. I grew up on a little farm outside of Baltimore. My granddad lived next to us and he was a magician, not a literal magician, but he was a tradesman. He only went to the seventh grade, but he could build or fix or fabricate anything from scratch. He just had that chip. So as a boy, I grew up with a front row seat to all kinds of different work,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
all kinds of trade work, and just an incredible work ethic, both in my dad, my granddad, and my mother, by the way, who just finished her fourth book at 87. The woman has written every day for 67 years now. But the point is, I got really good cards as a kid. We didn't have a lot of money or anything like that, but I
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And they need to do that in junior high and high school. On the other hand, right now in real time, as I'm talking to you,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
We need to make a more persuasive case for those eight and a half million jobs that currently exist, which is all a long way of saying, I don't know how many people who are listening to this thing should be working in the trades, but I can tell you that the opportunities are absolutely real. And there's never been a better time to at least kick the tires in that world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I just had a great example of what worked looked like and a really great exposure to the trades. And I was pretty sure I was going to follow in my pop's footsteps. That's what I wanted to do. But the handy gene, tragically, is recessive. The things that came easily to him didn't come easily to me. It was my pop who suggested that I could be a tradesman.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
and see if it makes sense to your brain. Because we've helped 2,200 people get the training they need. And their stories, their stories are way more persuasive than my own. And I hear them every day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
My God, there's so many. Please hook me up with Ms. Sanchez.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Yeah, I'd love to meet her. But I'd love to know too, before I answer you, how, I mean, you just described what you do in a pretty broad-based way, but like if you really distill it, what do you do? Like if you had a business card, what would it say? What's it come down to for you vocationally?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Okay. So I would go back to, I think, one of the very first things that came out when we started talking, which was my pop, if he were still around, would say, oh, this woman, this hollow woman, yeah, she's a tradeswoman, clearly. And if you pressed him, he would say, well, think about how she approaches work. She has many different clients.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
She advises them in different ways, depending on their needs. She's a jobber, probably has short-term contracts with some, longer-term contracts with others. She's probably paid on her results at some point. At some point, you're going to say, well, if I grow your business to this degree, how can I participate? Or are you purely time and materials? I don't know.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
No wrong answer either way, but those are all questions that tradespeople with an entrepreneurial bent will ask themselves. I look at myself, I think, much the same way you do in the sense that I do a lot of different things, but I'm really not trying to define the work by any one thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
One of the things really missing from the conversation today, whether you want to be an influencer or whether you want to be a plumber, the question is, are you an entrepreneur? Do you think like a freelancer? Do you even like the whole notion of a gig economy? Because the gig economy, that's under siege today. Freelancing is under siege. Here in California, it's a real thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
If I really wanted to, I just needed to get a different toolbox. That's when I realized that being a tradesman is really a state of mind more than a mastery of a specific set of skills. It's both, obviously, but I think today a lot of people really think about being in the trades in a very narrow way. It's very much a state of mind.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's a thing called AB-15. It's an assembly bill that turned into something called the PRO Act, which is currently in Congress. And there's a giant effort in this country to discourage people from freelancing. They want more employees. That's the relationship that a lot of people are being pushed into. And I think it's kind of tragic because it kills their entrepreneurial spirit.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So to answer your question, I got a call the other day from... And this happens all of the time because early on in MicroWorks, there was nobody but me to tell anecdotal stories of dirty jobbers and things that I had seen. What's happening now, and the reason the foundation is so robust, is that for the first time, I'm able to go back five or six years ago to check in with somebody who we helped.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
and ask questions like, so how's it going? And what I do is I bring a small crew with me, and I've been recording the answers to that question. And oh my God, the stories are amazing. But Dirty Jobs is the, I mean, it's the granddaddy of essential working shows shot through with an entrepreneurial spirit. And I could just talk for hours about all of them. Not all of them. That's a bit rich.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
We did 350 different jobs, and all of them are important. Some are critical. Some are small businesses. Others were independent contractors. Others were big companies with an employee focus. It was a mosaic. But I'll tell you what shocks people to this day, and they just straight up don't believe me when I tell them, but I swear it's true.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
If you go back and look at old episodes of that show, I think the exact number was 41. 41 of the people we profiled were multimillionaires. And you would have never known it because they were covered in crap or something worse because they just didn't look like the modern version of what a successful aspirational entrepreneur looks like. But they're there and their stories are amazing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's a privilege to tell them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Way leads on to way. And part of what I think we've lost is patience. We want to see a playbook. We want to understand, if I do this, this, this, and this, am I going to get to where I want to be? And it's reasonable. Well, it's just not accurate. It just doesn't happen that way. And this is my complaint, aside from what I think is a preponderance, a proliferation of cookie-cutter advice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
When I accepted the fact, honestly, that just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it and started to put together a different toolbox in a community college and with a couple of really great mentors and the way I just kind of was able to Forrest Gump my way into the TV business was was a real blessing. And it started with the attitude of touch everything like it's hot.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's just this tendency among successful people to look back and say, let me tell you how I did it. Here's what you do. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. In fact, it's fun to do. But it presupposes the idea that the people who are reading your book and taking your advice are you. And of course, they're not. Like I said, the phone call I got from my mom, I got exactly when I needed it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And the 15 years I spent freelancing, I wouldn't trade for anything. I loved it. But neither would I trade where I am now. And really, I mean, I'll take my own advice, even though I couldn't master any of the trades I was interested in. my pop explained were beyond my grasp. I don't know if I've mastered anything necessarily, but I've become fairly facile at the things I get paid to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So I don't waste anybody's time. I know how to narrate. I can write. I know how to do what I'm good at. And so once you find that out, and maybe you've seen this in your own business, but I've done, I don't know, probably seven shows starting with Dirty Jobs that are all out there. But the truth is, honestly, they're all the same show. I just change the title every few years.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Dirty Jobs, Somebody's Gotta Do It, People You Should Know, Returning the Favor, Six Degrees even, some history shows I've worked on. They're all a version of me tapping the country on the shoulder and saying, what about her? What about him? Get a load of that. Look at what they're doing over there. That's my brand to the extent that that can be a brand. That's my trade.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And that's why I asked you before, how do you really see yourself? And that, at the risk of contradicting myself, that is some advice that I would offer to really to anyone. It's really like take your own inventory and be really honest with yourself and ask yourself, how have you been defining yourself? Because who you are and what you do, it becomes more crystallized when you hang a label on it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
for better or worse. And so for me, it was useful for a while to see myself as a host and to see host in the credits. Okay, that's what Mike does. He's a host, and I'll work for a bunch of people being a host. But the truth is, I would probably still be doing that kind of thing had I not had that moment in the sewer. The Greeks call it a peripeteia.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's a moment in the narrative when the hero of the story or the protagonist realizes that everything he thought he knew about himself was wrong. And it's like, those are the moments that I that I find myself most interested in, in, in people's lives. Not when they realized they were on the right track, but when they knew they were on the wrong one.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And like, if you're, if you're really interested in storytelling and you start to look for parapetias, you'll, you'll find them everywhere. You remember the sixth sense?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's a great example of a modern parapetia. You got Bruce Willis, spoiler alert, but you got Bruce Willis and he's a psychologist and he's helping this little kid who sees dead people. And all through the movie, their relationship develops and Bruce is very fond of this kid, but he's crazy, obviously.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
He's mentally troubled and that's what Bruce Willis believes and that's what informs everything he does. And then in the final act of the movie, he realizes this little kid really can see dead people. And therefore he realizes in that moment, oh shit, that's why he can see me. I'm dead. I've been dead the whole movie.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So like when you realize you've been dead the whole movie, when you realize you're actually not really a host. You're not really the thing you've been seeing when you look in the mirror. And it's true, I think, honestly, of all of us. We are who we see in the mirror, but we can decide to call that reflection whatever we want. And that makes a difference.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Don't swing for the fences. It's not about home runs in this game. It's about singles and doubles and do as much work as you can in as many different categories as you're able. And so I got a liberal arts background. a healthy sense of curiosity. And consequently, I tried a lot of different things. And the ones that stuck, I doubled down on. And before long, I had my toolbox in order.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So if my buddy Jake sees himself as a welder, period, he's never going to go on to run a mechanical contracting company. And if I see myself as a host, period, then, hey, look, Ryan Seacrest had a pretty great life, but that's not the life I want. I don't want to be a host. Not forever. I wanted to change that. I would say to people, like, really think about it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Are you sure you're a lawyer or are you something else? Are you sure you're a brand consultant? Or maybe, maybe that's exactly what you ought to be right now. Maybe that makes sense. Maybe everything's firing on all cylinders. But a year or two, it probably won't be. And you'll probably be looking around going, ah, God, somebody moved my cheese, right? Something changed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I want to mix it up a little bit. Well, what are you going to do? How are you going to mix it up? I would say maybe one of the ways is to think about a different business card, different label.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And yeah, I was singing in the opera. I was doing infomercials. I was guest starring in sitcoms. I was doing pilots for talk shows. And God, I wasn't terribly proud of the work, but I wasn't ashamed of it either. And spent probably 15 years probably doing maybe 200 different jobs in the entertainment business before Dirty Jobs even came along.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The happy answer is we need to carpet bomb the country with myriad examples of guys like Jake and women like Chloe Hudson, another scholarship recipient who's living basically the exact same life. People who are thriving as a direct result of mastering a skill that's in demand.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
To make the skills gap close and to challenge the primacy of a four-year degree, we need to make sure that parents and guidance counselors and everyone in every state has a steady diet of examples of the very thing I'm talking about. And the good news is those examples are out there. My job in the missionary side of things is to do a better job of sharing those stories.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The more cynical part of me says what needs to happen for people ship to truly turn around and for the Blue Forge Alliance to find the 100,000 tradespeople that they need in the next nine years is, unfortunately, things need to get a little worse before they get better. And going splat is never fun, but sometimes that's what needs to happen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
For people to really think twice about the value of the Ivy League, maybe they need to see the Ivy League affirmatively discriminating against free speech. Maybe they need to see the leaders of certain universities be found guilty of plagiarism, which they clearly were. Maybe these bad things need to happen in some ways to create some kind of wake-up call inside that institution.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Maybe in order to understand that the only way to really live in harmony with nature is to control burn, to clear the forest from time to time, to do the thing that's uncomfortable to watch. And to get that through our head, maybe the palisades need to burn. Maybe Santa Monica needs to burn.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I hate to say that, but maybe we don't get enough skilled workers to build those submarines until we get into some kind of hot conflict and we realize, you know something? The aircraft carriers that we used to believe were the pointy part of the spear are now on the bottom of the ocean because they have no defense against hypersonic missiles.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Submarines do, but oh my God, we didn't know that, but now we do. And I hope it's not too late. but I hope we start to think differently about the definition of a good job before those kinds of things go splat. I don't have a crystal ball, but I'm basically a glass half full kind of guy. And I know that from where I'm sitting, I can see the ship starting to turn. I have seen more and more people
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
step back and think a little more critically about the opportunities that exist and the way they might interact with their own sense of dreams and passions and hopes and so forth. But all we can do is what we can do. It's quixotic, but I've been tilting at windmills my whole life and pushing the rock up the hill. No, wait, that's not quixotic. That's Sisyphean.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So there's a weird but bright line on my resume that I would call before Dirty Jobs and after Dirty Jobs because really everything changed in a huge way once that show hit.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Whatever it is, all we can do is what we can do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's no age limit. In fact, I'm more excited when I get applications from people who have hit the reset button at 35 and 40 years old and want to go back and right, just kind of start from scratch. It takes a lot of balls to do that, and I appreciate it, and I admire it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Typically, though, we're talking about men and women who are just coming out of high school or a partway through college and realizing that They want to change the road they're on. If you're that person, what you do is you go to microworks.org and you just click on the apply button and you apply for a work ethic scholarship. No guarantees, but the scholarship game is simple.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There are lots of different scholarships out there, by the way. Some focus on athletic achievement, others on academic, others on art. There's scholarship for everything. Ours are for work ethic and the skilled trades. So if a four-year degree is in your future, I can't help you. But if you're open to any of the other jobs that require a different kind of education, I'm your guy. Check us out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
We're here to help.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, again, I would contradict myself if I actually answered that directly. Because I don't know what leads to profit, especially like tomorrow, if you mean that in the literal 24-hour sense. It took me 42 years to figure out my career. So I don't know about tomorrow. But I will tell you this. There's nothing new to say about failure.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I'm sure everybody who's ever come on your podcast has talked about failure is just learning. Failure is that's where we learn, blah, blah, blah. So I won't say that. But I will make a case for the importance of being uncomfortable. If you're willing to be uncomfortable, that's a step in the right direction. Because discomfort doesn't necessarily mean failure.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It really doesn't mean anything other than, are you willing to be uncomfortable? Actually, it was my old scoutmaster who who told me this, and I hated him for saying it at the time, and I didn't believe him for a long time. But you will hear that character has a lot to do with a willingness to be uncomfortable. But what I'm saying is slightly different.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's great to be willing to do a hard thing or to agree to volunteer for a difficult thing. That's well and good. The next level, though, is to figure out a way to like it. That's what Mr. Huntington said to me. He said, look, man, if you want to go somewhere, it's not enough to simply endure being uncomfortable. You have to find a way to like it and look forward to it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's what Dirty Jobs was for me. It was uncomfortable. I took a pie in the face in every single episode. There were broken bones, and I seared off my eyelashes and my eyelids. I mean, it was painful. It was painful. But the Navy SEALs say the same thing. Embrace the suck. Look forward to it. Take a cold plunge. It's good for you, and it's miserable, but you feel great afterwards.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's so many things you can do, little things, to reintroduce yourself to the kind of discomfort that usually leads to something good.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, a couple of things come to mind, but I'm going to go with the word you used earlier because I love it. And the word is pivot. It has to do with changing your course, but still being persistent. It has to do with... a word you don't hear a lot about anymore, which is initiative. God, talk about what's in short supply.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's what every employer I know is just dying, dying to find, people with initiative. But I'll go back to pivoting. I've always known it was important, but it wasn't until the lockdowns that I saw just how clarifying that was. And I mean, it was pivot or perish. It was adapt or die.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And how many businesses went out of business because they just sat around waiting to be told what to do, where they just got into that, okay, two weeks to flatten the curve. All right, I'll wait another two weeks. I'll wait two more. Meanwhile, life is happening right in front of you. I remember two weeks into that, I called the president of the Discovery Channel.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And I said, Hey, this can't be good for you guys. I mean, your whole pipeline of content relies on people going out into the world and working, and we can't go out into the world now. And she said, uh, look, I know, I know, we're freaking out over here. Any ideas? And I had just read an article on this thing called Zoom. I'd never heard of Zoom.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I thought it was just some adjective or something like Zoom, whatever. But I looked at it and I'm like, wait a minute, people are talking. People are having meetings. This thing is connecting people in a totally new way. I said, what if we call the crab boat captains? from Deadliest Catch, which I've been narrating for 21 years. And I'm like, what if we do a Zoom call and record it?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And what if you put that on at 9 p.m. as a show at a time when we're all literally like in the same boat? What if you go to crab boat captains to talk about what's happening in the lockdowns and get their take on it? So we did it. And we were the first Zoom show to ever air in prime time. That happened about a month into the lockdowns.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And then after that, I was like, look, I don't care what it takes. I'm going to put this show back in production. I got my old crew together and we went out into the world and we started filming a new season of Dirty Jobs. That show went out of production in 2012. We went back into production in 2020. And I'm proud of that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Not because it was particularly great, although frankly, I thought it was pretty good. I was proud because my crew was so anxious to pivot. And the network was willing to pivot. And I was desperate to pivot. And being allowed to pivot when you feel like that's what you got to do, man, that's freedom 101. And being willing to pivot, even into something uncomfortable, that's life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, it helped me for as long as it helped me, and then it didn't. And that's the thing, really. I mean, the thing about advice is that I've lived long enough to know that the best advice I've ever gotten only applied at the time I needed to hear it. And I don't know...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The way I heard it is probably playing right where this podcast is playing, Spotify, Apple, wherever people get podcasts. I talk to people I find interesting every single week. I write a lot of short stories, mysteries that we put on the podcast. That turned into a show, and those have been a lot of fun as well. The shows are all out there. I'm still narrating a bunch of stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Dirty Jobs is still on every day on the Discovery Channel. God bless them. Working on a new show called People You Should Know. That'll be coming to YouTube. There's a website with my name in it called micro.com. And of course, nine or 10 million people somehow or another on Facebook and Instagram still pretend to care what I say. So I'd be honored if you join them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And most importantly, microworks.org. You know, we got a big pile of money there. I'm desperate to give away to people who want to learn to trade. So if that's you, go get some.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
who's listening to this conversation right now necessarily or really what they need to hear all i know for sure is that i i live two very different lives in the course of the career that i've had and both were fun and both were necessary but neither could have happened
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
contemporaneously so the mercenary thing you read about was probably me talking about my foundation today and how i squared this kind of bloody do-gooderism with the business of actually making a buck in an industry that is in fact very mercenary and um In those conversations, I typically say something like, look, I think there's a missionary position and a mercenary position in all things.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And I think both those positions are somewhat underrated. But prior to Dirty Jobs, it was all mercenary. I was a freelancer in every sense of the word. By the way, do you know the etymology of that? Where freelance comes from? No. I didn't either. And when I learned about it, it really resonated with me that the word is actually medieval. It refers to a knight who served no lord or no king.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
His lance, in other words, was for sale. He was a freelance, not an inexpensive one, but he was free to work for anybody he wanted to. That attitude combined with the tools in the box my pop told me to assemble, a willingness to relocate whenever necessary, those things really informed the first 15 years of my career. And I loved that life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I loved looking at every job like it had a beginning and a middle and an end. I enjoyed doing the best work that I could, but I also love knowing that I wasn't going to be tied to any particular project the way success demands. And so I carved out a really fun niche in the entertainment business where I owned virtually nothing. I was working on multiple projects at the same time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I had clothing deals, for instance, with like American Eagle and Nordstrom's and Different shows had different deals. So I didn't really own any clothes except the ones I picked up in whatever town I landed in. I was working for American Airlines at the time doing a traveling show. So I had a free pass to travel anywhere in the world I wanted to. I had deals with hotels.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And so I was like a nomad for 15 years. I flew wherever the work was. I did the best I could on the job. And I mean, not to sound too cynical about it, but honestly, in those days, when I was in my late 20s and 30s, I was affirmatively looking for work and ideas that had been so poorly conceived that no amount of execution could possibly save them. That's the thing nobody talks about in Hollywood.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's so many ideas and so many of them are bad. And if you associate yourself with these ideas that don't turn into hits, but do a good job working on them, you'll get a good reputation and you'll get hired. For virtually, I got hired a lot. I got hired for a lot of things I auditioned for. And I never really got punished for the fact that most of those things didn't actually work long term.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And so by the time I was 35, I realized I'd been taking my retirement in early installments. I'd been traveling a lot, working maybe seven months a year on projects that didn't really matter too much to me. But I didn't care because at that point in my life, it all made perfect sense. I'd made enough money to save and be comfortable, and I had enough time to enjoy myself.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And so for a long time, I thought I'd cracked the code. And I was pretty satisfied with all that until I wasn't.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It was very strange. What happened was I was 42 and I was living that freelance life and everything was great. I had moved up to San Francisco to work temporarily as a host for a show called Evening Magazine, which is one of those local shows that comes on after the news. And I was the host of this show, and it was a pretty good gig.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I would go to wineries up in Napa, and I would go to museum openings, and I would basically host the show every night from these different locations. It could be anywhere. I had settled into the job, and my mom called me. I was sitting in my cubicle at KPIX here in San Francisco, and she called to say, Michael, your grandfather turned 90 years old yesterday, as you know.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And, you know, I was just thinking he won't be alive forever. And wouldn't it be great, she said, if before he died, he could turn on his television and see you doing something that looked like work. And so remember, my pop is the guy who could build a house without a blueprint. He's the guy who can, he was a tradesman's tradesman.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And I laughed a lot when I think about what he must have thought when he saw me singing in the opera or selling things in the middle of the night on the QVC cable shopping channel or doing all of these jobs that I had been doing that I didn't really care about that made absolutely no sense to his brain. So my mom calls and kind of gives me this good-natured challenge, as she always does.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
She still does, in fact. But she was right. I'm like, why does Evening Magazine always have to be hosted from a winery? or a museum or opening night at a theater or something? Why can't it be hosted from a factory floor or a construction site or a sewer? And that was the question I asked my boss back in 2002. I said, I want to host tomorrow night's episode from a sewer. He said, I don't care.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Do whatever you want. Nobody's watching the show anyway. I took my cameraman, I went into the sewers of San Francisco, and what happened down there is a book that I got around to writing a few years ago. And the massive lesson that I learned down there was that I was basically unable to do my job.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
between just an endless river of crap that kept knocking me over and rats the size of a loaf of bread and millions of roaches that completely covered us. I mean, it was so disgusting and so impossible to be a host. I stopped trying. And instead, I just asked the sewer inspector who was down there sort of as my guide if I could if I could help him do whatever it was he was doing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
He was replacing the bricks in the wall. That was basically his job. So my camera guy filmed me working alongside this sewer inspector, and our conversation was captured on the video. And I thought when I looked at this footage of me working with Gene Cruz, the sewer inspector back then, it was like, why does the authority figure have to be the host? Why can't they just be a regular person?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And if that happens, then what am I if I'm not the host? And the answer was, well, maybe you're an apprentice or a guest or an avatar or a cipher of some kind. It might not seem like a big distinction today, but back then it was huge.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And this idea, like after 15 years of impersonating a host, if all of a sudden I could work instead as a guest and find a dynamic where I could spend time with regular people doing real work, would anybody watch that? That was the question. Well, holy crap, man. I put that That segment went on the air on Evening Magazine, and the response was telling.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It wasn't that people said, God, that was enjoyable. People were horrified. They were trying to eat dinner, and I'm crawling around in a river of crap. It was just totally inappropriate for that show. In fact, I was fired ultimately for putting that on the air.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
But the feedback that I'll never forget came from hundreds of viewers who just said, hey, Mike, if you think that was dirty, wait till you see what my dad does. Why don't you come and drive the food truck at the zoo or replace a lift pump in a pumping chamber at a wastewater treatment plant and so forth? And I just thought I'd never seen that kind of reaction to anything I'd ever done on TV.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
People just don't believe you can make six figures working with your hands. There are 8.7 million open jobs. Most of them don't require a four-year degree. What they require is training and the mastery of a skill that's in demand.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It wasn't thumbs up or thumbs down. That didn't matter. It was like, hey, come and let me show you what I do. And that was the moment for me. I thought, man, there's something here. And even though CBS let me go. They let me take the tape with me, and I got their permission to try and sell a show. I called it Somebody's Gotta Do It back then, but everybody said no.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I took it to every network, every place you can take a show to sell it. The only people who didn't say no were Discovery, and they didn't say yes. They just said, look, we'll let you do a pilot, like three episodes. They hired me to be sort of the Discovery guy. They wanted me to go on expeditions around the world and
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
see the titanic and climb kilimanjaro with experts and i was totally into that and they let me narrate pretty much everything they did for about 15 years there but this thing we call dirty jobs was not supposed to be a hit it wasn't supposed to be a series it certainly wasn't supposed to be a franchise and it sure as hell wasn't supposed to launch 38 different shows it did all those things happened
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And as they started to happen, I realized for the first time in my life that I was actually working on something that I did care about. That's when I went to work in earnest, truly, for the first time in my life, when that thing went on discovery and hit, and we were overwhelmed again with the same response, only this time it was thousands of letters.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's when everything changed, because my mom called and told me to do something that looked like work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So much of what eventually came out of Dirty Jobs was an alternate compendium for living. And it was somewhat contrarian. I had seen, and I'm sure you and all your viewers have too, these successories, right? They hang on walls everywhere. They say things like, stay the course. And it'll be a picture of some guys maybe rowing in a shell or kayaking.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And at some point during Dirty Jobs, when it really blew up, I started to realize that the people I was working with almost always had a different take on conventional wisdom. So stay the course is a great example. It makes great sense to tell somebody to stay the course if they're going in the right direction. If they're not, it's probably the worst thing in the world you can tell them to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Dirty Jobs became a hit in 2006. By 2008, it was the number one show on cable. There were 12 million people looking for jobs. But the crazy thing was on Dirty Jobs, everywhere we went, we saw help wanted signs. Those jobs are real. They're not vocational consolation prizes for people who can't do the other thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Never quit. Never give up. So to answer your question, if the subject is passion and the topic is your dream, then Well, I'd wager most people listening right now have been told from an early age, just as I was growing up, to follow your dream, and to never give up on your passion, and to be resilient, and to be stubborn in this regard.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And boy, sometimes that is great advice, but my God, the evidence to the contrary is voluminous. We've all seen American Idol, and we've all heard, you know, Beyonce, Lesnar, Lady Gaga and Cher and all the rock stars of our day say, look, never give up on that dream. I've heard them say it when they're standing there clutching their Grammys. And yet, what's the real lesson from American Idol?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The real lesson isn't the winner. It's the thousands of people who audition. And it's the many, many, many hundreds of those people many of whom are in their early 20s, who realize that, incredibly, they're not going to be the American Idol. In fact, many of them realize, to their wonder and horror, that they can't sing at all. And they realize it on national television.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
As they're standing there, watching their dreams crumble around them, watching their passion drain out of them when they realize, like I said earlier, just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. And conversely, just because you don't feel passionate about a thing doesn't mean you can't change the way you feel about something.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I get a lot of pushback in this conversation, Hala, because it sounds like what I'm saying is screw your dreams. I don't care about your dreams. Don't follow your dreams. And then it's true. I am saying all those things. And I say them every day, many times to people who apply to our scholarship program. But I'm not saying your dreams aren't important.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
What I'm saying is your dreams are way too important. Your passion is way too important to follow. You don't follow a thing that's important. If you identify a thing that's important, you take it with you. You put it in your pocket.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
and you say, okay, I'm a passionate person, and I'm passionate about learning how to build homes, but if I can't crack that nut, am I really going to spend 50 years beating my head against the wall, or am I going to change my course?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So look, it's a hard thing to do on your own, and that's why friends are important, and that's why books are important, and that's why the unexamined life is a tragedy. You You have to kick your own tires. And sometimes you just have to pick up the phone in your cubicle so your mom can tell you, no, not that way, this way. Try this instead.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Wouldn't it be fun if your pop could see you doing something that looked like work? She didn't call and say, hey, you know what you should think about doing is maybe changing the topography of the Discovery Channel by taking reality TV at its literal definition and reimagining yourself as a guest instead of a host.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And she said that I would have hung up on her and told her to stop drinking so early in the day. But all she said was, do something that looks like work. And it was just the right thing for her to say and just the right time for me to hear it. At 42, had this happened to me 10 years earlier, I would not have been able to handle the success of a show like Dirty Jobs.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I just wasn't mentally prepared for it. So you never know.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. Follow your dreams. Follow your passion. The trap with that is...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I'm just sitting here nodding in violent agreement. It's back to cookie cutter advice, unfortunately. We all need to hear exactly what you just said at some point in our life, but we don't all need to hear that at the same time because we're on a trip. This is a journey. I just had this conversation with my mom again, not to drag her back into it, but it's really apropos.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
This woman wrote every day for 60 years. I'm not even kidding. Her dream was to become a published writer. And she gave up on that dream after 40 years of beating her head against the wall. But she never stopped writing. She kept doing it because she knew the work. She found a passion in the work. Her dream of being a bestselling author was out the window until she turned 80.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Then she sold a manuscript and it went to number four on the New York Times bestseller list.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And then two years later, she freaking did it again. I mean, if you want the persistence rap, this is the story. She's 80 and she writes a book called About My Mother. She's 82 and she writes About Your Father. That thing also top 10. Then she writes Vacuuming in the Nude and Other Ways to Get Attention, which goes to number one.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And then she just wrote her fourth, Oh No, Not the Home, True Stories About Life in this Retirement Community. I don't mean to turn this into a commercial for her books. What I mean to say is, what are we to learn from a woman who wrote every day for 60 years before she got what she wanted? It actually contradicts and makes my point at the same time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Based on that, I said, Mom, so what do you tell a writer who comes to you and says, do you have any advice? Because it's a very heavy thing. If you encourage somebody to do what you did, the odds are very good they're never going to get published. And they're going to spend 60 years making little rocks out of big rocks.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
But if you discourage them, then you're this sweet little America's grandmother who's going around killing people's dreams. How do you square that? And she said, oh, Michael, you know what I do? I tell them that I encourage them the way somebody in the crowd of a marathon does. might encourage a runner. I just stand there and I applaud as they go by.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And maybe I offer them a sip of cool water to make their journey a little more pleasant in that moment. But that's all I can do as somebody who finally got to do what she wanted to do at 87. All I can do is encourage you at whatever point you are in your race that you better be enjoying the race because there is no guarantee that you're going to hit the finish line.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, in a lot of ways, I think one way is exactly what we've been talking about. We've told kids that job satisfaction is a result of their ability to make their dreams a reality. It kind of starts with that. And so you put this incredible burden on a kid to say, look, if you want to be happy with your life, you need to identify right now the thing that's going to make you happy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And then we'll embark upon a plan to borrow vast sums of money in order to get you the proper credentials that will permit you to pursue this goal. That's baked in. It's kind of like, not to digress, but it's like a soulmate. If you're out there looking for your soulmate, that's like looking for your dream job. It's really hard to find.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Better to find a job and then craft it into the thing you want. Better to find a good and decent person you can trust and then find a way to love him or her. I know I'm saying the same thing in a slightly different way, but we've got it so inculcated in the minds of this generation that they could be the next American Idol. All you have to do is want it bad enough.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So yeah, to that I do say bullshit. I'm sorry, but wanting a thing is not enough. So the first order of business is to get a more realistic set of expectations. Then you have to take an honest look at the opportunities that exist. Again, I'm not saying ignore your dreams.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I'm just saying take a breath and just push them aside for a minute and look around to where the opportunities really and truly are. Right now, there are 8.7 million open jobs. Most of them don't require a four-year degree. What they require is training and the mastery of a skill that's in demand. That's not my opinion. That's just the way it is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Thank you. Do I still qualify as young? I mean, profiting, I understand, but I'm not sure the young thing still applies, but I'll take it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Other facts worth thinking about are the $1.7 trillion in student loans that are currently on the books. That's a fact. It's a fact that most of the people who hold that debt don't even have a degree. Debt includes people who got halfway through a college experience and threw their hands up and said no. Well, yeah, you can walk away from the university, but you can't walk away from that debt.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's a fact that many people who did graduate in their chosen field are either not working at all Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Yeah, guilty as charged. I grew up on a little farm outside of Baltimore. My granddad lived next to us and he was a magician, not a literal magician, but he was a tradesman. He only went to the seventh grade, but he could build or fix or fabricate anything from scratch. He just had that chip. So as a boy, I grew up with a front row seat to all kinds of different work,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
all kinds of trade work, and just an incredible work ethic, both in my dad, my granddad, and my mother, by the way, who just finished her fourth book at 87. The woman has written every day for 67 years now. But the point is, I got really good cards as a kid. We didn't have a lot of money or anything like that, but I
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
We need to make a more persuasive case for those eight and a half million jobs that currently exist, which is all a long way of saying, I don't know how many people who are listening to this thing should be working in the trades, but I can tell you that the opportunities are absolutely real. And there's never been a better time to at least kick the tires in that world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
and see if it makes sense to your brain. Because we've helped 2,200 people get the training they need, and their stories, their stories are way more persuasive than my own, and I hear them every day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I just had a great example of what worked looked like and a really great exposure to the trades. And I was pretty sure I was going to follow in my pop's footsteps. That's what I wanted to do. But the handy gene, tragically, is recessive. The things that came easily to him didn't come easily to me. It was my pop who suggested that I could be a tradesman.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
My God, there's so many. Please hook me up with Ms. Sanchez.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Yeah, I'd love to meet her. But I'd love to know too, before I answer you, how, I mean, you just described what you do in a pretty broad-based way, but like if you really distill it, what do you do? Like if you had a business card, what would it say? What's it come down to for you vocationally?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Okay. So I would go back to, I think, one of the very first things that came out when we started talking, which was my pop, if he were still around, would say, oh, this woman, this hollow woman, yeah, she's a tradeswoman, clearly. And if you pressed him, he would say, well, think about how she approaches work. She has many different clients.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
She advises them in different ways, depending on their needs. She's a jobber, probably has short-term contracts with some, longer-term contracts with others. She's probably paid on her results at some point. At some point, you're going to say, well, if I grow your business to this degree, how can I participate? Or are you purely time and materials? I don't know.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
No wrong answer either way, but those are all questions that tradespeople with an entrepreneurial bent will ask themselves. I look at myself, I think, much the same way you do in the sense that I do a lot of different things, but I'm really not trying to define the work by any one thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
One of the things really missing from the conversation today, whether you wanna be an influencer or whether you wanna be a plumber, the question is, are you an entrepreneur? Do you think like a freelancer? Do you even like the whole notion of a gig economy? Because the gig economy, that's under siege today. Freelancing is under siege. Here in California, It's a real thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's a thing called AB-15. It's an assembly bill that turned into something called the PRO Act, which is currently in Congress. And there's a giant effort in this country to discourage people from freelancing. They want more employees. That's the relationship that a lot of people are being pushed into. And I think it's kind of tragic because it kills their entrepreneurial spirit.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
If I really wanted to, I just needed to get a different toolbox. That's when I realized that being a tradesman is really a state of mind more than a mastery of a specific set of skills. It's both, obviously, but I think today a lot of people really think about being in the trades in a very narrow way. It's very much a state of mind.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So to answer your question, I got a call the other day from... And this happens all of the time because early on in MicroWorks, there was nobody but me to tell anecdotal stories of dirty jobbers and things that I had seen. What's happening now, and the reason the foundation is so robust, is that for the first time, I'm able to go back five or six years ago to check in with somebody who we helped.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
and ask questions like, so how's it going? And what I do is I bring a small crew with me, and I've been recording the answers to that question. And oh my God, the stories are amazing. But Dirty Jobs is the, I mean, it's the granddaddy of essential working shows shot through with an entrepreneurial spirit. And I could just talk for hours about all of them. Not all of them. That's a bit rich.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
We did 350 different jobs, and all of them are important. Some are critical. Some are small businesses. Others were independent contractors. Others were big companies with an employee focus. It was a mosaic. But I'll tell you what shocks people to this day, and they just straight up don't believe me when I tell them, but I swear it's true.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
If you go back and look at old episodes of that show, I think the exact number was 41. 41 of the people we profiled were multimillionaires. And you would have never known it because they were covered in crap or something worse because they just didn't look like the modern version of what a successful aspirational entrepreneur looks like. But they're there and their stories are amazing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's a privilege to tell them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Way leads on to way. And part of what I think we've lost is patience. We want to see a playbook. We want to understand, if I do this, this, this, and this, am I going to get to where I want to be? And it's reasonable. Well, it's just not accurate. It just doesn't happen that way. And this is my complaint, aside from what I think is a preponderance, a proliferation of cookie cutter advice.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's just this tendency among successful people to look back and say, let me tell you how I did it. Here's what you do. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. In fact, it's fun to do. But it presupposes the idea that the people who are reading your book and taking your advice are you. And of course, they're not. Like I said, the phone call I got from my mom, I got exactly when I needed it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
When I accepted the fact, honestly, that just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it and started to put together a different toolbox in a community college and with a couple of really great mentors and the way I just kind of was able to Forrest Gump my way into the TV business was was a real blessing. And it started with the attitude of touch everything like it's hot.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And the 15 years I spent freelancing, I wouldn't trade for anything. I loved it. But neither would I trade where I am now. And really, I mean, I'll take my own advice, even though I couldn't master any of the trades I was interested in. my pop explained were beyond my grasp. I don't know if I've mastered anything necessarily, but I've become fairly facile at the things I get paid to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So I don't waste anybody's time. I know how to narrate. I can write. I know how to do what I'm good at. And so once you find that out, and maybe you've seen this in your own business, but I've done I don't know, probably seven shows starting with Dirty Jobs that are all out there. But the truth is, honestly, they're all the same show. I just change the title every few years.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Dirty Jobs, Somebody's Gotta Do It, People You Should Know, Returning the Favor, Six Degrees even, some history shows I've worked on. They're all a version of me tapping the country on the shoulder and saying, what about her? What about him? Get a load of that. Look at what they're doing over there. That's my brand to the extent that that can be a brand. That's my trade.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And that's why I asked you before, how do you really see yourself? And that, at the risk of contradicting myself, that is some advice that I would offer to really to anyone. It's really like take your own inventory and be really honest with yourself and ask yourself, how have you been defining yourself? Because who you are and what you do, it becomes more crystallized when you hang a label on it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
for better or worse. And so for me, it was useful for a while to see myself as a host and to see host in the credits. Okay, that's what Mike does. He's a host, and I'll work for a bunch of people being a host. But the truth is, I would probably still be doing that kind of thing had I not had that moment in the sewer. The Greeks call it a peripeteia.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's a moment in the narrative when the hero of the story or the protagonist realizes that everything he thought he knew about himself was wrong. And it's like, those are the moments that I that I find myself most interested in, in, in people's lives. Not when they realized they were on the right track, but when they knew they were on the wrong one.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And like, if you're, if you're really interested in storytelling and you start to look for parapetias, you'll, you'll find them everywhere. You remember the sixth sense?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's a great example of a modern parapetia. You got Bruce Willis, spoiler alert, but you got Bruce Willis and he's a psychologist and he's helping this little kid who sees dead people. And all through the movie, their relationship develops and Bruce is very fond of this kid, but he's crazy, obviously.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
He's mentally troubled and that's what Bruce Willis believes and that's what informs everything he does. And then in the final act of the movie, he realizes this little kid really can see dead people. And therefore he realizes in that moment, oh shit, that's why he can see me. I'm dead. I've been dead the whole movie.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So like when you realize you've been dead the whole movie, when you realize you're actually not really a host. You're not really the thing you've been seeing when you look in the mirror. And it's true, I think, honestly, of all of us. We are who we see in the mirror, but we can decide to call that reflection whatever we want. And that makes a difference.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So if my buddy Jake sees himself as a welder, period, he's never going to go on to run a mechanical contracting company. And if I see myself as a host, period, then, hey, look, Ryan Seacrest had a pretty great life, but that's not the life I want. I don't want to be a host. Not forever. I wanted to change that. I would say to people, like, really think about it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Don't swing for the fences. It's not about home runs in this game. It's about singles and doubles and do as much work as you can in as many different categories as you're able. And so I got a liberal arts background. a healthy sense of curiosity. And consequently, I tried a lot of different things. And the ones that stuck, I doubled down on. And before long, I had my toolbox in order.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Are you sure you're a lawyer or are you something else? Are you sure you're a brand consultant? Or maybe, maybe that's exactly what you ought to be right now. Maybe that makes sense. Maybe everything's firing on all cylinders. But a year or two, it probably won't be. And you'll probably be looking around going, ah, God, somebody moved my cheese, right? Something changed.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I want to mix it up a little bit. Well, what are you going to do? How are you going to mix it up? I would say maybe one of the ways is to think about a different business card, different label.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And yeah, I was singing in the opera. I was doing infomercials. I was guest starring in sitcoms. I was doing pilots for talk shows. And God, I wasn't terribly proud of the work, but I wasn't ashamed of it either. And spent probably 15 years probably doing maybe 200 different jobs in the entertainment business before Dirty Jobs even came along.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The happy answer is we need to carpet bomb the country with myriad examples of guys like Jake and women like Chloe Hudson, another scholarship recipient who's living basically the exact same life. People who are thriving as a direct result of mastering a skill that's in demand.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
To make the skills gap close and to challenge the primacy of a four-year degree, we need to make sure that parents and guidance counselors and everyone in every state has a steady diet of examples of the very thing I'm talking about. And the good news is those examples are out there. My job in the missionary side of things is to do a better job of sharing those stories.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The more cynical part of me says what needs to happen for people the ship to truly turn around and for the blue forge alliance to find the hundred thousand trades people that they need in the next nine years is unfortunately things need to get a little worse before they get better and um going splat is never fun but sometimes that's what needs to happen
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
For people to really think twice about the value of the Ivy League, maybe they need to see the Ivy League affirmatively discriminating against free speech. Maybe they need to see the leaders of certain universities be found guilty of plagiarism, which they clearly were. Maybe these bad things need to happen in some ways to create some kind of wake-up call inside that institution.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Maybe in order to understand that the only way to really live in harmony with nature is to control burn, to clear the forest from time to time, to do the thing that's uncomfortable to watch. And to get that through our head, maybe the palisades need to burn. Maybe Santa Monica needs to burn.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I hate to say that, but maybe we don't get enough skilled workers to build those submarines until we get into some kind of hot conflict and we realize, you know something? The aircraft carriers that we used to believe were the pointy part of the spear are now on the bottom of the ocean because they have no defense against hypersonic missiles.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Submarines do, but oh my God, we didn't know that, but now we do. And I hope it's not too late. But I hope we start to think differently about the definition of a good job before those kinds of things go splat. I don't have a crystal ball, but I'm basically a glass half full kind of guy. And I know that from where I'm sitting, I can see the ship starting to turn. I have seen more and more people
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
step back and think a little more critically about the opportunities that exist and the way they might interact with their own sense of dreams and passions and hopes and so forth. But all we can do is what we can do. It's quixotic, but I've been tilting at windmills my whole life and pushing the rock up the hill. No, wait, that's not quixotic. That's Sisyphean.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
So there's a weird but bright line on my resume that I would call before Dirty Jobs and after Dirty Jobs because really everything changed in a huge way once that show hit.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Whatever it is, all we can do is what we can do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's no age limit. In fact, I'm more excited when I get applications from people who have hit the reset button at 35 and 40 years old and want to go back and just kind of start from scratch. It takes a lot of balls to do that, and I appreciate it and I admire it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Typically, though, we're talking about men and women who are just coming out of high school or a partway through college and realizing that They want to change the road they're on. If you're that person, what you do is you go to microworks.org and you just click on the apply button and you apply for a work ethic scholarship. No guarantees, but the scholarship game is simple.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There are lots of different scholarships out there, by the way. Some focus on athletic achievement, others on academic, others on art. There's scholarship for everything. Ours are for work ethic and the skilled trades. So if a four-year degree is in your future, I can't help you. But if you're open to any of the other jobs that require a different kind of education, I'm your guy. Check us out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
We're here to help.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, again, I would contradict myself if I actually answered that directly. Because I don't know what leads to profit, especially like tomorrow, if you mean that in the literal 24-hour sense. It took me 42 years to figure out my career. So I don't know about tomorrow. But I will tell you this. There's nothing new to say about failure.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I'm sure everybody who's ever come on your podcast has talked about failure is just learning. Failure is that's where we learn, blah, blah, blah. So I won't say that. But I will make a case for the importance of being uncomfortable. If you're willing to be uncomfortable, that's a step in the right direction. Because discomfort doesn't necessarily mean failure.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It really doesn't mean anything other than, are you willing to be uncomfortable? Actually, it was my old scoutmaster who who told me this, and I hated him for saying it at the time, and I didn't believe him for a long time. But you will hear that character has a lot to do with a willingness to be uncomfortable. But what I'm saying is slightly different.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It's great to be willing to do a hard thing or to agree to volunteer for a difficult thing. That's well and good. The next level, though, is to figure out a way to like it. That's what Mr. Huntington said to me. He said, look, man, if you want to go somewhere, it's not enough to simply endure being uncomfortable. You have to find a way to like it and look forward to it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's what Dirty Jobs was for me. It was uncomfortable. I took a pie in the face in every single episode. There were broken bones, and I seared off my eyelashes and my eyelids. I mean, it was painful. It was painful. But the Navy SEALs say the same thing. Embrace the suck. Look forward to it. Take a cold plunge. It's good for you and it's miserable, but you feel great afterwards.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's so many things you can do, little things to reintroduce yourself to the kind of discomfort that usually leads to something good.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, a couple of things come to mind, but I'm going to go with the word you used earlier because I love it. And the word is pivot. It has to do with changing your course, but still being persistent. It has to do with... a word you don't hear a lot about anymore, which is initiative. God, talk about what's in short supply.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
That's what every employer I know is just dying, dying to find, people with initiative. But I'll go back to pivoting. I've always known it was important, but it wasn't until the lockdowns that I saw just how clarifying that was. And I mean, it was pivot or perish. It was adapt or die.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And how many businesses went out of business because they just sat around waiting to be told what to do, where they just got into that, okay, two weeks to flatten the curve. All right, I'll wait another two weeks. I'll wait two more. Meanwhile, life is happening right in front of you. I remember two weeks into that, I called the president of the Discovery Channel.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And I said, Hey, this can't be good for you guys. I mean, your whole pipeline of content relies on people going out into the world and working, and we can't go out into the world now. And she said, uh, look, I know, I know, we're freaking out over here. Any ideas? And I had just read an article on this thing called Zoom. I'd never heard of Zoom.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I thought it was just some adjective or something like Zoom, whatever. But I looked at it and I'm like, wait a minute, people are talking. People are having meetings. This thing is connecting people in a totally new way. I said, what if we call the crab boat captains from Deadliest Catch, which I've been narrating for 21 years. And I'm like, what if we do a Zoom? call and record it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And what if you put that on at 9pm as a show at a time when we're all literally like in the same boat? What if you go to crab boat captains to talk about what's happening in the lockdowns and get their take on it? So we did it. And we were the first Zoom show to ever air in prime time. That happened about a month into the lockdowns.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And then after that, I was like, look, I don't care what it takes. I'm going to put this show back in production. I got my old crew together and we went out into the world and we started filming a new season of Dirty Jobs. That show went out of production in 2012. We went back into production in 2020. And I'm proud of that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Not because it was particularly great, although frankly, I thought it was pretty good. I was proud because my crew was so anxious to pivot and the network was willing to pivot. And I was desperate to pivot. And being allowed to pivot when you feel like that's what you got to do, man, that's freedom 101. And being willing to pivot, even into something uncomfortable, that's life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Well, it helped me for as long as it helped me, and then it didn't. And that's the thing, really. I mean, the thing about advice is that I've lived long enough to know that the best advice I've ever gotten only applied at the time I needed to hear it. And I don't know...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
The way I heard it is probably playing right where this podcast is playing, Spotify, Apple, wherever people get podcasts. I talk to people I find interesting every single week. I write a lot of short stories, mysteries that we put on the podcast. That turned into a show, and those have been a lot of fun as well. The shows are all out there. I'm still narrating a bunch of stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Dirty Jobs is still on every day on the Discovery Channel. God bless them. Working on a new show called People You Should Know. That'll be coming to YouTube. There's a website with my name in it called micro.com. And of course, nine or 10 million people somehow or another on Facebook and Instagram still pretend to care what I say. So I'd be honored if you join them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And most importantly, microworks.org. You know, we got a big pile of money there. I'm desperate to give away to people who want to learn to trade. So if that's you, go get some.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
who's listening to this conversation right now necessarily or really what they need to hear all i know for sure is that i i live two very different lives in the course of the career that i've had and both were fun and both were necessary but neither could have happened
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
contemporaneously so the mercenary thing you read about was probably me talking about my foundation today and how i squared this kind of bloody do-gooderism with the business of actually making a buck in an industry that is in fact very mercenary and um In those conversations, I typically say something like, look, I think there's a missionary position and a mercenary position in all things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And I think both those positions are somewhat underrated. But prior to Dirty Jobs, it was all mercenary. I was a freelancer in every sense of the word. By the way, do you know the etymology of that? Where freelance comes from? No. I didn't either. And when I learned about it, it really resonated with me that the word is actually medieval. It refers to a knight who served no lord or no king.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
His lance, in other words, was for sale. He was a freelance, not an inexpensive one, but he was free to work for anybody he wanted to. That attitude combined with the tools in the box my pop told me to assemble, a willingness to relocate whenever necessary, those things really informed the first 15 years of my career. And I loved that life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I loved looking at every job like it had a beginning and a middle and an end. I enjoyed doing the best work that I could, but I also love knowing that I wasn't going to be tied to any particular project the way success demands. And so I carved out a really fun niche in the entertainment business where I owned virtually nothing. I was working on multiple projects at the same time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I had clothing deals, for instance, with like American Eagle and Nordstrom's and Different shows had different deals. So I didn't really own any clothes except the ones I picked up in whatever town I landed in. I was working for American Airlines at the time doing a traveling show. So I had a free pass to travel anywhere in the world I wanted to. I had deals with hotels.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And so I was like a nomad for 15 years. I flew wherever the work was. I did the best I could on the job. And I mean, not to sound too cynical about it, but honestly, in those days, when I was in my late 20s and 30s, I was affirmatively looking for work and ideas that had been so poorly conceived that no amount of execution could possibly save them. That's the thing nobody talks about in Hollywood.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
There's so many ideas and so many of them are bad. And if you associate yourself with these ideas that don't turn into hits, but do a good job working on them, you'll get a good reputation and you'll get hired. For virtually, I got hired a lot. I got hired for a lot of things I auditioned for. And I never really got punished for the fact that most of those things didn't actually work long term.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And so by the time I was 35, I realized I'd been taking my retirement in early installments. I'd been traveling a lot, working maybe seven months a year on projects that didn't really matter too much to me. But I didn't care because at that point in my life, it all made perfect sense. I'd made enough money to save and be comfortable, and I had enough time to enjoy myself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And so for a long time, I thought I'd cracked the code. And I was pretty satisfied with all that until I wasn't.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It was very strange. What happened was I was 42 and I was living that freelance life and everything was great. I had moved up to San Francisco to work temporarily as a host for a show called Evening Magazine, which is one of those local shows that comes on after the news. And I was the host of this show, and it was a pretty good gig.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
I would go to wineries up in Napa, and I would go to museum openings, and I would basically host the show every night from these different locations. It could be anywhere. I had settled into the job, and my mom called me. I was sitting in my cubicle at KPIX here in San Francisco, and she called to say, Michael, your grandfather turned 90 years old yesterday, as you know.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And, you know, I was just thinking he won't be alive forever. And wouldn't it be great, she said, if before he died, he could turn on his television and see you doing something that looked like work. And so remember, my pop is the guy who could build a house without a blueprint. He's the guy who can, he was a tradesman's tradesman.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And I laughed a lot when I think about what he must have thought when he saw me singing in the opera or selling things in the middle of the night on the QVC cable shopping channel or doing all of these jobs that I had been doing that I didn't really care about that made absolutely no sense to his brain. So my mom calls and kind of gives me this good-natured challenge, as she always does.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
She still does, in fact. But she was right. I'm like, why does Evening Magazine always have to be hosted from a winery? or a museum or opening night at a theater or something? Why can't it be hosted from a factory floor or a construction site or a sewer? And that was the question I asked my boss back in 2002. I said, I want to host tomorrow night's episode from a sewer. He said, I don't care.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
Do whatever you want. Nobody's watching the show anyway. I took my cameraman, I went into the sewers of San Francisco, and what happened down there is a book that I got around to writing a few years ago. And the massive lesson that I learned down there was that I was basically unable to do my job.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
between just an endless river of crap that kept knocking me over and rats the size of a loaf of bread and millions of roaches that completely covered us. I mean, it was so disgusting and so impossible to be a host. I stopped trying. And instead, I just asked the sewer inspector who was down there sort of as my guide if I could if I could help him do whatever it was he was doing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
He was replacing the bricks in the wall. That was basically his job. So my camera guy filmed me working alongside this sewer inspector, and our conversation was captured on the video. And I thought when I looked at this footage of me working with Gene Cruz, the sewer inspector back then, it was like, why does the authority figure have to be the host? Why can't they just be a regular person?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And if that happens, then what am I if I'm not the host? And the answer was, well, maybe you're an apprentice or a guest or an avatar or a cipher of some kind. It might not seem like a big distinction today, but back then it was huge.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
And this idea, like after 15 years of impersonating a host, if all of a sudden I could work instead as a guest and find a dynamic where I could spend time with regular people doing real work, would anybody watch that? That was the question. Well, holy crap, man. I put that That segment went on the air on Evening Magazine, and the response was telling.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
It wasn't that people said, God, that was enjoyable. People were horrified. They were trying to eat dinner, and I'm crawling around in a river of crap. It was just totally inappropriate for that show. In fact, I was fired ultimately for putting that on the air.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mike Rowe: The Hidden Path to Wealth, Career Growth, and Business Success | Career | E343
But the feedback that I'll never forget came from hundreds of viewers who just said, hey, Mike, if you think that was dirty, wait till you see what my dad does. Why don't you come and drive the food truck at the zoo or replace a lift pump in a pumping chamber at a wastewater treatment plant and so forth? And I just thought I'd never seen that kind of reaction to anything I'd ever done on TV.