Rory Vaden
Appearances
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yeah. Yeah, there is. So, I mean, this is what you just described was my life. I mean, this was pretty much like all the things we study. I was not... Trying so much to solve the problem for the world, I was trying to solve a problem in my own life. Just busy, buried behind, overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated. No matter how fast you work, you just never feel caught up.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yeah, you just can't, there's this frustration of like, am I ever gonna have peace? Like, am I ever gonna have margin? Am I ever gonna have space? And just feeling like things are under control. And so we started looking at this and we started profiling people that at the time we called ultra performers, which were the top one percenters in different industries.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of used that term loosely, but if it's church leaders, it's large church leaders. If it's athletes, it's professional athletes. If it's financial advisors, they're probably top earners. Sure, sure. So it's just from different walks of life. And what we found is there is a new type of thinker that has emerged that we call them a multiplier. Because most people...
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
are trying to manage time, right? Like you even hear this, you go, I need, you know, I need to be better at managing my time. Time management. But you know, what's funny about that is there is no such thing as time management. There is only self-management. You cannot manage time. Time ticks on second by second. I can't fast forward time. I can't stop it. I can't pause it.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
And so what this conversation really about is managing ourselves, managing our decisions, managing our use of time. But even that is kind of a first step
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
shift that needs to happen is it's not like i'm this helpless victim that is subject to the world around me who is unfairly blasting me with all this stuff no you're in charge like you everything that exists in your life you either said you said yes to it in some way so it is your responsibility and and you created the problem but that also means that you are in charge of fixing it that you have the power to change it but
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
what we started to realize is that most of what people have learned and think about time management, I went so far as the opening line in my TED talk is I said, everything you know about time management is wrong. It's wrong because we have been taught to think about time in a very, you know, linear way. And the world today is much more like multidimensional.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yeah, so a little bit about that. We love to take people on a quick history of time management theory. So era one time management thinking was very one-dimensional. We refer to era one thinking as efficiency. So that was the strategy was I got 10 things on my to-do list, how do I crank them out faster?
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
time management and productivity as a body of work really develops, like it comes on in the scene in like 1950s, 60s. So, you know, it's the manufacturing era where it's conveyor belts and engineering and just doing things faster. That also reflected in our mindset was how can I be more efficient?
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
now efficiency is good all things being equal doing things faster is great the problem is that there is a point of diminishing returns to using efficiency as your only strategy for productivity right um which is that no matter how fast we move the the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time available right So it's more like quicksand.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
It's just kind of like the faster you go or the more that shows up. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be fast. It's just not going to get you what you're looking for. Then in the late 80s, Dr. Stephen Covey wrote a book that changed the world, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm sure you're familiar with it and sold tens of millions of copies.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Dr. Covey pretty much single-handedly introduced a new era of time management thought that the world refers to as prioritizing, but we would classify prioritizing as era two thinking, which is still to this day the predominant strategy that most people use in terms of how they think about time. Here's what prioritizing is. It's to focus first on what matters most. Super powerful, super relevant.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Dr. Covey had this thing called the time management matrix that he explained of urgency and importance. And basically, he taught us to score our activities so that we could reorder them and say, it's not just about getting these done faster. It's saying, hey, item number seven needs to be pushed to item number one. which is valuable. And so that's super valuable.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Prioritizing is as important today as ever before. But what I noticed in my own life, because I was a student of Dr. Covey and several books on time, I mean, there's no shortage of books on time management. There's no shortage of apps. There's all these tips and tricks and tools and technology that exist to help us with this problem of feeling so busy. And yet,
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
the majority of us are still overwhelmed.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
So it's like there's something missing. And what we started to notice in these ultra performers that we now refer to as the multipliers is that they are doing a different type of thinking. It's like evolution, like their thinking has evolved. For almost all of them, it was subconscious. And they weren't even aware of it, not even aware of it. It wasn't something that someone taught them to do.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
They did it instinctively, you know, like instinctually. They they they they figured out and and most of them couldn't explain it. They couldn't explain it to me and they couldn't explain it to most people. They said, why are you how are you so productive? Right. Like how does it? How do you become a billionaire in 10 years when most people work for 40 years and they can barely retire?
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
It's a different type of thinking. One of the things, this is true in many areas of our life, the next level of results always requires the next level of thinking. So here's what it is. So era three time management is multiplying. It's not efficiency, it's not prioritizing, it's multiplying. And it's all based on what we call the significance calculation.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
So it's really it's not it's adding on like Dr. Covey's work as an example. So he presents this two dimensional figure like a square where the Y axis is importance and the X axis is urgency. But what multipliers are doing is they're making a third calculation, which we call significance. So it's kind of like if you were doing algebra, it would be the Z axis. It would turn the square into a cube.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Three-dimensional. Three-dimensional thinking. Era three thinking or three-dimensional thinking. And so here's the difference. Urgency is how soon does this matter? Most of us live in a world of urgency. It's all about what needs to be done right now. Importance is different. Importance is how much does this matter? But significance is even different still.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Significance is how long is this going to matter? How is what is the impact of this activity in the future? 10 years out, 20 years out, even 10 days out. Yeah, it's it's it is breaking free of the paradigm of one day and instead thinking about tomorrow and the next day. And the significance calculation changes everything because this is how it's possible to multiply time. So I'll just tell you.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
In one sentence, okay, so if you say, Rory, how is it possible to multiply time? This is the answer. So you want to write this part down. You don't want to miss this. The way you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. There's certain things you do right now that create more time in the future.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
That's the significance calculation.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
so when i say multiply time people often think i'm exaggerating or that it's like a marketing hyperbole right as i'm like i'm sensationalizing a concept when when we say this we're not exaggerating we mean this literally now it kind of fries your brain because you go you've been told your whole life you can't time is the one thing you you can never get back it's the one thing you can never get more of um
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
And it is true that there's nothing that we can do, there's nothing I can do to give you more time inside of one day. So one day is finite and we're all limited by the same 24 hours, which by the way is 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. So I can't teach you to create more. I don't have control over time, right? There's no such thing as time management. There's only self-management.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
That's exactly the problem is most of us think about our activities in the paradigm of one day. We wake up and we say, what's the most important thing I can do today? And it's not that that's a bad question. It's just not the question that multipliers ask. Multipliers don't say, what is the most important thing I can do today?
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Multipliers ask, what are the things I can do today that create more time tomorrow? What are the things I can do now that make the future better? You're literally breaking free of the urgency paradigm of just what matters right here, right now. And you're introducing the significance paradigm of what is going to have impact over the long haul.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yes. So, well, there's a tool called the Focus Funnel that we developed here to help people apply this. So there's only one big idea in this whole conversation, which is spend time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. That's how you multiply time. And then you go, how do I do that? And there's five core methods, strategies. We call them permissions because there's an emotional side.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
What we've also learned is that most people treat time management logically. but it's actually an emotional conversation. For most of us, it's not just our calendar and our inbox and our to-do list. It is our underlying feelings of guilt and fear and anxiety and worry, as well as ambition and our drive to be successful and feel valued and important and to make impact in the world.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
These underlying emotional drivers dictate how we spend our time and the choices that we make as much as anything on our to-do list.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
I would say that guilt. So guilt corresponds with the first of the five permissions, which is eliminate. So if you if you were to picture a funnel, OK, so if I were going to draw this out, right, like you think of all of the stuff there is to do comes into the top.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
And then the focus funnel is our attempt to create a visual illustration that codifies the thought process that multipliers go through intuitively in their own brain so that the rest of us can kind of like see it and follow it. So the very first question is, can this be eliminated?
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
There's tons of things. I mean, in your personal life, I mean, I like the example of TV because it's hilarious how people will, in the same dinner conversation, talk about how they're so busy and married and overwhelmed and then talk about the three series on Netflix that they have binged in like the last month. Right.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yeah, and so it's like, okay, and I'm not saying you shouldn't watch TV. By the way, I'm not telling you anything you shouldn't or shouldn't do. I'm just introducing the framework for you to decide how to spend your time.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yeah. And Nielsen ratings, you know, this is from a few years ago, but they said the average American watches 27 hours a week of television. A week? A week. It's a part-time job.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
I mean, so seven times, it's like four hours a day.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
It's like four hours a day. That's a ton.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
I mean, you could build a big side hustle in a couple hours every day.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
So yeah, there's anything, eliminate is the first opportunity to multiply because anything I say no to today creates time in the future. How? It's preventing me from doing something that I would have otherwise been doing had I not given myself the permission to eliminate, like had I not said no. So basically this is saying no, and people really struggle with saying no.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
In businesses, this happens all the time. People have all these, so you know, at Brand Builders Group,
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
we do personal brand strategy right so we're coaching all these like people on uh building and monetizing their personal brand well they have like a hundred business models it's like oh i want to have a video course and a membership site and a live event and consulting i want to do keynote speaking and and i want to get a book deal and and you know and sponsorships and brand deals and and it's like when you have diluted focus you get diluted results
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
So you have to, by saying no to some things, you power your ability to focus on the few significant things that will multiply time. So you have to say no, but this is something that people struggle with. I struggle with it.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
don't make conscious decisions.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yes, they're unconscious emotional impulses, right? And if you're not consciously saying no to the things that don't matter, you end up unconsciously saying no to the things that do matter.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
So that's what I said, actually. So this became the Procrastinate On Purpose book. So this was my second book. When we were profiling all these people, I was doing interviews. And I told one of the multipliers, I said, I don't like this one. I got to where I am by being a yes man, by like doing a lot of things and doing them well and like saying yes to meetings and meeting people all the time.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
And they said, Rory, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And I was like, oh, okay. And here's what they said. They said, you're trying to go through life without saying no, which is admirable because you're a nice guy. But what you failed to realize is that you are always saying no to something. Anytime you say yes to one thing.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
you simultaneously are saying no to an infinite number of other things.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
So even when you think you're saying, yes, everything is important to me. No, nothing is important to you. Nothing is important enough for you to focus on. And you don't have a method for for focus and focus is power. So that most of us are losing because we're wandering, we're meandering through a bunch of insignificant, trivial tasks feeling productive when really we're just diluted.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
So that's the first one, eliminate. Now, if you can't eliminate the task, then it drops down to the center of the focus funnel, which is automate, the permission to invest. And this is so powerful because anything you create a process for today saves you time in the future. Yes.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
We if I set up a process for it or a system or if I write code, you know, there's a lot of automation like actual technologies and things that you can deploy. If I if I take the time to set it up today, then tomorrow the system or the process is doing the thing instead of me. So it's multiplying time. Now, here's the challenge is that most of us are aware that those tools exist.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
But if you ask someone, Lewis, I mean, like if you ask the average business owner, you know, whatever, you know, achiever, you know, somebody pursuing greatness, are you aware of tools and systems and processes and technologies that you could implement or deploy or improve inside of your goals? that would automate things, they would all say yes. But if you said, why haven't you done it yet?
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Bingo. Yeah. So it's so ironic because the two excuses we would use for why we haven't automated things is we would say either I don't have the time or I don't have the... Patience? Money. The money. The patience. The patience we'll talk about in a second. The money.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Out of the time or the money. And it's wild because those two excuses we would use for not automating something are exactly the opposite of how it is when you make the significance calculation.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Yeah. So an easy example is bill pay. This is a quick example. So if you had two hours open in your day today and I said, Lewis, what's the most important thing you could do today? You'd have a list of things that you would do. And if I said, hey, I think you should consider setting up online bill pay. For most of us, we would be like, no, that is not important. That's not significant.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
That seems totally trivial. But if you look at this the way a multiplier would, you go, okay, if you spend two hours today setting up online bill pay, And it saves you 30 minutes every month from paying your bills in the future. Then after four months time, you will have broken even, 30, 30, 30, 30. You will have broken even on those initial two hours.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
And then every month thereafter, you'll get something that we call ROTI, return on time invested. Because now the system is doing the thing that you would have otherwise been doing. Another way that we say this, I know this is one of your favorite Rory-isms, is that automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and it turns it into more money, automation takes time and it turns it into more time.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
Just like nobody has extra money to invest, I mean, not nobody, some people are so rich it's like that's all they do, but the average person doesn't have an extra 10 grand just laying around to be like, yeah, I'm gonna invest it. Usually you have to sacrifice something in the short term.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
You don't go on a trip, you don't buy the car, you don't buy the TV, and that is where you create the margin to reinvest into whatever, the stock market and mutual funds, like real estate, whatever you do. That is also how time is. Nobody has extra time to set up a system. Marketing automation is one of the big things we teach our clients. I know you guys do a lot of it here.
The School of Greatness
The Practical Guide To Making More Money in 2025
We're experts in marketing automation. One of the reasons we became experts in it is we realized, oh my gosh, if I can build a funnel, which is just a sequence, a series of emails and automating trust, basically, giving value to people, then that system basically becomes like an employee for me that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's always out there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
How do you best build trust online? We would say, how do you best build trust offline? Well, if you made a list, okay, so let's first start with the people. If you made a list of the top 10 people you trust in your life, like would trust with your life or with your kids, right? Like I've got two toddlers. So like if you go, who would you trust?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
There's a good chance that the people on that list, like you would trust with your banking information or your, you know, like that kind of stuff. There's a good chance you know those people intimately. You know...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
where they eat, you know, where they live, you know, about their families, you know, where they went to college, you know, where they grew up, you know, about their siblings, you know, like, you know, maybe some of their fears, you know, some of their mistakes, like some of where they're, you know, those people intimately.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And when I first got on social media, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so stupid. Why is everyone posting pictures of what they ate? And then I realized, oh, because we trust people that we know intimate details about their life. Now that doesn't mean you have to post pictures of your kids, right? There's a lot of reasons why not to and a lot of fears why not to. AJ and I happen to do it a lot.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
AJ is my wife and she's also my co-founder and the CEO of Brand Builders Group, by the way. So we were business partners in our former company that we sold and then we started Brand Builders Group, just the two of us. And she's the CEO and I'm the CMO. And we're married, right? So we got two kids. So we post, we happen to share those things occasionally.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
We trust people that we know details about their life. If I see someone walking down the alley, I've never seen them before. I don't know anything about the person. I don't care what the color of their skin is. If it's dark and it's an alley and I've never seen the person before, I don't care if it's a man, a woman, or their age. My spidey senses go up. I'm in an alley with a stranger.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And that's how it is, right? Who's going to buy from a stranger? Nobody. So they got to know something about you. Who else do we trust in real life? Well, we tend to trust people who we learn from. We trust pastors. We trust lawyers. We trust accountants. We trust doctors. We trust experts. We trust people. We trust teachers. We trust mentors. We trust counselors.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
We trust people who teach us things. Um, who else do we trust in real life? We tend to trust people who entertain us, right? They make us laugh. They make us, uh, inspired. They, they, they're, they're, they may, they, they, they're musical, right? Like we, they're, or they're entertaining. Like we, we see them on movies. I mean, think about that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
We trust movie stars who we've never met, but we see them a lot. Um, Who else do we trust in real life? We tend to trust people who encourage us in our darkest moments. The people who were there when you had your heartbreak, when you didn't get into that school or you didn't get that job or the relationship fell apart or, you know, you lost money on that deal.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
The people who were there to encourage us in that moment. Those are the people we trust because it's like we've been through the fire, right? I know you, you got my back. So when you roll that forward to online, we have three simple strategies that we teach. We call them the three E's for content marketing. First of all, educate, encourage, and entertain. Educate, encourage, and entertain.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Turn Your Followers Into Superfans With Trust and Authenticity | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
We typically say your feed should be more of what you do and it should educate, encourage, or entertain because strangers don't care about your cat. The only people who care about your cat typically are going to be once they're intrigued by you and they want to kind of really vet you out, that's where they go, who are you really, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If you're struggling on social media and you just go, well, gosh, maybe I'm not cut out for that. Well, of course, then it's not gonna be successful. But the people who are successful at it are the ones that go, no, I'm gonna figure this out. I'm gonna spend more time, more energy. I'm gonna hire coaches. I'm gonna hire an agency. I'm gonna learn. I'm gonna figure this out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I think the difference here is going, You don't have a plan B. You only have a plan A. Now, you have to be flexible to adapt what plan A is, but leaving or quitting or escaping is not one of the options. And that is one of the secrets of ultra performers, right? They lock in on a goal and they go, I am going to achieve this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
How or when, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm target locked and I'm gonna find a way. Other people go, I'll do it if it's comfortable. I'll do it if it's safe. I'll do it if it's easy, but not ultra performers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, and there's always a way. So that's another thing is that what most people ask when they reach this decisional threshold of deciding, should I continue forward in this commitment or should I not? What most people ask is should, as they say, should I do this? Should I do this? Do that? Is it possible? Do I like this? And what the ultra performers do is only one degree different.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
They don't ask, is this possible or should I do this or can I pull this off? They simply ask, how is this possible? How could I make this work? What would it take in order for it to come true? And the moment you ask this question, how, it's like your mind transcends all limitations and you break free of these preexisting limitations
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
belief barriers and these mental prisons of our own construction of what we think is possible and what isn't, and your creativity engages. And the human brain, this is where you get into the neuroscience. Well, the neuroscience of this is that the human brain cannot delineate between positive or negative. It simply does whatever you tell it to do,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The human brain also cannot delineate between true and false. It simply believes whatever it is told most often. So if you tell yourself this is hard and I don't know if this is right for me, your brain is going to process and find evidence and documentation and examples for why it's too hard and why it won't work out for you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it will process until it finds a rationalization that is comfortable for you to accept so that you can quit and you can stay safe. But similarly, if you ask the question, how is this possible? Your brain will process indefinitely on that. And it will process and process and process until one day you'll wake up in the middle of the night and boom, the answer comes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's not that most people don't have the talent or the skill to succeed. It's that they don't have the resolve or the commitment. And so they're not able to see the solutions because their brain is not actually being programmed to look for solutions. Their brain is being programmed to look for excuses.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, my first book, Take the Stairs, and my second book, Procrastinate on Purpose, Five Permissions to Multiply Your Time. So really the way this fits in is I have always been fascinated with success. And really, if you look at the arc of my whole career, Hala, I bucket it with something very simple called the four levels of influence. And so level one is influencing yourself to take action.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're influencing one person, yourself. And all of my early work is about level one influence, which is basically the enemy of influencing yourself is procrastination. And so we talk about creative avoidance and priority dilution these terms that I invented for different types of procrastination that people aren't aware of. So we can talk about those if you want.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yes, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I think you're like my newest, coolest friend. Thank you for having me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And level two influence is influencing one other human. And so that is all of my work in sales. And our first company was a sales coaching company. We started that in 2006. We grew that to eight figures. We sold it in 2018. We had 200 people. And all we did was sales coaching. That's influencing another person. Also relationships and one-on-one communication is level two influence.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
How do I talk and listen and interact with an individual in a way that creates influence? It moves them to action. Level three influence is influencing a group of people or a team. So this is all the area and the work and the study and the writing we've done on leadership.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's going, how do you act, talk, behave, operate, and create systems in a way that activates a small group of people to take action? So that's leadership. And then level four influence is really what we're doing now, which is personal branding. And that is inspiring and moving a community of people. It's creating a movement of
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's activating and influencing people who you may never actually meet face-to-face, but you impact them through your writing, your videos, your podcast, et cetera. So that's most of where we spend our world now. But my early books and my early work really stem from learning how to influence myself and to battle my own beast of overcoming procrastination.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And one of the things I think not enough people understand that you can't build a great personal brand until you build strong personal character.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Totally. And my pastor said this to me one time. He said, your influence will never grow wider than your character runs deep. Your influence will never grow wider than your character runs deep. And if it does, that's when the implosions happen, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's when the celebrities and stuff, they have these implosions because they have wide influence in the public, but they have personal lives that are a mess. And that's what causes implosion. So you have to build a strong personal brand on a foundation of strong personal character. because the reality today is it takes serious muscle.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I mean, you look at the people who are crushing it on YouTube. These are not people just pushing record and throwing it up there. They have teams of people. They have editors. They're thinking of hooks. They're very... intelligent and sophisticated. You look at the people who do marketing and funnels.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I think a lot of times people go, yeah, just build an online business, like throw up a website and make millions. It's like, no, that's not really how it works. It takes extreme discipline, focus, commitment, intelligence, strategy. And that's true about anything. I mean, excellence is never an accident.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I think we hear a lot more about personal branding these days, and we need to hear probably a little bit more about personal character.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Real quick, there's three types of procrastination. There's classic procrastination, which is consciously delaying what you know you should do, right? I know I should pay my taxes. I know I should work out. I know I should make this difficult phone call, whatever. But most of us, while most of us do struggle with classic procrastination, most of us are aware of that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Where we're really losing is to the two types of unconscious procrastination, one of which is creative avoidance.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So creative avoidance is a term that I coined that is unconsciously creating stuff for yourself to do so that you can achieve trivial things which make you feel productive because dopamine is released, that chemical is released from your brain into your body every time you delete an email or you cross something off your to-do list Dopamine is released, so it makes you feel good.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You feel productive, but really what's happened is you're addicted to accomplishing the trivial. You're addicted to completing the insignificant. That's what creative avoidance is. Then there's priority dilution, which is the chronic overachiever's procrastination. They're not lazy. They're not apathetic. They're not disengaged. They're not even distracted. What they are is interrupted.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So you're building a team now. You've got dozens of employees. As you become more influential, more and more people are vying for your attention. You get higher and higher profile clients, higher and higher profile employees. opportunities. And so everybody is coming at you with their agenda.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I think of an inbox, an email inbox as a great literal illustration of this, because what is an inbox other than a mechanism for prioritizing other people's requests? Your inbox is none of the things you want to do. It's everything everybody else wants you to do. And most of us sort even our inbox from what has come in most recent. And we just see what is most recent.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, often the most recent request is not the most significant request. And so priority dilution is living in a constant state of interruption ending your day with your most significant tasks incomplete, not because you're lazy, but because you've allowed yourself to fall victim to whatever is vying for your attention rather than the things that you know you need to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So that was introduced in Take the Stairs. Well, when we studied ultra performers and we started to look at how do they get past this, that was when we invented the system of multiplying time. Well, we didn't really invent the system. We just put a vernacular around it, which was what my TED talk was. So my TED talk that went viral is called How to Multiply Time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And all we were doing is we were putting a vernacular and semantics around the unconscious thought process that the world's ultra performers use when it came to managing their time. And people, of course, say time is the one thing you can never get more of. Well, that's not actually true. It is true inside of one day, right? There's nothing you can do to get more time in a day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What a good question. Also, you guys went into the backlogs. You did. Oh, we went to the backlogs. The back catalog. So that was from Take the Stairs, which has been out over 10 years. So success is never owned. It's rented and the rent is due every day. I do still feel that way. I feel that way. And I feel like the people we work with exhibit that. you're still hustling, I'm still hustling.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We all have 24 hours, which is 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. But that's exactly the problem. Everyone believes they cannot get more time because that's what they've been told most often. So your brain believes it. In reality, you can create more time. You say, how? Simple, and this is the premise of the TED Talk and the whole second book.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The way that you multiply time is by spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow. While there's nothing you can do today to create more time today, there's all sorts of things you can do today that if you do them today, they will create time and space tomorrow that you would not have otherwise had.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We bucket those in something called the focus funnel, which again is sort of the flagship framework of the TED talk in the book. Well, it's eliminate, automate, delegate, concentrate are four of the five. The fifth one is procrastinate. And procrastinating on purpose is about procrastinating on purpose with the insignificant tasks. the trivial tasks.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And ultimately, when you become an ultra performer, you ultimately will have to say no to some things. You will ultimately have to ignore some things because there are too many applicants for your time, too many applicants for your podcast, too many emails that you can ever respond to.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so you become an ultra performer, not by being a master of what you say yes to, but more of being a master of what you say no to.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And if you procrastinate on the trivial things, then that suddenly creates a margin or a pocket of time that you can then reinvest and reallocate into the things that multiply your time, which are things that you've spent time on today that create more time tomorrow. So that's the whole book as fast as I can give it to you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The TED Talk is called How to Multiply Time. And by the way, this is my greatest, my most painful, most expensive marketing mistake I've ever made. When TED asked me for the talk, they didn't ask me, what do you want to call your talk? They asked me, what is the talk about? And I said, oh, the talk is about how to multiply time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so they titled it for me, How to Multiply Time, and it went viral. Well, when I wrote the book, I had a chance to select the title and I thought procrastinating on purpose was so catchy and unique and clever and people had never heard of it. And people have never heard of it. And maybe it's intriguing, but the problem is it's confusing and it's not enticing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Nobody wants to procrastinate on purpose, but everyone wants to multiply time. And so this is one of the other really big personal branding lessons that we teach people is that clear is greater than clever. Clear is greater than clever. So my TED talk is clearly titled how to multiply time. My book, which is on the same topic, has a crappy title of procrastinate on purpose.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The subtitle is five permissions to multiply your time. It's the same content, The TED Talk went viral. That second book doesn't sell that well. And I'm convinced it's because of this painful mistake that I made of mistitling the book.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Ed Milet, Lewis Howes, our clients, Amy Porterfield, these people are still hustling. Some people might look at them and go, oh, they're at the top, like why are they hustling? But they don't look at it that way. They look at Jay Shetty and go, oh, they're always pursuing somebody or the next level. And the other thing about that, Hala, is if you take out that word success,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We are a personal brand strategy firm. Think of if you were building a house, you could go to Home Depot, grab some tools, grab some supplies, roll up on some pile of dirt and start building a house. You probably would do better if you started with an architect.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And you had an architect that understood everything about zoning and permits, slope and grading and everything about structural engineering and someone who could design something for you that could hold a skyscraper and not just a shack that you kind of threw up. Well, that's what we are. We are the architects. We work with several of the biggest personal brands in the world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Some that I mentioned, Ed Milet, Lewis Howes, Amy Porterfield, Tom and Lisa Bilyeu, Eric Thomas, E.T., The Hip Hop Preacher. It goes on and on. Amazing people. So many you've had on your show. So many I know that you are friends with. So... What do we do for them in a tactical way?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We tend to help people get really, really clear on their uniqueness and figuring out what's the thing that only they can do and talk about that nobody else in the world can talk about. So we do a lot around identifying their uniqueness and the identity of their brand, not the visual identity, but the actual personification of their message.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We do a lot around the art of speaking, the business of speaking, live events, monetizing live events, putting on live events. We do a lot around book launches. That's one of the things that we probably do as good, if not better than anyone else in the world. We have helped 29 people become New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or USA Today national bestselling authors. We don't game the list.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We don't let authors buy their own books. We're not tricking the system. We just have really proven ways to get real humans to buy books. So we do that. And then monetization strategy. So if I had to say, it'd be messaging and positioning, speaking, books, and then monetization strategy. We get into various components of that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But the single best piece of personal branding advice I've ever received, and this is not a Rory quote, I wish it was, But it came from a guy named Larry Winget. And I heard Larry say this early in my career. He said, the goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. Find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The first time I heard Larry say that, I was like, God, that is it. That is brilliant. That's exactly what it is. Now, the thing was, he never had a business teaching people or helping people find their uniqueness. So we developed a methodology, a process that we take people through. It's a two-day experience. It's this whole set of introspective questions.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We could touch on some of them now if you want to help people figure out What is the thing that only you can do? What is the divine calling on your life? What is your uniqueness? And once we help people find that, that's a huge, huge part of everything else falling in place.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Great question. It's because of a concept that we refer to as Sheehan's Wall. And I named this concept after a colleague of mine named Peter Sheehan, who showed me a model that we have since kind of adapted to personal brands. He works more in like the corporate space, but I saw his sort of model. And here's how it works.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
In any industry, in any vertical, in any market, on any platform, there's two groups of people. There are those who are unknown. They're living in obscurity. They're yet to be discovered or found. or popularized. And then there is a group of people who are well-known. They don't have obscurity. They have notoriety. They have trust. They have recognition. They have reputation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and you put in for it whatever really matters. Financial security is never really owned. It's rented and the rent is due every day. Like if you start making stupid financial decisions, you can blow a lot of money quickly. Being in great physical health, certainly never owned. That's rented and the rent is due every day. A great marriage or a happy relationship,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, in between being unknown and well-known, between obscurity and notoriety is this huge invisible wall that we call Sheehan's Wall. And what most people do who are living in obscurity is they look at the people in notoriety, right? They look at Tony Robbins or Gary Vaynerchuk or whoever, and they look at what they're doing, Oprah, The Rock, and they go, I want to do the things that they do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so they go, well, Tony Robbins has all these different topics, right? Like he talks about money and he talks about health and he talks about unleashing the power with wind and date with destiny and relationships and spirituality. Well, I have all these topics. So they talk about lots of different topics. And then they are like, oh, I got to be on lots of different platforms, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The whole thing is you got to be on LinkedIn and you got to be on TikTok and you got to be on Instagram and YouTube and X, Twitter, whatever. And then every time they go on Facebook or something, they see a new ad for a new business model. And it's like, oh, the way to get rich is doing webinars. No, it's live events. No, you should publish your own book. No, you should become a speaker.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
No, you should do masterminds. No, you should do retreats. No, you should do one-on-one coaching and all these different business models. And then they have all these audiences, right? And it's like, well, I'm really passionate about talking to stay-at-home moms, but I want to help kids who are like high school and college age, but I kind of live in the corporate world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But I also, again, sort of entrepreneurial. So they have too many audiences, too many messages, too many platforms, too many business models. And what happens is they bounce off the wall. And the reason that they bounce off the wall is is because if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results, period. If you have diluted focus, you get diluted results.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so if you look at Lewis Howes as an example, so he was our very first client. I had met him at our former company. We had been friends. I had casually helped him with his first book launch. And then when we sold our first company, Lewis and I reconnected. He actually called us and said, hey, I'd love your brain on my business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he's the whole reason we started Brand Builders Group because we weren't planning on doing this. And we didn't teach Lewis podcast tactics to grow his show. We didn't teach him any of that stuff. What happened was we took him through this process and we found that he had 17 revenue streams. And he had always been told by his friends and community, like, multiple streams of income.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, multiple streams of income is crappy advice. It is terrible advice when you're just first starting out. Nobody who got super rich got super rich from multiple streams of income. They got super rich by being amazing at one thing. What you need is not multiple streams of income. You need one freaking amazing stream of income. One brilliant stream of income.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
One thing that you monetize the crap out of that does really, really well. That's how you break through the wall. Once you're sitting on a pile of money, then you diversify. Sarah Blakely didn't have multiple streams of income. It's not how she got rich. Even Warren Buffett, even though he invests in a lot of things, investing is the only thing he does.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You look at athletes, all of these people, they had one stream of income. Well, Lewis had 17. One of the exercises we take people through is called the revenue streams assessment. And we just look at how long have you been doing them? What's the total revenue? How much stress is it causing you? How much natural momentum does it have for growth in the future? And it's like the scoring system.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It doesn't matter if you've been married 20 years. If you don't treat your spouse or significant other in the way that they deserve, 20 years can disappear in one moment or a few minutes of bad decisions. So I do agree with that. And I think I look at people like you constantly leveling up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he had this podcasting thing, which at the time was like a side hustle for him. He was really a course company. Most of his money was selling courses. And we said, well, this little exercise says that podcasting is the thing that is most taking off with the least amount of energy, causing you the least amount of stress, that is the most fun, and has the biggest opportunity for future growth.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What would happen if we shut everything else down and just went all in on this one thing. And so he's been so generous about his praise of us, but really, that's pretty much the only thing we ever did. He's been through, I think, nine of our 14 curriculums, so we have worked a lot with their team. But the main thing was just going, if you're a small business, Just think about it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If you're a small business and you have limited resources, right? You don't have hundreds of employees. You don't have millions of dollars. If you just have those few resources spread across 20 things, what's the likelihood that any of them is going to take off versus going, if you take those resources and you put them all in on one thing, the success is inevitable.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It almost doesn't matter what the one thing is. It just matters that there's one thing This is where too many people try to make the right decision. And what ultra performers do is they make a decision and then they make it right.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, you're breaking through the wall. Gary Vaynerchuk's my favorite example. Everyone says, well, Rory, I think your whole finding uniqueness is stupid because Gary talks about a million things.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, Omnichannel. And, you know, he talks about rap music and sports and Web3 and social and business and whatever, advertising and all this stuff. And he tells people, you know, talk about all the things you're passionate about. Yeah, except that's not how he got there. You can't look at what those people are doing today. Look at how he got there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Gary Vaynerchuk, in the beginning, talked about one thing on one channel. Wine on YouTube. So I love Gary. I don't know him personally. I have so much respect for him. I've learned so much. But I go, he did not get there by doing what he's doing now. You can't get to where he is by doing what he's doing now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You have to look at what he did and you break through the wall on that one thing or one channel, one topic and just go, what's the likelihood of success? Talking on YouTube and TikTok and podcast and LinkedIn and Instagram about 25 different things or going, I'm going to dominate the topic of wine on YouTube.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You blew my mind when you came on my podcast and I was just like, gosh, there's such a next level for me in podcasting. And I gotta do the work if I want the results. So what a great question. And yes, I would emphatically say there are some things I've changed my mind on, but that's not one of them. Success is never owned, it's rented and the rent is due every day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I'll start with the common sense part first. The reason that it applies to everybody is because when people hear the word personal brand or personal branding, They think the wrong things. They think social media. They think it means podcasting or social media or speaking or writing books or creating a course. But that's not how we think of it. That's not how we defined it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
To us, personal branding is not a new concept. It's a new expression of an old concept. Personal branding is simply the digitization of reputation. The digitization of reputation, right? Reputation's been around since the dawn of time. What do people know you for and what do they know about you in real life and do they trust you?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
All we're doing with personal branding is digitizing that and automating trust at scale. So I'm not saying those things aren't valuable. They're super valuable, right? They're super valuable. But many of the most influential people you meet and many of the most influential relationships also will come offline, not online, right? I mean, even you and I, right? You've got this great following.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I've never had a huge social media following. We've always been like offline people and we're a coaching company. So even the service we provide in the world is very human. It's one-on-one human to human kind of thing. But I met you because Julie Solomon introduced you to me. And then I recognized, you know, Jenna and Amy and a lot of our other friends.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it's like, it was your offline reputation that really caught my attention and and then supplemented by your online reputation, which is clearly super impressive. So I think the reason it matters in business, I mean, the reason I know it matters in business is because reputation matters in business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It really started even before that. So I was raised by a single mom and my mom sold Mary Kay cosmetics. So my mom had my brother when she was 17 years old and then she was divorced from his father a few years later and then she had me when she was 22 and then my biological father, they were divorced six months after I was born and I never really saw him again.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Today, reputation is determined at least as much by what your online reputation is as your offline one. And if you don't have one, It's just like going, well, would you want to not have an offline reputation? You would never say, I don't need a reputation and I don't need people to say good things about me or to know about me. That's vain.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You would never say that about an offline reputation, but those are the things we sort of errantly say about personal branding online just because it's newer and we don't understand it. And because business people don't want to point and dance and do trending songs and spend their whole day trying to deconstruct an algorithm, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's not how they spend their time, but it doesn't change the fact that it's super important and becoming more and more and more critical. So that's the common sense part. Now, if you look at the data, okay, so if you're going to talk about business people, We're very, very data-driven as a company. Part of why we do the various things we do is because it's data.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And one of the things that we led, a PhD-led academic research study weighted to the U.S. Census, a statistically valid, and it's a national to the U.S. We didn't do it for the whole world, but we spent tens of thousands of dollars on this. In fact, if you want to go download the study, if you go to freebrandstudy.com forward slash profiting, you can download a copy of the full study.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's across all ages, income ranges. We trust people who have an established personal brand. And when you look at the professions... One of the things that we ask, so one of the questions is, how important is it to you that each of the following people have an established personal brand?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so we ask the general public, which careers, which professions, does it most matter to you that your provider has a personal brand? The top ranked spot, 61% of people said they want their doctor to have a personal brand. 58% of people said they want their lawyer to have an established personal brand.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
55% of people say they want their financial advisor, their banker, their business consultant to have a personal brand. 53% said they want their insurance agent to have a personal brand. 52% said they want their real estate agent to have a personal brand. This goes on and on and on. And here's what we found.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The higher the requirement for trust, the more the general population cares that you have a personal brand. So the question is, how much does trust matter in your business? If it matters a lot, you probably need to take this thing seriously because reputation precedes revenue. Reputation precedes revenue. That's why it matters to business people. And some of them have caught on to it, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Ed Milet, Jamie Kern Lima, Elon Musk, like Richard Branson. I mean, these people have caught on to it early and it's made a big impact. Other people have not yet and they're falling behind.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so she was a single mom and she got into direct sales. So I learned about direct sales. And then when I was in college, I got involved in a company. I actually went door to door, 14 hours a day, six days a week on straight commission, just so I could pay my way through school. And there was a speaker who came and and spoke at that company.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
In order to answer that question, you'll see this recurring theme in what we do. To answer the question, how do you best build trust online? We would say, how do you best build trust offline? Well, if you made a list, if you made a list of the top 10 people you trust in your life, like would trust with your life or with your kids, right? Like I've got two toddlers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So like to go, who would you trust? There's a good chance that the people on that list, like you would trust with your banking information or that kind of stuff, there's a good chance you know those people intimately. You know where they eat. You know where they live. You know about their families. You know where they went to college. You know where they grew up. You know about their siblings.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You know maybe some of their fears. You know some of their mistakes. You know those people intimately. And when I first got on social media, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so stupid. Why is everyone posting pictures of what they ate? And then I realized, oh, because we trust people that we know intimate details about their life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Now, that doesn't mean you have to post pictures of your kids, right? There's a lot of reasons why not to and a lot of fears why not to. AJ and I happen to do it a lot. AJ is my wife and she's also my co-founder and the CEO of Brand Builders Group, by the way. We were business partners in our former company that we sold. And then we started Brand Builders Group, just the two of us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And she's the CEO and I'm the CMO. So, and we're married, right? So we got two kids. So we post, we happen to share those things occasionally. So we trust people that we know details about their life, right? If I see someone walking down the alley, I've never seen them before. I don't know anything about the person.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If it's dark and it's an alley and I've never seen the person before, my spidey senses go up. I'm in an alley with a stranger. And that's how it is, right? Who's gonna buy from a stranger? Nobody. They gotta know something about you. Who else do we trust in real life? Well, we tend to trust people who we learn from. We trust pastors. We trust lawyers. We trust accountants. We trust doctors.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We trust experts. We trust teachers. We trust mentors. We trust counselors. We trust people who teach us things. Who else do we trust in real life? We tend to trust people who entertain us. They make us laugh. They make us inspired. They're musical or they're entertaining. We see them on movies. I mean, think about that. We trust movie stars who we've never met, but we see them a lot.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Who else do we trust in real life? We tend to trust people who encourage us in our darkest moments.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The people who were there when you had your heartbreak, when you didn't get into that school, or you didn't get that job, or the relationship fell apart, or you lost money on that deal, the people who were there to encourage us in that moment, those are the people we trust, because it's like we've been through the fire, right? I know you, you got my back. So, when you roll that forward to online,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We have three simple strategies that we teach. We call them the three E's for content marketing. First of all, educate, encourage, and entertain. Educate, encourage, and entertain. And we typically say your feed should be more of what you do and it should educate, encourage, or entertain because strangers don't care about your cat.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The only people who care about your cat typically are going to be once they're intrigued by you and they want to kind of really vet you out, that's where they go, who are you really, right? So I'm a hardcore Bible-thumping Jesus freak. I post Bible verses every day in my stories because I read the Bible every day. I started a whole podcast
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
just looking at the academic and logical scrutiny for the evidence of Jesus of Nazareth. It's called Eternal Life. This was a huge side project. I make no money for it. It's not associated with any churches. There's no sponsors or anything, but it was a huge personal project that I did. I shared all of that in my stories. Occasionally, you see it in my feed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I thought, man, that's my dream is I want to speak. And so I went up to him. His name was Eric Chester. And I said, Eric, one day I'm going to do what you do. But he had mentioned that he had a son in college. And I said, right now I need your son's phone number because I'm going to recruit him to come with me and do this next summer. And we made like a pact.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Occasionally, you see me talk about my kids in my feed. Most of my feed is education, and encouragement, because I'm not that entertaining. But if I was, I'd be entertaining.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The number one mistake we already talked about is diluted focus, diluted results. Too many messages, too many audiences, too many platforms, too many monetization streams, just too much stuff. You need to find one thing. I mean, if you think about breaking through the wall, right? Literally think about trying to knock down a concrete wall.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Even if you took a sledgehammer, if you hit all different spots on that wall, you're not doing anything to it. The only way is to hit the same spot over and over and over and over. And eventually it'd be frustrating at first, right? It would feel like nothing's happening, but it would chip a little bit and then it would chip a little more and you hit it over and over and over.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it's like, this is how it is. You're doing it a consistent, consistent, consistent, same message, really dominating your niche. And then eventually you would crack through the wall. And once that first hole opened up, then the whole wall would collapse. The mistake is they're doing too many things. They don't have focus.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Our entire methodology, our entire curriculum is actually 14 different two-day experiences. That's like our full, like if you did the full everything we do, there are 14 different two-day experiences. Well, the very first question in the first experience is a super simple question, which almost nobody can answer. And it is, what problem do you solve in one word?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What problem do you solve for the world in one word? And most people cannot answer that question. If you cannot answer that question in one word, there's no way your audience is ever gonna be able to answer that question. So how are they gonna refer you? We buy solutions to problems, right? I get a flat tire, I have a flood in the house and I call a plumber, right? We buy solutions to problems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You have to be able to articulate the problem you solve. If you can't articulate the problem you solve in one word, This game's over before you even started. That's the thing is just too much. And honestly, that's the only mistake, Hala, that really matters. Probably that and consistency, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like once you get it, everything else is a tactic that can be tweaked or figured out or somebody brilliant like you's got, they got the answer for how to do it. You just got to find it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, totally. We, as I mentioned, we're very human experience. So we do the first call with everybody for free. If you go to freebrandcall.com forward slash profiting. So freebrandcall.com forward slash profiting. I mentioned freebrandstudy.com forward slash profiting. If you just want to download the study, you can go just get the data. But freebrandcall.com slash profiting.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
He said, if you mentor my son in this program, then when you graduate, I'll mentor you. And so he did. I did. And his son, Zach, worked with me for two years. We became really good friends. And then when I finished my undergrad and was in graduate school, Eric was the one who he was a Hall of Fame speaker. And, you know, I asked him, I was like, okay, I'm ready. What do I need to go do?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You can fill out a form. And we will do the first call for free with everybody. And we just want to hear your story. We want to hear who you are and what you're about. And most of the clients we work with are not the celebrities. Like a lot of my private clients like you are people that are pretty well known.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But our company, we work with people just starting out to intermediate to like advanced, but all the above. But if there's a shortcut to finding your uniqueness, here's the pattern that we noticed. We didn't know this when we started the company. We figured this out after about 1,500 clients. You are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. So, On our first call, that's what we usually ask about is, who are you? Who have you been? What challenge have you conquered? What setback have you survived? What obstacle have you overcome? What tragedy have you triumphed over? We want to hear your story.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We want to know about you because we know that if we can really understand your story, put a little strategy behind it, then we can set you on a path and reconnect you with People like Hala that can give you more and more of the tactics and you're gonna blow up. But we gotta find your uniqueness. We gotta know what is the divine design of your life. What is the calling? Why are you here?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And for most of us, at least for our audience of mission-driven messengers, it's not to be famous. It's about serving and serving the person that you once were, your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Other than requesting a call with us, which is an actionable thing you can do, I would ask you specifically when it comes to making money, I would say, look at your business and your life and go, where do you have the most natural momentum? Where are you winning the most while trying the least? The more that you can lean into that the faster you will make money.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oftentimes, it's doing the thing you're already doing, but doing it better and letting go of the other stuff. It often is serving your current customer in a deeper way. Everyone's so consumed with millions of followers and more people and more reach, they're overlooking the people that are right in front of them. Most of us do not need millions of customers to double our income.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Most of us would double our best year ever with a couple dozen of our perfect clients. So you don't have to chase the quantity of everything. Serve the people who are in front of you. Look at where you have the most natural momentum. Double down on that and say no, at least temporarily. Procrastinate on purpose to everything else.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's interesting. So I mentioned my wife, AJ, right? Who's now been my business partner since 2006. Also, she took a spiritual assessment, like your spiritual gifts one time. And she found out that her spiritual gift is making money. And I'm like, yes, that's what I'm talking about. I want to be a kept man, you know, high rolling wifey. So, but in all seriousness, I think that a huge key in
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
someone's ability to attract money is for them to develop a healthy relationship that includes a comfortable separation from money. People who think of money as a shield or a defense or something that they have to hold tightly onto They never get much more than they have. It's sort of like a closed fist, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'll never forget how the very first time we sat down, he said, Rory, the difference between a good speaker and a great speaker is 1000 speeches. So the first thing I want you to do is go out and give 1,000 speeches. And just a couple of years ago, I became the youngest person in US history to be inducted myself into the Professional Speaking Hall of Fame.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You get to keep what's in your hand, but you're never gonna get more than what's in there, because nothing can get out, but nothing can get in. The people who have the most money think of money not as like a shield, but as a tool. A tool to invest and to use, and predominantly to give. The reason why, as a Christian, I want to make loads and loads of money.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I don't need private jets and private islands and all that sort of stuff. For me, there is some amount of money that I needed first to get debt free, then to have the lifestyle that I wanted to have, which mostly included hiring the staff to do all the things that I wanted to do so that I didn't have to do them. But after that, you find that that much more money is not really going to satisfy you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The truth is, peace is the new prophet. Peace is the new profit and giving money and using your money to help other people or investing money into your platform in a way that serves people. That's what's really going to give you peace, not some number in a bank account. It just won't. And I know, I mean, we had four billionaire clients with a B last year.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We work with a lot of really wealthy people. And I'm telling you, it's not the amount of money. They're all chasing peace and more money won't give you peace. More fame won't give you peace. For me, the greatest source of happiness and peace is service. As a Christian, it's love God and love others. That's the whole message. It's service.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's where you'll find peace and peace is the new prophet.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Honestly, if you're interested in learning about us, I would just say, go to one of the two places I mentioned, freebrandstudy.com forward slash profiting or freebrandcall.com forward slash profiting. Whether you, if you want the study or the call or, you know, you could do both, but I would just say, go there. You can learn all about us. You can learn about our clients.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That'll point you back to me in other places. So I would just say, go there and let's be friends.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Hala, thank you so much for having me. I'm so impressed by you and thus very, very honored to be a part of this. So appreciate it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I've got a viral TED Talk that has like 5 million views. And I have to tell you, Hala, I'm still excited to go back and see Eric Chester and find out what step two is because there's been so much speaking. So that was how I got my start early on.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What actually happened was Eric said the fastest way to get stage time is to join a group called Toastmasters. And so it's this worldwide organization that's been around for decades. And they had a contest called the World Championship of Public Speaking. And so I thought, gosh, maybe, you know, at the time I was 22 years old. And so I had no credibility.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
This is long before social media, you know, was like ever really out. And I thought, maybe if I could win the World Championship, of public speaking, maybe that would give me the credibility to like launch a speaking career, you know, it was all adults who were in this competition. And I thought if I just got more reps, and I practiced harder.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I did, I went out and I spoke 304 times for free. The first year I made it to there's 25,000 contestants, I made it to the top 10 in the world, and I lost. And then the next year, I got more coaching. I spent more time, thousands of hours studying film, made it all the way back to the world championship. And then I lost again, actually, but I came in second.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I lost better than the first time. I was the world champion first runner up. And that was just my strategy. That had been my strategy for life in school and in knocking door to door was like, I'm just going to do a higher quantity than everybody else. And I had this belief that if I did more quantity, eventually that would lead to quality. And that's what happened.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then that's what led us to start our first company.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So one of the things that we say at Brand Builders Group, we tell our clients, the shortest path between turning someone from a complete stranger into a lifelong fan of yours is a world-class one-hour presentation. Somebody can go from, I've never heard of you. Now they can do that in a book too, but it takes longer. It takes four, it's more like four hours.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But if they see you on stage, if you've ever seen Ed Milet on stage, you could go, I've never heard of this guy. And you walk in, you know, another, one of my good friends is Jamie Kern Lima. She right now, I think is one of the best speakers in the world. If you've never heard of Jamie Kern Lima and you step into a room After a one hour experience with her, you become a lifelong fan.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so that's the power of the spoken word is it is just a trust accelerator. And they don't really teach it in schools and they don't really teach it in business. If you don't study it or get coaching on it, a lot of people think they're good speakers. In reality, they're good talkers. And there's just a big difference.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But, you know, we define personal branding, which is most of what we do now, as simply the digitization of your reputation. And reputation has been around since the dawn of time. And the spoken word is like before there was going live and before there was webinar and before there was podcast and before there was YouTube. there was just the spoken word in front of live audiences.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I think the reason why social media and the reason why YouTube and podcasting is so valuable is because if you have the ability to speak, if you have the ability to communicate with authority, if you have the ability to make an audience laugh, if you have the ability to articulate points eloquently, then you can create the same level of trust, except now you can do it at scale.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You can automate trust at scale when you combine some of my superpowers with some of your superpowers and really like growing your platform.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, and ironically, I think as AI takes over more and more, people are going to gravitate towards that human experience. And I think people are going to gravitate back towards live events because it's not that far away. In many ways, it's already here where you can replicate a video of someone, a voice of someone.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You can use mid-journey and create an entire person that's fake and turn them into an influencer. But what you can't really do is have someone stand on stage in front of a room full of humans and move them emotionally, create that human bond. And I think as AI takes over content more and more digitally, I think there's going to be a return of this skill coming back for humans.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's so interesting. You're going to quote me to me. That's kind of awkward for me, but I love it. I love it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, so that actually really should be given appropriate citation to Zig Ziglar.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So Zig said that differently. Zig said there is no escalator to success. You have to take the stairs. And after my world championship of public speaking, I was at an event of the National Speakers Association event And we're sitting in this huge convention and it's lunch and I'm sitting in this cafeteria and I knew nobody, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I'm this 20 something year old kid and I'm sitting by myself and this guy walks up to me and he says, hey, you're Rory Vaden, right? And I said, well, yes, sir, I am. And he said, I heard about you. You're the Toastmaster kid, right? Like you made it to the Toastmaster thing. And I said, well, yes, sir, that's me. And I said, I'm sorry, I don't know. Have we ever met?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he reaches his hand out and he says, my name is Zig Ziglar. And people today may not even know who Zig is, but Zig was an absolute legend for decades in this space. And he sat down next to me with his wife, who he used to call the redhead, if you've ever seen any of his old videos. And we became personal friends. He was a personal mentor of mine for several years.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I used to travel with him to these big, huge arenas. He passed away several years ago. But anyways, he was the one that said, there is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs. And so even the whole take the stairs concept was a bit of a homage to my mentor, Zig Ziglar.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Anything that matters to you is gonna be hard to let go of. The things that matter to you are the things that you've put the most time and love and energy and money and prayer into. So you go, if you lose a loved one, why is it so hard? It's because we've spent so much time together. We have so many shared experiences. We have so many interests and stories.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The irony is that the more we have invested into something, the less likely we are to let it fail. Well, what most people do is they keep their commitments conditionally. They keep their commitments as long as they're convenient to do so.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But the moment it becomes inconvenient to keep that commitment, we typically question the commitment or we challenge ourselves to go, oh, maybe I'm not cut out for this or maybe it's not worth it. And so they go in search of something easier. In reality, they find that there's not anything easier.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
They keep showing up and the same issues replicate again and again in their life because they struggle with commitment. And the real thing to do is when you are kind of tested to go, I'm not sure if this is gonna work out. I'm not sure if this is the right thing. is to increase your commitment. You increase your level of investment, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
They keep showing up and the same issues replicate again and again in their life because they struggle with commitment. And the real thing to do is when you are kind of tested to go, I'm not sure if this is gonna work out. I'm not sure if this is the right thing. is to increase your commitment. You increase your level of investment, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If you're struggling on social media and you just go, well, gosh, maybe I'm not cut out for that. Well, of course, then it's not gonna be successful. But the people who are successful at it are the ones that go, no, I'm gonna figure this out. I'm gonna spend more time, more energy. I'm gonna hire coaches. I'm gonna hire an agency. I'm gonna learn. I'm gonna figure this out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I think the difference here is going, You don't have a plan B. You only have a plan A. Now, you have to be flexible to adapt what plan A is, but leaving or quitting or escaping is not one of the options. And that is one of the secrets of ultra performers, right? They lock in on a goal and they go, I am going to achieve this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
How or when, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm target locked, and I'm gonna find a way. Other people go, I'll do it if it's comfortable. I'll do it if it's safe. I'll do it if it's easy. But not ultra performers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, and there's always a way. So that's another thing is that what most people ask when they reach this decisional threshold of deciding, should I continue forward in this commitment or should I not? What most people ask is should, as they say, should I do this? Should I do this? Do that? Is it possible? Do I like this? And what the ultra performers do is only one degree different.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
They don't ask, is this possible or should I do this or can I pull this off? They simply ask, how is this possible? How could I make this work? What would it take in order for it to come true? And the moment you ask this question, how, it's like your mind transcends all limitations and you break free of these preexisting limitations
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
belief barriers and these mental prisons of our own construction of what we think is possible and what isn't, and your creativity engages. And the human brain, this is where you get into the neuroscience. Well, the neuroscience of this is that the human brain cannot delineate between positive or negative. It simply does whatever you tell it to do
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The human brain also cannot delineate between true and false. It simply believes whatever it is told most often. So if you tell yourself this is hard and I don't know if this is right for me, your brain is going to process and find evidence and documentation and examples for why it's too hard and why it won't work out for you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it will process until it finds a rationalization that is comfortable for you to accept so that you can quit and you can stay safe. But similarly, if you ask the question, how is this possible? your brain will process indefinitely on that. And it will process and process and process until one day you'll wake up in the middle of the night and boom, the answer comes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's not that most people don't have the talent or the skill to succeed. It's that they don't have the resolve or the commitment. And so they're not able to see the solutions because their brain is not actually being programmed to look for solutions. Their brain is being programmed to look for excuses.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, my first book, Take the Stairs, and my second book, Procrastinate on Purpose, Five Permissions to Multiply Your Time. So really the way this fits in is I have always been fascinated with success. And really, if you look at the arc of my whole career, Hala, I bucket it with something very simple called the four levels of influence. And so level one is influencing yourself to take action.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're influencing one person, yourself. And all of my early work is about level one influence, which is basically the enemy of influencing yourself is procrastination. And so we talk about creative avoidance and priority dilution, these terms that I invented for different types of procrastination that people aren't aware of. So we can talk about those if you want.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And level two influence is influencing one other human. And so that is all of my work in sales. And our first company was a sales coaching company. We started that in 2006. We grew that to eight figures. We sold it in 2018. We had 200 people. And all we did was sales coaching. That's influencing another person. Also relationships. and one-on-one communication is level two influence.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
How do I talk and listen and interact with an individual in a way that creates influence? It moves them to action. Level three influence is influencing a group of people or a team. So this is all the area and the work and the study and the writing we've done on leadership.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's going, how do you act, talk, behave, operate, and create systems in a way that activates a small group of people to take action? So that's leadership. And then level four influence is really what we're doing now, which is personal branding. And that is inspiring and moving a community of people. It's creating a movement of
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's activating and influencing people who you may never actually meet face-to-face, but you impact them through your writing, your videos, your podcast, et cetera. So that's most of where we spend our world now. But my early books and my early work really stem from learning how to influence myself and to battle my own beast of overcoming procrastination.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yes, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I think you're like my newest, coolest friend. Thank you for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And one of the things I think not enough people understand that you can't build a great personal brand Until you build strong personal character.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Totally. And my pastor said this to me one time. He said, your influence will never grow wider than your character runs deep. Your influence will never grow wider than your character runs deep. And if it does, that's when the implosions happen, right? That's when the celebrities and stuff, they have these implosions because they have wide influence in the That's what causes implosion.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So you have to build a strong personal brand on a foundation of strong personal character because the reality today is it takes serious muscle. I mean, you look at the people who are crushing it on YouTube. These are not people just pushing record and throwing it up there. They have teams of people. They have editors. They're thinking of hooks. They're very intelligent and sophisticated.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You look at the people who do marketing and funnels. I think a lot of times people go, yeah, just build an online business, like throw up a website and make millions. It's like, no, that's not really how it works. It takes extreme discipline, focus, commitment, intelligence, strategy. And that's true about anything. I mean, excellence... is never an accident.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I think we hear a lot more about personal branding these days, and we need to hear probably a little bit more about personal character.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Real quick, there's three types of procrastination. There's classic procrastination, which is consciously delaying what you know you should do, right? I know I should pay my taxes. I know I should work out. I know I should make this difficult phone call, whatever. But most of us, while most of us do struggle with classic procrastination, most of us are aware of that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Where we're really losing is to the two types of unconscious procrastination, one of which is creative avoidance. So creative avoidance is a term that I coined, that is unconsciously creating stuff for yourself to do so that you can achieve trivial things which make you feel productive because dopamine is released. That chemical is released from your brain into your body.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Every time you delete an email or you cross something off your to-do list, dopamine is released. So it makes you feel good. You feel productive, but really what's happened is you're addicted to accomplishing the trivial. You're addicted to completing the insignificant. That's what creative avoidance is. Then there's priority dilution, which is the chronic overachiever's procrastination.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
They're not lazy. They're not apathetic. They're not disengaged. They're not even distracted. What they are is interrupted. So you're building a team now. You've got dozens of employees. As you become more influential, more and more people are vying for your attention. You get higher and higher profile clients, higher and higher profile opportunities.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so everybody is coming at you with their agenda. I think of an inbox, an email inbox as a great literal illustration of this because what is an inbox? other than a mechanism for prioritizing other people's requests, your inbox is none of the things you wanna do, it's everything everybody else wants you to do. And most of us sort even our inbox from
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
what has come in most recent and we just see what is most recent. Well, often the most recent request is not the most significant request.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so priority dilution is living in a constant state of interruption, ending your day with your most significant tasks incomplete, not because you're lazy, but because you've allowed yourself to fall victim to whatever is vying for your attention rather than the things that you know you need to do. So that was introduced in Take the Stairs.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, when we studied ultra performers and we started to look at how do they get past this, that was when we invented the system of multiplying time. Well, we didn't really invent the system. We just put a vernacular around it, which was what my TED Talk was. So my TED Talk that went viral is called How to Multiply Time. And all we were doing is we were putting...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
a vernacular and semantics around the unconscious thought process that the world's ultra performers use when it came to managing their time. And people, of course, say time is the one thing you can never get more of. Well, that's not actually true. It is true inside of one day, right? There's nothing you can do to get more time in a day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We all have 24 hours, which is 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. But that's exactly the problem. Everyone believes they cannot get more time because that's what they've been told most often. So your brain believes it. In reality, you can create more time. You say, how? Simple. And this is the premise of the TED Talk and the whole second book.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The way that you multiply time is by spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow. While there's nothing you can do today to create more time today, there's all sorts of things you can do today that if you do them today, they will create time and space tomorrow that you would not have otherwise had.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We bucket those in something called the focus funnel, which again is sort of the flagship framework of the TED Talk in the book. Well, It's eliminate, automate, delegate, concentrate are four of the five. The fifth one is procrastinate. And procrastinating on purpose is about procrastinating on purpose with the insignificant tasks, the trivial tasks. you know Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What a good question. Also, you guys went into the backlogs. You did. We went to the backlogs. The back catalog. So that was from Take the Stairs, which has been out over 10 years. So success is never owned. It's rented and the rent is due every day. I do still feel that way. I feel that way. And I feel like the people we work with exhibit that. You're still hustling. I'm still hustling.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
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. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Ed Milet, Lewis Howes, our clients, Amy Porterfield, these people are still hustling. Some people might look at them and go, oh, they're at the top, like why are they hustling? But they don't look at it that way. They look at Jay Shetty and go, oh, they're always pursuing somebody or the next level. And the other thing about that, Hala, is if you take out that word success,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and you put in for it whatever really matters. Financial security is never really owned. It's rented and the rent is due every day. Like if you start making stupid financial decisions, you can blow a lot of money quickly. Being in great physical health, certainly never owned. That's rented and the rent is due every day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
A great marriage or a happy relationship, it doesn't matter if you've been married 20 years. If you don't treat your spouse or significant other in the way that they deserve, 20 years can disappear in one moment or a few minutes of bad decisions. So I do agree with that. And I think I look at people like you constantly leveling up. You blew my mind when you came on my podcast.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, you're breaking through the wall. Gary Vaynerchuk's my favorite example. Everyone says, well, Rory, I think your whole finding uniqueness is stupid because Gary talks about a million things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, Omnichannel. And he talks about rap music and sports and Web3 and social and business and whatever, advertising and all this stuff. And he tells people, talk about all the things you're passionate about. Yeah, except that's not how he got there. You can't look at what those people are doing today. Look at how he got there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Gary Vaynerchuk, in the beginning, talked about one thing on one channel. Wine on YouTube. So I love Gary. I don't know him personally. I have so much respect for him. I've learned so much. But I go, he did not get there by doing what he's doing now. You can't get to where he is by doing what he's doing now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You have to look at what he did and you break through the wall on that one thing or one channel, one topic and just go, what's the likelihood of success? Talking on YouTube and TikTok and podcast and LinkedIn and Instagram about 25 different things or going, I'm going to dominate the topic of wine on YouTube.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I was just like, gosh, there's such a next level for me in podcasting. And I got to do the work if I want the results. So what a great question. And Yes, I would emphatically say there are some things I've changed my mind on, but that's not one of them. Success is never owned. It's rented and the rent is due every day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I'll start with the common sense part first. The reason that it applies to everybody is because when people hear the word personal brand or personal branding, they think the wrong things. They think social media. They think it means podcasting or social media or speaking or writing books or creating a course. But that's not how we think of it. That's not how we define it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
To us, personal branding is not a new concept. It's a new expression of an old concept. Personal branding is simply the digitization of reputation. The digitization of reputation, right? Reputation's been around since the dawn of time. What do people know you for and what do they know about you in real life and do they trust you?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
All we're doing with personal branding is digitizing that and automating trust at scale. So I'm not saying those things aren't valuable. They're super valuable, right? They're super valuable. But many of the most influential people you meet and many of the most influential relationships also will come offline, not online, right? I mean, even you and I, right? You've got this great following.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I've never had a huge social media following. We've always been like offline people. And we're a coaching company. So even the service we provide in the world is very human. It's one-on-one, human-to-human kind of thing. But I met you because Julie Solomon introduced you to me. And then I recognized Jenna and Amy and a lot of our other friends.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it's like, it was your offline reputation that really caught my attention. and then supplemented by your online reputation, which is clearly super impressive. So I think the reason it matters in business, I mean, the reason I know it matters in business is because reputation matters in business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Today, reputation is determined at least as much by what your online reputation is as your offline one. And if you don't have one, It's just like going, well, would you want to not have an offline reputation? You would never say, I don't need a reputation and I don't need people to say good things about me or to know about me. That's vain.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You would never say that about an offline reputation, but those are the things we sort of errantly say about personal branding online just because it's newer and we don't understand it. And because business people don't want to point and dance and do trending songs and spend their whole day trying to deconstruct an algorithm, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's not how they spend their time, but it doesn't change the fact that it's super important and becoming more and more and more critical. So that's the common sense part. Now, if you look at the data, okay, so if you're going to talk about business people, We're very, very data-driven as a company. Part of why we do the various things we do is because it's data.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And one of the things that we led, a PhD-led academic research study, weighted to the US Census, a statistically valid, and it's a national to the US. We didn't do it for the whole world, but we spent tens of thousands of dollars on this. In fact, if you want to go download the study, if you go to freebrandstudy.com forward slash profiting, you can download a copy of the full study.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It really started even before that. So I was raised by a single mom and my mom sold Mary Kay cosmetics. So my mom had my brother when she was 17 years old and then she was divorced from his father a few years later. And then she had me when she was 22. And then my biological father, they were divorced six months after I was born and I never really saw him again.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's across all ages, income ranges. We trust people who have an established personal brand. And when you look at the professions, one of the things that we ask, so one of the questions is, how important is it to you that each of the following people have an established personal brand?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so we ask the general public, which careers, which professions does it most matter to you that your provider has a personal brand? the top ranked spot, 61% of people said they want their doctor to have a personal brand. 58% of people said they want their lawyer to have an established personal brand.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
55% of people say they want their financial advisor, their banker, their business consultant to have a personal brand. 53% said they want their insurance agent to have a personal brand. 52% said they want their real estate agent to have a personal brand. This goes on and on and on. And here's what we found.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The higher the requirement for trust, the more the general population cares that you have a personal brand. So the question is, how much does trust matter in your business? If it matters a lot, you probably need to take this thing seriously because reputation precedes revenue. Reputation precedes revenue. That's why it matters to business people. And some of them have caught on to it, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Ed Milet, Jamie Kern Lima, Elon Musk, like Richard Branson. I mean, these people have caught on to it early and it's made a big impact. Other people have not yet and they're falling behind.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
In order to answer that question, you'll see this recurring theme in what we do. To answer the question, how do you best build trust online? We would say, how do you best build trust offline? Well, if you made a list, if you made a list of the top 10 people you trust in your life, like would trust with your life or with your kids, right? Like I've got two toddlers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So like to go, who would you trust? There's a good chance that the people on that list, like you would trust with your banking information or that kind of stuff, there's a good chance you know those people intimately. You know where they eat. You know where they live. You know about their families. You know where they went to college. You know where they grew up. You know about their siblings.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You know maybe some of their fears. You know some of their mistakes. You know those people intimately. And when I first got on social media, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so stupid. Why is everyone posting pictures of what they ate? And then I realized, oh, because we trust people that we know intimate details about their life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so she was a single mom and she got into direct sales. So I learned about direct sales. And then when I was in college, I got involved in a company. I actually went door to door, 14 hours a day, six days a week on straight commission, just so I could pay my way through school. And... there was a speaker who came and spoke at that company. And I thought, man, that's my dream is I wanna speak.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Now, that doesn't mean you have to post pictures of your kids, right? There's a lot of reasons why not to and a lot of fears why not to. AJ and I happen to do it a lot. AJ is my wife and she's also my co-founder and the CEO of Brand Builders Group, by the way. We were business partners in our former company that we sold. And then we started Brand Builders Group, just the two of us.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And she's the CEO and I'm the CMO. So, and we're married, right? So we got two kids. So we post, we happen to share those things occasionally. So we trust people that we know details about their life, right? If I see someone walking down the alley, I've never seen them before. I don't know anything about the person.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If it's dark and it's an alley and I've never seen the person before, my spidey senses go up. I'm in an alley with a stranger. And that's how it is, right? Who's gonna buy from a stranger? Nobody. They gotta know something about you. Who else do we trust in real life? Well, we tend to trust people who we learn from. We trust pastors. We trust lawyers. We trust accountants. We trust doctors.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We trust experts. We trust teachers. We trust mentors. We trust counselors. We trust people who teach us things. Who else do we trust in real life? We tend to trust people who entertain us. They make us laugh. They make us inspired. They're musical or they're entertaining. We see them on movies. I mean, think about that. We trust movie stars who we've never met, but we see them a lot.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Who else do we trust in real life? We tend to trust people who encourage us in our darkest moments.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The people who were there when you had your heartbreak, when you didn't get into that school or you didn't get that job or the relationship fell apart or you lost money on that deal, the people who were there to encourage us in that moment, those are the people we trust because it's like we've been through the fire, right? I know you, you got my back. So when you roll that forward to online,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We have three simple strategies that we teach. We call them the three E's for content marketing. First of all, educate, encourage, and entertain. Educate, encourage, and entertain. And we typically say your feed should be more of what you do and it should educate, encourage, or entertain because strangers don't care about your cat.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The only people who care about your cat typically are going to be once they're intrigued by you and they want to kind of really vet you out, that's where they go, who are you really, right? So I'm a hardcore Bible thumping Jesus freak. I post Bible verses every day in my stories because I read the Bible every day. I started a whole podcast
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
just looking at the academic and logical scrutiny for the evidence of Jesus of Nazareth. It's called Eternal Life. This was a huge side project. I make no money for it. It's not associated with any churches. There's no sponsors or anything, but it was a huge personal project that I did. I shared all of that in my stories. occasionally you see it in my feed.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Occasionally you see me talk about my kids in my feed. Most of my feed is education and encouragement because I'm not that entertaining. But if I was, I'd be entertaining on my feed too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The number one mistake we already talked about is diluted focus, diluted results. Too many messages, too many audiences, too many platforms, too many monetization streams, just too much stuff. You need to find one thing. I mean, if you think about breaking through the wall, right? Literally think about trying to knock down a concrete wall. Even if you took a sledgehammer,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If you hit all different spots on that wall, you're not doing anything to it. The only way is to hit the same spot over and over and over and over. And eventually it'd be frustrating at first, right? It would feel like nothing's happening, but it would chip a little bit and then it would chip a little more. And you hit it over and over and over. And it's like, this is how it is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're doing it a consistent, consistent, consistent, same message, really dominating your niche. And then eventually you would crack through the wall. And once that first hole opened up, then the whole wall would collapse. The mistake is they're doing too many things. They don't have focus. Our entire methodology, our entire curriculum is actually 14 different two-day experiences.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I went up to him, his name was Eric Chester. And I said, Eric, one day I'm gonna do what you do But he had mentioned that he had a son in college. And I said, right now, I need your son's phone number because I'm going to recruit him to come with me and do this next summer. And we made like a pact. He said, if you mentor my son in this program, then when you graduate, I'll mentor you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's like our full, like if you did the full everything we do, there are 14 different two-day experiences. Well, the very first question in the first experience is a super simple question, which almost nobody can answer. And it is, what problem do you solve in one word? What problem do you solve for the world in one word? And most people cannot answer that question.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If you cannot answer that question in one word, there's no way your audience is ever gonna be able to answer that question. So how are they gonna refer you? We buy solutions to problems, right? I get a flat tire, I have a flood in the house, and I call a plumber, right? We buy solutions to problems. You have to be able to articulate the problem you solve.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If you can't articulate the problem you solve in one word, This game's over before you even started. That's the thing is just too much. And honestly, that's the only mistake, Hala, that really matters. Probably that and consistency, right? Like once you get it, everything else is a tactic that can be tweaked or figured out or somebody brilliant like you's got, they got the answer for how to do it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You just got to find it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, totally. We, as I mentioned, we're very human experience. So we do the first call with everybody for free. If you go to freebrandcall.com forward slash profiting. So freebrandcall.com forward slash profiting. I mentioned freebrandstudy.com forward slash profiting. If you just want to download the study, you can go just get the data. But freebrandcall.com slash profiting.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You can fill out a form. And we will do the first call for free with everybody. And we just want to hear your story. We want to hear who you are and what you're about. And most of the clients we work with are not the celebrities. Like a lot of my private clients like you are people that are pretty well known.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But our company, we work with people just starting out to intermediate to like advanced, but all the above. But if there's a shortcut to finding your uniqueness, here's the pattern that we noticed. We didn't know this when we started the company. We figured this out after about 1,500 clients. You are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. So, On our first call, that's what we usually ask about is, who are you? Who have you been? What challenge have you conquered? What setback have you survived? What obstacle have you overcome? What tragedy have you triumphed over? We want to hear your story.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We want to know about you because we know that if we can really understand your story, put a little strategy behind it, then we can set you on a path and reconnect you with People like Hala that can give you more and more of the tactics and you're gonna blow up. But we gotta find your uniqueness. We gotta know what is the divine design of your life. What is the calling? Why are you here?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And for most of us, at least for our audience of mission-driven messengers, it's not to be famous. It's about serving and serving the person that you once were. You're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Other than requesting a call with us, which is an actionable thing you can do, I would ask you specifically when it comes to making money, I would say, look at your business and your life and go, where do you have the most natural momentum? Where are you winning the most while trying the least? The more that you can lean into that, the faster you will make money.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so he did. I did. And his son, Zach, worked with me for two years. We became really good friends. And then when I
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oftentimes, it's doing the thing you're already doing, but doing it better and letting go of the other stuff. It often is serving your current customer in a deeper way. Everyone's so consumed with millions of followers and more people and more reach, they're overlooking the people that are right in front of them. Most of us do not need millions of customers to double our income.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Most of us would double our best year ever with a couple dozen of our perfect clients. So you don't have to chase the quantity of everything. Serve the people who are in front of you, look at where you have the most natural momentum, double down on that, and say no, at least temporarily, procrastinate on purpose to everything else.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
finished my undergrad and was in graduate school eric was the one who he was a hall of fame speaker and you know i asked him i was like okay i'm ready what do i need to go do and i'll never forget hollow the very first time we sat down he said rory the difference between a good speaker and a great speaker is 1 000 speeches So the first thing I want you to do is go out and give 1,000 speeches.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's interesting. So I mentioned my wife, AJ, right? Who's now been my business partner since 2006. Also, she took a spiritual assessment, like your spiritual gifts one time. And she found out that her spiritual gift is making money. And I'm like, yes, that's what I'm talking about. I want to be a kept man, you know, high rolling wifey. So, but in all seriousness, I think that a huge key in
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
someone's ability to attract money is for them to develop a healthy relationship that includes a comfortable separation from money. People who think of money as a shield or a defense or something that they have to hold tightly onto They never get much more than they have. It's sort of like a closed fist, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You get to keep what's in your hand, but you're never going to get more than what's in there because nothing can get out, but nothing can get in. The people who have the most money think of money not as like a shield, but as a tool, a tool to invest and to use and predominantly to give. The reason why, as a Christian, I want to make loads and loads of money.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I don't need private jets and private islands and all that sort of stuff. For me, there is some amount of money that I needed first to get debt-free, then to have the lifestyle that I wanted to have, which mostly included hiring the staff to do all the things that I wanted to do so that I didn't have to do them. But after that, you find that that much more money is not really going to satisfy you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The truth is, peace is the new prophet.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Peace is the new profit and giving money and using your money to help other people or investing money into your platform in a way that serves people. That's what's really going to give you peace, not some number in a bank account. It just won't. And I know, I mean, we had four billionaire clients with a B last year. We work with a lot of really wealthy people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'm telling you, it's not the amount of money. They're all chasing peace and more money won't give you peace. More fame won't give you peace. For me, the greatest source of happiness and peace is service. As a Christian, it's love God and love others. That's the whole message. It's service. That's where you'll find peace and peace is the new prophet.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Honestly, if you're interested in learning about us, I would just say, go to one of the two places I mentioned, freebrandstudy.com forward slash profiting or freebrandcall.com forward slash profiting. Whether you, if you want the study or the call or, you know, you could do both, but I would just say, go there. You can learn all about us. You can learn about our clients.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That'll point you back to me in other places. So I would just say, go there and let's be friends.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Hala, thank you so much for having me. I'm so impressed by you and thus very, very honored to be a part of this. So appreciate it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And just a couple years ago, I became the youngest person in U.S. history to be inducted myself into the Professional Speaking Hall of Fame.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I've got a viral TED Talk that has like 5 million views. And I have to tell you, Hala, I'm still excited to go back and see Eric Chester and find out what step two is because there's been so much speaking. So that was how I got my start early on.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What actually happened was Eric said the fastest way to get stage time is to join a group called Toastmasters. And so it's this worldwide organization that's been around for decades. And they had a contest called the World Championship of Public Speaking. And so I thought, gosh, maybe, you know, at the time I was 22 years old. And so I had no credibility.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
This is long before social media, you know, it was like ever really out. And I thought, maybe if I could win the World Championship, of public speaking, maybe that would give me the credibility to like launch a speaking career. You know, it was all adults who were in this competition. And I thought if I just got more reps and I practiced harder.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I did, I went out and I spoke 304 times for free. The first year I made it to, there's 25,000 contestants. I made it to the top 10 in the world and I lost. And then the next year, I got more coaching. I spent more time, thousands of hours studying film, made it all the way back to the world championship. And then I lost again, actually, but I came in second.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I lost better than the first time. I was the world champion first runner up. And that was just my strategy. That had been my strategy for life in school and in knocking door to door was like, I'm just going to do a higher quantity than everybody else. And I had this belief that if I did more quantity, eventually that would lead to quality. And that's what happened.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then that's what led us to start our first company.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So one of the things that we say at Brand Builders Group, we tell our clients, the shortest path between turning someone from a complete stranger into a lifelong fan of yours is a world-class one-hour presentation. Somebody can go from, I've never heard of you. Now they can do that in a book too, but it takes longer. It takes four, it's more like four hours.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But if they see you on stage, if you've ever seen Ed Milet on stage, you could go, I've never heard of this guy. And you walk in, you know, another, one of my good friends is Jamie Kern Lima. She right now, I think is one of the best speakers in the world. if you've never heard of Jamie Kern Lima and you step into a room after a one hour experience with her, you become a lifelong fan.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so that's the power of the spoken word is it is just a trust accelerator. And yeah, they don't really teach it in schools and they don't really teach it in business. If you don't study it or get coaching on it, a lot of people think they're good speakers. In reality, they're good talkers. And there's just a big difference.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But we define personal branding, which is most of what we do now, as simply the digitization of your reputation. And reputation has been around since the dawn of time. And the spoken word is like before there was going live and before there was webinar and before there was podcast and before there was YouTube, there was just the spoken word in front of live audiences.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I think the reason why social media and the reason why YouTube and podcasting is so valuable is because If you have the ability to speak, if you have the ability to communicate with authority, if you have the ability to make an audience laugh, if you have the ability to articulate points eloquently, then you can create the same level of trust, except now you can do it at scale.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You can automate trust at scale when you combine some of my superpowers with some of your superpowers and really like growing your platform.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, and ironically, I think as AI takes over more and more, people are going to gravitate towards that human experience. And I think people are going to gravitate back towards live events because it's not that far away. In many ways, it's already here where you can replicate a video of someone, a voice of someone.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You can use mid-journey and create an entire person that's fake and turn them into an influencer. But what you can't really do is have someone stand on stage in front of a room full of humans and move them emotionally, create that human bond. And I think as AI takes over content more and more digitally, I think there's going to be a return of this skill coming back for humans.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's so interesting. You're going to quote me to me. That's kind of awkward for me, but I love it. I love it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, so that actually really should be given appropriate citation to Zig Ziglar.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Zig said that differently. Zig said there is no escalator to success. You have to take the stairs. And after my World Championship of Public Speaking, I was at an event of the National Speakers Association event. And we're sitting in this huge convention and it's lunch and I'm sitting in this cafeteria. and I knew nobody, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I'm this 20-something-year-old kid, and I'm sitting by myself, and this guy walks up to me, and he says, hey, you're Rory Vaden, right? And I said, well, yes, sir, I am. And he said, I heard about you. You're the Toastmaster kid, right? Like, you made it to the Toastmaster thing. And I said, well... Well, yes, sir, that's me. And I said, I'm sorry, I don't know. Have we ever met?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he reaches his hand out and he says, my name is Zig Ziglar. And people today may not even know who Zig is, but Zig was an absolute legend for decades in this space. And he sat down next to me with his wife, who he used to call the redhead, if you've ever seen any of his old videos. And we became personal friends. He was a personal mentor of mine for several years.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I used to travel with him to like these big, huge arenas You know, he passed away several years ago. But anyways, he was the one that said, there is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs. And so even the whole take the stairs concept was a bit of a homage to my mentor Zig Ziglar.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Anything that matters to you is gonna be hard to let go of. The things that matter to you are the things that you've put the most time and love and energy and money and prayer into. So you go, if you lose a loved one, why is it so hard? It's because we've spent so much time together. We have so many shared experiences. We have so many interests and stories.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The irony is that the more we have invested into something, the less likely we are to let it fail. Well, what most people do is they keep their commitments conditionally. They keep their commitments as long as they're convenient to do so.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
How Rory Vaden Helps Entrepreneurs Build Powerful Personal Brands | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But the moment it becomes inconvenient to keep that commitment, we typically question the commitment or we challenge ourselves to go, oh, you know, maybe I'm not cut out for this or maybe it's not worth it. And so they go in search of something easier. In reality, they find that there's not anything easier.