IDL10 Season 1: Impact a Life and Fulfill Your Purpose with Rory Vaden
Have you identified the problem you are here to solve? Where do you have the most impact? How is finding your purpose related to serving those around you?
As leaders, we are here to serve, this is something I have come to learn. Today I speak with Rory Vaden about becoming a mission-driven messenger for the problem you uniquely solve, why enjoying it isn’t a requirement for doing it and why you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.
Meet Rory Vaden
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND HALL OF FAME SPEAKER, RORY VADEN, IS THE WORLD’S LEADING EXPERT IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ULTRA-PERFORMANCE.
Rory’s pioneering concept of Multiplying Time resulted in a TEDX talk with millions of views that has revolutionized the way that today’s leaders think about time and make decisions. His compelling stage delivery made him one of the youngest people in history to be inducted into the professional speaking Hall of Fame. And his keen insights on clarifying focus, overcoming procrastination, and inspiring action have made him one of the world’s most followed podcasters and online influencers. Rory’s unique message and approach will inspire you and entertain your audience while delivering them the strategies that will unlock their potential.
Visit his website. Connect with him on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
In this episode we discuss:
Be clear on the problem you solve
Work from your power
The nature of purpose
BE CLEAR ON THE PROBLEM YOU SOLVE
“Once we got clear on that, then we became an ambassador of the problem and that is the genesis of all personal branding which is being able to answer the question: what problem do I solve? In one word. That is the first step and it is often the hardest step and it is the most overlooked step that most people cannot answer that question in one word, what problem do I solve? ”
The world sells solutions to everyone but you cannot properly market yourself to your clients unless you know what the problem is that you are providing a solution to.
Over and above that, when you do not have a guiding principle or the answer to the problem that you are providing solutions to, you become a part of the noise. You fall into the trap of saying a lot about a lot without any real action behind anything, and then your customers cannot hear and distinguish you from the crowd.
Identify what the problem is
What are the pains due to the problem?
What is the process for fixing it?
What is the payoff?
“The payoff and the pain are two sides of the same coin, so if you follow the process, the payoffs are what will result, and if you don’t follow the process the pain is what will result. ”
WORK FROM YOUR POWER
Where do you have the most impact? Rory has a shortcut for finding it out, and it is:
“Whether you are a leader trying to figure out what company should I work at or what project should I take on, or you’re an entrepreneur and what business should you start … here’s the shortcut: you are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. ”
Think about what you have actually done in your life, because these skills and experiences you have can directly assist those who are coming after you, and you impart first-hand information with first-class knowledge to provide them with actual, factual help.
THE NATURE OF PURPOSE
In Rory’s experience purpose is not inherently self-centered, but it should be service-centered in nature. Your purpose is created through helping someone because that gives you purpose, joy, and satisfaction.
How can you help? How can you be useful and who can you serve? You know the best way to help someone who is where you once were. That in itself gives you purpose because your life then, and your experience, have a purpose.
“We have no problem with money, we like money, but the mission is first. It is mission over money and there is no amount of money that will fill that hole of you feeling like your life doesn’t matter but helping only one person will fill that hole. ”
It is not about being the best of the best. It is not about being the number one in your industry, and it does not matter how much money you make: what matters is that you are available to the average Joe down the road who needs help.
That person will not care, and does not care, if you are number one in the world or not. They simply need you to help them. Do not falter on your path simply because you cannot beat the top dogs in your industry, focus instead on being useful because that gives you purpose.
No matter how much money they have, you will be the one that has purpose whereas they do not.
“Money is pretty useless. If the purpose of my life is to accumulate a lot of money, literally what impact does it make in the world? It’s a number in an account when I die, versus how many people have I been able to help? ”
Money should be treated as a tool, not an end-goal. Money is more powerful and magnified when it is given and moved forward instead of becoming stagnant in someone’s account.
Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:
Visit Rory’s website. Connect with him on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Request a free strategy call with Rory’s team
The Impact Driven Leader YouTube Channel
Join the Impact Driven Leader Community
Connect with Tyler on Instagram and LinkedIn
BOOK | Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success by Rory Vaden
About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast
The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.
Rate, review and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts or subscribe on Stitcher and Spotify.
Podcast Transcription
[TYLER DICKERHO...: Hey there. welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. I'm glad you're joining in. If you are in flow with us, the next episode here is Rory Vaden. If you're just catching up with us, it's the first episode, but look back through this month, we are talking about purpose. We got three or four episodes here, really digging into purpose, what it means. And Rory and I are going to talk about it from a different perspective. Rory and his wife, AJ are the founders of the Brand Builders Group, a service that I have personally worked with. They work with individual brands to help them really understand who they are, what service they provide, what problem they solve. It's all in their DNA helix. So you'll hear about that more over our conversation.
Rory is a Hall of Fame speaker. He's an author of two bestselling books, Take the Stairs and Procrastinate on Purpose. He's a TEDx presenter with over 3 million views and a two time World Championship of Speaking finalist. Man, he's a much better presenter than I am, obviously. But today we talk about personal brand and purpose. Now some of you may have a personal brand and Ryan Brand Builders Group, I highly recommend. Their strategists are amazing. They really help you define and identify your brand, and really, as they call it become a mission-driven messenger for the problem you uniquely solve. Now, if you don't see yourself as that, I can guarantee you're going to get some amazing tidbits. Really the amount of knowledge that Rory dropped was amazing from a leadership perspective. So here's a few key takeaways. Enjoying it isn't a requirement of doing it.
Make sure you get your notes ready and write this stuff down. Be clear, clever, [inaudible 00:01:56]. You are most powerfully positioned. Let me say that again. You are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were, and instead of being the best be useful. Those are the topics that we kind of dig in and talk about and I'm thankful Rory gave me his time to be able to share with you guys, because I don't know how much people hear about this. And again, this whole idea of talking about purpose, I think is so important because we, I believe as leaders, when I found out my purpose, I was able to really be better positioned to help people as opposed to just trying to figure out what can I do? So take notes, enjoy this episode with Rory. I know you're going to get a lot out of it.
[TYLER]: All right, Rory, I'm so glad to chat with you today. I'm so glad to share your story. As you know, the audience got to know you a little bit in there in the introduction for my point of view as our relationship expands now almost years . I can say this and I said this again, as we were getting ready, the time that I spent with you is probably one of the most impactful times that I've spent aside from the time that I've spent with John Maxwell in the last two to three years, because I learned about who I was and that process of developing and understanding my personal brand, which everyone has. Everyone has a purpose. And as you and I chatted this month, we're going through in the book club, Paula Faris' book Called Out. And when I read that and I knew I wanted to have you talk about personal brand, but before we get to that, that's kind of the teaser, I would love to know how you went along the journey of understanding your personal brand and what you kind of, how you evolved through that personally, then to be able to help others.
[RORY VADEN]: Well, yes, I mean, for me I was pretty young when I figured out I wanted to be a speaker. I mean, that was like my dream was, I was in sixth grade at Platt Middle School, PMS, true story. I went to PMS and this guy comes in and he's really funny and really inspiring, but he tells this horrible story about how, like he got into drugs and went to jail and his brother got murdered and like, he made all these bad decisions. His life was a wreck. But that was the first time that I was like, "Gosh, I wonder how you get this job. How did this guy get to do this?" And then when I was in high school, I got, I was on student council and so we paid a guy, a thousand bucks to come speak and it blew my mind.
I was like, "You got to be kidding me. Not only do they get paid to do this, but this guy's getting a thousand dollars for an hour to like come and tell jokes and stories?" And I was like, "This is what I was born to do." And so anyways, I was in direct sales for five years and got really exposed to personal development. And I made about a quarter million dollars over those first five years when I was in college and then, that was just like something that I went through that I wanted to be a speaker. And I did this contest called the World Championship of Public Speaking and I spoke 304 times for free and I ended up becoming the number one loser in the world. I was the first runner up out of 25,000 contestants. I was the World Champion of Public Speaking first runner up. And anyways I started my career and I knew that self-discipline was what I wanted, was my message. It was like God had given me that from the time I was young, like, "Rory you're supposed to go out and like talk to the world about discipline."
[TYLER]: Was that something that you like displayed over time or, because I'd love to know a little bit about that because you wrote a book about that, Take the Stairs. So it's a great injection here.
[RORY]: Yes. So it becomes, it ended up becoming that book. Well, it started because I didn't, I started in martial arts when I was five years old and so I started learning discipline. I used to fight with my mom because, by age 10 I had become the youngest black belt in Colorado to ever get beaten up by a girl in a public tournament. And I would tell my mom, "I don't like this mom. Like this isn't fun." And my mom would say back to me, "That's okay, Rory. Enjoying it isn't a requirement of doing it." And enjoying it isn't a requirement of doing it. And so I learned about discipline at a young age and then I went door to door and did network marketing for five years and learned about discipline and, had just, that was just a word that I had latched on to.
And then I met, I had several mentors along the way, but my first company was Disciplined Dynamic, disciplineddynamic.com and you go to the website and there's a slight running crash, "disciplined dynamic" and I was maybe, I don't know, 18, 19 years old. So I was out there like trying to get people to buy discipline and I was trying to like sell discipline. The thing I had going for me early on was that I was very clear. And a lot of the personal brands that we work with today, what they're trying to do is to be clever. They try to come up with catchy things and pithy things, and they look for taglines and slogans and fancy names. And it's one of the biggest reasons why they fail because clear is greater than clever. Clear is greater than clever.
So I had clarity, but discipline is not a great marketing message. It's a great truth that changes life, but it's not the thing that people want to buy. It's, and so somebody said, "Well, Rory you got to get clear on what problem you solve." And it took us a few years to figure out that, "Oh, the problem that I solve is procrastination." And once we got clear on that, then we became an ambassador of the problem. And that is the Genesis of all personal branding; is being able to answer the question, what problem do I solve in one word? That is the first step and it is often the most hardest step. And it is the most overlooked step; is that most people cannot answer that question in one word, what problem do I solve? And yet the world buys solutions to problems, which means if you're trying to get them to buy you, you have to market the problem, not just the solution.
You have to be an ambassador of the problem. You have to celebrate the problem. You have to promote the problem. But if you don't know what the problem is, then you have a problem which is not, nobody's going to buy from you. And worse than that, you will get absorbed into the noise. You become part of the noise. You're saying a lot about a lot, and people can't hear you. You're just making noise. But when you pinpoint a specific problem and you say, "I am the person who owns this," if you are struggling and for me back then, it was, it started with procrastination, which became my Take the Stairs Book. We then evolved that a little bit into distraction, which then led to my TED talk, How to Multiply Time, which went viral. We should have called our book, our second book should have been called that. We called it something else. We call it Procrastinate on Purpose.
And then today at Brand Builders Group, we solve the problem of obscurity, which is people who are unclear, untrusted and unknown. They're struggling to find their uniqueness. But anyways, whatever your life is about, your message is, about start with getting clear on what problem did God put me here on this earth to solve? Or what problem is my business dedicated to resolving?
[TYLER]: Okay. So we packed a lot in there.
[RORY]: That was a lot. That was a lot.
[TYLER]: That was, it was so great. So I'm going to go back. One of the things that, I got to reflect my notes here, so we're going to get lost because there's a lot to digest in that. If you're listening in, please take notes. You can go back. It's good. It's good, to me, when we're seven minutes in and we've unpacked this much, there's a lot to learn. You talk about this idea of being clever instead of clear. I heard somebody say this and I just ---
[RORY]: Clear is greater than clever.
[TYLER]: Yes, yes. When people try to be clever, they fail. They just need to be clear. And that's what, you know, clear is greater than clever. He told this story about being an HVAC (heating and air conditioning). And he said, "People don't buy a furnace. They buy being warm, sitting with their family in their house." And as you said, that the idea of being clever, it's like, I sell the best furnace and like people don't want to go out and buy a furnace. They want to buy the feeling of being warm, sitting beside their family, because that's what they will pay any amount for and they can relate to. So if you could take that image and how do people as leaders, how do people in our society get that confused to where people look at them as like, "What are you trying to sell them??
[RORY]: Well, so there's a couple of things. So if you really break it down here and is, what we would actually say is what they buy is not being cold. Being cold is the problem. Like when you buy a furnace is not, when, you don't wake up one day and go, "You know what? I think we could have a better experience in the living room." You buy a furnace when you go, "Our crap is broken and it's freezing in the house. Somebody called the dude that sells furnaces. Someone get the guy over here to fix the heat." So the problem is cold. The process is the furnace. The pay off is the being warm and being around with the family. So you can sell payoffs, you can sell based on payoffs, but you, it's actually more powerful to sell based on problems and pain.
So the problem is what caused the problem. The pain is what are all the results that have shown up as a result of that problem? The problem is the furnace broke. The pain is you're cold. Your wife is angry, the kids have to sleep together in the room, blah, blah, blah, blah. But anyways, we all have that. Like, it's identifying what is the problem? What are the pains that result? What is my process for fixing it and then what is the payoff? The payoff and the pain are two sides of the same coin. So if you follow the process, the payoff is are what will result. If you don't follow the process, the pain is what results. So anyways, so that's how we would break that.
[TYLER]: Yes. I love it. I think that as you did a great example, great job of integrating that into the furnace, people could feel that. I think what happens in, when we start talking to a theorial is people can't relate to, "Oh, what's really the problem?" I think that in my personal experience in the past is I was trying to solve a problem, but I didn't understand my purpose. I didn't know what I uniquely was able from experience or what I had learned to be able to solve and so it just gets to, "Well, I just got to do my job." And then all of a sudden, you find yourself in this place where you're just doing the job and you're miserable and everyone else around you knows that and then all of a sudden, one day you get to do the fun thing exciting, the speaking up on stage, and you see the results and you're like, "How can I get more of that?" But they don't understand that delivering that and seeing transformation is what brought on that feeling. And I think personally, as what I heard from you is you went through that process personally and through your different careers allowed that to play out and then you were like, "Oh, I can help people do this, create clarity for them." And I think that's what you guys are doing brand building.
[RORY]: Yes. So here's the thing. I mean, the best piece of branding advice that I've ever received, this is not a Rory Vaden quote. This is from a guy named Larry Winget. And Larry said, you have to find your uniqueness so that you can exploit it in the service of others, find your uniqueness so that you can exploit it in the service of others. And the very first time I heard that I was like, "That's it. That's how it's done. That's how you break through the wall. You find our uniqueness and then you put it to work in the service of other people." I'm on board. I get it. But Larry wasn't in the business of teaching people, how to find their uniqueness. That's not what he did. So that was like this kind of side program that he was just teaching speakers.
So when we started Brand Builders Group, we realized that there is a process. The set of questions that we take people through, we call it the Brand DNA Helix, which you went through that help people land on what their uniqueness is. And we can talk about that as much as you want, but if there is a shortcut to what you were just saying, and this is what we train our strategists, because we do all one-on-one coaching. We don't do like courses and membership sites and stuff as much. We are a one-on-one coaching company. So we work human to human with people. And what we train our strategists to do is to look for this shortcut, and for you listening, you can apply this to your own life. Whether you're a leader trying to figure out what companies should I go work at or what projects should I take on or you're an entrepreneur, what business should I start or you want to be a personal brand going what should I talk about, here's the shortcut.
You are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. You're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. The reason we're working with so many New York Times bestselling authors and hall of fame speakers and people viral TED talks, and trying to build online businesses is because we know intimately, the fear that the dream and the fear and the pain and all the obstacles and the struggles and the steps that you have to take to get there. Because that was my dream. And I grew up, raised with very little money. I was raised by a single mom. We lived in a trailer. We didn't have a lot of money. And so these ideas of being the person on the stage in front of 25,000 people was about the most impossible thing that I could think of.
And so when we meet somebody who we refer to as the mission-driven messenger, we know what it feels like to go, "I have this calling inside of me that I feel like I'm supposed to share with the world, but yet I'm frustrated because I don't know how to get it out and I'm not sure exactly what it is. And even if I can get it out, I'm not sure how to get more people to hear about it and how do I make enough money to do it as an actual job?" So for you listening, the question is going or just knowing that you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. What have you actually done? That is where you are going to have the most natural traction; is helping somebody else do what you have done.
[TYLER]: It really separates this again, in this context of listening to a few of these interviews together, is it separates this idea of, I should just do what I'm passionate about. Because as you just, what I heard just from you it was like, you can be passionate about it, but if you haven't gone through that walk, if you haven't had that crucible experience to help you go through and understand how can I use that to help serve others? How can I use those skills, those experiences I've gone through to serve others, this uniqueness that you talk about? Well, then you're passionate about it all day long, but if it is not your purpose, if it's not the problem you solve, that's where people get misaligned. And all of a sudden to me, it gets really clunky because it separates this idea of passion from purpose to where they are mutually exclusive, and you can have passion in the way that you serve people, but yet it's not always synergistic.
[RORY]: Well, yes. I mean, I think a passion is a part of the calculation and passion is actually one of the six questions in the Brand DNA Helix. The first question is what are all the problems I could solve for someone, where you make a list of all the things you could solve for somebody? The second question is, what am I passionate about? That's a part of the calculation because that's like, "I could teach people how to do spreadsheets. I'm really good with spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets, but I don't love teaching people how to do spreadsheets. In fact, I don't have a lot of patience for it." So, it passes the problem question, but it doesn't pass the passion question. Now when you talk about purpose, purpose to me is an interesting conversation because what we do is we help people find their uniqueness, which is kind of like what we think is, you know this is kind of like who you are. That is what makes you so different from everybody else.
Purpose in terms of how do I use my life is interesting. And I think many people are sort of searching for their purpose as if there is something out there that they've yet to discover that they're trying to find. And when you think of it that way you are searching for something or trying to achieve something. And what my working hypothesis is right now is that purpose is realized through helping others. In other words, I think people ask the wrong question. I don't think the question is what is my purpose? I think the question is, how can I help? If I'm searching for my purpose, it's like, "I should meditate. I should go on a yoga retreat. I need to go manifest. I need to pray." It's like, I'm waiting for something to come to me or I'm waiting to achieve something or to find something or discover something that will never come.
That kind of question, what is my purpose is self-centered in its nature. To me, purpose is never self-centered in nature. It is service centered in nature. My purpose is as I help someone, I feel more purposeful. I feel like my life has meaning. I feel like I have joy. I feel like I have satisfaction. And so it's like, instead of going, "What's my purpose? What's my purpose? What's my purpose," it's going, "How can I help? How can I be useful?" Who can I serve?" As you do that, the only answer is, I mean, typically the best answer is, "Well, I can help people who are trying to do what I have done, because that's what I know something about." And in that you're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. In that, because I've been down that journey, I helped them to achieve and my life is filled with fulfillment and joy and deep satisfaction, what you might call purpose. Not because I found something that I was looking for externally for myself, but because I utilized my life in the service of another person, which gives me the pay offs that I seek when I'm actually saying, "What is my purpose?"
[TYLER]: That was good.
[RORY]: This is what we're just talking about here. I know, this is, if I were going to do a TED talk tomorrow, like this is going to be, this is the next book that I'm working on right now, by the way. So we don't, we haven't actually, this is pretty early stuff that you're hearing right here.
[TYLER]: Okay. So let me bring everyone into this conversation and you don't even know this Rory. So, and just, this is a little bit behind the scenes, but it's great because, what you just said is exactly what's been going through my mind when I read Paula's book Called Out, because it was just about that exact thing. I'd read the book, the Purpose Factor, and I just, if the audience is listening, you just heard last week, myself talking to Brian and Rory, you and I haven't talked about this, but in Brian's book, and he talked about in that podcast, the two questions that he and his wife wrote is what is purpose and answers these two questions, who am I, and who can I help? And so that's exactly what you just said. And so as I look at this, and we're going back to the questions in the Brand DNA Helix, that those six questions, and as I've gone through that, and when read these two books, and I was like, yes, all of this makes sense because of the journey that I walked through with brand builders to understand just what problem did I solve?
Like, what purpose did I have? Why did I have the experiences that I've had? You know, you have in some of your books and some of your different podcasts, where you've talked about growing up essentially without a father, having this stepfather step into you, which I can only imagine solidified that martial arts experience, because that's where that relationship came into your life. And you're like, "Okay, I understand this journey process." And as I understood, you know going through the trauma of losing a brother when I was 14 in a tragic accident, it's like, but how does all that play in? And again, that experience to be able to push through it, to not allow that to overwhelm me is part of the journey of walkthrough and as a leader to have to take off the armor of, "I'm protecting myself," and allow my insecurities to show and develop empathy, which is, as I learned the problem, I solved all of those experiences as you talked about our uniqueness and helping serve people and the problem you solve. And that's where, you know as all of this in my world has come together, it's like, "I get this."
[RORY]: Yes. When you realize that your purpose exists in the context of your relation with your relationship to other people, not in isolation, just among yourself. And so when we say we help people find their uniqueness we help them figure that out and then we help them turn that into their message and create a business model around it and create a marketing plan around it. And it becomes like this uncopyable difference because nobody else can do what you do because they haven't walked the same exact path that you have. They can kind of talk about the same topic and things, but they can't do it the way that you can do it because they haven't walked your path, which is beautiful. That's like the power of human life; is that every life is its own story.
We're each uniquely equipped and uniquely designed to be able to serve some other certain section of people. The world that we live in with digital media and social media and automation makes it more possible than ever before to take that and make it into a livable wage and in many cases an extraordinary wage where you're like, "I mean, I can't believe that this is my life. I can't believe I get paid as much as I do to do the things I would do them for free." I mean, it's like, if someone would've just told me when I was 17, "I'll pay all your bills for the rest of your life and you can just do this," I would have taken the deal. So, and it's not the money. Like we say a Brand Builders Group, we serve mission-driven messengers.
We like money. Like we have no, we love money. Like, we're happy with money, but the mission is first. It is mission over money. And it is going, there's no amount of money that will fill that hole of you feeling like your life doesn't matter, but helping only one person will fill that hole. Like helping just one individual person experience something that they would not have experienced in the absence of you, there's nothing like the feeling you get from doing that. It's a spiritual connectivity, I think among us. And it's wild because it's accessible to everyone. And, but we're searching in all these places, like we don't have something without realizing the person right in front of me or the person right next door to me in the moment I help them, my purpose is realized and the feelings that I've been seeking my whole life are immediately available.
[TYLER]: If you contextualize it that way, you're serving an audience of one. Every time you serve an audience of one, that fulfillment occurs. If you create it to where you try to say, there needs to be a scalable, there needs to be a number. I have to serve a thousand. I have to serve a million. I have to serve a billion before my purpose is realized. I believe you're always going to be wanting just as much as I don't have value in the world until I make a hundred thousand, a million, a billion dollars. It is coming back to that. Every one is important that I think is so important as a leader and as a person, because then all of a sudden, you cut out some of that comparative noise.
[RORY]: Definitely. And that's the reason why people fail on social media is because of that. I mean, social media is like the currency of the day. It's like we used to compare money and now we compare followers and likes and all that stuff. And so what happens is it's like, oh, you know people will start on this journey to like build their personal brand and they go, "I want to impact lives." And then they'll post a YouTube video and it'll get seven views. And their immediate thought, they'll do it for two months and then they'll, they'll have like 25 views and their immediate thought is, "This is a waste of time." And they quickly overlooked there are 25 people that watch this thing. So if the mission you actually set on was to impact lives, you're actually doing it immediately.
The only reason you're stopping is not because you're achieving your purpose, you're stopping because you feel like it's not succeeding compared to the context of somebody else. And what is also really wild about that is I think it's, I find it funny how people are like, somebody will be upset because it's like, "Oh, I've been following the brand builder system for six weeks and I don't, it's not working. I don't have a million followers." And it's just a shame because for most of us, if we see 70 views on a video, in the context of looking at a Jay Shetty video that has 7 million views, we go, "Well, I suck. Like I'm not good at this. I can't do this. God must not want me for this. The universe is working against, the universe is telling me like...," whatever we would say, because only 70 people watch my video. And yet, if you were standing in front of a room with 70 people out there in front of you, most of us would be sweating. Like we would be sweating profusely. We would be so excited about, or just nervous or anxious about like, "There's 70 people I'm about to speak to." And some of the average person has like 365 Facebook friends. Most of us, if we stood on stage right now in front of 365 people, we've can be pretty amped up about that. And so we actually are in a very literal way, making a great impact, but because it's through the virtual medium and because there's the transparency of comparison that is available, we discount it.
And you just can't, you can never undervalue the significance of impacting one life. And yet we do it all the time and that is why most personal brands fail. They go, "I've got seven views. I've got, I've been doing this for five months. I got a hundred subscribers. Like this isn't working." And the reality is, it's just, you have to do the right thing for the long-term. And it's a snowball and it takes awhile. It takes a while. Everything does. If you're really about impacting lives, you are one button away. Like you can literally go live and impact people globally in the push of a button. You have the ability to fulfill your purpose in an instant. Why aren't you doing it?
[TYLER]: How much do you feel like speaking that message right there as part of your purpose and calling?
[RORY]: I mean, I guess a huge part, because apparently it's what a lot of people are struggling with ---
Is that something you've gone through yourself?
Yes. Freaking yes. Every day, every freaking day. I mean, look at, it's amazing because you're like, "If you look at our clients," you know we got billionaire clients, we have bunch of New York Times bestselling authors, we have people who have hundreds of millions of podcast downloads. I mean, one of the time magazine people of the year, the wealthiest people on the Forbes list. I mean, these are the people that are our clients. They hire us. And so it's like we're in a world constantly of like the biggest in the world. So like, no matter how successful we are, we can never feel like, you know relatively speaking, it's like, well you can't help but feel small sometimes. And it just doesn't matter. And this is the other thing about the whole imposter syndrome.
You know, like coming back to the furnace, let's go to your furnace example. Because what a lot of us do when it comes to our purpose and our personal brand specifically is we think, "You know what, if I'm not the number one furnace seller in the world, then my life isn't valuable or I'm not successful. Like why would I do it? I can't be the number one furnace seller in the world." So we kind of think the same thing. It's like, "Well, why would I talk about leadership? Like John Maxwell already talks about leadership and going well, I'm pretty far away from that. So why would I do that? Who's going to listen to me right when they could listen to John Maxwell?" Except when my furnace breaks, I'm not looking for the number one furnace seller in the world. I don't need the world's greatest, most knowledgeable furnace person. I need someone who knows enough about furnaces to come and fix mine, who is close enough to me, that I can find them, who can actually be there when I need them.
t has nothing to do with that furnace seller compared to all the other furnace sellers. The context of the purchasing decision is that furnace seller related to me. So I'm not going to go through a seven month analysis of which furnace seller is the best one. There'll be a quick analysis of like, "Okay, does this person look like they know what they're doing?" But it's not like, "Ooh, their logo looks a little better than the other person's logo." It's like, there's a certain threshold, but that's what we do all the time with our personal brand. It's like, "Well, I'm not John Maxwell. So I can't talk about leadership. I'm not Dave Ramsey, so I can't talk about money." People don't even know. I mean, Dave Ramsey is huge, huge, and 7.8 billion of the people on this planet will never even know who he, will never hear his name one time. And he's reaching 15 million people on the radio every week. And they got a thousand employees and there's this monster nine figure business and they're changing lives. And most people will never, ever, ever even know who he is. And the person who is struggling with debt, they don't care if it's Dave Ramsey helping them, or it's you. They only care about the fact that they have debt and they need help getting out of debt.
So if you can help them with that, then they'll buy from you. They don't have to buy. Like, there's this over fascination with just being the best and what we need to be more fascinated with is being useful. Like we don't have to be the best in order to solve the problem. We don't have to be the best in order to be useful. We don't have to be number one in order to live our purpose. Our purpose comes from serving the person who needs our help. And it's not about comparing ourselves to other people who do what we do. It's about being available for the people who need what we have.
[TYLER]: It's being you, right?
[RORY]: Yes, it's being who you were designed to be. It's being whatever path God laid in front of you or whatever you want to call it. I call it God, I'm a Jesus freak, but like, whatever you call it. It is the purpose of your life, the divine reason for your creation, which makes sense. It makes sense that I'm not just here for me. Like what a trivial waste of space that would be. It makes sense that it's like the value of my life is multiplied in so much as my ability to make a positive impact on other people. And also like, money is pretty useless. Like if the value, if the purpose of my life is to accumulate a lot of money, like literally what impact does it make in the world? Like, it's a number in an account when I die, versus how many people have I been able to help. Now, to the extent that money enables that, that's a really great thing, right? We don't think money is bad at all. Money is a very, very valuable tool, but it's not the thing that gives your life purpose and meaning and significance.
[TYLER]: Money is more powerful if I've learned in it. And this idea of generosity is when it's going and doing other things. And you're that river to allow that to happen. It's towed. It's always magnified by giving and not just having it on a balance sheet. That's something that I've so thankfully learned and it's something that Kelly and I really embrace. It's like, "Hey, what are our giving goals?" And I know John Maxwell has talked about that and others have talked about that; is when you get past a certain point of personal needs, the more that you can embrace, even if as part of that embracement is generosity, you know talk to John Ruhlin, gone through all of that, and it's so empowering. But it comes back to when you identify that as part of your purpose and you, how can I help? What can I do?
[RORY]: If you're clear on what can you help people with, what are you best positioned to help people with, that's going to be extremely powerful. It's going to make a lot of impact. You're going to grow your influence. You're going to build an audience. You're going to have a lot of like influence in the world and there's a good chance that will turn into money. As you are clear about what I can help people with, that's the first step. That is how you'll break through the noise. And that's, so the Brand DNA Helix is our framework for walking people through that and taking them through this inventory to go, "Okay, what is that?" And you know, by the way, since you mentioned that talking with us, if anyone's listening and they want to talk to us, if you go to freebrandcall.com/tylerdickerhoof, freebrandcall.com/tylerdickerhoof, you can actually request a call.
You can request a free call with our team. So like, if you do feel this calling more formally, I guess, like, do you feel this desire to like express yourself more formally and you want to know, like, what's the big picture and how does that happen? What are the sequences? Go there, freebrandcall.com/tylerdickerhoof and then we'll pair you up with someone they'll talk to you. But the context of purpose is the same. It's like you don't have to have the desire to build a personal brand in order to apply this through the lens of purpose and is just going, "I will experience more purpose in my life as I become more useful to other people."
[TYLER]: Well, and there's that fulfillment, there is accomplishing more, because that's really what influence is. As John has said, leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. Well, how you influence people is understanding what problem you solve and your purpose, and being comfortable with that and not comparing to others, because as you said that hey, if I'm here in Spokane, Washington, and they, the best seller of furnaces in the world is in Nashville and they're your service provider, and I need a furnace, that's not going to do me any good. But yet, if you take that out of context of location, because the world is getting smaller, well, you'd be uniquely connected with people, but it goes back to that experience channel and how can people relate differently and saying, "Okay, that's what I need now." And it comes back to this of what uniqueness do you have.
And that's what I so valued in the process of working with brand builders, this discovering that to where I wasn't falling into that comparison. I wasn't ashamed of who I was. I wasn't afraid of why my unique experiences were weird, but instead that gave me tremendous context to be able to really have conversations with a lot of different people and understand a lot more towards this understanding insecurity and in developing empathy and being a better leader, because it wasn't about me. It was about helping other people find their purpose to do what they were great at. And if we're all going in the same mission, the same direction, we've accomplished a lot, if we're going different directions to releasing people of that. And I think that's really important that I've learned as a leader is when you hold people captive to serve you, you're not serving them. And you're just holding them captive. If you say, "Hey, we're going this way and I invite you in. If your purpose fits it and your skills fit it, great. We're going to accomplish some amazing things." And if it's a different Avenue, if it's going and working with Rory brand builders, go do it and do the best you can, because that's where I know you will have the most fulfillment. Your purpose will be lived out.
[RORY]: Well, I appreciate that brother. And amen and thank you for having me just keep doing what you're doing, man. And you're pouring into lives and I'm honored that you gave me a chance to kind of be here. This has been fun.
[TYLER]: Dude. This has been amazing. Again, thank you, Rory. We'll get everything in the show notes for you guys that Rory had mentioned, lots of details, how you can see his books, his YouTube, TEDx, all of those things. Dude, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate what you've done in my life and the opportunity to have this relationship continue to be sharpened.
[RORY]: Thanks brother.
[TYLER]: All right. Thank you so much again for listening. I'm glad you're here. My hope is that you'll go check out freebrandcall.com/tylerdickerhoof. It'll be down in the show notes. Lord knows. That's a lot to try to remember and try to take in. I know this, you're going to learn something just by going there. I know they're going to have questions that are going to make you think. When I sat down and thought with them, it was probably one of the most revolutionary times that I spent learning about me, how I was able to better show up as a parent, how I was able to better show up as a husband and really try to lead people in a much more authentic, honest way, because I understood what problem I was here to solve. I dealt with a lot of insecurity growing up and it created masks and barriers that really I needed to learn how to be truly empathetic.
And that's what I'm here to show up to tell you guys and to share with you guys how I'm doing and people like Rory and some of the books that I've read, how impactful that has been in my life to be able to better serve. And as he mentioned when we go through the stuff we go through, that's what positions us to be able to help people. It's finding that uniqueness and exploiting it in the service of others. And I'm trying to figure that out. That's why I have this podcast and I'm glad you're listening in. I surely would love it if you'd be able to share it with someone else, if they could get value out of this. Go rate and review the podcast wherever you listen to it so that way more people can possibly find it. And again, till next time, thank you for listening in. We'll catch you back here again.
