How To Turn Your PASSION Into A 7-Figure Income Stream | Rory Vaden

0:00Multiple streams of income is the dumbest piece of advice on the internet today. Nobody who got rich got rich through multiple streams of income. Nobody. The way you get rich is by doing one thing extremely well over and over and over. And you master it and you dominate it and you crush it and you make money. It's Rory Vaden, a New York Times bestselling author. He's an eight figure entrepreneur, Hall of Fame speakers, TED Talks have millions and millions of views. worked with some of the top names when we think about the concept of personal branding. Your personal brand is not just colors and fonts and logos.

0:40The way that we defined it is very different. It's the digitization of your reputation. Everybody thinks the key to making millions is like, I got to reach millions of people. No, you don't. The fastest way to succeed in business is to change the lives of the people who are right in front of you. I'm going to give you the greatest secret that we found for how to do this. And you don't want to miss this because this is everything we do boiled down into one secret. What's up, Los Angeles?

1:14Woo! I'm so excited to be here. I loved being in Columbus and Ohio. It's great to be in LAX, although I did figure out it's faster to fly to Ohio than to drive across town in LA traffic. Have you had a great day? Epic day. Who loved Joe Dispenza? I mean, we got to see Joe Dispenza. We got to see Rachel. We got to see Cody. We got to see Louis with his shirt off. Come on. And we're going to have a great time. You know, one of the questions people always ask me whenever I speak at large events like this, you know, the balcony and all these people, they say, hey, do you ever get nervous when you speak in public, like to the big rooms?

1:54and I actually used to get nervous, but then I found this research study that was done by Harvard that found they studied all these different audiences, and they found that actually only 11 % of the audience retains any of the information the speaker says. We're going to talk about how to build an influential personal brand, and this has been one of the great honors in my career is to be a personal brand strategist to Lewis Howes, one of the greatest voices in our generation. Getting to be a part of Lewis and his team and work with Matt and just have a small piece of being behind the scenes, crafting what they're doing, it's just been so inspiring.

2:33And being with you, I know that you all don't see me, but Lewis and the whole team, they work so hard for you. They care so deeply about you. And I know that you care about living your dreams and also just making the world a better place. And I just, I'm so ecstatic and honored to be here. and I know that what's your experience these two days is going to be life-changing. Now, my role is going to be somewhat tactical because I'm going to talk about what we do at Brand Builders Group, and we have worked with several of the biggest personal brands in the world. In fact, Ed Milet. Any Ed Milet fans out there?

3:11So, Ed Milet is a client of ours. You know, Jim Quick, Trent Shelton, Amy Porterfield, Jasmine Starr, Eric Thomas, the hip-hop preacher, all private clients that I've had the fortune and the blessing of getting a chance to work with to help them sort of craft some of the things going on with their personal brand. And so what we're going to talk about is what really is a personal brand according to data, okay? Not just according to opinion, but according to data. And Cody just talked about how there's such a big opportunity with starting a business and owning a business. And I think the greatest opportunity for owning a business right now is building a personal brand.

3:54I just think it's extraordinary. So we'll talk about that. Then we're going to talk about why personal brands fail, and then how to separate yourself from the crowd. Because there's a lot of people online, and it's like, well, how do you then break through the noise. And those are all the things. But I want to start off by talking through exactly what is a personal brand. And really, a simple way to think about a brand in general is what do people think of when they think of you? Right? That's really what it is. What do people think of when they think of you? And that's a really important thing.

4:29Now, you don't get to control that. You only actually get to influence it. So there's a lot of things that we can do, And there's a lot of strategies that our team does when we work with personal brands to help them sort of craft a narrative that encourages the world to respond to them in a certain way. But ultimately, you don't really control your brand. In fact, the classic definition that we offer about personal branding is very different from how most people think of it. Because when most people hear personal branding, they think that we're like an agency, like a marketing agency, that we do like maybe like logos and fonts.

5:02We don't do any of that. We're a personal brand strategy firm. So the way that we think of it is that your personal brand is not just colors and fonts and logos and websites and emails. That's what people all think of like social media and podcasts. But the way that we define it is very different. It's simply the digitization of your reputation. That's what personal branding really is, the digitization of your reputation. So it's not even really a new concept. It's really an old concept that is just being modernized through the platforms and the outlets that are available to us today. What is it that people think of when they think of you?

5:45Now, one of the things that we did is you will come to find the more that you know and follow me and stuff. I am basically just a nerd with a microphone. And I really love data, and we really love strategy. And we actually went out and we conducted the world's first national research study to understand what the data is about personal branding. And so we hired a company. We had a PhD-led study that is weighted to the U.S. census that is statistically valid, right? And it's to understand the dynamics of personal branding, to really understand, is this important? And if it's important, why is it important?

6:25And one of the things that we found that is fascinating is that almost three-fourths of Americans, 74 % of Americans say they are more likely to trust someone who has an established personal brand. They're more likely to trust you. And so we thought, oh, well, maybe this is just like, you know, what parts of the business does this affect? Like, is this really just about vanity and going viral and TikTok and followers and sort of celebrity? Well, no. What we found is that Americans say, this is the general population, it says that they are willing, 63 % of Americans say they are willing, more willing to buy from someone who has an established personal brand.

7:0957 % say they're willing to recommend you. 55 % say they're more willing to do business with you. My favorite one on here is that 29 % of Americans say they're more likely to date you just because you have an established personal brand.

7:26Right? Like, that is fascinating. Fascinating. So I thought, well, yeah, I guess that maybe that's true. It's probably just for the young generation, though. This can't really be like, you know, maybe if you're a YouTuber, or, you know, maybe if you're a podcaster, I'm sure this really matters. But we said, but surely this doesn't affect like, you know, like real jobs and like real business, right? So we actually asked that question. And we took some of the most common professional services, and we asked, how important is it that these people that you do business with have a personal brand. And the results are shocking.

8:0761 % of Americans said they want their doctor to have a personal brand. Americans say they want their lawyers to have an impersonal brand, their employers. And then at first it was shocking. It was like, wow, that's fascinating. But if someone's going to do surgery on you and cut you open, you kind of want to know who they are, right? Like it matters to you a bit what their pedigree is and what they've done and how much experience they have and maybe where they went to school or whatever. And so then the epiphany happened, which is very, very simple. The higher the requirement for trust, the more important having an established personal brand becomes.

8:51So then the question is, how important is it that people trust you? How much does it matter in your business, whatever business you're involved with that they actually trust you. And if your business has anything to do with people giving you money, then it's probably pretty important. Now, we invested over$100 ,000 into this research study when all was said and done to produce, to conduct it, field it, you know, analyze the data, produce the reports. And we are giving away the entire national research study. If you want it, there's a lot more data than we're going to have time to get into, but I'm going to give it to you for free.

9:29If you want it, just hit this QR code. It'll take you to my Instagram profile, and just DM or comment the word greatness, and then I will send you through the DMs, I will send you the full study. So you can either go on the QR code or just go to Instagram, and then just leave a comment or DM me greatness, and we'll send you the full study. But that is, according to data, that is what a personal brand is and why it matters. It's not just something for online influencers. It is becoming so pervasive, it is affecting the very structure of how we think and operate and do business and who we choose to do life with.

10:12It's pervasive. It's ubiquitous. So then that brings us to why do most personal brands fail? And this is a really important question because as this becomes more and more essential to our daily professional lives, we need to understand why do most personal brands fail. And the reason is because building a personal brand the right way is simple, but it's not easy. In fact, here's what I want everybody to do for a second. Just stand up, if you will, just for one second. Go ahead and stand up. Everybody, just stand up. We're going to do a really quick exercise, and don't worry, I'm not going to make you touch anybody or do anything weird.

10:56Okay? All I want you to do, all I want you to do is everybody turn and face the person to your left, the person on your left. Great. Okay, well done. Now turn back and face the person on your right. Everybody look at the person on your right. Okay, great. Now this is the tricky part, and here's where the choice comes in. What I want you to do is to think very hard and then turn back and face the better looking of the two.

11:34Once you've made up your mind, you can sit down. I love that. I love that. I love it because it's so incredibly awkward. I mean, like some of you are sitting next to your spouse, so you feel kind of obligated, right? Half of you were looking at me. Thank you very much. But that exercise demonstrates a very important part of what I'm talking about, that simple is not easy, right? Left and right is a simple choice, but once you change the context of that choice, it becomes difficult. The things I'm going to teach you are very simple to learn, theoretically, but they're very difficult to execute upon.

12:19And the number one greatest mistake that almost all personal brands make, and the number one reason why personal brands fail, can be demonstrated through a framework that we call Sheehan's Wall. Now, we named this after a colleague of mine named Peter Sheehan. He was the one who taught me the original kind of concept, but it was in corporate, and then we adapted it to personal brands, and we named it after him. He didn't name it after himself. But this shows very much what the challenge is, because in any given market or vertical or industry or, you know, new business area, there's two different groups of people.

12:58There are those who are unknown. They are living in obscurity. They're unclear, untrusted, and unknown, which is the mass population. And then there are those on the other side of the wall who are well-known, right? These are the people who have notoriety. This is Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk and Brene Brown and Oprah and The Rock and people like that. Well, in between these two groups of people is this huge invisible wall that we call Sheehan's wall. And what most of us do is most of us who are on this side of the wall, we look at what the people on the other side of the wall are doing, and then we try to do and emulate what they do, right?

13:45So we go, well, Tony Robbins has lots of different topics, right? He talks about unleash the power within, and date with destiny, and he talks about money, and business mastery and health. And you go, oh, he's got lots of topics. And Gary Vaynerchuk talks about, you know, wine and sports and music and entertainment and social media and cryptocurrency. And so we look at those people and we go, well, I have a lot of topics too. I have a lot of things that I'm interested. So we talk about a lot of different topics. So we're talking about a lot of topics. And then what happens is we struggle to clarify an audience because we go, well, my friends from high school are following me, and grandma's following me, and my colleagues are following me, but then I'm also trying to start this new business, but I'm involved with this non-profit.

14:31And then some people from my Bible study are in here, and then my kids' parents, and we're trying to address all of these different audiences. And then, of course, we've got to be on all the different profiles, right? So we're trying to keep up with Twitter X, and Facebook Meta, and Snapchat, and Pinterest, and Instagram, and maybe podcast, and YouTube. And so we have all these profiles, and then every time you turn or not, man, every time you scroll online, there's somebody showing you a new way to get rich, a new business model. And they're like, man, if you want to get rich, courses are the answer.

14:59No, you should write, you should launch, you should launch a course, you should launch a mastermind. We should do live events. We should be a coaching company. We should do consulting. You should be a keynote speaker. You should write your own book. You should, you should do destination retreats. And it's just like, okay, all the multiple streams of income. And it's like, we're doing all of this. And then we're, but we're a small business, so we're doing all of the jobs and we have too many ideas, and what happens is you bounce off the wall. And the reason you bounce off of the wall, friends, is so incredibly simple.

15:30It's because when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. Period. When you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. It's hard when you're distracted. And by the way, this is, I struggle with this too, because like, you know, now I'm a parent, and so this is what my daily life looks like. Like, this is from my house. So, I'm sorry I'm late to respond to your text message. It's not that I'm busy working, and I'm not having fun. I'm dealing with this, people. Okay? So, the question becomes then, okay, if diluted focus creates diluted results, we don't want that. And trust me, you've tried it.

16:20right? You're living it now. Everybody who comes to us, this is what they're trying to do and balance all of these things, and they're bouncing off of the wall. And this is what happened, frankly, when Lewis came. The first time Lewis came and worked with me in 2018, and we've done many different sessions together, but Lewis had 17 streams of revenue. We wrote them out on a board, and he was talking about all the things he was doing because all of his friends were doing free plus shipping funnels, and they were doing, you know, all of these different things, and he had 17 revenue streams. He thought that was like a good thing because that's what we hear, right?

16:53Multiple streams of income. You want to get rich, you should have multiple streams of income. Let me let you in on a little piece, a little secret. Multiple streams of income is the dumbest piece of advice on the internet today. And there's a lot of dumb advice on the internet. But nobody who got rich, got rich through multiple streams of income. Nobody. The way you get rich is by doing one thing extremely well over and over and over, and you master it, and you dominate it, and you crush it, and you make money, and then you deploy that money, and then it multiplies. But that's not how you get rich.

17:34That's what you do once you're rich. So the question is, how do you break through the wall? And the single greatest piece of personal branding advice I've ever received came from a gentleman named Larry Wingate. And I wish this was my quote, but it's not. I heard this from this guy, Larry, and here's what Larry said. And the moment I heard this, I was like, that is so brilliant. That is exactly what you should do. Larry 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. And this is what we have replicated over and over again with our clients.

18:21You see, what we do is we take our clients through a process that helps them identify what is the one thing that they could potentially do better than anyone else in the world. And what we do is we focus, we go all in on that one thing, serve one audience, one topic, solve one problem, make money with one primary revenue stream. And if you think about it, think about this like a concrete wall. Y 'all, like if I had a sledgehammer and I'm swinging at a concrete wall and I'm hitting the wall all over the place, nothing is going to happen to that wall. I'm just going to get tired and frustrated. But imagine this, if I hit the same spot on that wall over and over and over and over, at first it'll be frustrating just the same, but then the paint will chip.

19:09Then there will be a crack. Then there will be a divot. Then there will carve out a little spot, and you hit it again and again and again. And eventually you will crack through that wall. And then once you crack through the wall, you can reach through and pull the entire wall down. And once you are on the other side, then you can expand into lots of other things. then you can do the thing. Like, yes, you know, The Rock has a tequila line and a clothing line, and now he's got facial stuff and like all these different, and he's an actor and he's a comedian, but in the beginning, he was a wrestler, right?

19:48Like, he got famous from professional wrestling. Yes, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about a million things on a million platforms, but in the beginning, in the beginning, how did he get there? He talked about one topic. What was it? Wine on one platform. YouTube. Gary Vaynerchuk broke through the wall talking about wine on YouTube. And so we have to figure out for you, what is your one thing? Specifically, the genesis of building an influential worldwide personal brand comes from answering this one simple question with one word. Most personal brands fail because they can't even get this first step right, which is answering the question, what problem do you solve in one word?

20:44One word. That's important because people buy solutions to problems. That's what we spend money on. We think of, a lot of times we talk about money like, you know, private jets and buying houses and cars, but the reality is what people spend money on is to solve problems, right? Like, you may not have money, but if your tire gets, if you get a flat tire, you find the money. Your water heater breaks, you find the money. Your kid gets sick, you find the money. People always have money to solve problems. They sometimes have money to buy luxuries, but they always have money to solve problems. And look at some of these examples, right?

21:17Now, these are not clients of ours. Brene Brown is such a great example of this. She has become one of the most influential people in the world, in the world, not just as an author or a speaker, in the world. And Brene Brown never set out to be famous. She never set out to, like, be an online marketer. She dedicated her life to studying the problem of shame. Brene Brown is the world's leading expert on shame. She was a researcher. That's what she studied. Dave Ramsey, personal friend of mine, lives in Nashville. Dave Ramsey has 1 ,000 employees. It is a multi-nine-figure business a year in annual revenue.

22:00He reaches 17 million people every week on the radio by saying the same thing over and over and over again that he's been saying every day for three hours for 30 years, debt is dumb, cash is king, follow my seven baby step formula. Three hundreds of millions of dollars. Dave Ramsey owns the problem of debt. You can't talk about debt and not talk about Dave Ramsey. Someone will mention him. He owns it. Tony Robbins dedicated his life to helping people be free from pain. That's what he does. When we worked with Lewis all the way back in 2018, we helped Lewis get clear on one thing, that he was going to talk about overcoming self-doubt.

22:46That his interviews would be different because he would ask people about how they got through self-doubt. He would share his personal story about how he overcame self-doubt. He'd build a community for people who were trying to move past self-doubt so they could achieve greatness. And it's not just in business. Mother Teresa dedicated her life to ridding the world of poverty. Martin Luther King Jr. literally gave his life to rid the world of inequality. What would you give your life for? Now, for me, this was how I broke through the wall originally. Most people don't know me for this now, but I started my career when in my early 20s, I studied the psychology of procrastination.

23:28That was all I studied. I was one of the world's leading authorities on the psychology of overcoming procrastination. And I invented these two new terms, creative avoidance and priority dilution. In 2022, Lewis actually had me do my Take the Stairs talk at the summit. Some of you may have been there. That was the talk that I built my career on. Because the Take the Stairs book became a New York Times bestseller when I was that was how I met Lewis. And then I had a TED Talk that went viral that was all about how to overcome priority dilution. Well, that's who I was. That was my original personal brand.

24:03But then we sold that company and we actually had a non-compete. I had to pivot. Part of what we did was we sold all of my social media, all of my email list, our team. It was all gone. And so then we started over in 2018 and Brand Builders Group, we figured out that the problem we were going to tackle was obscurity. We were going to tackle obscurity. We were going to teach people who were living in obscurity, who felt called to reach more people, how to become more wealthy and well-known. And in five years, we went from zero, we started back over on zero, and we went to eight figures. We hit the Inc.

24:385000 list twice, and more importantly, we started working with the biggest personal brands in the world, became clients of ours, because we were the leading authority on one specific problem. And so the question for you is, what problem do you solve in one word? We have to know that answer because you have to sell the problem as much as you sell the solution. If you want to make money, you have to become an ambassador of the problem. You have to promote the problem. You have to celebrate the problem. You have to raise awareness for the problem, and by virtue of doing that, you will become the natural, automatic, assumed, go-to source for the solution.

25:24We have 12 different two-day experiences that we take clients through. We don't have 24 days right now for me to take you through all of that. So what I'm going to do is I know some of you go, well, Rory, is there a secret? Is there a shortcut? Like, how could I find my uniqueness? and I would love to help you do that. That is something that we do help people do. But I'm gonna give you the secret right now, the greatest secret that we found for how to do this. And we discovered this once we started training strategists. So we have about 45 employees now and we have a couple dozen strategists who are just talking with clients all day, every day, helping them figure this out and then turn it into a business and turn it into like revenue generating income.

26:06Well, what we started to discover was a pattern. We started to notice a consistent trend, something that happened over and over. After we'd done hundreds of them, it was like, there's definitely something similar with each person, even though everyone has their own uniqueness, there is this pattern. And I can tell you what it is in one sentence. And you don't want to miss this, because this is everything we do boiled down into one secret. it. One sentence, we figured out that for all of us, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.