SPI 884: Personal Branding is More Important than Ever with Rory Vaden

SPI 884: Personal Branding is More Important than Ever with Rory Vaden

Pat Flynn: What if the key to your entrepreneurial success lies not in what you know, but in how well you tell your story? Welcome to episode 884 of the SPI podcast, and today we are joined by Rory Vaden, a New York Times bestselling author, an expert in personal branding to explore this very idea. And I can vouch for Rory because he and I recently worked together and he’s a major reason why my book Lean Learning, which just came out, did so well and became a New York Times bestseller itself. So thank you to Rory.

Now, in a world where information is abundant, Rory believes that humanness is the new uniqueness, and I love that. We’ll dive into how your personal experiences and your authenticity can set you apart in the current entrepreneurial landscape.

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your brand, this episode is packed with insights on leveraging your story to create meaningful connections and drive personal success. So join Roy and I as we uncover the art of storytelling and its power to transform your business. Get ready to be inspired and be equipped with actionable strategies to elevate your brand.

Let’s dive in.

Rory, welcome back to SPI, my friend. Thank you so much for being here.

Rory Vaden: Buddy. It’s so good to be back. And now you are a New York Times bestselling author. Hey, which makes me so happy. Yes, yes. Proud of you, brother.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, man. You had a lot to do with that. Your guidance and your wisdom, especially with what you and your crew have done for me, have been huge.

So I, I definitely wanna publicly say thank you for that. And also congratulations to you because your recent book has become a New York Times bestseller, wealthy and well-known with yourself and your wife. And congratulations to both of you on that.

Rory Vaden: Thank you, buddy. Yeah. I mean, you are the epitome of a, a mission driven messenger, an entrepreneur who wants to make the world a better place.

And you know, so that’s who we live to serve. And we want to help those people who actually care about making a difference in the world to become more wealthy and more well known, right? Not for them, but just because of the impact they can make in the world. And it’s fun to see how all of that is emerging and evolving in a world of AI and in a world where, you know, theoretically you can write a book in a few minutes and like, how does that changed the landscape of things. So it’s fascinating, but we love it.

Pat Flynn: I have a number of questions. My first one is, what is it like to write a book with your wife?

Rory Vaden: Yeah, you know, it’s funny, that’s probably like one of the most popular questions we’ve started getting now. Like Oh really? Is, yeah. Well it’s just ’cause it’s like wow. ’cause you know, now AJ and I have been business partners since 2006. So we actually met as business partners. So we had a, a mutual friend I met in college, he grew up with AJ.

And so when we started our first company, the three of us started together with one other gentleman, and then it was a year later, AJ and I started dating, and then a couple years after that we got engaged and then we got married in 2010 and then we exited from that company in 2018 and that’s when we started Brand Builders Group.

And so our entire career is almost 20 years we’ve been working together. But the truth is we we compliment each other really well. And for the most part, we divide and conquer is really how we operate. You know, like at Brand Builders Group, she’s the CEO. I operate very much like a CMO. Even though we’re 50 50, you know, co-founders in the business.

And so I didn’t know how it was gonna go writing a book because it’s a very intimate process, but it was phenomenal. Almost all of the reviews that we’ve gotten have been about her stories. ’cause this is my third major published book, second New York Times bestseller. I’ve written a kid’s book. I had another self-published book, but this was her first book ever.

And so the world is really meeting her for the first time. And everybody cries in chapter three when they hear her family story. I mean, it is. It’s the most miraculous story, and it was powerful and so exciting for me to go through the journey with her. As a first time author, I posted a video on Instagram.

The moment I found out that we hit New York Times. When I went and told her, I recorded it and posted it and it was super special. But she’s a phenomenal writer. I mean, and you know, she is really the CEO around here. She runs the business and we’ve been business partners with everything and I’ve just been more front facing.

So it’s really cool to have the world get to see her and hear her story and yeah, pretty much everybody says her chapters are the best, so that’s humbling, humbling as well.

Pat Flynn: We’ll have to get her on the show here at some point. I’m sorry she wasn’t able to make it today, but the book is so awesome and it’s helping a lot of people already.

New York Times bestseller and you had mentioned AI just a second ago and people churning out books. I, I met somebody the other day who is coming out with a book a day. Publishing it on Amazon. My heart just sank because I put four years into Lean Learning and it wasn’t even like, oh, you get to do it so fast.

It’s just like, how could those books possibly be good when they’re just getting churned out in this world of AI? For you, as somebody who’s helped people like me and like our audience write books and become personal brands, what are your reactions to where we’re at with how easy it is to create books and where is your head at with books and personal brands these days?

Rory Vaden: Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, right? I’d say my opinions and assessments are evolving as things take shape, but the single best piece of personal branding advice I ever received was from a gentleman named Larry Wingett, and he said, the goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others.

And that’s how we’ve built our curriculum, basically on top of that premise to help people find their uniqueness. And as I think forward into a world of AI and you go, yeah, you can crank out a book a day, you could crank out the hundreds of videos, hundreds of podcasts, you don’t even need to be there. I really think humanness is the new uniqueness, like humanness is the new uniqueness and to go, we already sort of live in a world of infobesity, right? Like so much information, like more than we could ever consume or take action on. And it’s like. Information doesn’t make us feel more connected. In many ways, we feel less connected according to data like than past generations.

And I think what it accelerates is, I think it accelerates people’s appetite for community, for authenticity, for realness, for all the things that make a great personal brand today. And in many ways it’s like. I’m not so worried at this point about being replaced by AI avatars. I mean, the YouTube decision that came out recently I thought was huge, where they said, you know, they’re not pushing the AI generated content.

And you go, why? Well, because to preserve the sanctity of what makes a creator a creator and what makes a creative place creative, it’s like it’s inherently connected to humanness. So I actually think as the world becomes more artificial there is more attraction from humans to other humans. So one of the things we did last year was we bought a building and the reason we bought a building was to host events.

And it’s not a huge building, but we do have an event space that holds like 55 people. And so the thought is going, we’re doing more events with smaller audiences, smaller communities at round tables where it’s like more than half of the event has nothing to do with me or AJ. It’s them sharing with each other and building relationships because I still believe that relationships are the irrefutable accelerant to success at the end of the day.

You know, you and I being buddies it would take me a couple decades to build an audience of like the size of what you’ve built here. But we become friends in real life and now all of a sudden we have a connection where I’m able to introduce you to our audience. You’re, you know, introducing me to yours, and that I don’t think will ever change.

I think that will only speed up. So I don’t know what the future holds, but. I maybe instinctively am leaning into early indicators that say humanness is the new uniqueness and it, and it’s really the old uniqueness, but it’s It’s being accelerated.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. It almost sounds like a book topic that you could write about because that is so true and a great way to phrase it.

And we have experienced this at SPI, it’s exactly why we shifted our business model in 2021 from standalone courses to now community powered courses, kind of bringing the people together virtually. In my Pokemon community, we just came back from Tampa where 5,500 Pokemon nerds came together from around the world to hang out and ’cause you hit the nail on the head.

People want those human experiences that guess what? AI will never replace and AI’s gonna get close, but you’re never gonna feel a soul between two people with an AI or a tool like that. And there’s a place for AI and there’s good things that can happen with it. It can accelerate the service that you can offer to others.

And that’s my argument for it. You can breeze through research and other things faster to get to the point of service faster for people. But when I heard my friend was pumping out books like that, I was just cringing a little bit. I was like, how is this making the world a better place? You’re just adding to the noise.

And he knew I just wrote Lean Learning, which is like against that and still told me that anyway. But I feel like all of this means personal branding you becoming a human and sharing the unique things about you that make you you is more important than ever. These days, you came on not too long ago and talked about what it takes to build a personal brand, and I’m gonna reference and, and relink that episode to this one because it’s so important.

But I, I feel like it’s even more important than it was back then. I’m guessing you feel the same.

Rory Vaden: Well, yeah, I mean if you just look at, okay, so wealthy and well-known, our new book, and by the way, if you’re okay with it, we’ll give it away for free to everybody at some point in the interview. So stay tuned for free.

Yeah, we’ll give away the audio book for free to anybody who wants it.

Pat Flynn: Dude, that’s amazing. Thank you.

Rory Vaden: So whenever you want to do that. But one of the things that we realized in our monetization strategy, which is one of the chapters, and that’s one of the things that we talk a lot about and we help a lot of people, right, with their monetization strategy, is that people don’t pay for information, they pay for application. We’re huge fans of ai. I think AI can accelerate people’s ability to apply what they’re learning, and I think that’s super powerful, right? We’re investing heavily right now in building bots that help people, right? Like we teach a concept. For example, one of the techniques is what we call the expert bio, and it is what exactly needs to be in your one paragraph description of yourself.

If you want people to hire you, you only have one paragraph to tell your whole story. You know, we’ve got basically a formula that we go, these are the things that should be included in that. Well, we created a bot called Biobot where you can just chit chat back and forth with this bot, and it has all of our knowledge, as you know.

It’s got a ChatGPT base or an AI base, and then our knowledge on top of it, and then one of our users can interact with it and then it’s like, boom, it spits out a bio that fits our criteria of what a great bio should be. And I think that is where I think thought leaders can use AI in a way to go. Yeah, you, you know, you can’t ask AI what an expert bio is according to Brand Builders Group ’cause that is our proprietary IP. So that is gated only inside of our own community, but it’s built on top of this sort of ChatGPT base. I think there’s a huge application for thought leaders and personal brands and entrepreneurs and experts building their own sort of bots to do those very specific tasks.

But as many different techniques are in wealthy and well known. Writing bios, figuring out what problem you solve in one word, identifying your audience, creating your monetization strategy, you know, creating content, marketing strategy, various things that we talk about. The thing that everybody is talking about is, AJ’s story about her family had a car accident. Her two brothers were pronounced dead on the scene, and they both miraculously survived and their family became the Miracle Networks like Family did a tour. This is a couple decades ago, but they’re talking about her story. They’re talking about the story in the book, about how I met Louis Howes and how Lewis became our first client and everything that we did.

And when Lewis and I started working together and like his podcast exploded, and that story of our connection, it’s the stories that are resonating the most with people, even though the book is chockfull of tactics and techniques. So it’s exactly what you’re saying is going in a world where every bit of information and data becomes available instantaneously at our fingertips. Stories, your story matters more than ever. And I’ve experienced this before, like, you know, I’ve been speaking for a lot of years. I started speaking when I was 17 and I have this story that I tell about, I was raised by a single mom and my mom happened to sell Mary Kay. So I grew up around women. Who were always teaching me about the principles of success, and they were also teaching me about makeup.

So I grew up learning an abnormal amount for a young man that to know about makeup. And so I tell this joke where I say, you know, ladies, every morning you wake up and you stand in front of the mirror and it goes wash toner, moisturizer, foundation wrinkle-free eye cream base eye shadow, dark eye shadow, blush, eyeliner, mascara, lip, lip liner, and lipstick, and I will tell that joke or story in a speech, and let’s say the, it’s about my first book, which was called Take the Stairs, which is about like the psychology of self-discipline. Somebody will recognize me occasionally. This does not happen a lot. Occasionally, on very, very rare occasions, someone will recognize me in an airport years later and they’ll go, huh?

I remember you, you are the Mary Kay boy.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Rory Vaden: And, and it’s like, they don’t, they don’t necessarily remember what any of the techniques that we taught, they might, but they def they remember the story and it is your story that makes you human. It is the story that moves people emotionally. And so being able to tell your story and realizing that.

Your story doesn’t have to be this grandiose story of I cut my arm off in the desert to survive, or I climb Mount Everest blind. Or I was the first fighter pilot to like, you know, whatever. It’s the natural human things that happen every day. You know, you and I have, you know, kids and we connect over those things.

And so I think more and more your story should come forward and your story is gonna be what connects people. And look, everything that we teach in personal branding is about automating trust at scale. Automate trust at scale. How do you automate trust? Well, some of it is with tools and techniques, but really it is connecting with people, letting them see who you really are and telling your story.

And so I think more and more entrepreneurs need to come to be in front of the camera. People need to see you. They want to know who you are, and you gotta share your story and your story matters, even if it doesn’t feel big.

Pat Flynn: How do you get better at telling your own story?

Rory Vaden: Great question. Okay. Well, let me just tell you, here’s a four part storytelling framework for you how to tell any story better. ’cause most stories suck and most storytellers tell crappy stories. So in any story, there’s really four main parts of a story.

Okay. The way that you wanna set this up is it starts with the scene, okay? The first part is the scene. And the scene is who is there, what is going on, you know, who, what, when, where. Okay. The scene, set the scene, and if you think of movies, the opening frame of a almost every movie sets the scene, right?

It’s the 1920s, and they’re showing people like partying or it’s out in the ocean and it’s showing water, it’s Armageddon, and it shows space. The scene is where the story starts. Now, the second part in telling a great story is the struggle, and the struggle is by far the most important part of telling a story.

In fact, one could argue that the struggle is the story. The struggle is really the only critical and necessary part. If you don’t have a struggle, you don’t have a story. And so a struggle is all about a gap, and it is a gap between what the main character wants to achieve and the reality that they’re currently living in, and usually there is an obstacle, a villain, whether that villain is a person or it’s some type of man versus nature, right?

I’m stranded somewhere, but there is a villain that is blocking them between where they are. Where they want to be. And that is all of storytelling. And this, this is rom-coms, right? It’s like, ooh, you know, man sees cute girl. And like there the story begins, he wants a cute girl. He goes to approach her, and the whole storytelling formula is sort of like two steps forward and one step back.

So the story has to show me progressing towards this thing that I want, but then being met with resistance. So, you know. Cute girl. I try to talk to her and I freeze up ’cause I’m so nervous. And then I go back and, you know, maybe she’s a barista at the coffee shop. And then, you know, I developed the courage to talk to her and oh crap, I, you know, she gets a phone call from her boyfriend and then it’s like, okay, well she winks at me and then she comes and brings my coffee and we have a five minute conversation.

Pat Flynn: Then, but then I embarrass myself.

Rory Vaden: ’cause I, then I embarrass myself. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s like, whether it’s a rom-com or it’s Star Wars, right? Or it’s Karate Kid, I’m progressing towards some goal and there’s something blocking me. So in your personal life, what’s the story? Simple. The story is the struggle.

What is the struggle you have been through right here on the cover? So here on the, this is the physical copy of the book. We had this inscribed, it’s a little Easter egg. It says you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. That is like one of the core messages of the book. If you go, okay, well, I’m not an expert.

Well, you are an expert. You are an expert at serving the person you once were for all of us. Your credibility doesn’t come from the fact that you’ve got certain number of degrees or a certain number of followers. Your credibility comes from the fact that you have walked the path of that heartbreak, that you’ve experienced that pain and that is where you have to tell your story, right? So my stories I usually talk about are, first of all being raised by a single mom, poor, born into a trailer park, and I was always, you know, didn’t grow up with money. And then, you know, I tell the story about the first time I saw a, a professional speaker and thought, how do you get to be the person on stage?

And the first time I walked into an airport and thought to myself, how do you get your book on this shelf? And how do you get that New York Times bestseller logo, like on your book? This is my personal story. And so yes, we tend to help speakers, authors, coaches, consultants professional service providers the most because that’s who we are.

We know that journey so extremely well. And then we became entrepreneurs and we figured out, oh, we could build our, our business faster by building our personal brand and now we work with a lot of experts and entrepreneurs are our two primary audiences. So for you, this is the struggle, right? So whatever your struggle is, that’s the story.

And then the third part of a great story is what we call the summit. The summit, which is the climax, right? Which has to be a moment where there is resolution about whether or not the main character achieved their thing. Did it come true? Did they win the championship? Did they lose? What happened? There’s gotta be a moment where all the questions are resolved.

And then this is what’s important for experts and for entrepreneurs is the fourth part of a great story is what we call the lesson. So there’s the scene. Part one, there’s the struggle. There’s the summit, and then there’s the lesson. I was in a contest called the World Championship of Public Speaking in my early twenties, and I had a mentor, a guy named Craig Valentine, who was the 1999 world champion.

So he had won the contest and he told me this lesson. He said that the key is you tell an I focused story, but you deliver a you focused message. So meaning. Your story is your story, and people listen because they put themselves into your story and they think about what it would be like to be you struggling through that thing, but then where you turn it into like a professional credibility boosting, lead generating sort of tactic for your business is the lesson as you go, you don’t just say what happened to you. You share what you learned from what happened to you, and that’s where people move from. I had an entertaining experience being in your shoes, going through that story to now I am having an educational experience that makes me want to hire you.

And so when we teach people to create some of their own content for speeches and books and courses, et cetera, we teach this framework, tell a story, make a point, teach a framework, inspire a behavior. And so you tell your story and then you make a point. And the point is the lesson of the story. What did you learn from that experience and how does that apply to the person that you are talking to?

So that I think is, is how you tell a great story scene, struggle, summit lesson. If you do those four things, you’re gonna have a quality story. And if you’re telling your own story, you just gotta tell those four things about your life. What was the scene? What was the thing you struggled with in this isolated moment?

How did it get resolved? And then what did you learn from that? And that’s how people will go with you on a ride.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And practicing that in emails or on a podcast when you’re a guest or even at the dinner table, when you’re at a conference or something like that, or with just a person that you’re speaking to is, is great because you’re gonna have to fine tune over time.

I’ve told my story of getting laid off, which again, that was my struggle getting laid off, building a family, having moved back in with my parents, like, this is not where I want to go in life. And then learning my way into entrepreneurship and failing along the way. Very relatable. Right. And these kinds of things, very similar to the structure that you just spoke about, but kind of building it out as, as I was before knowing it. But once I understood it, leaning into it more, and then telling that story hundreds of times, I’ve. Had a lot of people who I get on their podcast and they say, Pat, I, I know you’ve probably told your story hundreds of times, but like, I need to ask you again.

And I’m like, no, I’m gonna tell it to you again and I’m gonna try to get better every single time. Especially because when you’re a guest on a podcast, like maybe you’ve told that story many times, but it might be the first time a person’s have heard it. So it’s always important to continue to improve over time.

Rory Vaden: Yeah. And one, one other little advanced storytelling tip just on this topic is that point you made is so good, Pat, that even though you might have told this story a hundred times, you have to remember that for the person hearing it, it’s like they’re watching a movie for the first time, they’re seeing it unfold.

And so you don’t wanna retell the story. You wanna relive the story. Yes. You wanna go back in your mind to that moment, right? Like what did it feel like to move back in with your parents and what happens? Robert Frost has a great quote. He was a writer and he said, no tears in the writer. No tears in the reader.

And so it’s like if you want your audience to get emotional. You have to get emotional, not fake emotion, real emotion. You go back to that moment of like, what was that heartbreak like? What was that painful moment like? And when you go there, you viscerally feel like a physiological change in your body.

That’s how you know you’re telling a story the right way. If your heart rate speeds up or the hair’s on the back of your neck stand up, or you get tingles on your arm, it’s like I’m reliving this moment. When you do that, the audience will do the same thing. And I don’t care how good a bot becomes at telling stories, it’s not telling a story of something it actually lived through.

It’s not telling that human experience. And so even if it can tell a story as good as a human, the sheer fact that we know that bot didn’t live through that creates a defining difference and delineation that will never change. It is back to, to our, our humanness. And so relive the story and people sometimes go, well, what story should I tell?

Tell whatever stories cause the most visceral reaction in your own body, whatever creates the most biologically charged set of responses in your body. Like those tend to be the good ones. The opening line in wealthy and well-known, the very first line. So AJ’s the first chapter. It says May 4th, 2018. Your services will no longer be needed here today is your last day. The very opening line starts with AJ getting fired, which is what happened at our first company. We spent 12 years making cold calls out of the yellow pages. We started doing that with cold calling out of the phone book. We turned it into an eight figure business. We had 200 people, and we brought on investors that, you know, basically had control of the company. And at some point, you know, we had philosophical differences and we walked into a meeting and they fired AJ on the spot and then I resigned and we walked away from everything. Geez. Our team, our income went to zero. My podcast had millions of downloads. My social media following our first books, like everything, we lost it all in literally one moment. That’s where the story starts. Our story of Brand Builders Group and wealthy and well-known starts, which by the way, so just to tell you, I, I mentioned this earlier, so if you go to FreeBrandAudiobook.com/flynn. You can get the whole book for free on audio FreeBrandAudiobook.com/flynn for Pat Flynn.

You can get the whole audio book for free. You can hear these stories and learn these techniques.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that, Rory.

Rory Vaden: Of course. Yeah, I mean, it’s an honor to share and you’ll see it’s the stories that are the most powerful parts.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, so go there now. Free brand audiobook.com/flynn, F-L-Y-N-N, and Rory and his team will get that book over to you for free to listen to, which is absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for that.

The stories that you tell differentiate you from AI, and I think I wanna lean into that so much more. I mean, this audience here has heard me more and more this year talk about the importance of storytelling. So I’m super grateful you came on to give us a little breakdown of, of how that is.

I remember when I started my podcast, I was only able to do a podcast every other week because it just took forever. ’cause I was just starting out and I was learning my way into it. I was blogging three times a week and in 2010 I went to an event called Log World Expo in Las Vegas, and that was my first time meeting actually, Louis Howes and a few other people there.

And I was talking to people who knew about my brand and my audience and some fans of mine, and they could not stop talking about the podcast. I was blogging three times a week. I was only podcasting. I only had maybe five or six podcast episodes, but they couldn’t stop talking about the podcast. But not only could they not stop talking about the podcast, it was one story that I told in one of my episodes that everybody had more and more questions about.

And it was about when we had our son and we didn’t have health insurance because we didn’t know any better. I had just gotten laid off and we didn’t have health insurance. And so we were like close to potentially bankruptcy at that point. And the. Just emotion. I remember recording that episode, I think carried forward into the audience’s ears and made them want me to podcast more.

In fact, it was that story that inspired that reaction that inspired me to then go weekly with the show and cut down on my blog because people didn’t go up to me and say, oh, I love that article you wrote about the top five ways to use the Facebook landing page. Nobody says that. It’s always the stories that connect.

So I just wanted a plus one you for that because that was, that’s absolutely key. And one other thing before we finish up here, Rory, and again, make sure to go get that book, it’s absolutely free, FreeBrandAudiobook.com/flynn. Speaking about the in-person experiences, like I said, I just hosted one myself for the Pokemon space.

You have this building now and you’re running these small live events. I went to one of them once and it was tremendous, like literally life changing. When I think about the impact that that made on my book, and it was just a few conversations you and I had and and me with the other members there who really changed the direction of what Lean Learning became because I was kind of in a bind with where the book was at the time, and you helped me break through that, and so I wanted to thank you for that.

And the in-person stuff, if you are a personal brand, there are people who wanna connect with you because of the way you are, no matter how you compare to other people who talk about the same thing, again, it’s not about the information like Rory said, it’s about how you show up for those people. People are gonna wanna connect with you.

So what would be a way that people can start thinking about bringing their audience together, even if it’s a small audience where maybe they can’t buy a building or they can’t run a conference hall like I can. What are some easy ways brands are starting to really make a direct connection and even just kind of lean into the humanness part of that in person with their people.

Rory Vaden: So one thing, just to also underscore what you said is imposter syndrome is one of the biggest things that holds people back. Yeah. And they go, oh, well I shouldn’t bother doing this because you know, Brene Brown already talks about shame. Or Tony Robbins already talks about whatever this person talks about, whatever.

And what you said is really important. We call this the law of the frequency, which is that two radio stations could be playing the same exact identical song at the same time on the radio. To the recipient, they can only hear it from one of the radio stations. ’cause you can only be tuned into one radio station at a time.

And that’s exactly how it is in this world. There are some people who they can’t learn from Tony Robbins. They can only learn from Pat Flynn, right? Because they like you. They connect with you, they connect with your stories. It’s not the message solely that matters, but the messenger we connect with the messenger.

In addition to the message, and messages often aren’t that unique. We often say that, you know, we’re hardcore Bible thump and Jesus freaks around our house, and so we have this joke that everybody’s just plagiarizing Jesus because every quote, you know, goes back to these ancient scriptures of like, oh gosh, did you know that was already like in ancient scripture.

Well, how many original ideas are there truly, like, I don’t know, but every messenger. Is completely unique. No one can say it the way you can say it. They haven’t been through your exact experiences. They don’t have your exact takes. So I think that really does matter. And to your question, Pat, about how would we bring people together?

I think it starts with just like. Having little meetups, if you’re traveling, meet up with your audience, get them together. You don’t even have to be there. Right? It’s like one of the things we’re trying to do is go, how can we mine our database to figure out more intelligently where our people live just so that we can be like, Hey, did you know you live two miles from like this other person who’s a, is a Brand Builders Group member?

But it could be virtual, you know? I think live is the key, right? Is, is going how do we foster that community? But I think. It’s also taking a little bit of the pressure off yourself and going get your community to connect with each other. You don’t have to be the point of orientation. It doesn’t have to all revolve around you.

You and I both have a great mutual friend and Hal Elrod, right? Like his Miracle Morning community is the freaking best like it has taken on a life of its own. It’s gone global. Hundreds of thousands of people that share their stories and they all, they bond. And yes, you know, Hal is the catalyst for it in his brilliant book and his, you know, inspiring story is like the catalyst for it.

But like, they create a community that outlasts Hal and, and extends beyond him. To me, I think that’s a real power of going, you know, create a community that would outlive you. Like if you weren’t there, it would survive without you. I think it can be small. In fact, I think small is beautiful. I think small is, in many ways, small is becoming better.

I still love the huge event, but it’s, it’s expensive and it’s hard. I mean, you just did one 5,000 people. It’s so hard to put on an event like that. It’s so expensive. It’s so time consuming. Like most people can’t do it. And I do think those events are extraordinary and will continue to be just because they’re so hard.

But it’s like you don’t have to do that. It can be powerful. The event of ours you came to, I mean. There were 10 people there, so don’t write yourself off just because you go, oh, it’s small. I mean, we had, we rented a little conference room, and that’s part of why we also like bought this building, is we rent it out to people for, you know, very affordable so they can have little connections.

We got little, little rooms, but you’ve got WeWork space and you know, just coffee shops and just gathering at the park and whatever. So, I don’t know. I, I wouldn’t say I’m the best at creating community, honestly. I think our team has done a good job of that. AJ does a better job of that, but I do think people come for the content, they stay for the community. And I think as the world of AI takes over, we, we gotta be asking this question, the question you’re asking, how can I create more connection for people, more connection to each other, more connection to the group, feeling a part of a group. I think that’s what we all want.

And ironically, social media has done the opposite, I think. I don’t think most people who are on social media would not say like, I’m more connected. From a standpoint of communicating with people, but I feel more isolated and less connected in terms of humanity.

Pat Flynn: How many people have now taken sabbaticals for social media?

Like it’s like I just need to get away from it, right? Whereas I don’t really hear about anybody taking sabbaticals from meeting up with people or being with friends or having conversations that they enjoy. Nobody’s doing that. So I agree with you a hundred percent and it’s interesting, but. With these tools like social media, like with ai, we can use them for good and we can use those to lean into how we can better serve our audiences.

And you know, you have served this audience very well today, Rory. I appreciate you so much for coming on and indirectly AJ as well. Thank you for what you’ve written inside of Wealthy and Wellknown. Everybody go check out the book and if you wanna check it out for free, which is amazingly generous. Ray, thank you.

You always provide so much value when you’re here. FreeBrandAudiobook.com/flynn. Go ahead and download that now, Roy. Just so grateful for you and can you give us any insight on what’s next or where are you and AJ focusing the next year or two with your work? ’cause every, every place, every person you’ve touched, you’ve helped out in so many ways.

We just wanna know where you’re going next.

Rory Vaden: Well, thanks buddy. I feel the same way about you and what you’re doing. I mean, Lean Learning is, could be more critically valuable and important as you know, the, the world of information just like, just explodes, I think for us we’re at a place where there’s nothing more invigorating than seeing our customers succeed.

And one of the things that we wrote in the book is that we believe that the best form of marketing in the world is a changed life. There’s nothing like you saying, Hey Rory, thanks for helping us. Like that’s the most powerful thing you can do. And it’s also the most fulfilling thing for us. It’s not about just going, okay, you know, how do we convert more people?

It’s more going, how do we help the people that we have succeed faster, succeed bigger, because that’s great marketing for our company, but it’s like, it’s the only thing that’s exciting. The only thing that’s exciting at some point. You know, in the epilogue of wealthy and well-known, we talk about this, what’s real wealth?

I used to think that real wealth was an abundance of money. Then I thought it was an abundance of time, and now I think it’s just an abundance of peace. It’s what we really want is this fulfillment, and there’s nothing like the feeling you get when you help someone else succeed. And so that’s what we wanna encourage people to do.

That’s what we want to be about. In a word, I’d say that service. So that’s what we’re aspiring to, brother. So thank you for letting us hopefully be of service to somebody out there listening today and we wish you all the best Pat. Always.

Pat Flynn: Thanks, brother. Absolutely. Thank you Roy. And I will see you next week at our authors retreat in Nashville with a bunch of other amazing authors, many of which have been on here on the show before.

So it’s a fun little annual reunion that we have together and looking forward to thanking you in person for everything you’ve done for me and especially with the book. And congrats again on the New York Times bestseller. Thank you, brother. See you soon. Thank you.

All right. I hope you enjoy that episode with Rory Vaden and remember, your story is your superpower and it’s time to harness it to make a real impact, go and get your free audiobook copy from, or his book, Wealthy and Well-Known over at FreeBrandAudiobook.com/flynn. Again, that’s FreeBrandAudiobook.com/flynn. And for all the show notes and resources mentioned in today’s episode, head on over to smartpassiveincome.com/session884. Thank you for tuning in, and until next time, keep pushing forward and sharing your unique story with the world.