96: Take the Stairs – Featured Interview with guest expert Rory Vaden

Bestselling Author, Self-Discipline Strategist, and Co-Founder of Southwestern Consulting

>>>Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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Interview Insight

Listen to this interview to learn:

• The paradox principle, in which easy short-term choices lead to difficult long-term consequences.
• Why balance is not something that high performers make a top priority.
• What to focus on to have great fitness, great relationships, and great finances.
• The perspective of peace as a form of wealth that is undervalued in society.
• Daily habits that lead to high focus and productivity.

Read the Show Notes from this Episode

• 1:10 “I have always been infatuated with successful people and how they become successful.”
• 1:25 How a conversation with a friend in the airport led to Vaden writing Take the Stairs.
• 2:30 Vaden’s early experiences with public speakers, and how his stint working as a door-to-door salesperson with the Southwestern Company as a freshman in college instilled essential business skills in him.
• 5:10 “Southwestern really created this system of self-discipline, getting perhaps the most least likely person to succeed in sales – a college student – putting them in one of the toughest sales environments imaginable – residential door-to-door – and the training them to be extraordinarily successful.”
• 5:52 “I realized self-discipline was the key and with the most disciplined people the world, it’s not that they like discipline more than the rest of us. In other words, their brain processes their choices that are presented to them through a different set of criteria, and they make calculations of opportunities based through a different set of lenses.”
• 6:44 “There are these seven key distinctions in how the most disciplined people think that is different from everybody else.”
• 8:00 [On the book’s case studies] – “We tend to think that success is about luck or skill or education level or who your parents are or who you know, and you know all of those things do play a role, but all of these people they somewhere along the line learned about thinking differently, they learned how to process things differently from most people.”
• 9:00 [The Paradox Principle of Success] – “Easy short term choices lead to difficult long term consequences. Meanwhile, difficult short term choices lead to easy long-term consequences.”
• 9:35 “We are governed by emotions, feelings, and impulses and what feels good right here and now in the moment.”
• 10:03 “The most successful people realized at some point that the inverse is also true, if you save that money, your money grows by the virtue of investing or saving it.”
• 10:21 “When we make good choices on the front end – the students who work hard in school and pay the price while they’re in school have a whole different set of opportunities that are open to them in the long run that are not necessarily available to everyone else.”
• 10:45 “Problems that are procrastinated on are only amplified.”
• 11:32 The Harvest Principle – Time Management, how do you use your time?
• 12:05 “Balance is a horrible metaphor for spending time. Balance by definition means equal force in opposite directions.”
• 12:51 “It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on something, all that matters is the results that you create.”
• 13:42 “They’re strategy was imbalance: imbalancing their energy, time, and their resources in one specific area of their life, and once they created that result, it was much easier to maintain it.”
• 14:21 “Balance is not equal time spread across equal activities, it’s appropriate time, spread across critical priorities.”
• 14:47 “You learn to work double time part time for full time free time.”
• 15:53 What Vaden did to introduce self-discipline in his own life for a healthy lifestyle.
• 17:15 “When you let go of the escalator mentality of the magic pill and the secret potion and the hidden formula and the escalator way of thinking of there’s gotta be some convenient way to make the change, and instead you embrace the change of this take the stairs philosophy, in taking pride in things you don’t want to do, you get the life you want to have quicker.”
• 18:18 “I’m not interested in increasing your motivation, I’m interested in changing your mindset.”
• 18:38 “If you can change the way a person thinks just by providing a few insights, then I don’t have to tell them what to do.”
• 19:58 The perspective principle of faith
• 20:20 “All of the other 6 strategies of the take the stairs methodology all have to with achieving success, they all have to do with accomplishing something and how to get yourself to do things you don’t want to do. But this one, the perspective principle of faith, is the one that talks about how do you respond to failure. What happens when there’s an unexplained tragedy in your life.”
• 21:55 How to respond to everyday challenges in a way that is positive and productive.
• 22:43 “What horrible thing could happen to me today that in 1000 years would affect the whole world.”
• 23:07 “Our ability to have peace has nothing to do with money. Our ability to have peace has nothing to do with success. Our ability to have peace in the face in the face of failures, setbacks, and tragedies is directly proportionate to the term of our perspective.”
• 24:43 How Vaden uses spirituality in his own life to cope with unseen circumstances.
• 25:45 “You do your best and you forget the rest.”
• 27:20 “If I’m not consciously choosing a good attitude then I’m unconsciously choosing a negative one.”
• 27:40 Vaden’s regular habits for positivity and productivity.

Expert Bio

Rory Vaden is a self-discipline strategist and the Co-Founder of Southwestern Consulting, which works with organizations, companies, and individuals on leveraging self-discipline to create an extraordinary performance.

His book Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success is a #1 Wall St. Journal, #1 Amazon, and #2 New York Times bestseller. He is a two-time world champion of the public speaking finalist for Toastmasters International and is currently on a “Take the Stairs World Tour” where he is taking the stairs to the top of the 10 tallest buildings in the world to raise money for America’s high schools.

Rory is a regular contributor to several publications, including The Huffington Post, and has been featured on Oprah radio, Fox News, CNN, Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

For more information, visit Rory’s website.

Contact Info and Social Media for Rory Vaden

• Business Phone (Southwestern Consulting): 877-589-0606 ext 704
• Web address: RoryVaden.com
• Travels From: Nashville, TN
• Connect on LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Books by Rory Vaden