Business and life coach Aaron Walker returns to the show to talk about living a life of significance, and his new book View From Top. Introduction: Hey everyone and welcome to the All-Star Leader Podcast, where together we learn about leadership from the best and brightest, and keep it fun by connecting it to our passion for sports! I’m your host Daniel Hare, and today we are once again joined by a returning guest who has recently authored a book! You’ll remember Aaron Walker from episode 11 of the podcast, and I encourage if you didn’t catch that episode to pause this one, go back and listen to episode 11, and then come back to this conversation. We’re going to skip through much of the typical intro/bio since we all know Aaron and get right into his new book, View From The Top: Living a life of significance. This is Aaron Walker. Aaron welcome back to the show! Interview Questions: Tell us how you’ve been what’s new in your world. Grueling exercise and a lot of time; 38 years of entrepreneurship to build the stories that are in the book 10% writing and 90% marketing is a truism! Lots of interviews and marketing/promotions; purpose is to help people learn how to live a life of significance. Let’s get right into this. On page 10 you say something I think is critical: “I knew that in order to be good at any one thing, it takes total commitment and a sense of devotion, and I was willing to do that.” Can you speak to the importance of that statement in relation to how some of us might get distracted by different/new things, or just try to do too many different things at one time? Important (Greg McKowen “Essentialism” – inch deep/mile wide…should be an inch wide and mile deep) not to have so many things going on that we can’t be good at any one thing. “The One Thing” another great book on this. Following up on that, you recently ended one of your coaching programs, The Community, much for the reasons we’re discussing here. Could you take our audience into how focusing on certain things necessarily means excluding (perhaps even profitable/good) others? Two years ago began “The Community” as a lower price point for people to interact with him and his coaching programs But realized he was devoting a huge amount of time in the community, while figuring out his strength was in facilitating mastermind groups After months of prayer and evaluation, he decided to stop the community and devote entirely to the masterminds. Though it was profitable and enjoyable, the Community had to go. (Daniel – encouragement for people to taking that hard step of eliminating things): money won’t keep you in the game; passion might get you started but won’t last either; you need purpose. Two buildings side by side with a board across; for $10 you wouldn’t do it; to save your child, you would. That’s the purpose we need. So evaluate where you’re spending your time and determine if it’s your purpose. If you’re not doing anything that fulfills your purpose, try something else! You talk in chapter two of the book about delayed gratification; can you share some thoughts on that subject? Aaron and his wife Robin both came from poor/humble beginnings As he got started, he gave up 2/3rds of the business in order to get it going since they didn’t have any money – was willing to give up that much to get it started They committed to live on a very modest salary while building the company up, and putting all the profits back into the business. That resulted in him paying off a ten year loan in 36 months, and buying out his financial partners, leaving him with a paid-for business. Did the same thing again with another store…kept adding stores and doing the same things. This led to a Fortune 500 company wanting to buy his company The problem today is we want it now and aren’t willing to be patient. We shouldn’t compare our beginning to our parents’ middle, or our middle to our parents’ end. Live like no one else today, so tomorrow you can live like no one else – Dave Ramsey You retired from your first business at the age of 27. For the leaders in our audience, who are scattered among a number of industries from business to education, the ministry and more, what are one or two keys you can share about how you created that type of success in such a relatively short amount of time. Started business at 18 (no college) But even graduated high school early by going to summer school and night school You’ve got to have the grit, the perseverance and the determination to get whatever it is you wanted Delayed gratification in other areas (e.g. sports) – wanted to work more than he wanted to be an athlete. What is it for you that you want bad enough to give up other things? Got rid of all naysayers from his circle Recent study that the most common trait of multi-millionaires is grit You have to develop a mindset of I can do this – “can’t couldn’t do it and can did it all.”...
