[00:01:29] Robert Leonard: I’m looking forward to our conversation today because I grew up in a blue collar family. A lot of my dad’s a blue collar guy, my uncles, some of my best friends, own plumbing companies, et cetera.

[00:01:42] Robert Leonard: So, A lot of the people in my life are in blue collar trades. I actually am kind of like the black sheep of my friends and my family in being kind of white collar in the finance world, investing world. So your book really hit home for me. So I’m excited for our conversation today. And I want to touch on the first part because it focuses on mindset and visualization.

[00:02:08] Robert Leonard: I’m curious, why did you decide to start the book? I. With this, why did you make this the first part of the book, and what do you want someone to take away and implement after reading this first part? 

[00:02:19] Ken Rusk: For me it seems like, let’s just take for example, you getting in your car, okay? And you get in your car, you start the engine, you put it in, reverse you back out to the driveway, you hit it and drive.

[00:02:29] Ken Rusk: You always have an idea of where you’re going, right? I mean, you don’t just aimlessly drive around town. Something as simple as that. You’re using visualization every single day, so I wanted to put that first because it’s my belief that before you pick a career, you should figure out what you want your life to look like first.

[00:02:47] Ken Rusk: In every detail that you can imagine, because once you know that you’re beginning, kind of like with the N Nirvana, in almost the end in mind, you’re beginning with the path, the end of the path in mind first. And once you see something so clearly as a path versus just a hope, a wish, a dreamer or goal, once you see something that clearly your mind and your brain is so powerful, it automatically attracts itself to that eventuality.

[00:03:11] Ken Rusk: And because of that, you can pick one of the many different career paths in order to get there. 

[00:03:17] Robert Leonard: In part of the book where you’re talking about the visualization you say, to take crayons and draw it all. And I, that’s interesting to me because I’ve heard they have a vision board and with technology these days, people are making vision boards on the computer and not actually printing things out and cutting ’em out and pasting them on boards anymore.

[00:03:36] Robert Leonard: They’re making ’em on Canva or any other software that you could use these days. And so, It’s interesting to see that you’re like, no, take crayons and draw it all out. 

[00:03:48] Ken Rusk: Yeah. I do that a lot with kids in junior achievement and coaching sessions and whatnot, and I gotta tell you for an adult, the last time they held a crayon in their hand was probably when they were like four or five, I don’t know, 5, 6, 7, whatever.

[00:04:02] Ken Rusk: I. And believe it or not, you had a blank piece of paper and someone would say, draw a horse or a rocket, or draw a sunshine, and you had to get creative. You had no preconceived idea. So you pulled something out of your mind, and that’s probably when you were at your most creative and innocent point where if you think about it, why not get back to that?

[00:04:21] Ken Rusk: Get that crayon in your hand and draw out in great detail what you want your life to look like. And again, I call it in the book Comfort, peace, and Freedom. That’s the nirvana I think everyone should be chasing, and I think it’s really important that we have to start with something because people who visualize very well, there’s been studies done.

[00:04:40] Ken Rusk: They quickly, I’ll tell you, they took a hundred people. They put ’em in a room, they had ’em they asked ’em all. Let us know if you have crystal clear goals. Only 20 people out of the hundred said they had crystal clear goals. Then they said, okay, of the 20, how many of you write them down in a way that is vivid and colorful and clear?

[00:05:00] Ken Rusk: Only four people admitted to doing that. So then they asked those four. What did you do with that drawing? What did you do with that? Only one of ’em said, I had it posted on my wall so I could look at it every single day. And the greatest part about that is they followed the careers of those people over 10 years, that one person earned nine times more in their lifetime than all of the others in that study.

[00:05:25] Ken Rusk: So if you think about it, you have to use something that’s free to you, which is the power of your brain to allow it to attract itself to whatever you want, whatever that thing may be, or that collection of things. Because what it sees, it attracts itself to and again, it’s just a wonderful way to live.

[00:05:45] Robert Leonard: Talk to us a bit about the blue collar crisis or the blue collar industry as a whole, kind of the crisis that we’re seeing right now. 

[00:05:54] Ken Rusk: Well, sure. So if you look back, when I went to high school, and I hate to say this, but that was in the eighties, okay? They had something called shop class in high school and you could walk down the hallway and you could see somebody changing a transmission on a Mustang, or you could see somebody doing somebody’s hair, or you could see somebody welding something or building a tabletop or wiring an outlet or cooking or whatever, and you would almost accidentally discover how cool it was to be in one of those trades.

[00:06:21] Ken Rusk: Carpenter, electrician, plumber, hairdresser, whatever. They took those machines out and they replaced them with computers. Now I know we all had to learn computers. I get that. But why was it at the expense of the other? Why couldn’t we have had both? So what you did is you eliminated the accidental discovery of millions of kids going into these industries.

[00:06:40] Ken Rusk: And what happens then? You have a lack of supply. So if you couple that with the fact that instead of kids going out and playing in the backyard and building tree forts or building, playing house, or doing all those kinds of things, now they’re building cities on their cell phones. And that’s just not the same experience, right?

[00:06:59] Ken Rusk: It’s not the same practical hands-on experience. And if you put those two things together with the fact that colleges are really good at shaming you into saying you gotta go to school or else you’ll be nothing, which is crazy. It’s never been true. It isn’t true. Now don’t forget that they make money saying that.

[00:07:17] Ken Rusk: And if you put those three things together, now you have a lot of electricians and plumbers and whatever who are retiring. Nobody’s filling those spots. They’re only being filled at a rate of 30 to 50%. Simple supply and demand says where supply is low and demand is high, that’s where all the money goes.

[00:07:36] Ken Rusk: And that’s why you’re seeing these 30, 40, $50 an hour jobs right now that almost anybody can jump in and start doing. 

[00:07:44] Robert Leonard: I don’t necessarily regret going to college. I’ve had a lot of opportunities come my way because I went to college. Connections I’ve made. I generally think fairly positively towards education, but I do sometimes look back and think I learned more from books that I’ve read outside of college.

[00:08:02] Robert Leonard: I spent a lot of money to go to college, so maybe I would’ve been better off going into the trades and starting a business as a plumber or another electrician, or any other trade that you could think of. And so sometimes I do think about that. Think about it, maybe I should have done it a little differently. And with Chat GPT becoming so popular in AI and just all of the automation that can come with that, I am a little bit worried about some of these white collar careers that I might be involved in, whether it’s finance, accounting, podcasting, people are being automated from podcasting so there’s a lot of automation going on in these kind of white collar careers, but the blue collar stuff seems to be a little bit more resistant to this because you can’t.

[00:08:44] Robert Leonard: Hire AI to come fix your toilet or put a roof on your house or like an electrical system in your house and do all the new wiring and lighting and things like that. So it’s interesting to see this trend of automation and AI and how trades jobs kind of seem safe from that to me at least. 

[00:09:05] Ken Rusk: Well, if you look at the United States alone, there’s 167 million people considered to be fully full employment.

[00:09:11] Ken Rusk: Okay. 77 million of those people to this day still work with their hands, still do something in a skill or trade or whatever. And if you rise up out of bed in the morning, put your feet on the ground, by the time you go from your bed to your office, school, church, whatever, you’re going to cross thousands of blue collar jobs that are still viable today and more lucrative than ever because less and less people are willing to do them.

[00:09:37] Ken Rusk: But I look at it this way, and this is a little controversial sometimes, but I’m not so sure. It’s so important what you do for a living as it is what you do with what you do for a living. And what I mean by that is I was a ditch digger that was number 99 out of a list of a hundred things that I wanted to do.

[00:09:54] Ken Rusk: I wanted to be a race car driver or something like that. But what it afforded me to do is to control my input, my output, the quality of my output. I could control my day, my time, my schedule. I could control my financial gain, and I could create that puzzle or that picture that I was talking to you about earlier.

[00:10:13] Ken Rusk: I think as long as your life is progressing in a way that you want it and the way that you see it, a lot of different paths will get you. 

[00:10:22] Robert Leonard: Why do you think going into a blue collar career has such a negative connotation or perception from so many people? And why do you think so many people are straying away from blue collar work?

[00:10:32] Ken Rusk: Well, it has to do with a lot of things. And don’t forget when they took their shop classes out to high school. Now all of a sudden the new cool buzzword is you’re going to a college prep high school. What does that even mean? Okay. Can someone tell me what that even means? Because they didn’t change the high school at all.

[00:10:49] Ken Rusk: They just put a name on it now and call it a college prep high school. Well, if you’re walking those hallways as a junior or sophomore or who, whatever, and you keep hearing that, you know you’re going to this college prep school, aren’t you going to start to feel a little stigmatized if you really wanted to start your own carpentry business?

[00:11:06] Ken Rusk: Aren’t you going to feel a little like, wow, am I not measuring up because I’m not going down this path that they are trying to take me down? And the problem with that is I’m not. I mean, if you’re going to operate on my shoulder so I can get back out on the golf course, I want you to know everything there is to know about a knife before you pick it up and come at me with it, right?

[00:11:25] Ken Rusk: And the same thing goes with a job specific career, like a teacher or an architect or an engineer. That’s not the problem. The problem is putting all these people into college that are just going for some liberal arts degree or some bland business degree with no job specific thing, waiting for them at the end of that four years, except a bill for a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:11:45] Ken Rusk: And I think that’s the real problem is parents somehow think, well, let’s see. I gave birth to my child. I clothed my child. I fed my child and raised my child. I protected them and sheltered them. I taught them what I know. Now, I guess I have to give ’em a college education or I have failed.

[00:12:03] Ken Rusk: Ridiculous. Never been true in the history of our world. Not true now, and it won’t be true in the future. 

[00:12:10] Robert Leonard: Again, I want to preface that I’m not necessarily against college. I have an MBA, et cetera. Like I’ve gotten a lot of value from college. I think college is right for a lot of people, but you talk about this interestingly.

[00:12:22] Robert Leonard: Concept that people who listen to the show should consider. And maybe it’s too late for some people listening to the show, but it’s still an interesting thought exercise to do. And not a lot of people talk about this, but you go to college, you’re, most people are going to take on student loan debt.

[00:12:37] Robert Leonard: And when you look at that payment, when you graduate, what you talk about in the book is what would that payment be worth if you had invested it? So let’s say you go to college, you get student loan debt, you come out to college and you pay student loan payments between 500 and a thousand dollars per month.

[00:12:52] Robert Leonard: And then let’s say on the other side, you don’t go to college and instead you invest, maybe you can invest 500 to a thousand. Cause that’s a lot of money and maybe you don’t make as much right away out to college. Eventually you can make just as much in a trade. But let’s just say without just getting started, no college degree and a trade.

[00:13:08] Robert Leonard: You maybe make a little bit less, you can invest the full 500 to a thousand, but maybe you can invest 250 to 500. So still less than what your monthly payment is on your student loans. Like how much does that mean? End up being invested for five or 10 years, an extra five or 10 years in the early days of your career, especially when you’re young, which is the most powerful years of investing for everyone.

[00:13:30] Robert Leonard: I mean, that’s inarguable that compound interest. The earlier you get started, the better it is. So it’s really interesting to look at this dynamic of how much wealth without college can you generate just by getting started investing that money earlier without having the student loan debt payments.

[00:13:47] Ken Rusk: Well, there’s two things I want to tell you. The second thing I want to tell you is about the $400,000 swing, so I’ll get to that in a second. But as it relates to college today 40% of kids go into college not knowing why they’re going. That’s really scary. And then 25% of those changed their degree in the first year or two.

[00:14:07] Ken Rusk: So now that’s inefficient, costly, and wasteful in some ways. What’s the scariest one of all, is only 30% of people ever use their college degree in their job, ever. You’ve got all these people with all these expensive degrees out there floating around and they’re just not using them. So, to your point, if it costs you $50,000 all in, okay, to go to an expensive school or to go to any school, and I’m talking about room and board gas, your car maintenance, I mean everything, the books, the whole shot, that’s $200,000 when you’re done.

[00:14:39] Ken Rusk: If you don’t have a job specific career waiting for you, I hope you didn’t borrow that money, because there’s a debt there of $200,000. So you can go right now and get into a career that will pay you 50, 60, $70,000 day one. And after four years, you’re up 200,000. So you go from negative 200 to a positive 200.

[00:15:02] Ken Rusk: That’s a $400,000 swing. By the time you’re 23. I think you at least need to think about that before you just jump right into college. Like that’s my only option because think of the headstart that gives you in life over someone else who now comes out and they’re working in some job that doesn’t even relate to their degree and now they have this debt and they’re like, my God, I think I might’ve even sold the bill of goods here because now I have all this debt.

[00:15:25] Ken Rusk: When does my life start? Right. Yeah. It’s something that it’s a crisis and it really needs to be looked at seriously, especially by the parents because they’re helping to kind of helping traffic cop these decisions sometimes. 

[00:15:37] Robert Leonard: How do you recommend parents approach this in the future? Not wanting to push their children one way or the other, whether they go to college or go into the trade?

[00:15:45] Robert Leonard: How do you recommend they approach this? 

[00:15:48] Ken Rusk: I would simply be, I would simply be observant. Okay. Watch them from the time that they’re 5, 6, 7 years old until now. See what they do. I mean, are they people that tend to get involved in building things or fixing things or kind of like researching things? Or are they involved in trying to beautify something?

[00:16:05] Ken Rusk: I mean what were they good at growing up? I mean you’re a kid better than anybody does. Keep an eye out on that kind of thing, because some people learn tactically with their hands. Other people’s learn by listening. Some learn by watching or seeing. So just keep an eye on that.

[00:16:20] Ken Rusk: But the other thing is there are so many jobs right now, everybody is hiring like crazy. You could have your child take a year and just job shop, just go from one type of thing to the next. Try several different things. Everybody’s hiring, okay? You’ll be able to get jobs wherever you want. And then see if something doesn’t catch their eye or catch their interest.

[00:16:41] Ken Rusk: You can always go back to college. You can always do that. I mean, I know people that go to college and when they’re 28, just think about that because there is a really good chance if you have 1, 2, 3, or four kids, there’s a really good chance that two of them are not meant. To be book learners and degree holders when in fact they might be way better off owning their own hair salon or starting a flower shop or maybe a bakery or even their own plumbing company.

[00:17:08] Ken Rusk: I mean, I. I’ve got a lot of friends, as you know from the book. I got a lot of friends that people are like, oh yeah, well, his son’s just a plumber. Well, okay, I know that plumber, he’s, he now has six vans, 12 employees, and he is making two, 300,000 a year. But that’s okay. You can look down on him if you want.

[00:17:27] Ken Rusk: Again, this is all about how we win our life, our life picture. It’s not necessarily, no one ever came into my driveway and looked at my house and the things that I’ve accomplished and said, wow. What kinda degree do you have? I mean, that’s never been asked of me. Instead, they come in and they say, Ken, man, this is cool.

[00:17:43] Ken Rusk: How did you grind this out? Well, then I’m, I’ll be happy to tell them that story because it all starts with what do you want it to look like, and then how do you get there?

[00:17:52] Robert Leonard: I listen to them, there are a few different people who I listen to. I don’t want to say they’re necessarily motivational talks. Some of them are, some of them aren’t.

[00:17:59] Robert Leonard: But I listen to them on YouTube, Eric Thomas and Matthew McConaughey, the famous actors. And there’s a talk that Matthew McConaughey gives. I think it might be a commencement speech or graduation speech. But regardless it’s a talk that Matthew McConaughey gives on YouTube and in the video he talks about how his brother, who’s a little bit older, didn’t necessarily, college wasn’t as popular as it is today, so he didn’t necessarily have to go to college and he could still get a good job.

[00:18:26] Robert Leonard: And then the brother that’s a little bit younger than him, but still older than Matthew, It was kinda like you had to go to, you should go to college because if you did, you would get a better job. And then by the time McConaughey went to school, it was like you had to go to college if you wanted to get a good job.

[00:18:41] Robert Leonard: And now today it’s almost like if you only get a bachelor’s, you’re not even really competitive in the job market in terms of like white collar careers. Like a lot of careers are forcing you to get master’s degrees and more than that. So it’s this really interesting, almost never-ending cycle for college students.

[00:18:58] Robert Leonard: Then on the flip side, you have some companies, you mentioned this in the book, that companies like Apple are apparently hiring kids without college degrees because they’re starting to find that it’s easier to train them. So I don’t know necessarily, I haven’t seen that in practice myself, but I know you talked about that in the book, and I think that’s really interesting.

[00:19:18] Ken Rusk: Yeah, there’s no question. There’s an old joke that’s been resurfacing where the guy walks into an interview and the gentleman who’s interviewing him says, Hey, listen, forget everything that you learned in college because we trained people to do everything we need to do right here. And the interviewee said, well, that’s great cause I didn’t go to college.

[00:19:36] Ken Rusk: And then the guy looks back at him and says, well, I’m sorry you don’t qualify for the job. I mean, think of how ridiculous that is. Right? Think of how crazy that sounds. To your point, so many companies now are saying people may have these degrees, but they don’t have practical knowledge.

[00:19:52] Ken Rusk: They don’t have hands-on kind of problem solving skills. They have papers and frames they can hang on the wall, but they don’t necessarily have the grit that we’re looking for. So that’s why they’re interviewing people. 50% of their workforce, they hired without college degrees. That has to tell you something.

[00:20:07] Ken Rusk: Because they want to get ’em when they’re still young and they’re still moldable. They’re trainable. They’re, they can make what they want them to do culture-wise and work-wise. And it works out better for ’em. I, oh, by the way, they’re not towing a debt of a hundred or $200,000 when they get to the job.

[00:20:24] Ken Rusk: I just think you’re going to see that trend continue. And I’ve always believed that you walk into an interview, Hey, what’s in it for me to work here? I have a vision for my future. I have a vision of what I want. If I can get it with and through your company, I’m all in it. Okay? Those are the kind of people that you want to hire.

[00:20:42] Robert Leonard: Let’s spend some time debunking some of the misconceptions around blue collar work. What are the most common ones you see that we can debunk? 

[00:20:51] Ken Rusk: It’s really super hard work and you don’t get paid. Crazy supply and demand. I just saw the other day that an entry level construction job is over 30 bucks an hour, even a small amount of overtime.

[00:21:03] Ken Rusk: You’re talking 75, 80,000 a year there. That’s pretty good, and that’s even without a lot of experience. The other one is that there’s no future in it. Wrong. All these companies now are having to buy for workers. So they’re putting out 401ks and they’re putting out savings plans, and they’re putting out healthcare and all these things to try to attract workers because they’re harder to find.

[00:21:24] Ken Rusk: So the competition is getting more difficult. The environment there, I mean, the culture of working as a team, as a group where you can go out to, let’s say somebody’s house and build them a beautiful outdoor kitchen out of stone. And at the end of the day, you get to lean back on that shovel and look at that and say, wow, I created that.

[00:21:44] Ken Rusk: I call it the stand back moment. I created that beauty, I created that, and that will be here. That will stand the test of time. I don’t think you get that kind of satisfaction when you’re on the 15th floor in some cubicle and you don’t know how you fit into this major corporation. Like, what am I doing?

[00:22:00] Ken Rusk: How do I, how am I in this little piece of me in this big wheel. How do I fit? So the fact that you can control and they talk about happiness. They talk about only 20% of white collar workers consider themselves happy, but over 50%, up to 60% of blue collar workers claim that they’re happy.

[00:22:21] Ken Rusk: I think the reason is because those people are solely in control of everything. Their day, their life, their financial gain, their future. It’s up to them to make it happen. They’re not beholden to a bunch of other people, either above them or below them, telling them what to do, how to think, and how to act.

[00:22:39] Ken Rusk: I think those are some of the major differences. And again, like you saw in the book, I’ve got a lot of friends that are really successful. Having no education and taking on a blue collar career. 

[00:22:49] Robert Leonard: What are you seeing for average blue collar salaries over the last couple years and how has that changed and how does that compare to how white collar.

[00:22:57] Robert Leonard: Career averages have been historically, and also now are they getting closer together? Have blue collar potentially even passed white collar? What are you seeing? 

[00:23:06] Ken Rusk: Years ago when I was in high school and the teacher said, raise your hand if you’re going to college. Only about a third of the people did.

[00:23:14] Ken Rusk: So two thirds of the people were going to go to work in some other thing, some type of blue collar trade. So the supply was a lot higher back then. And therefore, because college was a little more rare, you would come out and they would make a little bit more money than the blue collar workers would.

[00:23:30] Ken Rusk: That has completely changed. And I know that there are some people out there that still try to tell you that white collar workers make more than blue. Well, what they’re doing is they’re lumping all of the part-time jobs where you work at a burger place after school, or you have a paper route, or they’re lumping all those lower paying part-time starter jobs.

[00:23:53] Ken Rusk: That is in the blue collar category, take those out because they shouldn’t be there to begin with. And if you go full-time to full-time, blue collar workers are making a fortune out there. I mean, they’re starting at like 60, 70,000 when some of these overproduced college kids are coming out at 50,000 thinking they were going to make 70 or 80, but they’re not because there’s too many of them.

[00:24:16] Ken Rusk: So the company’s supply and demand works in the opposite way for them. If there’s too many of ’em, then their wages go down, and that’s what we’re seeing now. Everyone’s going to college. We don’t know why, but we have to have those 78, 77, 70-8 million workers still working in our society or else things aren’t going to be running smoothly, like infrastructure and those kind of things.

[00:24:38] Ken Rusk: So yeah it has changed, but it has changed for the better. And the best part is this pendulum isn’t going to swing back anytime soon. Until the stigma goes away from blue collar workers and the younger people are willing to do them, we’re going to have supply and demand. I call it a blue collar crisis, and that’s going to be around for a very long time.

[00:24:57] Ken Rusk: But if you’re smart and you’re a contrarian thinker, if everyone’s going this way, you should go that way because that’s where the money’s going to be, and that’s where you’re your financial rewards going to be as well.

[00:25:08] Robert Leonard: I mentioned this before, but it’s probably a little late for a lot of listeners of this show.

[00:25:13] Robert Leonard: To change their career to go into a blue collar career, like that’s probably not going to happen. I’m sure we have some people who are maybe in high school still that listen to the show, but generally most people are probably either in college or out of college already. So it’s a, they’re probably already set in a career, so they’re probably not going to make a massive career switch to go into a blue collar trade, 

[00:25:30] Robert Leonard: But, it’s interesting from maybe their children’s perspective, if they have kids or if they’re going to have kids in the future.

[00:25:36] Robert Leonard: Like how do they plan for that? For me specifically, I have a son, he’s about to turn five, and I am not necessarily putting money in a college fund for him because I don’t, I’m not going to go into the technicalities of this, but generally that money has to then be used for college and if not you pay some penalties and taxes, et cetera.

[00:25:55] Robert Leonard: And I just don’t know what college is going to look like for him in the future. I don’t know if he’s going to want to go to college, if he’s going to go into a trade, if he might take over a business that I start and run that for me. So it’s, even if you’re not going to set necessarily, if you’re already in a set career and you’re maybe not going to switch your careers, it’s interesting to at least consider these for maybe your potential children.

[00:26:15] Robert Leonard: But you also then talk about, I just mentioned my son might take over my business, but he might not want to, and you talk about this in the book, how there might be an investment opportunity for people who are listening to the show. Because there are a lot of people who are a bit older, that have been in the trades, that they’re getting ready to retire and their kids don’t want to take over the business.

[00:26:35] Robert Leonard: So there could be an opportunity for people listening to the show who maybe are in white collar careers to have some savings. They could either invest in these businesses or buy them, and then perhaps they could run it. They don’t even have to be on the boots and have the boots on the ground doing that work, but they could learn the business well enough and they could run it.

[00:26:52] Ken Rusk: There are just in my small town of Sylvania, Ohio, there are five people that wish they could find someone to take over their businesses, and these are businesses that are paying them in excess of $200,000 a year. You’re talking about stonemasons and drywall people and brick layers, and again, they’re running these really cool small businesses.

[00:27:14] Ken Rusk: And here’s the other thing. This guy rolls up into my driveway because he actually did an outdoor kitchen for me. He rolls up into my driveway, he’s got this brand new pickup truck. Gets out of his car, he’s got his huge coffee. He’s got Led Zeppelin on the stereo. He’s wearing his t-shirt, his jeans, and his boots.

[00:27:30] Ken Rusk: And he’s just whistling while he is working, laughing and joking with his buddies while they build this amazing thing. There’s something to be said about that, right? I mean, again, he helps when he wants to and doesn’t help when he doesn’t because he is running the company. But these are people that have these great businesses and they have nobody to give them to.

[00:27:49] Ken Rusk: I think it’s something that you at least need to think about as a parent, because you could put your child into one of those businesses and within four or five years he or she could take it over and know it and run it and make a great living for themselves. Because again, this isn’t about how we get there.

[00:28:07] Ken Rusk: It’s about what it looks like when we get there. I mean, what do you want your life to look like? And this is why I designed this entire course that goes with my book. I wanted to make sure that people would say, oh, I’m not just going to read this book and put it on the shelf and forget about it in three months.

[00:28:23] Ken Rusk: Okay. Like I did all the other ones. I’m going to spend 40 minutes a week on this computer. I’m going to learn how to think differently. I’m going to learn how to reprogram my priorities. I’m going to learn how to visualize my future, and I’m going to be forced to take the knowledge from the book into my actual life.

[00:28:42] Ken Rusk: And again, look at my future in a different way. And I think to me it’s one of the most powerful tools. I’ve gotten so many people that have said, wow, I took this course. And I mean, it was, it’s crazy because this course is $99. You get a free $25 book with it. And if you buy one, I give you one free to give to your friend or neighbor or a family, loved one, whatever.

[00:29:04] Ken Rusk: It’s not about making money for me. I’ve already done that. It’s about me shortening the learning curve to entrepreneurship for future generations. And if I can make that happen then I’ve done my thing. 

[00:29:16] Robert Leonard: What do you say to someone who feels stuck in their career, whether it’s blue collar or white collar, maybe they’re in white collar and they do want to make a switch to the trades, or maybe they’re in a blue collar career and they don’t necessarily love it and they want to try different trade.

[00:29:29] Robert Leonard: What do you tell them? How do you guide them through this situation? 

[00:29:33] Ken Rusk: So, in the old days, that would’ve been tougher. I mean, before technology, that would’ve been a lot more difficult. So many people I know were in their company and they weren’t happy with it, but they had their hobby, their thing that maybe they built river edge tables or maybe they had a craft or something.

[00:29:50] Ken Rusk: So what they would do is they would do that and they would get a website going. They would build these things on the weekends or after work and they would slowly kind of transition from their full-time job to this new side gig. And then when that would take over, then they could kinda like lop one off and go full on and into the next one.

[00:30:11] Ken Rusk: And it’s really cool because when I was younger, we had long pieces of graph paper and pencils that we kept all of our accounting tools on, right. Now if you have one of these things and a pickup truck, you got a business, okay? And you can run your apparel off of it. You can run your accounts receivable, accounts payable off of it.

[00:30:29] Ken Rusk: You can do all your accounting with it. It’s so much easier now to transition from a job to your true passion or whatever. That hobby that you can monetize will be a lot easier now than it was in the past. So that’s what a lot of people do. They kinda run both things at the same time and slowly move across.

[00:30:48] Ken Rusk: I’ve had so many people say, Ken, thank you so much for doing this. Because when I was in college I was a plumber’s helper. That’s how I got my way through. I didn’t even want to go to college, but I had to, according to my parents, now I’m in this job that I hate. I slowly transitioned on the weekends to being a plumber again, and I’ve never been happier.

[00:31:08] Ken Rusk: Now they have their own business and their business is growing, and they’re making a lot of money doing it. So you have to say to yourself, enough’s enough. It’s my time. I’m going to start focusing on what I want my life to look like. Okay? I’m going to focus on visualizing my nirvana, my comfort, peace, and freedom, and then I’m going to figure out a way to get there.

[00:31:30] Robert Leonard: What advice do you have to somebody who is early on in their entrepreneurship journey?

[00:31:36] Ken Rusk: I would say this if you did it because you visualize your future, and I know I keep harping on that, but that’s the first step. If you did it that way, then find as many other people that you can to work in your business that think the same way.

[00:31:51] Ken Rusk: Okay. Find other people that have a clear vision for their futures or help them create a clear vision for their futures, because that’s how you grow. They call those people entrepreneurial employees, or they call them intrapreneurs. What that means is they come to your company and they feel like they own part of it, and they run their division or their area, just like they would run their own mini company, collect as many of those people as you can, which is what I’ve done over the years, and we started with a staff of six and now I have over 200.

[00:32:21] Ken Rusk: You collect as many people that think like you and your company just goes crazy. Now, just so you know, people will say, well, Ken, you’re lucky. You’re an entrepreneur. Okay here’s a crayon and some paper draw. Entrepreneur. You can’t because it’s just a concept entrepreneur at what? Now I can draw that.

[00:32:43] Ken Rusk: We all have, and I talk about this in the book, we all have these nine characteristics. Of being an entrepreneur, things like initiative, faith, generosity, resistance, persistence, all those types of things. We have these characteristics within us. We just need a reason for them to come out. I mean, they may be hidden behind the shoes in your closet that you haven’t worn in a very long time, but once you get this reason, once you get this vision or this future, or this picture, or this path drawn very clearly.

[00:33:18] Ken Rusk: All those characteristics start coming out in you. If you’re good enough to plan a vacation, you’re good enough to plan the future of your life. And we’re all pretty good at planning vacations. We know we need the suntan lotion, and we need the beach chair, and we need the towels, and we need the sunglasses and the music and the hat and the palm trees and the sun and the ocean and all that stuff.

[00:33:42] Ken Rusk: The sand, right. We’re also good at envisioning that. Why aren’t we as good at envisioning the rest of our lives in the same exact detailed way? Those same things that you think about when you think about, man, I can’t wait to go on vacation. You should think about all the rest of your life that way because then the power of anticipation, which is what you’re doing when you go, when you’re waiting for a vacation to happen, you’re anticipating it.

[00:34:05] Ken Rusk: The power of anticipation should be happening in all aspects of your life. It is the only way to live.

[00:34:10] Robert Leonard: I think it’s pretty safe to say that entrepreneurship has become a little bit trendy over the last couple years, five years maybe. But I don’t think it’s necessarily for everybody. So who do you think entrepreneurship is not the right route for?

[00:34:24] Ken Rusk: I think if you’re somebody that is very comfortable, and I have to be careful how I say this, it’s almost dependent on other people’s structures. If you feel like you need to be in a corporate environment because you need that, all that stuff around you to help you function. The structure, the time, all the meetings, the ladder, you have to climb all of that corporate governance and all that mindset stuff.

[00:34:53] Ken Rusk: If you feel like you need to be part of a huge organization, then maybe entrepreneurship isn’t for you, but you have to always question, well, why do I think that way? Is it because you know I’m uncomfortable taking risks? Well, I can tell you that no growth ever came to anybody without being uncomfortable first.

[00:35:13] Ken Rusk: Okay. Risk makes you uncomfortable, but it also makes it so much more rewarding when you come out the other side, right? So I think you need to examine why being in a corporate structure makes you feel so comfortable. They’re so incubated, like, that’s really good for me. Why? Why is that? Well, take a look at why you think that.

[00:35:33] Ken Rusk: See how much you see your future, or maybe don’t see your future because maybe you’re feeling that company’s going to make the future for you. That probably isn’t going to happen until you come forth and say, okay, I need to know what I want. And then some of that stuff kind of goes away. 

[00:35:51] Robert Leonard: It kind of just plays into human psychology as we just kind of naturally want to be comfortable and almost like in this state of homeostasis, we don’t want to feel uncomfortable because that would mean that there’s maybe a threat or something bad happening.

[00:36:05] Robert Leonard: When in fact that’s probably when the biggest and best rewards or opportunities happen is the highest risk, highest reward, and sometimes maybe that’ll be a way more fulfilling path than just living a very comfortable and steady life. 

[00:36:19] Ken Rusk: I can tell you that there’s this one thing that all of my friends do: own businesses or are blue collar entrepreneurs.

[00:36:25] Ken Rusk: They all have in common. They all kinda have this eerie calm about them. And when you talk about the fact that they’re being stigmatized, because they’re blue collar workers or whatever, and college is the only way to go, we all kind of look at each other and just kinda get a little grin on our face.

[00:36:41] Ken Rusk: Like, yeah, okay, you’re right. Yeah, that’s true. Knowing it’s not. So yeah, there’s really something to the fulfillment of saying, okay, this is kind of like my baby. I’m running this thing. And again, you come out the other side with all the things that you want for your life. And these aren’t necessarily always material things.

[00:37:01] Ken Rusk: I mean, it could be your charity or give back moment. It could be walking your dog in the park or whatever dog, whatever. Whatever you decide to have as a pet. It could be your sport, your hobby, something you share with others. It could be the fact that you’re now spontaneous, where before you were overly stressed and overly scheduled.

[00:37:18] Ken Rusk: Wouldn’t it be great to be spontaneous again where we could say, you know what, I think I’m going to call my friend up and take him out to lunch. Instead of having your whole week planned out for everything in front of you. So there’s a lot of mental side of running your own thing and being in a blue collar trade that I think is really invaluable and something people should definitely take a look at.

[00:37:37] Robert Leonard: What have you seen from a work-life balance perspective for blue collar and white collar jobs? Do one tend to offer better work-life balance than the other? 

[00:37:48] Ken Rusk: Yeah. Sometimes in corporate life, they don’t necessarily look at what the individual is doing as much as how hard they look at what they’re doing.

[00:37:57] Ken Rusk: You know what I mean? Like, oh, they’re, they came in early and they stayed late. They must be really great employees. Well, what if they’re not? What if the one person sitting next to them can get more work done in six hours than the other one gets done in 10? So there is a lot of that where it’s like, I feel like I have to really overachieve in order to get my boss’s attention.

[00:38:17] Ken Rusk: I hate that because that takes the control away from you. It takes the control and puts it in somebody else’s hands. Whereas in a blue collar scenario, again, I think you can paint the picture any way you want it. You can say, I’m happy and comfortable working 60 hours a week, running my company. Or I’m going to get some help so that I can run for 50 hours or more.

[00:38:40] Ken Rusk: Helps me run for 40 hours. And allow yourself to build the amount of freedom that you want. It’s up to you. No one’s going to come to you and say, Hey Ken, I think you should start working less than 60 hours and you should go play golf more. You’re the only one that’s going to come up with that conclusion.

[00:38:57] Ken Rusk: And what happens is the older you get, the more you conclude that quickly because you realize life isn’t forever. So I think the fact that you don’t have that rat race of I need to climb to the top and I need to do all these crazy things, throw out, my boss notices me I, that’s not for me being in control of my time and my freedom where I want to be, when I want to be, and how I want to be there.

[00:39:20] Ken Rusk: It requires that you have some other people help you with that. But you know what you share in your good benefits and your good fortune with them, and they’ll push your company a lot further than you can do it yourself, that’s for sure. 

[00:39:31] Robert Leonard: In your book, you also talk about the importance of financial responsibility, and you talk about ways to better manage your money and finding a career that’s more fulfilling and really allows you to live the life that you want.

[00:39:43] Robert Leonard: Walk us through some of your top tips for our listeners. 

[00:39:47] Ken Rusk: Yeah, this one is so easy. I can’t believe that this isn’t like the first thing you learn in high school. Like the very first thing before even where your locker is. You need to learn this, and that is if you take the first $60 that you ever make you go to high school and then you come out, maybe you’re getting a job paying you 50,000 a year.

[00:40:06] Ken Rusk: You look back at the person paying you that money and you say, thank you for paying me 47,000 a year, but I offered you 50. I know. But that first 3000 or $60 a week, I never had it. I can’t spend it. I won’t miss it because I’m not using it in my budget. I take that $60 a week. I put it into a 401K program where that money, every dollar you save becomes a dollar or a dollar and a quarter tax free because your employer will match what you save.

[00:40:37] Ken Rusk: In 10 years, you can stop saving that money. You’ll have saved $33,000. And by the time you retire at 65, you’ll have over a million dollars in your 401K account, even if you stop saving. Now, I’m going to suggest you keep doing it because if you’re used to that $60 being gone, you might as well just keep going.

[00:40:58] Ken Rusk: And if you wait to start this process, and it’s all about the time value of young money, this is what it’s about. You have to start this process between 21 and 25 years of age in order to make this work because you need the time for the money to keep doubling. If you try to start this when you’re 35 or 40, you’re going to have to save way more than the other person did to get half the benefit when you retire.

[00:41:22] Ken Rusk: People that start when they’re 35 have to save way more, and they only get 600,000 in their account when they retire. It’s the simplest, easiest way, and by the time you’re 21 and 10 minutes old because it takes 10 minutes to fill out that form in the time it takes to do that. You can say to yourself, I’m now a 401k millionaire.

[00:41:44] Ken Rusk: I don’t have to worry about my retirement. I’m done. It’s over with. I don’t have to think about it anymore. How crazy cool is that? When you think of all the other people that you see at a bar or a restaurant or wherever you’re going, they’re like, man, I don’t know how to find my money. I got all these bills and blah, I can’t even think about retirement.

[00:42:01] Ken Rusk: No, pay yourself first. You heard Ramsey say that all the time. Pay yourself first. Get yourself into a 401K program where the company’s giving you money. They’re paying you to save and never look back on your retirement. That’s just one way. 

[00:42:15] Robert Leonard: It’s something that’s relatively simple, but so powerful, and it’s almost like anybody, no matter what their circumstance is, can do that.

[00:42:22] Robert Leonard: So I like that advice. As we get towards the end of the show, I want to wrap up. What is one piece of advice you would give our listeners today to help them live a better and more meaningful life? 

[00:42:33] Ken Rusk: You and only you know everything there is to know about you. Okay? You know your favorite color. You know what your favorite car is, you know what your favorite house would look like.

[00:42:42] Ken Rusk: You know what your favorite charity moment would be. You know what your favorite vacation might look like, or your favorite sport or hobby, whatever. You and only you know these things, so why are you relying on other people to tell you how to go get them or what they even should be? I say, take control of your life because you’re the only one who knows these things.

[00:43:00] Ken Rusk: Okay? I did a drawing one time and I had 30 people draw their favorite vacation. Every one of these drawings was different, and that’s good because it’s unique to you. So why are you letting other people tell you how to, what to do, how to get there, and how to make that happen? You know how to do this. You know what your favorite things are.

[00:43:19] Ken Rusk: You have these characteristics within you that can be awakened once you know what your picture looks like. So just go start it. Just start out someday. Never comes. Do it today. You’ll be so happy you did, and you’ll live the life that you want. 

[00:43:33] Robert Leonard: Thanks again for coming on the show today, Ken. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to join me.

[00:43:42] Robert Leonard: Before I let you go, where can everybody listening today go to find you? Your sources of information, online, social media, your book, etc. Where do you want people to go?

[00:43:54] Ken Rusk: Well, if you can start by going to KenRusk.com, you’ll see what we’re up to there. You can get the course and get it for half off, and even donate one to a friend. That’s really cool because then you can both do it together and learn together, which is really neat. You can also find me on all the socials at @KenRuskOfficial, and you’ll see what we’re up to there. We try to help out with these mindsets as well.

[00:44:27] Robert Leonard: All right, I will make sure to put a link to all those resources in the show notes below for anybody that’s interested in checking ’em out.

[00:44:33] Robert Leonard: Thanks again, Ken. 

[00:44:34] Ken Rusk: Well, thank you so much. It’s been great talking with you, and I’d love to continue these conversations because it’s something that needs to be taught. We’re certainly willing to talk about it and help people out.

[00:44:49] Robert Leonard: All right, guys, that’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing.

[00:44:54] Robert Leonard: I’ll see you again next week. 

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