You Can’t Dodge the Universal Success Principles | Renowned Speaker Bryan Dodge Breaks Down 10 Powerful Notable Quotables

Audio Transcription

All right. Thrive nation on today we are interviewing a happily married man of 29 plus years. A dedicated.

That’s 41 years now.

Did you say 41 years? Dang, that’s 12. That’s 12. More than 29. But you Brian, you look so young though. You look so young. Thirty nine years old. Married for 41. That’s impressive. Know Brian, you had been the speaker of choice for Bank of America. Ford, JP Morgan, g, kraft, comcast, American express a t and t basically all of the fortune 500 companies. Never heard of them. It’s my business coach understanding that as a speaker, it’s your desire to reach people at their head and their heart, my friend. How do you go about doing this?

Well, that’s, that’s a very, very good question. I think that, you know, one of the things that after being doing this for 30 years and I really got into business because I just liked to help, just like what you do, we’re doing here. Um, I’ve learned one thing. People don’t, don’t really care how much you know, they really care how much you know about them. So when I go into these environments that I’m blessed to be asked to come in, I really get to know who’s in the room, what’s going on so that they know that I know enough and then like prepared very well from my mind, but then I communicate clearly from my heart and I don’t talk to people. I talked through them and so it’s a connection. I love when people come up and say, you were talking to me. Well, yeah, I was just saying,

you know, Brian, you, uh, for people go on Youtube, I can see your speeches, excerpts and clips of them and you’re so good at what you do now as an inspirational speaker, but I’d love it if you could really deep dive into your personal history and your career before you decided to become an inspirational speaker because it almost looks intimidating. How good you are today. Uh, what, what was kind of your background before becoming a speaker and when did you decide this was your calling?

Well, that, that, uh, I don’t think you and I have enough time to go through all that in great business coach detail. So respect of your listeners. I’ll be very quick to the point number one is I went school to be that Mary. I love animals. That’s what I wanted to do. And through that process I became, began to realize that, okay, I wasn’t that good of a test taker. So I ended up again in a situation where my real calling was to help people, um, and develop them. Um, and so, and I’m a business minded person. So as I began to build different businesses, I’ve owned six different businesses. One of the things just over a period of time was that I found that in sales and in leadership and marketing. Back then there wasn’t an industry were brought education to people outside the university classroom.

So it just became a niche and we built results to over 100 plus employees and seminars around the country, uh, which led me into doing consulting and working with individuals that became lifetime friends. And so many of them would come to me and go, oh my gosh, I mean, when you get on stage, I can’t take. I’ve never sat for three hours and not wandered off. I mean, how do you do that? I said, I don’t know. When I was going to school, if somebody called on me to stand up, I became a class clown because I couldn’t talk in front of people. So the realization of it is it was in my heart like it is in so many. And if you’ll follow your heart, you’ll be able to deliver what you’re on this earth to do.

How old were you when you entered into a full time career as an inspirational speaker?

I was a, I would say 22.

Twenty two. And how old are you now?

I am 61.

Sixty one. Unbelief. I was looking at the photos and I’m like, this guy couldn’t have been married 41 years. There’s no way. There’s no way to drink a lot of fish oil, you know, you know, I’m uh, yeah. I do a lot of fishing.

Yeah.

But the, the real reality of it is I took that picture last year. I tried to keep those pitchers current every year because too often you look at pictures, you go, well, I’m going to take that one black and white.

I will take that one as a compliment. But no, I’ve got good business coach genes and I married my soulmate and I have three amazing children, uh, are licensed and perfect. But it is truly blessed.

Now you have been blessing people over the decades by teaching them words of wisdom, knowledge that you don’t get in college, teaching people practical skills that could help these guys pay the bills. And so I’d like to have you break down a 10 of some of the most well known, motivational, notable quotables that people have probably heard before. But I want you to explain, because you know some of these people, you’ve interacted with these people. I thought it’d be a great way for them, our listeners to get to know you as well as to get to know the meaning behind the quote. So we’ll go with the first one, earl nightingale he wants. We become what we think about. Could you break that down?

Yeah. Earl Nightingale. I mean, uh, you talk about a fascinating individual, uh, share a quick story with you. One of my goals, be careful what you write down those goals was I wanted to meet earl nightingale. And do you ever listened to him?

Yes. Yes.

He had that resident voice, that business coach radio. He is that guy and he was amazing. I got to meet him and I wrote it down like for everybody to where I got to meet this guy, beat this guy because he’s so, it’s helped me in just the way I thought about my life, where I going and, and so one day I went to this golf tournament and I walked up behind the golf cart and there was somebody sitting in the golf cart at that. Well, well, so I was, you know, being joking around and says, Hey, it’s your lucky day. You can play golf at Brandon Dodge. And all I heard was earl nightingale go, no, it’s your lucky day. I tell you too, I can’t tell you that I’d be talking to because I enjoy talking. I mean, I was speechless. I was like, I, I’ll never forget the things he always opened with and what he was very well known for us. We become what we think about, and I remember one time in Chicago there was, he was doing a seminar. He walked down on stage and it was amazing group and he says, you will become what you think about, and the guy sitting right next to me looked at me. He goes, I think I’m going to become a girl. I said, no, I don’t think that’s what he meant.

So the key element is it with earl nightingale, which is very powerful for anybody to hear is an average human being talks to themselves up to 50,000 times a day. And the problem is, is the conversations, the majority of them are negative because they’re easier. It’s easier. And in the worst thing is, is that there’s too much quiet. People fill it in with negative human nature, just human nature. So what you have to do with that quote us understand, it’s your responsibility to choose what you want to think about.

I agree with that and I would also pile on if you want to go to the book of proverbs. Idleness is the devil’s workshop and it’s a biblical principle. It’s a second principle is the universal principle. It is a principle that when people have nothing to do, they typically turn to doing bad things. Now, w clement stone, another legendary personality in the self help industry. He wants. Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. Break that down for us. Brian,

what was the first word?

Definiteness of purpose. Yeah.

That’s clarity. That’s defined. The other word. That’s key. Here’s business coach purpose. A purpose driven life. We know that book. Knowing some people say, I don’t know what my purpose is. Could you imagine being on this earth and not knowing what your purpose is?

I couldn’t. I don’t know how I would do. I mean, I, I, I can say this, um, I, I would not be motivated to get up to go to work if I didn’t know what I was doing because I had, I’ve done the thing there. Brian, you know, I’m working with direct TV and applebee’s and target and delaying gratification doing all that. Twenty years ago I would not have done if I didn’t know where I was going.

Yeah, and what drove your purpose? What’s your calling in your heart? You knew it was inside you. You knew that everything that you were doing that didn’t fit, that you couldn’t find energy. You were worn down, you were tired. Once you attached your choices towards that purpose, it energized you and people say, how do you find purpose? Then know where your energy comes from, and by the way, it doesn’t come into camp.

True. True. Now, okay. Okay, let me go. He just take it even deeper there with your pile onto what Brian just said. Validating that the word vocation means you’re calling the word vacation means to retreat from. I find that people that know they’re calling typically don’t. They enjoy trips, they enjoy time off it be, yeah, but they don’t dread their job. They don’t dread their, their occupation, they. They’d truly viewed their vocation as a calling. Now, Stephen Covey once wrote here, Brian, he said, I’m not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. Why is that such a powerful concept?

Responsibility can be a stronger country of each individual in America that we choose to be more personally responsible. There are many things that are like, we cannot control. The three of us know that, but there are a lot of things we can’t control. So by being responsible to realize a lot of things that are happening in your life is because you made those choices to create those possibilities.

You know Jim Rowan,

start when you stopped blaming others, you start taking responsibility, which then engages what in a person’s life.

Well, it gets your it get your resourcefulness activated. You begin to look for how can I. it’s not about resources now, it’s about resourcefulness. You begin to become creative. You begin to find that extra gear, that next and the next little energy. I mean, Brian, there’s so many things that come about when you take responsibility.

Well, you nailed it right then, which is no surprise to me because you’ve got depth of knowledge is you began to look, look, look, and you shall find, ask and you shall receive. You began to look. People say, why do I end up one place? Because you were looking there. How often they hear people say, well, you know, it’s greener on the other side of the fence, is it? No, it’s not. Go. Why is it because you’re spending more of your time looking there.

You know Jim Roan, the best selling author. He’s a guy who talks a lot about individual responsibility. He passed away here a few years back, but he said you either run the day or the day runs you. Brian, break that down.

No, he would say Jim. I actually knew jim very, very well during the results today. Brought him out of Herbalife, did one of his very first public seminars for me and Hopkins in Canada and a Hopkins was in the morning and Jim Rowan is the afternoon and it was the most. I still have the picture of those two on stage, so it was really an amazing thing, but either you run the day or the day runs you. The question is when you start your day, who’s in charge?

You don’t hill. I named my son after Napoleon Hill. My son’s name is aubrey, Napoleon Hill Clark, because that book called think and grow rich, so changed my life. That book that was commissioned by Andrew Carnegie in 19. Oh, eight. Forever change my life. That book, that’s kind of like the basic foundation of the self help industry changed my life. Napoleon hill once said, victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting. Could you break that down for us?

Yeah. Well, I think it says it all. The only thing I would add to that is what my father always said. If you find yourself in hell for goodness sakes, don’t stop.

Yes.

That’s the best way I can put. You know. The key of it is we all have that where y’all were used to going into or coming out of challenges every minute, every moment of our life. If you’re not one, now you’ve got one coming. The exciting part of it is that’s the journey. That’s the fight and when you’re connected with your purpose and you understand your soul and you understand what you’re doing, then it’s not a. it’s not a job and it’s. It’s really not a fight. It’s truly an honor, and the only day you look that upsets you is the day you’re not going to be able to do it. You don’t say to yourself, God, I have to do the formboard dates. No. You say to yourself, God, I hope I can do this for another 20, 30 years. I just heard that’s a complete different mindset. Go ahead.

I just heard an insightful interview with coby Bryant where he was talking about playing 20 years in the NBA and how when he had his big injury there two years before he retired, he forced him to think for the first time like, I don’t know how long, how much longer I can do this, but he never wanted to retreat from the game of basketball. You know? He loved it. It was like his source of business coach energy. It was like the more energy put into it, the more energy that he got in, and that’s just such a powerful idea. If you can just. If you’re out there today and you don’t know your purpose, I would just encourage you to really, really bore down and figure out what that purpose is, which, which leads me into our next notable quotable from Napoleon Hill. He writes, cherish your vision and your dreams as they are the children of your soul and the blueprints of your ultimate achievements. Can you break that down, sir?

Well, let me jump back real quick on something you just said earlier and I wanted to add into that for anybody that’s. I’m, I’m honored to be a part of this with you too. I’m, I’m blessed to be able to share this time with those listening. I would only say that the most important thing, um, that you need to understand in life and that is licensed too short, not to be happy. We, we all agree with that. Right? Right. Amen. And life is too long enough to figure it out. So there’s two choices. Either when you’re in where you are, so you’re not happy, you can’t find where you will be happy until you learn to be happy. You are where you go. It’s not going to make you happy. It’s your ability to be happy for wherever you are. We’ll give the possibility to find where happiness really comes from and when you find your happy place in basketball or football or communication or what you’re doing what I do then we never get tired of it.

We get frustrated, we get, we get irritated sometimes because we want people to do or we want to be better what we do, but we never get up saying, oh, I got to do one more day. Have you ever said that to yourself anymore? No, not at all. No. That’s the vocabulary. Alright. So moving onto your next one that you just read the blueprints of your ultimate achievements. This is where it comes down to your soul is the foundation which gives you all the proper answers to the blueprint that gives you things she cannot find any, uh, any other place.

Napoleon hill once wrote, he said, he said, did you know accident is the real measure of intelligence, and so as you’re kind of sharing this idea, you’re saying, okay, your soul provides the blueprint. That’s where you go back to our. You’re dropping knowledge bombs everywhere. I mean, I think chuck and I just had to duct tape our heads back together to try to contain the content in there and bloggers. What happens when people read all the self help books and don’t activate it and don’t, don’t take action, Brian,

they don’t. They don’t realize the difference doesn’t come from a book and the difference doesn’t. It doesn’t become part of the knowledge, the value that comes from the book and the knowledge is how you apply it and not only how you apply it, but when you apply it and why you apply it. Those are the key elements is I always talk about the truth. That diminishing attempt in my book, the good life rules out of Mcgraw Hill. I talked about truth. That diminished and tip. That is, once something is strong within the heart, you have 48 hours to act upon it. All the great people I’ve been blessed to meet with and understand there’s a timeframe in which it has to be acted on and that’s the highest level of intelligence. And once you begin to understand that’s what inspires intelligence, which then produces the outcome and results that everybody’s looking for.

Brian, were you ever at any point in your past. Pardon me? We, you a bus driver at any point in your past?

Uh, that would be a no,

I feel like he just ran over me with a bus there. These, these are awesome knowledge bombs either. I didn’t know where you’re going with that for a second that I got. I got kind of scared. They’re Rondo. Rondo question. Uh, okay. Now speaking of Brian, not driving a bus. Uh, Brian, I want to ask you

that. Was that, was that a squirrel moment?

Yeah. And I just get out to get chuck. This just ended. Brian Dodge has never driven a bus. So Napoleon, Napoleon Hill, he goes on to say, he says that action is there is a real measure of intelligence, which we broke down, so we never know. We got to activate this, we’re going to activate this now. He says, the man who does more than he has paid for will soon be paid for more than he does. Break it down, Mr Brian.

Well, I’ll tell you why. If you do more than paid for, then you believe in what you’re doing, period. If you only do what you’re paid for, then you’re doing it because you’re getting paid, done.

Harness the good energy there. Here comes the bus. Good detail, but that’s a. That was stated. Well, if you, if you are delivering more is because you believe in more than what’s being paid and the world itself says, wow, your belief allows you to receive more. Because of that, you know the hill road here, he says, the majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence and creating new plans to take the place of those which fail. Brian, break that down.

Well, it’s easy to break down due to the fact that one of the things you have to learn in this process is failure will let you learn that what you’re doing, how you’re doing it isn’t the right way why you’re doing it is the right way. So you have to begin to understand intelligence is persistence, you know, working on it. But most importantly, realizing if you don’t change, the outcome’s not going to change.

You know, why? Go ahead.

I was going to say when I was in college before I do these business coach concepts, um, I wasn’t trying to change myself at all. I was just trying to change the outcome I want, I want to be successful, but I didn’t know what to do. And so I would hang around other people that wanted to be successful but didn’t know what to do. And we would end up saying, why don’t we go to the casino? Because they’re given $5, Brian, of free tokens, free tickets, free, whatever you free gaming credit sellers. If we go in through the north end and if we go back in again to the south end, we could find more dollars as long as we changed shirts, so we would go back to the dorms, change our clothes and go back for $5. So we would literally take at least two hours of a night to go into the north end, go back, change shirts, go look in the south end, and we knew that we got $10.

It gave you the cash, they’re rolling and then we knew we could go to CC’s pizza where it was unlimited for four 99 cc’s, pizza unlimited pizza buffet for four 99 and we would eat as much as we possibly could because although I went to a Christian school at the time, oral Roberts University, we weren’t fasting for religious reasons, but we wanted to get ahead. We told ourselves and we didn’t want them to make a profit on. It’s Brian, so I’m not kidding. We wouldn’t eat from Wednesday to Friday, so that way we could go to the casino, to the North End, the south end, and then go. We knew we had it all figured out and we would go back to the dorms at 8:00 at night, 9:00 at night after each eating maybe what it equated to a large pizza or two, and then those cinnamon sticks, Brian, you know, those addicted cinnamon sticks there.

And all of us wondered why are we getting fat and not getting ahead. So I want to ask you this, this notable question I want to ask you this, this, this, about this next quarter wall Jim Roan wrote, we are the average of the five people that we spend the most time with and all of us, we’re idiots. And so if you averaged it out, we were all idiots. Weird pretty out there listening. Who says, I feel like I’m an idiot maybe for 80th divided by an idiot equals idiots. How does somebody upgrade their social circle?

Well, here’s what I’ve learned. If you’re the smartest guy in the group, never had that problem. And by the way, I got a question. Ask it. You Ready? Yeah. Were you a bus driver?

Uh, no. But I do have an audio. An audio clip of what I just thought here. Let me. Let me queue up the audio clip of what I just thought when you asked me that question.

Oh man, he must be good to know that I talk like Earl Nightingale and Charlie Charlie, tremendous Jones, Amanda, that I truly. He’s passed away. He’s just a great human being. He said something very similar where you are today and where you’d be. Tomorrow’s nothing more than the books you read, the people you meet and the process of learning is if you go through a week, and I, my teams, I go through a week and I said, so what did we do this week? We said, so what did we learn? What we did right? What did we do better and how do we do things different? Because we go through a whole week and you put your heart and soul and doing something and you’re not seeing better way. Then you’re not paying attention, paying attention. What sets things apart?

Okay? Okay, so here’s what I want to. I want to pay attention in these final five minutes. I know the listeners do. I’m going to ask tough questions because we’re always interviewing, you know, NBA basketball players, nfl basketball players, bestselling authors, giants musicians, people who are successful and our listeners are maniacally interested in the habits and routines of top performers such as yourself. So what do you do during the first four hours of a typical day at this point in your life?

That’s a really good question because there’s one, there’s a routine. I do believe in routines. I do not believe in routines when I’m on vacation, so I know the difference between my normal life, vacation life, but during my normal life, there’s one rule I live by. When I wake up, I get up. I don’t ever have an alarm clock to decide where I’m going to start. So if I’m. If I’m up at 4:30 in morning, I wake up, I get up. The first thing I do is I do what I call the 15, 15 rule and that is I go to my reading chair and I read for 15 minutes, but I tried to read a mental and 15 pages. So I tried to read. I hold myself accountable to a small amount of time because I used to coach soccer. I’ve never lost a game. I just ran out of time. I, I do. I shortened that time frame up and I’m setting a goal to see how many pages I can read because the faster I read, the higher the retention,

then what I, then I come out of there and I do. Then I do what I call my review moment where I take two minutes and I have a little thing of two minutes and I have to say everything I love most about my life and all the things I’m thankful for my life in two minutes. And Man, you got to go fast. I mean, you really gotta rock it. Um, and then. And then I do some exercising, get myself a cup of coffee and that’s now. Now I’m getting cleaned up, heading to the office. When I get to the office, the first thing I do is look at my priorities. What are the three priorities that I have to do? So I put my three priorities in front of me and the interruption system construction throughout the day. I love it because it’s so much fun. It doesn’t interrupt me because my priorities are and I know what I’m going to get accomplished at the end of the day and that’s the formula throughout the day and at the end of the day I start with a journal and with a journal and that is what did I learn today that I didn’t know yesterday? And then they start when the morning when I come in the office, I look at what I learned yesterday and how I can apply it to today to make today better. Some fundamentals I worked with.

You are an accomplished author. So this could be a self serving question or it could be a little more, uh, you can recommend other authors are. But for the listeners out there who our listeners are very voracious readers, they love to read a. okay, let me look,

let me, let me recommend something. I think most of your readers have not probably guarantee you haven’t either because there’s a lot of books out there and there are. Um, and I’m very thankful. I mean I’m, I’ve authored three books and I’m very proud of it, but this book is, is, is very unique. It’s been around a long, long time and it’s called the goal, the goal process of ongoing improvement by Elijah gold rat.

Okay. We’ll put it on the show.

L, D, r a t, t,

Yep.

Yeah. Theory of constraints in leadership and what it is. It’s a parable which is interesting reading, but ultimately it talks about the roadblocks and as leaders as well as family, as good people, what you should be looking for, what are the roadblocks that are getting in the way of people progressing? Things moving more efficient and that book talks about it. So I could go through a lot of books and people go, I read that one, read this when I read that one. I’m suspecting this is one. They’re going, okay, wait a minute. I haven’t heard of that one, so hopefully that’ll be helpful because it’s a good book.

Brian, have you ever driven a bus trip? Was there like a champ? Was that a pickup line back from college for you? Hey, have you ever driven a bus to, hey, you look like a bus driver.

There’s two kinds of people in this world, those that wish they could be one for those that want to date them. Well, my final question for the. My final business coach question for sake of time here is for those out there who would like to hire you to, to, to speak to their group? I mean, right now we’re in the top five on itunes. I think we’re number 26 set of all the podcasts in the world right now. There’s a lot of listeners out there for anybody who would like to hire you to speak to their group, what’s the best way for our listeners to find you online and to get ahold of you?

Just go to Brian Dodge.com. When you go to Brian Dodge.com, you’re going to realize I’m a full in house consulting firm. My company is, handles everything under one roof. We specialize in family based businesses. Uh, my new book just came out the principles of an unstoppable family business because my real love in life is family and family’s worth fighting for and I love when I get into second or third generations where I get to meet with companies and bring the family back together because when families united, my friends, all things grow. So not only that they’ll see that as a consulting firm, but also they’ll see the different topics that I’m more than happy to communicate and very honored to be considered

for the thrive nation. They know this, but, uh, the word boom, we say around in the show with a boom and boom for us stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. Essentially the attitude you have to bring the everyday to have some success. So Brian, we’re going to end this thing with a three, two, one and then a boom. So if you’d be willing to, to, to join us here, we would love to have you in with a boom here. Steve, are you ready for a bomb? I’m ready. Steve. Our Program Observer. Eric, are you ready for. I’m, I’m Bhumibol right now. Brian, are you ready for your day