‘Success is never owned, it is only rented; and the rent is due every day.’

I just finished reading "Take the Stairs" by my good friend Rory Vaden, which recently hit these bestseller lists:

#1 on Amazon worldwide
#1 on Barnes and Noble all categories
#1 on USA Today business
#1 on Wall Street Journal hardcover business
#2 on New York Times hardcover

Finally someone has convincingly and definitively taken on the topic of discipline and how it is the single most important factor in your success!

The title of today’s blog post comes from Rory’s book, and it reminds me of what Rick Lara, my high school speech coach, used to say – “You’re only as good as your next speech.”

I have this hanging above the door in my office as a constant reminder that we celebrate achievements but it is what we are yet to achieve that defines us. As CEO of an 80+ person company and leader of a 40,000+ member organization, I have to earn my spot here every day.

Rory’s book focuses on achieving success through discipline, and I think it’s especially relevant to those of us who work in real estate. Very few agents earn an hourly wage or salary; most get paid for their results. I’ve seen far too many agents fail because they spent their time on the wrong activities—something Rory calls “Creative Avoidance.”

No matter how you define success, it requires self-discipline. In “Take the Stairs,” Rory explains how we live in an "escalator world" that's filled with short cuts, quick fixes, and distractions, making it all too easy to slide into procrastination, compromise, and mediocrity.

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To meet Rory in person, be sure to register for our Breakthrough Conference in Las Vegas on July 15^th – 18^th where he’ll be one of our keynote speakers! _______________________________________________________

• Q1: According to your experience, what is the key to success?

It seems that the only thing that ALL successful people have in common is that they have developed the ability to do the things that they know they should be doing in the moments when they don’t feel like doing them. In other words success isn’t about choosing to take the escalator; it’s about choosing to Take the Stairs. In a word I sum it up as discipline. The discipline to do the things we know we should be doing even when we don’t feel like doing them. But self-discipline isn’t as hard as we think – when we think about it the right way.

What we noticed is that the most disciplined people in the world don’t like discipline more than the rest of us, and they aren’t disciplined out of some weird masochistic pleasure for seeking pain. Instead, they simply process their choices through a different set of criteria from the rest of us. In other words, they think about it differently (in 7 specific ways outlined in the book) and that enables them to make choices that most people can’t normally get themselves to make.

• Q2: How did you get to where you are? How is your personal experience one that lends itself to the study of self-discipline?

When I was 5 years old my mother put me into martial arts, and by age 10, I became the youngest black belt in Colorado…to ever get beaten up by a girl! I used to argue with my mom “I don’t like this! It isn’t fun for me! And this isn’t something I enjoy!” and she’d always say back “That’s OK Rory, enjoying it isn’t a requirement of doing it.” So, being raised by a single mom, she taught me to put a lot of faith in self-discipline.

Then when I went to college I worked with The Southwestern Company. I spent 5 summers away from home, waking up at 5:59 am, taking ice cold showers, and knocking on doors 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, on straight commission, paying all of my own expenses, selling educational children’s books door to door. It was the most rigorous and challenging thing I’ve ever done, but I made over $250k in 5 summers and Southwestern taught me the skills and character I needed to be successful in life.

• Q3: One of my favorite things in your book is the concept of creative avoidance. What is it, and how do we watch out for it?

Creative Avoidance is a new and much more pervasive form of procrastination that is subtly different. Procrastination is consciously choosing not to do something that we know we should be doing. But what most professionals are really struggling from today is unconsciously filling the day with menial work or trivial work where they can be working long hours, in lots of meetings, answering lots of emails but really they are nothing more than busy just being busy.

Distraction is a dangerously deceptive saboteur of our goals. It’s amazing how much time we lose to mindless minutiae that really doesn’t forward our progress to completing anything substantial. One of the key strategies presented in the book is learning how to ignore the small stuff temporarily so you can focus in on the big stuff. The book also works hard to empirically quantify some of the impacts of the various forms of procrastination, which helps readers ultimately realize that anything that wastes our time is a waste of our money.

• Q4: One of the most popular concepts you share is your Rent Axiom. Can you explain that?

It always cracks me up because at the end of every keynote presentation or interview I do people are always thinking “you’re right Rory. I’ve known for a while that there are some changes I need to make in my life and I need to do some things differently. So let’s say I start choosing to Take the Stairs and I start making sacrifices, and paying the price, and start being disciplined…how long do I have to do that for?” Makes me smile.

The truth is we never get to stop being disciplined. Now that doesn’t mean that our life will be one great big giant trip to the gym or that we’re only going to eat foliage for every meal but the reason we never get to stop being disciplined is because of something we, at Southwestern, call the rent axiom. And it says, “success is never owned, it is only rented; and the rent is due every day.” And even though it sounds like bad news at first, if you embrace that attitude as truth then you’ll enter into your commitments understanding that the change you are about to make is not a temporary one but a permanent one. Something magical happens and that is that your appetites begin to change. Until one day what was once a challenge to get yourself to do later becomes the very thing your body craves and what was once a sacrifice to give up later isn’t even much of a temptation.

• Q5: Tell us about your “Take the Stairs tour.” What is it all about?

We decided with all of the momentum of this book that we should do something more productive then just go around to bookstores and beg 3 friends to come out to get their book signed. So instead we are taking a tour bus across the country to 20 states between Feb 20 and Mar 20 to support Youth Character Education. We are hosting 2.5 hr FREE events in every city where members of the community come to a live event at a local venue (high school auditorium, college, church, etc) WITH their teenagers and I teach all 7 strategies of self-discipline and the Take the Stairs mindset. We then collect a $10 suggested donation at the door and give 100% of the money we raise that night right back to that local school district foundation or some other local youth charity that supports character education. Our plan is to hopefully raise at least $10,000 at each event and over $250k total for the whole tour.

Anyone can register, its absolutely free (other than the suggested donation), and we are inviting people to come with their teenagers (8^th grade and up) so they can do something fun together as a family and learn about the importance of self-discipline together. The complete list of tour locations where they can register and all of the information is available at www.takethestairstour.com

Anyone wanting to buy the book can do so at www.buytakethestairs.com.