Finding Strength in the Dreams of Others: Rodney Waits

Rodney Waits - Final Transcript

[00:00:00] Hersh Rephun: The funny thing about success is that it's really only elusive until we find out what it means. This is my conversation with Rodney Waits. What if the truth came in a gel cap and we could just pop it in our mouths and forget about it? Well, it doesn't, and we can't, but we can laugh in the face of reality while plotting our survival.

[00:00:26] Hersh Rephun: Welcome to The Truth Tastes Funny podcast. I am your host, ver Shrek, and if my guests can handle the truth, so can you open wide folks? Here it comes.

[00:00:43] Hersh Rephun: Okay. I am here with Rodney Waits on the Truth Tastes Funny. Podcast, Rodney is the founder of Impact is Greater than Influence. And it's gonna be an inspiring interview. We are here in Salt Lake City. It's kind of an unusual setting for us. We don't usually [00:01:00] get to do these things in person. I don't know about you.

[00:01:02] Hersh Rephun: And you do a solocast, right? Yeah, I do.

[00:01:04] Rodney Waits: So I've actually got a radio station that I get to go broadcast out of, and then that's repurposed into a podcast. So this is the normal way I do it. Oh, okay. Yeah. All

[00:01:13] Hersh Rephun: right. But you don't have guests all the time or you

[00:01:15] Rodney Waits: all the, the time. I do a solo cast, usually about three times per month.

[00:01:19] Rodney Waits: And then once is with a guest.

[00:01:20] Hersh Rephun: Right. Okay. So for my audience, which is always looking for inspiration, always looking for tools that they can use. Absolutely. In a world that's chaotic. So for you, what's your inspiration? To do this and how does it work? How is your show working? So

[00:01:37] Rodney Waits: the show pretty much right now has evolved and I just never saw it going to the heights where I believe it will go, and the underlying message of everything that I do is about empowering and inspiring others.

[00:01:50] Rodney Waits: So I believe in first to have someone inspired, they've gotta motivate their selves. I, I just believe that there's sometimes where people are going for motivational [00:02:00] talks and they're going for motivational meetups, and they don't apply it in their real life because they're not yet inspired. Okay. So my goal is to help them use that inspiration as a tool and refine, like where that can help them find fulfillment in their life.

[00:02:14] Rodney Waits: So the message itself, Is my own self realization. And I said that because there's an amazing quote and I can't attribute it to the right person, but I heard it just a couple weeks ago. Cuz I do a lot of personal development myself. Okay. And it sets sometimes our greatest gifts to humanity is our very own self realization.

[00:02:31] Hersh Rephun: Yeah. I think that a lot of people who were in the coaching or the mentorship roles are people who have gone through something and felt like, okay, I have to. Give back, or I have to help other people and help them get off of themselves sometimes or work on themselves, whatever it might be. So what was your background?

[00:02:52] Hersh Rephun: Where were you born? What's

[00:02:53] Rodney Waits: your story? So I'm actually from Albertville, Alabama, and oftentimes when people ask me like where I'm from, I usually just [00:03:00] use the pinpointed Birmingham. Oh, okay. Everybody knows Birmingham. Yeah. That's where it comes from. Right. I, I lived there till I was about eight and a half years old.

[00:03:07] Rodney Waits: My father passed of cancer at that time. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. And uh, it was a very hard trying time for my life and it was something that my mother thought we deserved to clean slate. So she literally hit the Google search and was like, we're going to Florida. We're gonna start our life all over. And so me, her, my little brother, and my stepfather at that time we moved to Florida.

[00:03:26] Rodney Waits: So I went to Navar for a very long time. Mm-hmm. Grew up in Navar and had to actually go through all of my entrepreneurial endeavors, close in proximity. But I'm a serial entrepreneur. I essentially picked up on the fact that personal development was empowering for not only me, but for so many others. So I started to see, after college, I was like, you know, I got a general degree, like an associate's degree in like general liberal arts.

[00:03:49] Rodney Waits: Yeah. And I was like, I, I, it just doesn't do anything for me. I was like, I'm gonna go out and live in the world. I'm gonna go fail and I'm gonna go meet some awesome people and I'm gonna go try to live. To have that [00:04:00] fullest stability and capability to showcase my values, my insights, and help other people be empowered to use theirs

[00:04:06] Hersh Rephun: while the operative word is fail.

[00:04:09] Hersh Rephun: You know, we hear this a lot. You have to fail to succeed, but you have to fail to learn. And if you don't fail to learn and you fail to learn. That's right. You know what I mean? Yeah. That sounds like the makings of a good quote, but I, but I haven't refined it, but in any way. That's kind of the storage. But when you're an entrepreneur and you're also dedicating yourself to self-improvement, helping, what's the model for that?

[00:04:33] Hersh Rephun: Like what is the model to make that viable? To make that a way that you can earn a living in a way that you can monetize it, so that you can

[00:04:40] Rodney Waits: continue to do it? That's a great question and the model's going to be dependent on who you are, but for me, I really boiled it down to two words, chase fulfillment.

[00:04:49] Rodney Waits: So I looked at it like the three F's, faith, fulfillment, and finances, and I was like, I've got to build myself before I actually can go empower other people in the right way to where I [00:05:00] won't burn out. Right, because as an entrepreneur I burn out. Yeah. A lot. Yeah. And I've had about nine different businesses thus far.

[00:05:07] Rodney Waits: Owned two coffee shops, built a real estate brand, both in investing and in buying and selling, and still do that to this day. But the way that I actually got successful with those career endeavors is not because of what I was doing. It was because the people that I was doing it for. So build on the strengths that you have and help other people find their strengths.

[00:05:27] Rodney Waits: Like that can go with sales, that can go with helping in partnerships. That's the mo. Yeah. Is to go and use what you have as your strengths, double down on it, and then find people to leverage or to empower really, to actually build the rest.

[00:05:42] Hersh Rephun: It's fascinating to me because I grew up being very interested in entertainment and entertaining, but not business.

[00:05:48] Hersh Rephun: And I had the idea that I would, you know, maybe just be an entertainer or a writer and I did those things, but it's very different from people who are entrepreneurs. People like me can end up [00:06:00] having our own business. Because that's, we're a little off the beaten track, and when we do just don't fit in in a corporate environment or whatever it is, we don't like it.

[00:06:07] Hersh Rephun: We like the freedom. We like to travel and make our own schedule, whatever. It's right. But I'm fascinated by someone who says, I'm going to invest in coffee shops, or I'm going to open a business. How do you decide, because it's not like you were 10 years old and said, I want to be in the coffee business.

[00:06:24] Hersh Rephun: Sorry. Or that you even limited yourself that way. Sure. How do you decide that to do a specific. Project or path?

[00:06:32] Rodney Waits: Well, to circle back to the voice of impact, which is quickly becoming not only my personal truth, but the movement that I want other people to see in the world, especially in a direct comparison to influence, because you're right, we live in a world distraction, delusion, and misconception, and people need to be empowered by their own gifts.

[00:06:47] Rodney Waits: They just need to be. I went and ran into all of these scenarios. Literally, I had a mobile detailing thing. I had the coffee shops. I've had an entertainment business. I did promotions. Oh, okay. Actually, with my best [00:07:00] friend, played three to four years, and that's what introduced me to entrepreneurialism. It was called Triple Tower Entertainment.

[00:07:05] Rodney Waits: We did extremely well. We didn't even know we were sitting on businesses and just became men in business, but really it was the people. So for example, the coffee shop. That was something that I never, ever thought I would do. But because of the fact I was building my foundation in real estate, I had a meetup group every month at that coffee shop.

[00:07:23] Rodney Waits: And when that owner fell on times where it made more sense to relinquish herself from the business, she came to me first. Mm-hmm. So it was always the people and creating those impactful relationships that led me into those business endeavors. I didn't know a thing about coffee. Matter of fact, yeah. The first two weeks I was on YouTube till like two in the morning and would get there at 8:00 AM.

[00:07:46] Rodney Waits: Yeah, and cause I didn't know how to run a coffee machine, run a payroll, run, anything to do with tracking inventory or all the POS systems. I had to learn. You

[00:07:56] Hersh Rephun: know what that shows though, Rodney, is that you, you were [00:08:00] willing to learn, which next to being willing to fail is probably like the most important thing that you're willing to learn, something you don't know, something you're not good at.

[00:08:08] Hersh Rephun: You know, you don't have a acumen in it yet. So for people who are listening, who are just trying to. Get by in a way. Like they want more fulfillment maybe because they recognize the the precious nature of life after going through pandemics and all kinds of other stuff. But what would you say to people who are listening and are just not quite sure where they're landing right now?

[00:08:34] Rodney Waits: I would say that that's number one, who my show has been for the entire time. Because even behind an entrepreneur that has his head in the clouds and thinks he's going big places most of the time, There's that person that just thinks that being a human in itself is making an impact on the world. So I would say embrace the strengths that you have and if you don't quite realize your strengths, serve other people to find them.

[00:08:57] Rodney Waits: Yeah.

[00:08:57] Hersh Rephun: That's great. That's great. Uh, [00:09:00] and so what's next? Is there a project that's going on? Is there another like you, hey, you're smiling, like you have this, this thing and, well, I'm actually gonna open up an entertainment co. Another entertainment company. And Hirsch is going to be my lead podcaster in this entertainment venture.

[00:09:15] Hersh Rephun: You have the person and so there and then there you go. But what is it? What's

[00:09:19] Rodney Waits: going on? Truthfully, right now I have a movement called the top 100, and it's just based off the first 100 supporters of the store, which is the Shopify, and empowers the message. Impact is greater than influence. Okay. With that movement, I'm going to be given away a source of value, such as free personal development, life coaching.

[00:09:36] Rodney Waits: I have a certification in life coaching with the Coaching Federation. Mm-hmm. Serving with you as well. Mm-hmm. But those things kind of come hand in hand. And then I'm also going to be pouring into all of what I learned. Like for here, I'm going to learn things and then go and pour directly into those grooves.

[00:09:50] Rodney Waits: I'm gonna have absolutely nothing to sail to them and everything to share with them. That's great. And after that top 100 builds into a movement, I'm going to be doing speaking [00:10:00] engagements. But my number one goal is to have the number one podcast for struggling entrepreneurs. I know what it's like. I've been to the bottom.

[00:10:07] Rodney Waits: If you wanna check out my story with my podcast, you can see what the bottom looks like. But I'm empowered to say ever since all of that happened, it's made me realize what I can help other people with at such scale. Yeah. So my largest mission, and this is why I was smiling, is to actually partner or create a foundation that helps with people that have struggled in business.

[00:10:30] Rodney Waits: Feel like it's almost the end and they need someone to pull 'em out of those depths. With coaching. Yeah, with providing the right strategies, with introducing to the right resources, because those people, they're just being harmed more and more every single day because this is an influential society and you feel like if I don't have amazing gifts, if I don't have a value proposition that makes me different than anyone else, then I'm no one, and that's simply not the truth.

[00:10:53] Rodney Waits: The most profound way to make an impact is to first be kind to yourself. Mel Robbins said that. Yeah.

[00:10:58] Hersh Rephun: Yeah. [00:11:00] And isn't that harder than we think? Absolutely. Listening to you talk about helping people who are struggling entrepreneurs, what I realized was, and I thought of it before, but I haven't, I've only started doing it, was that I want to help artists, you know, artists of all kinds, writers, painters, you know, art directors, copywriter, they could be any kind of artist, really.

[00:11:19] Hersh Rephun: Actors, singers, because, Sometimes we feel like we don't know where our place is in the world. Cuz you have business. Yes. And if you had the head for business, and some people have both and some people have it and don't realize it, but what do you do? You know when you, it's easy to become despondent when you have talents and gifts that are necessarily applicable.

[00:11:41] Hersh Rephun: Mm-hmm. That's just the kind of the flip side of what you're saying is something that, that occurs to me as well. It is. Um, I think, are we coming up on the end of our time? We can't be. I haven't really, I didn't know where to look, but

[00:11:54] Rodney Waits: I think we're, well, if you'd like to close out, I'd love to be able to say, in closing, I would love to have you [00:12:00] back just specifically for my podcast.

[00:12:02] Rodney Waits: That way we can Thank you. Talk again because your energy, like you said jokingly, like if you were to head. Podcasting for the entertainment, that's the most powerful thing because that energy people need to realize is what you need to work on date. It's not all of the strategies. It's not the scalability, it's not the measurement.

[00:12:19] Rodney Waits: It's the little things that you can capitalize on to get 1% better every single

[00:12:25] Hersh Rephun: day. That's great. Well, I would love to be on the show, Rodney, because I think, you know, that's why I got into this thing. I've only now started guessing more. Yeah. But it's so much fun and it's so different. And in many cases it's really because the guests that you came on with wanted to continue the conversation and vice versa.

[00:12:41] Hersh Rephun: That's it. And it was an opportunity to do that. Phenomenal. You know, so Awesome. I'd love to do it anytime.

[00:12:46] Rodney Waits: Awesome, ma'am. Well, for all of those that were here, thank you for having Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure.

[00:12:52] Hersh Rephun: All right. See, we win. We got, I don't even know if we, I have no idea what we did. This is our first one.

[00:12:57] Hersh Rephun: Funny. So many people go [00:13:00] over like, like I'm, you know, comedians so that they're comedians who run the light. Sure. Every time. And they're comedians that will, you know, usually they'll show you a light. Right. And you have one minute. But for the most part, like, I'm that person that's just respectful of the time and I don't wanna, I don't wanna make the other person totally lose their time.

[00:13:20] Rodney Waits: Yeah. No, I mean, it's something we're both kind of here just. Excited. Excited to see what

[00:13:24] Hersh Rephun: happened. Yeah, right. Look at

[00:13:25] Rodney Waits: this. Look. Yeah. This is great. Lights. Look at the setup. I'm grateful for you, man. Thank This is awesome you for grabbing being Yeah, my pleasure, man. It's a great thing you're doing. I apologize if you weren't able to get as witty as

[00:13:34] Hersh Rephun: usual.

[00:13:35] Hersh Rephun: Oh, jokes. There's never, yeah, there's never a, well, there's still, it's still recording, so I don't think it meant No, I like it. But, but that's the thing. What I tell people about truth tastes funny is that it isn't like I'm a character and I just make jokes about everything. It's more that I just have a sense of.

[00:13:52] Hersh Rephun: We have to lighten the mood. We have to, but you know, it goes where it goes. It can be very [00:14:00] emotional and very. Powerful. And I think the balance is what makes it great. Absolutely not. Not the co. Even comedy. And I'm a huge fan, obviously of standup comedy. Rookie comedy, yeah. What's your taste? Honestly, like the guy

[00:14:14] Rodney Waits: that's always really appealing to me.

[00:14:16] Rodney Waits: I think his last name's like Brusher, but he's got a shirt off always and he's like abnormally funny and he is got the red hair kind of in the. Pasting guy, I have to show you. Oh, Kreer. Yes. Yeah. And

[00:14:29] Hersh Rephun: I'm sitting Reiser. I was, yeah, he's good for pressure. Funny,

[00:14:33] Rodney Waits: funny because it's like worldly or like Collins, you know, like George Collins, that's his name, right?

[00:14:39] Rodney Waits: Where he's literally talking about the world and he makes it seem like a joke. He actually passed. Like not,

[00:14:44] Hersh Rephun: oh, I don't know. Oh, Carlin Carlin. George Carlin. George Carlin. Okay.

[00:14:49] Rodney Waits: That's another, that's my kind, yeah. George

[00:14:51] Hersh Rephun: Carlin, I was a, a big fan of that and there was a documentary about him recently. Was there It?

[00:14:56] Hersh Rephun: Very good. You should watch it. Yeah. Well, I'd love the mind of George [00:15:00] Carlin, I think it was called, but any called Mind of George. The Mind of George. I think it's called Mind George Carlin. But there are a lot of comedians like Bill Hicks. I loved. Yeah, bill Hicks was amazing. Um, you know, the classic.

[00:15:12] Hersh Rephun: Geniuses Pryor and Robin Williams and yeah. But those were people who had a lot to say and yeah, most powerful, brilliant. And you know, even his stuff that he did, he had done a Broadway show of standup. He had done some other stuff. So for a while, like I. I patterned myself after comedians, but I wasn't working exclusively as a comedian.

[00:15:36] Hersh Rephun: Sure. So it was like, that was another one of the truth tastes funny moments for me was like, you know, we have this perception of what we think we're supposed to do. Right. And what if we're, I mean, this is not, let's not even call it wrong, but what if that just isn't it? What if Tom isn't? Yeah. Yeah. Why?

[00:15:54] Hersh Rephun: Because, cuz you could say, and this was my, like, my personal thing was that I had felt. [00:16:00] Because I got married young and I started having kids and you know, I didn't pursue standup comedy at to my fullest when I was in my early twenties. I thought, well that was just a mistake. That was a critical error that I made in my twenties and it doesn't matter what else I do now, because you can't go back and change it.

[00:16:17] Hersh Rephun: You can still do standup, you can still do that. And what I realized, you know, like a year ago was. I don't think that was a mistake. I think that I made those decisions for a reason. I just didn't know why. Right. I didn't know why I made the decision. Absolutely. And so it wasn't even about blaming. I never blamed anyone else, but it wasn't about, you know, understanding what I.

[00:16:40] Hersh Rephun: What I really had to offer and could do. Mm-hmm. And I think sometimes we just take for granted some idea. That's why I asked you, like, it wasn't like when you were 10 years old and you wanted to be in the coffee business. Right. You know, there are people like that who know exactly what they want to do, but I think sometimes we get in our own way with whatever we think we're supposed to [00:17:00] do, whether it's being a ball player and I want him to be an actor, you know?

[00:17:03] Hersh Rephun: Yeah. So, and we can, that's the other thing is you can do. Whatever you want. I'm acting right now. Yeah,

[00:17:10] Rodney Waits: you're acting right now. You actually, one of my best friends has his own series called Runoff Office, about behind the scenes. Oh, okay. Yeah. I literally made it. I was acting in his Oh, okay. Series. That's crazy.

[00:17:21] Rodney Waits: Yeah. That's great. You just have to go after it, man. You just have to realize like that's the whole reason behind my message. Just that. Yeah. The impact is what has to have the main focus. Yeah, and the greatest thing that we can leave behind is how we make other peoples

[00:17:34] Hersh Rephun: feel. Totally like this energy, this currency.

[00:17:37] Hersh Rephun: Yeah. That's like with us in this room, it's irreplaceable and it's like, you know, when I see these people from the Pantheon that I've become friends with, yeah. It's like, there's like a level of something that I never really experienced. Because you know, it's one thing if you happen into friends in college or after college, could be anywhere, could be through business, but you see them over and over again.

[00:17:57] Hersh Rephun: Here, it's like we're just united in this [00:18:00] kind of, you know, purpose of success and helping people and. You know, feeling good about stuff and we, so we have all that vibe. We're mission driven, but we're mission driven. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly, exactly. Roddy. We're mission driven. Most of us are heart-centered.

[00:18:13] Hersh Rephun: Yeah. And we are just kind of together along for the ride. And we're along for the ride. That's great. Well, we definitely got some great stuff. We didn't, but I don't know what that close out, what the hell they're doing. Yeah. Well, once there you can

[00:18:27] Rodney Waits: What,

[00:18:27] Hersh Rephun: dude? The formal, I usually don't, I usually end on a, oh, like a.

[00:18:31] Hersh Rephun: I usually end on a quote from you or something like, usually, usually I let you let the guest have the last word and then I just go out. Because if they hear me saying, well, I wanna thank Rodney Waits for being on the show, then they'll just turn it off. Good call this way. Thanks me by the way, I do that.

[00:18:45] Hersh Rephun: Yeah. I let the guest say the last thing, and then right after that comes the outro with, if you'd like the show, you know, leave a review and do all that stuff. Are, are we done Two minutes? Oh, is that how it's gonna work? You're gonna come in and give us two [00:19:00] minutes. Two minute warning. Okay, we have two minutes.

[00:19:02] Hersh Rephun: All right. See, this is great, Rodney. Wow. So we have two minutes. Okay. Let's do this. Tell me some things that made you feel better when you thought nothing could make you feel better.

[00:19:15] Rodney Waits: I love that question. So I'm a big proponent of finding the right mentors of mastery. To actually align yourself with. And Robin Charla is one of those people, and he said that oftentimes the people that go through things in their life and journal about it heal at a better pace than others who keep it all in.

[00:19:35] Rodney Waits: Mm-hmm. So a lot of times when I feel like there's not much I can do, or there's lack of control, I have to journal about it. I have

[00:19:43] Hersh Rephun: 15. Books

[00:19:45] Rodney Waits: that are like this, that are all collectives of my feelings and my insights and my future recommendations to like kids I don't even have yet. I'm serious. I literally had a full YouTube channel.

[00:19:57] Rodney Waits: I still have it to this day, active and it's called Opinions of the Mind [00:20:00] Uhhuh, and I just went through one of the hardest things in my life and I had had that effort just. Sweeped under the rug. Like literally it was just like, I felt like I had nothing left. Everything was gone, and then all of a sudden I started making videos and I pointed the camera at me every single day and I would track how I would feel and I would track what my journey was like, and I would pretend I was talking to my future kids and grandkids.

[00:20:23] Hersh Rephun: That's awesome. It's amazing how the mine takes us to those places. When I was in lockdown and I, here I was in Iowa City with my two youngest kids still at home and my wife, and we're like, Going crazy of course, but I started making these little videos and I created a channel on Instagram called Three Times Daily Comedy because my supposition was that the amount of comedy that we needed in order to not go crazy is we needed three doses of comedy every day.

[00:20:49] Hersh Rephun: So I said, I'm gonna make three videos a day, and they could be a minute long or whatever. And I would do characters and I would do things, but it true to form for me, [00:21:00] it. It just became very natural to talk about things. I would just maybe use an accent or a character or a voice, but I would be sharing the same thing that we're all going through.

[00:21:08] Hersh Rephun: The uncertainty, the fear, trying to keep kids busy. Wow. You know? And I don't, I, my friend saw it. I don't, it wasn't really promoted. It's there, but

[00:21:18] Rodney Waits: Same mind, huh? Same with

[00:21:20] Hersh Rephun: Yeah. But it's a chronicle. Yes. And the kids are, the youngest kids are in it. And so I think even from that point of view, it's a little bit of an interesting chronicle for them to look back and say, what was I doing during this?

[00:21:32] Hersh Rephun: That's it. Crazy event in my life. And hopefully it'll fortify them because they'll realize that, you know, they got through something that was traumatic. Yeah, that was great brother. That was a such a nice two minute thing that we got to add to it. Thanks so much for tuning into Truth. Tastes funny. If you enjoyed the experience.

[00:21:51] Hersh Rephun: Please leave a five star review and share this podcast with your friends.[00:22:00]