Overcoming Victim Mindset — with Vince Warnock of Chasing the Insights

Vince has been recognised by Adobe as one of the top 50 marketers in the world, is a best-selling author and also has a great podcast called “Chasing the Insights”. 

And today, he takes us back to 1996. 

He was sitting on a bench with a friend, and his business had just failed. It’s what he recalls as a bit of a pity party.

But his friend didn’t see it that way. And after a stern talking to, Vince realise that what he needed to change was his mentality. 

Of course, this didn’t happen overnight. 

In what is a very in-depth and honest conversation. Vince looks back on his personal transformation of the victim mentality with a very clear perspective. He breaks it down into two parts.

We compare ourselves to 

1.  Others — even though it's our perspective of the person, not necessarily what they have achieved

2.  Where we want to be — which initiates a vicious cycle of never feeling successful, even when we are

Tune in, as Vince shares some simple tools that helped him to keep a broad perspective on the impact he’s making on others, rather than what he hasn’t done yet!

More from James:

Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com

Transcript

James: So I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Vince. He's been recognized by Adobe's, one of the top 50 marketers in the world. He's a bestselling author and he is also got a very fun podcast news checkout called Chasing the Insights. Welcome, Vince.

Vince: Hey, thank you for having me, buddy. Honestly, every time you read out their bio, I'm like, man, I, I'd sound quite impressive. I'm gonna get you to read it out for

James: know what I'm talking about. well today, clearly things are going well, but we'll jump into my coaching time machine. When, when are we going back to.

Vince: Okay, we are going back to 1996. So yes, I'm that old. Everyone going back to 96, to a moment where, uh, I still remember. I can't remember where I was, but I was sitting on a bench talking to my friend and one of my businesses had just failed miserably. Uh, like absolutely bombed, and I was just having the worst pity party ever.

James: Wow. what's so, so, I mean, clearly anyone's business failing is, is not a great moment in their, in their career.

So maybe there's a bit of pity party justify, but what's, what's, what's going on for you in this moment? You're on the bench with your friend and.

Vince: Yeah, well, it, I mean, look, if I look at why the business fail, first of all, so, um, I made a lot of mistakes. You know, it was one of my first ever proper, you know, big boy, big pants, uh, businesses, you know, when I was an adult. Not one of my little ventures as a, as a child, but it was something I was taking very seriously.

And I made a number of mistakes because I didn't really know what I was doing at the time. Um, so, Didn't secure contracts as well as I should have, and things fell apart there. Um, not only that, I was doing a deal with, um, a major telco over here, so they were gonna sponsor a lot of what we were building and, um, unfortunately didn't really understand terribly much about the cell phone market, for example, and the fact that Apple do not like being compared to anyone.

So the moment that the company was gonna sponsor us mentioned what they were doing at Apple. Apple turned around and went, no, no, no. You do that, you lose the rights to sell iPhones in your country. And that was a, a huge blow. And basically that pulled the rug out completely from under us. That was our last kind of, um, hail Mary where it could have saved the business and, and it didn't.

So I'm sitting there basically looking at every mistake that I had made and reflecting on my past. And for those who don't know, I grew up in a. A very abusive household. Um, I grew up in a very impoverished area here in New Zealand, and my father was an ex-convict who was a drug addict. My mom was alcoholic.

Um, and as you can imagine, that's not a great environment for a child, but it's not, also not a great environment to thrive. And what I mean by that is we, I had no role models in my life. I had nobody around me. Surrounding me that could teach me things like, Hey, how to secure a contract or teach me things like actually how to run a business or what that should look like, or how you should behave in these things, you know?

So I had no real world experience in that sense. My only real world experience was, you know, poverty essentially. So I was feeling pretty sorry for myself and, um, and you know, as you said, I could say it was justified, a petty party, but in reality it wasn't. It was my own fault. So I'm sitting there chatting away with my friend and he was an awesome friend, but I'll tell you, he, I'm pretty sure he was getting fed up with me having a petty party.

I think he was getting really tired of my negativity cuz he turned around and he said something that genuinely shaped the Knicks kind of half of my life essentially. Um, because he turned around and he said, look, and he kind of stopped me and said, you do realize that everything you've gone through counts for something.

And I didn't know what he meant, so he explained and he just said, look, doesn't matter what you've gone through, the good, the bad, the ugly, it all counts for something he said, and I, and the ugly stuff you've gone through and the bad stuff I wouldn't wish on anybody, but it's helped to shape you into who you are today.

And I happen to think you're a decent human being. And it was a weird perspective coming off the fact that I'm sitting there having a pity party about a failed business. But it would made me realize, cause I'm sitting there moaning about the fact that I didn't have any role models, I didn't have this, I never had the opportunity that other businesses have.

I never had blah, blah, blah. And I was playing the victim cut and all of a sudden I realize that everything I've gone through has made me into who I am and how can I play the victim card when I'm actually. Pretty happy with who I am. You know, like I'm, I'm, I'm an empathetic human being. I'm somebody who cares a lot about people.

I'm very entrepreneurial. I'm very creative. Uh, I'm terrible at sports, but boy, you put me on a karaoke stage and I slay. It's awesome fun. So, and in my mind, I'm a great dancer. According my daughter. I am not, but that's okay. Um, but, but it made me realize that I don't have to be defined by my

past. That I actually get to choose how my pastor defines me.

And that was a really eye-opening moment cuz suddenly I realized that the things I hadn't gone, uh, I hadn't learned. I can just learn now the things that I didn't have as a child or I didn't have as a young adult, I could just find in my life now. And so that's what kind of took me on the next mission, which was to find the people who could be those role models in my life and could speak into my businesses and things.

And, and I'd, I'd love to say from there, everything went from strength to strength and suddenly, you know, massive success and a billion dollar business. No, no. I failed at a few other businesses as well. But I fell with a very different perspective. I fell with this perspective of going, you know what? I tried it.

I tried something, it didn't work, but I learned a lot from that experience. So next, let's try the next thing. And that's been the big mark on, uh, both myself and my wife's life, where I. Um, you know, anytime, like we we're going through a major change very shortly we're about to move countries and, um, we did that rather whimsically, um, decided that that's it.

We're done here, we're moving to Australia. And we kind of thought, wait, we're doing this really fast. We haven't really thought this through. Uh, oh. You know what? If we make a mistake and my wife's like, yeah, but come on, when have we never landed on our feet? And I realized, going back to that moment, I get to define how we respond to the things that happen to us.

And if we make this move and it doesn't work for us, you know what? We'll just make another move. We'll just make another decision. Life's not that complicated. So yeah. So that was, that was a really defining moment for

me.

James: So it sounds like it was quite powerful two ways, just the shift of mindset from like in that moment you were going look at all the things I did wrong, and then secondly, you got went even further and it was like, oh, I never really had a chance. Because look at, look, look at the hand that life's dealt me,

Vince: yeah,

Yeah, exactly. It totally flipped that as well because it, it, victim mentality is an interesting one, and I totally understand it, by the way, I've played the victim card many, many times because, you know, when you go through trauma, it does affect you no matter what.

And, and sometimes that can affect how you respond to things. It can affect, affect how things happen to you and, and sometimes it's very easy to realize that, hey, I'm the victim in this. And to feel that and to carry that kind of trauma and that weight. Um, but the other thing is it's also very easy for to let that define you and to hold you back.

In other words, instead of saying, I failed at this business, or I made mistakes, and I can learn from those mistakes, I then took on board the identity of I'm a failure, 

uh, which is very different. Uh, those two things are not the same. It's, and it taught me, it even taught me some really valuable lessons with parenting, honestly, is um, because.

When your children, uh, you know, to be clear, my two kids, they're, they're all grown up now. My daughter's 26, my son's 20. But, um, they are amazing children. They always were, right. We had very few problems with them, but they're also children. So every now and then they could be a little bratty, but, you know, like have some bratty behavior.

But the thing is, you have to understand that that's not who they are, that's how they're behaving. Uh, so it really did teach me a lesson around that as well. So, uh, I would never turn around to our kids and say, ah, you're brat. I would turn around and say, Hey, you're behaving like a brat right now, which is not you.

Right. And this behavior, I dunno where it comes from, but let's sit down and talk about that. Um, so which, uh, after a while gets your kids really annoyed with you, like, dad, stop analyzing me. But it was a really important lesson to, to kind of separate what happens to you. And the things that have happened to you in the past from your sense of identity, those two things are not large.

You are not your past. You are not the things that have happened to you or the things that you've done. You're not your mistakes. You're not even your personality. You're not even your, what you've, you've been through and things. You get to define who you are and that's a really important lesson.

James: I think that's a really lovely point. I mean, a lot of people haven't been through what you've been through from, from childhood onwards, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs.

See their businesses themselves and really find a struggle pulling the two apart. And as you said, like you failed at Business one, and it sound like there were further failures in business after that, but that didn't make you a failure, it just made learnings on your journey to success.

Vince: Yeah, and we, we always hear the cliches. I I love the old Michael Jordan thing. You know, you, you see the shots of, maybe you don't see the mistakes. And for every, every success that I've had, there's a line of, of failures after it, you know, out behind it. And we understand that. But you never feel that in the moment at all.

You just feel like a failure. You're like, ah. But it, it is a really important distinction to make. And, and like you said, I went from that business, very different response, that business failing and me feeling that sense of failure. And me feeling like I just can't succeed to all of a sudden next time I fail at a business or next time there was a mistake made or something didn't go quite my way or whatever, I would look at that and go, now that's a lesson that I've learned.

It's a very different perspective. And when you can do that and you can disassociate it from your sense of identity, then you get to take more risks. You get to play around with these things more because as you know, if something's tied to your sense of identity, you're not gonna take terribly much risks on that cuz it, it's, it's scary territory.

James: sorry, that was clear. Like it was great to give your friend who called you on it in the moment and sort of held the mirror up and sort of fled back.

I imagine it wasn't sort of a, the mirror up, bang changed so what was next in that, in that process? Do you,

Vince: Yeah. Well I think the key word you just said there is process and that, that's what I had to realize as well was, is a process. Um, so the next thing for me was realizing that, okay, I am not gonna be held back by this. I knew. Well, basically I looked for the next venture straight away. I'm like, I need to try something new.

I need to try something creative. I took, uh, I tried my hand to art, um, and I thought, I'm, I'm, I'm completely colorblind. Let, this is the, the irony of this whole thing. I'm completely colorblind. I sucked it out at school. But I had a very unique perspective on things. So I did a whole pile of photographic art where I would, you know, take these photos and adjust them and play around with the colors to change people's perception on color.

And I thought, right, I'm gonna try that. And I did that and, and then got picked up as a principal artist and a huge charity art auction, and got a little bit of recognition, got in the paper and all these kind of things. I had to do that. So that I didn't sit back and be held back by the mistakes I made.

I wanted to try something new, something different and then, and then move on with it. Um, now that didn't flourish into a career or anything like that. And also I realized that little artists get paid. So that was ne definitely not gonna be the path that I chose. But it was the, the key thing of getting back on the saddle and trying something different and trying something creative.

So that was kind of one of the first steps. The next was to go, right, what are the gaps? Actually sit down with my friend, cuz I needed some help on this and say, Okay, what were the mistakes I made? What were the things that were missing from my knowledge, my experience, my life that I could try and fill elsewhere?

And, and I didn't get that right straight away. I, I got on board a mentor who was absolutely terrible. Um, his whole version of mentorship is just buy my software, buy this thing that I'm affiliate for by that thing. And I'm like, why am I just losing all this money and getting, you know, game? Oh, that's why.

Um, but once you start finding people that can speak into your life, They can give you that kind of advice. That's when things started to accelerate. So I did that step. Uh, I also became, you know, we all talk about being lifelong learners. I became a sponge. I read every book I could, which for me, um, is quite difficult.

I, I don't have dyslexia, but I do have a reading difficulty. Um, I'm a adhd and whenever there are large blocks of text, Uh, my brain just looks at that and goes, nah, I'm outta here, brother. I'm not even gonna bother trying to read that. So I have to force myself to read, uh, books and things as well. Uh, this is before audio books were really around.

So, so I kind of, I threw myself into that. I read every magazine, every newspaper, every article I could to try and learn as much as I could. Uh, and then the other thing that I learnt was, Um, basically to reflect on where I'd come from because most of us do this terrible thing. We do two things. We compare ourselves with other people, which is the silliest thing to ever do, and I do this as well, don't worry all the time.

But the reason it's silliest because we're not actually comparing ourselves with somebody else. We're comparing ourselves with our. Perception of that person. And great example of this. You mentioned in the the intro that, you know, I was picked by Adobe as one of the top 50 marketers in the world. And that is a surreal thing for somebody who's brutal with imposter syndrome, who came from nowhere and didn't feel like a success.

But you know, all of a sudden I'm on stage there. In fact, they only picked the top 25 at the time. Uh, I'm on stage there with all of my heroes in the industry and I'm freaking out. I'm going, I don't belong here. But then you go to dinner with these people and I'm sitting there going, these people are so much better than me.

They're so much more knowledgeable. Me, they're so much more experienced than me. So much more everything than me. And I would look up to every single one of them. Then I discovered something else. Americans are lightweights when it comes to drinking because I'm a Kiwi and Kiwis, Brits, Australians, you know, we all have a drinking culture.

So, uh, I decided, hey, we're gonna have some whiskey there and, and we're all drinking away. And next thing you know, these guys are getting drunk really quickly. But then they start opening up to you and then you realize when you are hearing the challenges they have around money or relationships or all these kind of things, you realize this person that I'd put on this huge pedestal, this, you know, this giant plinth and saying, Hey, this person is the epitome of what I want to be like.

You start to realize there are much as a hot mess as you are. all of us are the same in that we go through traumas and we go through things as well. So we are comparing ourselves to a perception of them. But the other thing that we do is we look at where we are not and we measure ourselves based on that gap. So we look at what we want to be like.

And I do this all the time. Like I, I'm a prolific author, I love writing books. Um, but I've got, like, honestly, there's a whiteboard next to me here that's got 36 different titles there for books that I'm writing or that I wanna write. And I will look at the end of that 36 and go, oh, but I haven't done those 36 titles yet.

And I will measure myself based on where I'm not. And then that sense of failure could creep in if I'd let it and go, well, I, I should have at least done 10 of those by now. You know, it's, it's whatever month we're in now, uh, almost in May. You know, and I, I should have done another 10 books by now. So we measure ourselves on where we're not, instead of taking the moment to reflect back and look at where we've come from and what we've achieved, and.

Part of the way I do this is, uh, a thing I create called a impact list, and everyone's got variations of this, but mine one's just called an impact list and it originally was post-it notes on my wall until I realize I have clients come into my office every now and then, it's kind of a little bit creepy seeing all these post-it notes there.

So I do it in Trello now, but I just create a card every time I've helped someone get a breakthrough. Or every time I've done something and not just in work, in, in life, like I, I took my neighbor's bins out because he's got a, a dodgy hip. He had hurt himself and it was raining. And I thought, man, that's gonna be real slippery.

So I was taking my bins out and thought, ah, you know what? It's only, it's only across there. Walked over, took his bins out, didn't think anything of it. Um, and a couple days later he came over and, Was talking to me about how much that impacted him. I'm like, I honestly had no idea it would make that much of an impact.

But he was like, dude, you just, that, that was so selfless and so I, I just really wanna thank you. And I'm like, oh, okay. So I added that to the impact list. Uh, every time a client gets a breakthrough, I add it to the impact list. Every time one of my clients publishes their book and it's a best seller, I add it to the impact list, or they launch their podcasts Impact list.

And the reason I do that is for a few things. Number one, because. It reminds me of why I'm doing what I'm doing, um, and what, and the type of person I want to be. So it's a good reminder for that. But the other reason is in those moments where you are being self-critical. In those moments where you are feeling like a victim or, or those moments we all have as entrepreneurs where you wake up and go, nah, today's too hard.

I wanna go back to bed I don't want to face today. I don't wanna call that client, don't wanna do that email. On those days, I go to that list and I just start reading things out. And the reason I do that is because it's going to give me perspective. And what I mean by that is if you understand like how our eyes work, for example, like if you are thinking about yourself, you're thinking about imposter syndrome, you're thinking about self-doubt, self-criticism, all these things, self is at the center of that.

So you are looking inward, right? So your focus is on yourself and on your lack, on your mistakes, on all of these kind of things. When you are looking at a list and you're looking at these other people and you're looking at what's happened in their life, your focus is now outward. It's now out there on these individuals.

And when you do that, I dunno if you realize, but you can't focus on two things at the same time. Which means when your focus is out there on them, the things that are inward, the things that are, um, you know, making you feel like a victim, the things that are making you feel terrible, they're now in your peripheral vision, which means they're not a focus for you.

So it takes away the impact of some of those things. It actually reduces the effect that victim mentality can have. So, so it does a really good job of keeping your perspective outward. But the other thing it does there is when your perspective's outward and you're looking at all these people and you are having a bad day.

You're like, well, I kind of don't have the right to just stop. I don't have the right to let this affect me because otherwise I'm potentially denying somebody else this kind of impact. So it's a really effective kind of tool that I use. It took me a while to get used to it because it felt really narcissistic.

When you're sitting down looking at a list of all your accomplishments and everyone that you've helped and all this kind of thing, you're like, wow, how vain am I? 

James: But it sounds similar to the idea of like really focusing on gratitude in life, 

Vince: Yeah. 

James: something that we, we don't do enough of. And actually when you start taking a grateful mindset towards things and rose what you're grateful for, and, and also when you, when you preach what they're bringing to you rather than for they're not bringing to you. These are all mindset shifts that, that have a lot of power.

Vince: Oh, absolutely. Well, your brain's a funny thing, man. It, it's, your brain is wired to prove you right. All the time. That's what your brain's wired to do. So when you're doing gratitude, for example, your brain is looking at this going, oh, so you are focused on all these things you're thankful for, you're focused on all these positive things.

Okay, well I'll prove you right? I'll show you some more positive things. Uh, and it shifts. It really does shift your outlook for the day. If you wake up grumpy and you focus on that and you're like, oh, life sucks. People suck. Clients suck. Everything sucks. The whole world sucks. You're just gonna see that all day.

You're just gonna see examples of why things suck. But if you focus on, actually this is a huge opportunity in front of me, or I'm very blessed to actually have clients like this, I'm very blessed to be able to do the work that I do. I'm very blessed of all this. Your brain's gonna take time through that day to show you more reasons to reinforce that thinking.

Um, and that's a really powerful thing to do.

James: How long do you think it took you to, to make, to make this mindset, to fully embed this mindset? It is always a work in progress, but 

Vince: That it is an ongoing thing. It's, it's not, Um, I think a lot of times when we're talking mindset stuff, we all think that it's like a switch that gets flicked and then suddenly you're okay. It's never that you, it's still always a work in progress, but you make those incremental changes and you start to see those, you start to see the improvements in this, you start to see things shift, um, and things can throw you back as well.

I remember working in corporate, you know, I'm at Cigna Insurance. I was the chief marketing officer there. You know, technically it's the dream job. You know, everything there is wonderful. You know, you, your pays ludicrous. Your bonuses are just embarrassing. Um, you know, you, you're getting the recognition there.

That's when Adobe, you know, picked me as one of the top 50 marketers published my first book. When I'm there, I, you know, massive amount of accolades and, and got to speak on stages all over the world. Um, but I was miserable. I really was miserable. And no matter how many hires are on there, no matter how, no matter how many things I can write on that impact list, there were times where it would affect me.

And, and even though I've made shifts in my mindset, I would turn up in the office and feel like a complete fraud and feel like I don't deserve any of this. Feel, like, feel really ashamed as well, because. You know, most marketers would kill for that job. It's like the epitome of what you want to achieve as a marketer.

And here I am with that job thinking, man, I'm so ungrateful. I really don't want this job. I don't want to be here. I'd rather do, I'd rather just write books for a living. So it's, it's always a work in progress. You're gonna take, you know, two steps forward, one step back, another two step forward, one step back.

But just keep making sure that you're pro pressing in the

right direction. 

James: C Cuz that's really interesting cause that so, so the moment we start off with this idea of unhappiness due to failure 

Vince: Yeah. 

James: and that moment almost feels like unhappiness due to success.

Vince: Yeah, it, that's an interesting way I put in there. I, I kind of, it took me a while to realize why I was unhappy there. Because like I said, on paper, everything, and I literally was writing, I say on paper, I was literally writing on paper why I should love my job. And I had the, the, I'm not supposed to say I had the largest office in our building because, um, technically the CEOs was just slightly smaller than ours, but we weren't allowed to tell you that because otherwise she'd take my office.

Um, so, so I had the, the largest office there though. And I had these beautiful views. I was watching all the cruise ships come into the harbor and thinking what cruise I'm gonna go on next. It should have been the dream life. And I just couldn't get my head around why I was so unhappy. And I remember coming home, came home to my wife, uh, one day she, I walked in the door and she goes, oh my goodness.

You were so unhappy there. I went, yeah. And she goes, is the time we made a change? And I thought, Yeah, it possibly is. Um, but I had to rationalize why am I feeling this way? And that's when I looked at what am I doing in my role? Yes, there's all these accomplishments. Yes, there's, you know, the pay. Yes, there's all these different things.

But what am I actually doing? Well, I'm making money for a Fortune 100 company. Um, am I impacting people? No, not at all. 

James: I suppose, your North Star. It's kind of your reason for being is very powerful. just to get the whole picture, was the job having impact on your personal life as well in that, when, in that moment of success? So you, you looked very successful, but were there elements of life that sort of weren't apart, apart from this not meeting your, your core driver, was there anything else going on?

Vince: Well, I, I think I, I'm a firm believer, like I don't believe in com compartmentalization, you know, a lot of people are like, Hey, your work self, your home self, your marriage self, your, your father's self, all these kind of things. You, you are who you are. You take yourself everywhere you go. If you're having stress at work, you're having stress at home.

Um, because no matter how much I try and compartmentalize that and push it down and, and that sense of unfulfillment there, when I came home, my wife and my kids would know that. They would feel that in the way I interact and, and I try my best not to let it affect that at all, but. I am who I am, I feel what I feel.

So, so it definitely has an effect in that way. Um, but also, I mean, it had a positive effect. It always, anytime we go through hard times, me, myself, and my wife, it always drives us closer together. Um, that's why we always knew we were, we've been married almost 28 years now, coming out to our 28th wedding anniversary, which is amazing.

Um, but every through those 28 years, every adversity, everything we had, we become closer and closer. So it's, it's awesome. But, um, yeah, so it was, yeah, I mean, The, the calling itself like, you know, and we'll call it a calling, actually, the calling itself to help other people. That didn't even come from me.

Essentially, that came from me experiencing things because when you grow up in an environment where you have to hide your whole life, You know, if you stick your head up above everybody else, you got a beating. If you stood out in any way, you got a beating. If you said the wrong thing, you got a beating.

Like it's not conducive to succeeding and it's not conducive to even helping other people. But what happened was when I was 11, um, I had a teacher who, uh, was probably one of the biggest influences on my life ever. And because he was the first time, it was the first time anyone, Appeared to ever believe in me, and he helped me to believe in myself.

So I remember, uh, I was, I was such a cheeky child man. Like honestly, I, because I was quite intelligent kid, um, in a very low decile, you know, low impoverished school, and he was talking about these projects we're doing. He said, oh, we've gotta get ready for your oral presentations. And I went, And he goes, what was that noise?

And I went, what? And he goes, what was that noise? And I said, well, when, why are we doing this? You know, why are we doing oral presentations? He goes, oh, it's preparing you for the real world, Vince. And I said, come on, look around. When are we gonna get the chance to do oral presentations in this world? Well get up on stage in front of people.

And he said, well, how about now? And he pulled me in front of the class and he goes, right, he's gonna teach me a lesson in a good way. He said, all right, K Class. Vince is gonna speak for the next five minutes on a topic. What topic is he gonna speak on? And being the ever creative 11 year olds, you know, they, one of them yell out an egg, so I had to speak for five minutes on an egg.

Now in doing that it, one of two things could have happened. Either could have humiliated me to the point where I realized I need to pay attention to this, or it could have been what actually did happen. And that was, I had 20 seconds to prepare. It goes, your time starts now. And the only thing in my head was that saying, which came first, the chicken or the egg.

And so I said that out loud and then my brain just went into this other mode where I just kept flowing off that and I kept talking. And it was honestly, it was so exciting. You'd like pull a string and everyone would laugh and you pull another string and you know, all this other thread and people go, Ooh, and all this.

And I'm like, oh my goodness, they're eating outta the palm of my hand. It was, it was so thrilling. I was like, this is incredible. And we got to the end and I was so excited. And he goes, right, you got 20 seconds left. And I was da da. I don't remember anything I said in the middle, but I got to the end. I went.

And so obviously the chicken came first. Everyone's like, whe. And I was like, oh man, this is exciting. But I turned around and I thought, part of me thought, ha, I showed you. But I turned around and he said to me, that was amazing. And I said, ah, ah, thanks, hahaha. And he goes, no, listen to me. And he grabbed me by the shoulders, not in the hard way, but he grabbed me by the shoulders.

So I would look him in the eyes and he said, that was incredible. You have a gift. He said, do you realize you could do something significant with your life? And I was like, what? And I was like, what's this weird feeling on there? So I had this bubbly feeling. I'm like, what the, this is, this is really strange.

I learned afterwards. It's called Hope, um, it's called being believed in. It's called seeing that there is a future for me, all of these kind of things. And, and he inspired me and I remember that feeling so vividly. That. That became a driving motivator for me that I wanted other people to feel that as well.

I would see people that were in my circumstance or see people that have gone through even way worse than I ever had to go through, and I'm like, but there is a future for them. There is. They can write their own future. They can write their own destiny. They need to know that. So it became a driving force for me.

And entrepreneurship is an incredible way to be able to do that and to impact people as well. Because you know, if you are providing services that give them financial freedom, that's gonna help them to know they can write their own future. And if you can inspire them while you're doing that, you can empower them, then it's incredible.

So I was always kind of cut out for coaching. I just didn't realize it, you know, that gap between being 11 and being whatever age I started this, you know, 40 something. Um, it was a huge long time to learn that actually, that's what I'm called to do here.

James: it sounds like that's given you a great role model to go after.

Vince: Yeah,

James: And even, even like this impact board that you talked about, How do you magnify that impact? So you, you're already having lots of impact doing the work that you do with entrepreneurs. 

Vince: Yep. 

James: What, what's, what's, what's the sort of current day state of that impact and what's, what's next?

Vince: Yeah. Well that's a, I mean, that's a great question, man. Um, because there's, there's a challenge with this as well. Like, you know, I look at the lights of, uh, and I'm not comparing myself to these people, but you've got Brendan Bouchard and you've got Tony Robbins, people like that. They are out there inspiring people all the time and Phil Stadiums and things like that.

And I look at that and go, that's not me. I'm not that type of person. I don't want to be that type of person either. No criticism on any of them. That's, that's what they're called to do. That's fine. Um, I work behind the scenes and I help people as much as possible. So to scale that, I have to think about that consistently.

And this is part of the process we do every single year. Um, myself, I sit down with my teams, uh, for the different companies I run and. I go, okay, right. This is what we've accomplished for the year. This is the impact that we've had. This is the people that we've helped. This is, you know, the, the kind of, this is where we fell short in some areas and things as well, but how can we now take all of that and scale that even further?

And we're not looking for a giant step jump. We never are. We never are. We're not going, okay. We've gone from helping, you know, 50 entrepreneurs become authors to now we want 5,000 in the next year. We've gotta be realistic about this, but we always wanna make sure that we're pushing that and pushing that and trying to not just grow it by incremental numbers, but grow it by percentages.

You know, like, um, so a good, a good example of that is this year. Um, so a lot of the stuff I do with my publishing company is, What we call ghost publishing. So, uh, I set up the company, I actually set up the company selfishly, to be honest, uh, cuz I was writing my first book and I got approached by some traditional publishers who wanted to publish it.

And once I sat down with them and realized that with a traditional publisher, you don't own your ip, I your own ip, like I can't just use that book as a lead magnet or anything. I'm like, nah, screw that. I wouldn't do this myself. So, so I went down a rabbit hole of learning for six months, interviewing every single person I could, every author.

Publisher, editor, proofreader, designer, anyone who's had anything to do with books, I would pick their brains and I would accumulate knowledge. And in doing so, I realized I'm gonna do this myself, but I can't do it alone. So I need people there to support me. I need a, a developmental editor, I need a proofread, I need a designer.

So I formed a team. They worked with me. We, I was very happy with the book. It was a best seller and was like, Sweet. We've done this. And I said to them, Hey, I'm gonna write my next book now. You know, love you guys to work with me on that. And they all kind of said things like, yeah, sure if we get the time.

And I'm like, wait, get the time. No, hang on. I will hire you all to come and work for me. I. Um, and that way you are always ready when I wanna write a book. And they said, well, what do we do? I went, I don't know. We'll make it up as we go along thinking they were gonna like, help me with copywriting, help me with content.

But that's when I realized that's a bit selfish. There are a whole pile of my clients who really want help writing books or want to become authors. So we made the team available to them. So that was the kind of birth of the publishing company, but we, we really started to. Expand was working as a ghost publisher.

So that means people like Simon Schuster Wiley and things like that would come to us. They would say, Hey, we're gonna give you our clients. You pretend you work for us. Craft a beautiful book with them. Publish the book and be a best seller. And you get no credit for Vince. We're like, oh, but they pay us good money and we get to help that person.

So, so that kind of, we were looking at that and we were doing a lot of work in that space and getting some really good success in that space. But it became awkward cuz if anyone said to me, oh hey. What books have you guys published? I'm like, well, I can't tell you that we're not supposed to admit it. You know, like it's supposed to be a secret.

Um, so we decided that that's not helping people as much as we want to, we can actually scale the work we do. So this year we set out to remove those relationships and we said, right, we're gonna move away from Ghost Publishing. We're actually gonna go loud and proud about who we are. We're very, very good at what we do.

Um, this is why we're hired by all these people, but now it's time for us to earn our stripes there. So, so we, uh, like publishing companies are called imprints. So we've got our imprints, um, and we want to really kinda la go loud with that this year. So we started going, right, how do we scale that work?

Let's do, let's do a launchpad. Let's get a whole pile of entrepreneurs. Together in a six month accelerator program. Teach them how to write their book, do everything for them. And at the end of that we've got like 30 different entrepreneurs. They're gonna be authors. So let's see if we can do that. And then next year we'll scale that.

We'll double that, we'll triple that. We'll do you know, however, however, we can kind of automate that as much as we can to help all these people. So that's the kind of question we just always ask ourselves is how can we expand, how can we grow? How can we scale the work we do?

James: super interesting and thank you so much for sharing so much. And 

Vince: Yeah, I, I love the format of your podcast, man. I really do. I just love the fact that you. Like most podcasts talk about, you know, successes or they go and they talk about, you know, how to do this, how to do that. You go in deep to who we are as entrepreneurs or who we are as people, as founders, and I think that speaks to so many different people.

So it's an absolute honor being on here. Seriously, man. Like the moment you said, Hey, do you wanna be on the show? I'm like, yeah, hell yeah. I mean, to be fair, anytime someone says You wanna speak Vince, I'll say yes cuz I, I, I do love being on stage. I'm one of those rare individuals that love public speaking, but, but this has been an absolute privilege.

James: Awesome. Thank you so much bud.