Today on Radical Personal Finance, we're going to talk about how to stop chasing influencers and how to become one. My guest is Kamonzi Constable. He used to deliver bread for a living. Now he travels the world and gets paid thousands of dollars to encourage, teach, motivate, and inspire others.

Today, sit back, relax, and let him inspire you. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. This is the show where we talk about how to live a rich life now and how to build a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My guest today has done exactly that. He started off exactly like I said, delivering bread, paid his dues, worked his tail off, and is enjoying a degree of financial freedom that most people would dream of today. My guest is Kamonzi Constable. I met him at, what was it, podcast movement and saw his table of books and started talking to him and then he just turned out to have a really remarkable story.

When I connected with him, I was just very impressed by his story and really enjoyed getting to know him. You'll hear in the interview, I've learned a lot from Kamonzi. He's really a great guy. I think you're going to enjoy this. Before I play the interview for you, I want to share with you our sponsor of today's show.

Sponsor of the day today is Trade King. Trade King is the official brokerage provider of Radical Personal Finance. I reached out to Trade King after connecting with them at a conference. I was really impressed by them. I was looking for sponsors for the show and I said, "Hey, listen.

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TradeKing.com/radical and set up your account today. Kamonzi, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Hey, Joshua. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the show ever since I heard your longer critique of Tony Robbins' book. I remember that. We met at Podcast Movement 2015 and I had never known you or your name or your work and you had a table there with your books and I was recording interviews at a table I had, let's just say stolen, next door to you to do interviews for the show.

We got to talking and you asked me what I thought of Tony Robbins. I sent you my three-hour intro to him and to the book and I appreciate you checking it out. It's hard for me to answer questions of, "Hey, what do you think about the book?" in about 10 seconds.

So it's nice to be able to send people a podcast interview. Yeah, that was good. So I've been excited about bringing you on because since we met, I went back and read your books and went through two of your books anyway and I went through and just started watching you and watching your work and I have been seriously impressed by your story and I've been excited to bring you to my audience.

So let's kick it off with, would you be willing to share a little bit of your background and especially your background in business, where you came from and the type of work that you do now? Yeah, at 19 years old, I had the opportunity to become an entrepreneur. I had worked for Sarah Lee Bakery delivering bread and every day I would see this guy delivering bread who wasn't wearing a uniform.

So I asked this guy one day, I'm like, "How come you guys don't have to wear uniforms?" And he said that he was an independent contractor and I'd never heard of that. I didn't have any entrepreneurial people in my family, so I didn't know what that was, but he kind of broke it down for me what it was.

He was a franchise owner for this bread company. They gave him 20% but he was responsible for all his own stuff. And out of that conversation, he said one thing that piqued my interest. He said, "The problem with being an independent contractor is you always have to have your route covered no matter what." And so there are some of us that have been doing this that haven't been on vacation in like seven years.

And I thought, "Well, it sucks not to go on vacation seven years," but I thought, "Hmm, that's interesting." And I asked him, I'm like, "Well, what would happen if you had a vacation guy?" And he said, "The vacation guy would have work all day long." So I said, "Hey, would you be willing to train me for free and get me set up in this?" So that's what happened.

He started training me on their systems and all their stuff. And I put out a schedule for the rest of that year saying that I was available to run vacation routes for these independent operators. This was my business under my name and they would pay me directly. And when I put that schedule out, it was filled up in a couple of days.

That schedule was full. And at that point, I had enough confidence to say, "Look, I got a full schedule. I got a little bit of money in the bank. I'm going to go ahead and quit Sara Lee." And so that's what I did. And that service business in the bread industry, it grew very fast.

I was full not only that year, which would have been, oh man, this was when I was 19 years old, so this would have been like 2009-ish. 2008, 2009-ish. And the schedule filled up very quickly that year and the whole following year to the point where I said I had to bring somebody else on.

So six years into this business, just to cut this story short, I had a business that did vacation routes for these independent guys in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. I had five guys working for me doing this as well, and the business was bringing in half a million dollars a year.

The problem was that because I didn't know anything about business, I didn't read any books or anything like that, I completely mismanaged the finances. So money would come in and- You did that too, huh? Yeah. It's strange how we have to go through this difficult road sometimes. Well, that first year when I got to the end of the year and I had a good year, made something like $100,000, and then I got that tax bill.

I didn't pay quarter lease throughout the year. I didn't know anything about that. And I got that bill for like, I don't know, $20,000, $30,000, just some crazy amount of money. And I'm like, "Who's supposed to pay this? Who's supposed to pay this?" And that's pretty much what happened for six years is I would get the bills and I wouldn't pay them.

I would file my taxes, of course, and all that. But I didn't have the money to pay them because I blew all the money throughout the year. And so 12 years into this business, 12 years in this business, it'd be 2011. I was $180,000 in debt from the business.

I was down to just me. I got rid of all the employees. I realized that having employees was something that I never wanted and will never ever in my life ever repeat. It's just not for me. So it was just me at this point. I had all this debt.

I was overweight because working at this job, I was always in the business. I never managed a business, meaning I always had to be on the bread truck. So I was always eating Taco Bell and McDonald's and blah, blah, blah at midnight. And so it led to weight gain.

I was 170 pounds heavier than I am now. And life was falling apart because once the finances were messed up and we were stressing about money and we couldn't even open a bank account in our name because the IRS was coming to take all the money in them, it led to a lot of problems in my marriage.

Money problems usually equal marriage problems. And so there was a lot of problems there. And that year I just sat on the ground, Joshua, and I was just crying. I sat on the living room floor, I can remember, of my friend's couch and some commercial came on for, it could have been like dentures, but it was like a happy family and they were smiling and blah, blah, blah.

And I'm like, "That used to be my family and I just lost it. I broke down at that point." And after a good cry, I got back up and I realized that if something was going to change, I had to be the one to do it. This isn't a movie.

I wasn't going to win the lottery. There wasn't going to be some magical thing that happened. If there was going to be change, I had to get off my butt and I had to make that change happen. And so that's what I did. The first thing I did was I journaled everything that was going on because I just had to get this stuff out of my head.

And when I looked down on this journal after a couple of months of journaling, I had filled like this little 90 page notebook. I'd filled this thing all the way up with everything that had just come out. And at that point, it was end of 2011, self-publishing was becoming a thing that I had been hearing about more and more in the news.

And I thought, "Man, maybe I could take this journal and self-publish a book." And so that's what I did. I paid some professionals, paid to have a website done, paid to have the book put out there. But the problem was I had no audience, Joshua. Nobody was listening. Nobody even knew that I was alive.

So I put this book out there and in the first six months, it sold five copies in the first six months. And it was pretty depressing. But by that point, I was determined that I was not going to give up. So I spent 2012 learning how to build an audience, how to connect with people.

And what I did that year, to make a long story short, was I just went out there and I tried to get massive exposure. I guest posted for 80 different blogs that year. I was a guest on 60 different podcasts that year. Wherever I could get exposure, I was out there filling out horror requests.

I was kind of all over the place just to really try to build my audience. And the result was by the end of that year, I had, by the end of 2012, I had sold something like 40,000 books. I had some coaching clients. I had a few opportunities to come speak at different conferences and they weren't paying a lot but they paid a couple bucks here and there.

And so the money at that point was good. We used most of that book money. The money that came in from royalties from books all went to pay down that debt. It wasn't paid off by the end of 2012 but we paid off a good chunk of that. And I felt confident at that point with a business that was consistently bringing in $5,000 a year, I felt confident that I could, a month, sorry, $5,000 a month, I felt confident that I could go ahead and quit the day job and build upon this thing.

So 2013, 2014 were years where I just continued to get the exposure, continued to go after it, I started proactively seeking out opportunities and the business just, it built and it's continued to build until today. We moved our family from Maui, Hawaii, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in April of 2014.

We paid off all the debt with the money from the book sales and other monies and now I operate a business that allows me to do some traveling and speaking. I'm the author now of four books which is pretty cool. I work with the full schedule coaching clients and do some consulting and life is drastically different than it was back then, Joshua.

So you obviously got lucky because you're an overnight success. So you got a lucky break. What was the lucky break, Kamonze, that just opened all the doors to the floodgates for you that, what was that one lucky break that completely did it for you? It was Oprah. Oprah. Oprah.

Oprah changed your life. She tweeted about my website. That's a lie. Don't take that seriously. Yeah, right. Sarcasm heavily implied there. And that was why I wanted to bring you on because I get so sick and tired of being involved in this building an entrepreneurial endeavor of my own and having consumed a lot of advice of other people, watching people with web businesses.

I get sick and tired of the lies that people tell. And as I've built Radical Personal Finance over the last year and a half, it has been probably one of the much more difficult things I've ever done. And people look and often say, "Well, look, Joshua, it's easy. You got all these listeners and the show has been so good.

And look, you've got this great Patreon campaign." I was like, "Do you understand the amount of work behind it?" And so I really appreciate it when people do a good job of identifying the great things about this type of business but also the challenges. And I have a lot of respect for people who balance those things and I believe you do that very well.

Thank you. Question I want to ask though about your story. So you are really good at sharing some ideas, sharing tips and sharing things like that. But your background that you often say in your bio is you talk about, "Well, I'm a bread delivery guy." And in my mind, that immediately puts an image of you driving around in a truck and it's like, "What does the bread delivery guy had to offer?" And if you juxtapose that with the fact that here you are writing about success, writing about things that entrepreneurs should do and sharing all these great wins, getting paid 20,000 bucks to come and give a speech for a day and traveling all over the world in first class as you've shared some of your experiences, at least for me, it makes me think, "What on earth does this guy, he's a bread guy, have to offer?" And I'm interested to know what gives you the right as a bread delivery guy to give other people advice about their life and business?

Well, life experience. I'm definitely not sharing anything like advanced SEO strategies or even maybe some of the stuff you talked about in the Tony Robbins book on finances or this, that. I'm only sharing what I've experienced in my life and my journey. And so I can speak about my experiences with authority because I lived them.

I didn't get that lucky break. I didn't get that tweet from Oprah. I had to hustle. My very first speaking gig, I still have a picture of it. I got a check for $125 to come and speak. So it wasn't a lot, but you know what? It was a lot to me back then.

And then since then, since that first $125, I've spoken over 60 times. It took 60 times before I got that gig that eventually did pay $10,000. So when I share that, I've done a lot to get to that point where I got the bigger dollar gigs. So for me, I have the authority to speak about these things because all I'm sharing is what I've gone through, my experiences, how I've overcome them and anybody else who is in the position that I was in.

So me, my audience is going to be the everyday working man and woman. If you come to my website, that's what you're going to see. It says so that everyday work in person, how they can create a life of freedom for themselves. So that's what I focus on. I focus on the experience and I believe I can speak with the authority because I've lived it.

This isn't just, I didn't leave some six figure corporate job, pay a bunch of money to hire some of the top coaches and get all the strategies and buy all the Facebook ads and all that. I built this thing living less than paycheck to paycheck. Tyler Litchenberger Yeah. If the tone of that question sounded sharp to a listener, I intended it to sound sharp and perhaps it came across as unfriendly.

But the reason was I wanted to develop this theme during the course of our interview because I feel that this is one of the major things that holds many of us back and I've struggled with it. I can imagine that you've struggled with it. You probably have not always just brimmed with confidence in the things you had to share.

In many ways, we often look to external sources for validation. Many people, I get so tired of it sometimes when I was working as a personal financial advisor and people would say, "Well, I want to do this so I'm going to go back to school." I would say, "Well, why do you want to go back to school?" "Well, because I need that certification." Well, certifications have their place.

School has its place. But the reality is in many ways, life is waiting for you to write your own ticket. You can sit around and just wait and wait and wait for other people to approve you or you can get busy and start the hustle, start working. Over time, let the marketplace approve you.

After meeting you and looking at your books and looking at your blog and all that, I found that part of your story super inspirational. Did that come easily to you as far as the idea of, "I'm just going to start"? Did you struggle with that? What was your background on that topic?

Yeah. It's always been – I had a post go live on my blog today called, "Four Ways to Beat Imposter Syndrome." I can remember when I self-published my first book, there was some attention but there wasn't a lot of attention. When I put the second book out there after I built an audience, the very first review I have on that book and it's still on Amazon is this long tirade from somebody that was actually on my book launch team, by the way, Joshua.

They said, "This guy is…" Enemies within the camp. They said, "This guy is an imposter. This guy can't – I don't know what authority he has to speak to us. He hasn't even done any of the things that he's writing about in the book." They're right because I wrote about moving to Hawaii.

I wrote about losing weight. I wrote about paying off debt. I had this book and I hadn't even done those things but I had tried to make it clear in the book that this is the journey that I'm on and I want you to come on with this journey with me.

Now, today I have done all those things but back then I didn't. So for me, I had to get to the point where I realized that I'm not doing this and I'm not writing this and I'm not in this journey to prove myself to that person, that person that left that review or anybody that thinks that like that person.

I'm in this journey to help people, to help the everyday working man, to help the person that feels like they're stuck. So if I'm going to do that, I have to focus on creating value and content and being there for that person. I can't focus on myself and my feelings and my feelings of being an imposter.

I just have to keep my eyes on the prize and I have to keep going. Those who this is meant for are going to get it. They're going to appreciate it. Those who are not, they're not part of my tribe anyways. So peace out. You do you. I just had to shift my focus from me to them and then I had to do everything I can to A, learn about this kind of stuff.

So do the research and then B, be a man of action. Yeah. And the amazing thing is that if you apply yourself to education and action, you can transform and become someone who's able to deliver an amazing amount of value. And there's no gatekeeper. In today's world, you don't have to impress the gatekeeper.

You just got to simply create the message and share it and start helping people and over time, you can reach the right people. And I want to thank you for the work that you've done. Since I met you, I've watched your information and I've admired and in some ways modeled a lot of what you've done because I've appreciated the very authentic tone that you take when you speak with things even as I've watched your social media, the way that you interact with your friends and readers on social media and different things like that.

I've watched that and I've really admired it and I've modeled some of it and it's been really helpful to me because I've often struggled with maintaining the glittering facade. We're often taught don't look weak, don't share how things are. But yet, I was attracted to your message because you shared the difficult things and I found it much more accessible than a lot of people.

I want to be able to encourage other people in an accessible way. I don't want to be the type of person who stands up on the hill and says, "Look at me. I've got it all together," because that's not me. So just a public thank you to you for the work that you've done.

So if it's not helped anybody else, it's certainly helped me in watching you. So thank you for that work. One of the themes that I explore a lot on Radical Personal Finance is how people can build their brand and build their own income by building their own brand. You are an expert at building and leveraging authority and influence in different areas of life.

If you were giving advice to somebody who's sitting down and kind of looking and saying, "I need to start to build my brand, build my authority in the marketplace," how would you encourage that person to build a plan and what would you encourage them to do in order to enhance their career, which can ultimately enhance their income?

So this is not going to be a surprise to Joshua because he's read my books, but I would tell you not to build it in the places that we're typically taught. I would tell you to go after the larger exposure, the more exposure. What I mean by that is all of the places that have name recognition for people.

So we're taught that one way to do it is to connect with an influencer. So that's why we had joked about the Oprah tweet. We're told that if we can connect with an influencer, add value to them somehow. I think we've all heard the story of somebody who saw a widget that was missing on somebody's website and this person pointed it out and became big, best friends with this influencer.

They got the shout out and they became famous, right? It's like the Cinderella story. But that is the exception. That's not the rule. And so like building influencers or going to like what's new and hot. So no offense to anybody who's blabbing or periscoping or stuff like that, but that's the new and hot thing.

That's where you're told you should be. You should connect with your audience. All that kind of stuff is great, but day in and day out, that's not the best place to build. You want to go where the people are. So like large publications such as like the Huffington Post and Entrepreneur Magazine and Forbes and Inc and all these places that literally get millions of captive readers every day, every month, you have the opportunity to get exposure in these places and get exposure to these millions of people.

And the cool thing is, is most of the people, most of the advice that we see like in the quote unquote online/lifestyle entrepreneurship space, they're all building in the same places. They're all going after the same audience. And that audience is being converted and capitalized by the people that are on the top of the food chain by the influencers.

So when you're just starting out, you're trying to get the same people that the big names are going after. So instead of chasing being in that pond, think a little bit outside of that pond and go to these larger media publications which anybody listening to this can totally get exposure on, get that exposure there and build a brand that's outside of this space.

It's an untapped field. All the things that we would take for granted, all the knowledge that we have in this space, it's new and it's untapped in more of the mainstream space. In my mind, that's one of the keys just is visibility. There's a balance for people in terms of what they can do and what they should be doing that you can be doing great work but if nobody knows about your great work, it's not benefiting you as much as it could be.

No matter where you are, whether you're building an online business, whether you're an employee of a company or whether you're in a brick and mortar traditional brick and mortar business, you've got to take charge of your brand. You've got to take charge of your image, your persona and you've got to take charge of going out and sharing that with people.

That's what separates those who are continually influenced by the latest economic changes from those who are able to, to mix metaphors here, who are able to surf the waves no matter when they get big and turbulent because it's that skill and they can slide right through. Your expertise in the area of writing and sharing that with people is valuable.

Do you come- - Yeah, because at the end of the day, if you don't have an audience or you don't have customers, you're not going to make any money. - With regard to your entrepreneurial journey, many people struggle to figure out how can I work and earn a job, keep my job and take care of my family and do all these things and you've been through that journey.

You had kids when you were working the job and then you're trying to build your business on the side. What was that period of your life like and do you have any advice for people who feel like they're stuck in the crunch? - Yeah, for me, it wasn't good.

I'll tell you right now, I did not keep a proper balance. I was obsessed with leaving the job that I hated, leaving this business. I was obsessed with getting out of it. For me, I would work 60 to 80 hours a week in this business. I would get home and then I would work another crazy amount of hours, two, three hours a day writing, doing podcast interviews, doing anything I could to get that exposure and also promoting my stuff.

Yeah, there was a lot of time that should have been spent with family, should have had the proper balance that wasn't. I'll be the first to admit that. If I were to give advice looking back on it now and from just what I've seen now with people that I've worked with and stuff like that, it's a matter of finding time where you can get some things done but you're not sacrificing that time with your family because that is important.

Life is short. We don't know how much time we have. All of us are guaranteed one thing and that's we're guaranteed to die. That's the one thing we're all guaranteed and we don't know when that is. That time with your family is greatly important. If that means waking up a little early, if that means staying up a little later, if that means working on something at your lunch break at work but just finding let's say an hour a day.

If you found an hour a day to work on your thing and build it on your side five hours a week, maybe add a little bit of extra time on the weekend. If you're using that time wisely, how you're using that time is the most important thing. It's not actually the amount of time.

But if you're using that time wisely, you can build this thing on the side and you can do it in a reasonable amount of time. You've written in your published work that there was a shift that happened. And again, your newest book, or your second to newest book, Stop Chasing Influencers, where you talk about, "Okay, we chase big people but then I just switched and said, I've got to build it myself." And you specifically talked about learning how to build your own social media presence.

What was the transition that you faced where you went from selling four copies of your book to selling 40,000? And what did you do differently with regard to social media to be able to engage with your readers such that they bought your books? Yeah, it was for me and self-publishing, I did this in 2011, 2012, which everybody says, "Well, how do you do that now?" It's a little bit different ballgame because back then there was something like 300,000 books on Amazon in the Kindle store.

Now there's like 4 million books in the Kindle store. So there was far less competition back then. Back then also there was more reach on social media. So back then Facebook wasn't a publicly traded company or they were just becoming one, but they didn't limit the amount of research you have or they didn't limit as severely as they do today.

So you had more reach organically on social media. So it was just kind of a number of factors. But I think the biggest thing was shifting the focus to I have to promote this thing to let me add value first. So instead of posting links to my book and stuff like that and heading people up all the time and coming on strong, what I did was I focused on coming on strong with the content.

So whether it was a blog post that I wrote related to the book or a video I made or some form of content, I would give them the content, that's what I would post, and then in that content I would reference the book. So I've shifted the focus where it's not promotional, this is I'm adding value, and if you want even more value you can buy the book.

And that to me was kind of the game changer when I came from that perspective because when people felt like they got the value, they would not only buy the book but buy other things that I was selling. Here's a follow on to that with a question that I personally struggle with so I'm going to take advantage of you with some free coaching here.

Thinking about the amount of time that you should spend creating versus the amount of time promoting, I have wanted to, so I built Radical Personal Finance exclusively on creating. I did no marketing, I did nothing. My theory was that if I create good stuff, the internet should work. And my only marketing has been satisfied listeners telling other people about the show.

And that worked extremely well for the first year. After about a year I've started to feel more comfortable with what I was doing. I felt like I'd made a lot of progress as a broadcaster to be able to create better content and I felt like I could afford to shift my focus over and do more marketing.

And so I've intended to do more writing, write more guest posts, share with more, write for large publications, etc. like you teach. But what I've found is that that aspect is very difficult for me. Writing is very difficult for me and it doesn't come as smoothly and as well as creating good content.

And my content has suffered due to the desire to be over there marketing. How would you think through the business problem of should I just continue what worked in the beginning and continue creating much more valuable content that people are going to find useful and share with one another and reference because I've got plenty of that that I could create or should I focus on marketing the content that I'm already creating even to the point where it makes my content suffer?

How would you think through that problem? I would stick with your strong suit. So if writing, writing is going to be difficult for a lot of people. You can either A, you can use like a speak to text program, you know, dragon dictator or something like that where you're not actually sitting out and writing the articles, but you're speaking the articles because what writing is at its core is your ability to express, express a thought.

The thought is what people are going to connect with, not the actual words. They want to know, you know, what is this about? What's that thought? So you can use a program like, like dragon dictator. And I know authors that I've written, I know an author who wrote 17 books and he did it all through dictation.

He didn't actually sit down and write any of it. So that's a possibility today. But more than that, the thing that I love about some large publications and the reason why I talk about it so much is because large publications today, they want to be with the times. They want to be very, they want to be, they want to be multimedia.

They really want multimedia content is what they're looking for. So not only do you have the written word, but like entrepreneur magazine, for example, they have bloggers or bloggers do video posts and that's become really popular over there. Several people that I know, several clients, several people that I just connected with are now vloggers for entrepreneur magazine where they're on there making videos for entrepreneur.

Several of my podcaster friends are on the Huffington post and what they'll do is pretty much what they'll post is their show notes. They'll post a good title for the article, their show notes, and then they'll embed the, the whatever SoundCloud, Libsyn, whatever it is that you're using, they'll embed that in the post.

So you have written content, you have podcasts, you have videos, it's all multimedia content and that's what these publications are looking for. They want to mix it up so you don't have to write. You can put your podcasts on there. So like if I was to advise you, that's what I would tell you to do is I would tell you to get into some of these places and start posting your podcast episodes over there.

And that's a whole nother, you get, if you look at somebody like a Lewis house, go to entrepreneur magazine, look up Lewis house and look at all the articles he's posted. It's all his podcast episodes. It's just his show notes with the SoundCloud feed and he's getting his podcasts exposed to millions of people and his numbers are crazy because of it.

So that, that's what I would tell you is I'd focus on your strength. If you're a podcaster, get your podcast exposure. If you're a vlogger, go ahead and start making some videos for these places and there's a, there's a lot of opportunity. You wrote a book called, are you living or existing?

And in many ways the, the, you know, the, the blurb as far as your author profile is very compelling. You know, bread guy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin goes from delivering bread for a living to moving his family to Hawaii, losing 170 pounds and paying off $180,000 in debt. It's a very compelling, succinct description.

But I have many listeners who write to me a lot of times and say, well, I just not sure what I want to do. And I know I'm not fully satisfied. I know I'm just existing, but I'm not sure what to do. How would you talk through somebody, a process of transition and identifying how they should create a plan to go from existing to living?

Yeah, that is not an easy one. I know a lot of people that do struggle with that. Um, it's, and there's no easy answer for that. What I would tell you is you have to take some time, maybe talk it over with family or friends or a mastermind group, but really take some time and think about what, what do you want from your life?

What is it that you enjoy doing? What are you passionate about? I've heard a lot of people say that passion is overrated and they've, they've taken shots at passion. And I, I sure think that, yeah, there's, there is a lot of garbage out there about passion, but at the end of the day, like if I told you, Joshua, you were coaching client, I told you, um, you have to write for these publications.

You could do it and you could probably do it for a month, but if writing is not something you're not passionate about, guess what? It's going to be like pulling teeth and you're not going to do it and you're not going to continue doing it. So if you don't have a passion for something, you can try it and maybe even experience success, but that's only going to be for a little while.

That's why, that's why passion is important. So what, what are you passionate about? What gets you excited? What could you see yourself doing? What did you always want to do when you were a kid? Like really tap into what it is that you want to do with your life because truly living doesn't mean you're traveling the world to speak.

It doesn't mean you're bungee jumping. It doesn't mean you're running with the bulls in Spain. It means that you're living what living means to you. So for all of us, each of us, that's going to be different. Josh, you know, has the Joshua has a radical personal finance. I'd write and speak.

Somebody else might want to like a client that I helped. He wanted a job in construction. He wanted to be a construction manager. He got the job and he's living life and he's loving it. You know, that's what truly living is to him. So each of us, it's going to be different.

There's no cookie cutter answer, but it's up to you to sit down, take some time, figure out what are you passionate about? What is it that you always want to do? And it might take a few tries. When I started out in this journey to leave bread, I didn't start out with writing.

The very first thing that I did was I thought that I wanted to be an event planner and I had seen some TV show somewhere where an event planner was bossing people around and they seem very important. I thought that's what I want to do. I even had, I had business cards made for this Joshua and I got the Bluetooth and I got the clipboard and I actually had the signal of power.

You need the Bluetooth, the clipboard and you got to be able to boss people around. And right away, like a month after I told everybody, family and friends is going to be event planner. My stepsister asked me to plan her wedding, like seriously asked me, like hired me to plan her wedding.

And I thought, okay, I'm going to get a chance to put this to the test. So one week into the wedding, it was a disaster. None of the family members were listening to me. Nobody was listening to what I was saying. Two weeks in the wedding, I had vendors like, is this guy an idiot?

Like what is this guy doing? And like three weeks into it, my family was ready to disown me. And that experience, not because I failed at it, but just going through the experience and seeing what you have to deal with with event planning showed me that, hey, this isn't the thing for me.

And it really wasn't. So it might take you a few tries at something to figure it out, but getting out there and testing and figuring it out for yourself, that's what's important. So I know you got the book coming out. I got a review copy, which is very exciting.

It was kind of fun to buy a review copy of Podcast Movement, Stop Chasing Influencers. So it's coming out soon here. Last question here, share with us the theme of the book, some of the major lessons learned from it so that my listeners can have a little bit more information about it and can go and check it out if it's right for them.

Yeah, I think the most important thing is just this idea of, it's not to say you'll never have heroes because each of us has heroes. Dan Miller's a hero of mine. If he called and wanted to talk to me, I'd be a fanboy and I'd be like, "Oh, it's Dan Miller." So it's not to say that you can't have heroes.

It just says don't chase when you could be using that time to build. And then the second half of that book is all strategies on how, if you want to build a "online/lifestyle business," something that allows you freedom of location, freedom of time, it allows you flexibility, it lays out how you can do that.

So we talked about large publications. It breaks that down. How to build a successful podcast. Jared Easley is the co-author of that book. He's the co-founder of the conference that Josh and I met called Podcast Movement, where it was the first time I ever went, Josh, when I thought that conference was absolutely well done.

It was. I thought it was beautiful and it was amazing. So Jared knows a little bit about podcasting, but things like getting on TV or getting paid consulting. So if you want to build this kind of a business, it lays out the exact how-to strategy you can use. But more than that, this overall message of don't chase.

You have everything you need to build. Work on building on your own and here's a strategy. That's what that message of this book is. That's what Jared and I are passionate about. And I don't think, Joshua, I'll ever write another book that's like that. I don't think I'll ever write another book about lifestyle entrepreneurship or anything like that.

So this is like a one-time deal for me. But to be able to write it with one of my best friends, it was a very special experience. And I'm a little biased. But I thought the book came out really well. Yeah, it's very good. And it's refreshingly frank and it's refreshingly clear and it's refreshingly realistic.

But I think just even the title itself, I'll share my experience in building this type of business. If you start to apply yourself to the work, that's what will ultimately grab the notice of the influencers. And I've experienced it with Radical Personal Finance. I had no name recognition. Nobody knew me.

Nobody knew what I was doing. I didn't have any brand. And so I just simply started doing the work. And even just in observing in our little niche industry, the personal finance online space and whatnot, in the beginning, I didn't go after anybody. I just simply focused on doing the work and trying to create something useful.

What I've noticed is, number one, I've started to make a little bit of a transition of people looking up to me and reaching out to me, which is very flattering. But it's become – it's harder to keep current with all of the requests. And so in many ways, if people are looking to me for help, it's just simply I try to help as much as I can.

But in many ways, I can't do much because it's just name. But as I've just simply focused on working, I have a lot of the leaders in the personal finance industry have admired the work that I've done and that has brought me to their attention without me ever having to chase them.

And so the whole idea of just simply do the work, don't chase the influencer, become the influencer, I think is a powerful idea. You've got to ultimately have people who are – people who are ultimately going to help you out. If nobody shared my show or a well-known guest didn't agree to come on, all those things help.

But at the end of the day, you can't control those things. You can control what you actually do and I thought it was a brilliantly titled book if nothing else. Ryan Neuhofeldt Yeah, and one thing that really stuck out to me and that I've seen as I built this is you think about influencers such as like let's say Dan Miller, Michael Hyatt, Dave Ramsey.

You think about those guys. Those guys didn't start out where they were. They started out from the beginning, humble beginnings, but they did it together. They had a mastermind and they did it together. They built this together. That kind of connection where you reach out to people that are similar to you and that are on the same journey with you and you build that relationship and you help each other out and you're there for each other, that is a strong connection that you can take with you all the way to the top.

I've heard somebody call it like the third circle theory. Instead of building up like the first tier – sorry, it's called the third tier theory. Instead of building at the top tier, you're connecting with people on the second or third tier and you're just building this thing together. I think that's a great way to build.

But would you – so do you think that even just the whole concept of mastermind is becoming a little bit overblown? In the sense that I've not found – I've not joined any paid masterminds or anything like that. There are a couple of people, a listener of the show and a couple of listeners of the show and a couple of friends who have for me have been instrumental.

But it wasn't – I didn't go out and buy some mastermind program to get a bunch of people to like my stuff. Do you think even just the whole mastermind concept has become a little bit oversold these days? It depends on the mastermind. Yeah, there's the paid ones. Yeah, there's some question there about the paid ones.

I've never joined a paid one so I won't speak to that. But if you get one where it's a good solid group of people, it's free, it's people that are doing what you're doing, you're all kind of on the same level, I think it could be so solid for you.

My mastermind is the best friends that I had when I started building this. My two friends are still in Wisconsin. That's who my mastermind is. We talk every day. We share things with each other. We give each other ideas and that has been invaluable to me. But it all depends on who the people are that are in there.

Awesome. Kmanzi, K-I-M-A-N-Z-I, Konstable.com. Your blogs are there and let's see, the newest book is Stop Chasing Influencers. Anywhere else you want people to be aware of your work or you just want to point them to your blog? Nope. Go to the blog. You'll see everything there. Well, Kmanzi, keep doing what you're doing.

I appreciate your voice. I appreciate the content and the information that you share. It's been a help to me personally and I know to many other people and I wish you ever increasing and increasing amounts of success. Thank you so much for having me. Today I urge you to please take the name and the meaning of the title of this book to heart.

Frankly, I wondered, I was like, "Do I need to do anything except just read the title of this book and have that be the whole show?" I decided to go ahead and play the interview for you because a 20-second podcast would be a little out of character for Radical Personal Finance.

But it really says it all. Stop chasing influencers. Here's my go-to thing is how can you stop chasing influencers and become one? Well, in order to do that, you've got to become a person who's worthy of influence. Are you that person? That's not a trick question of like a Mr.

Motivational Guru for you to say, "Yes, I'm that person. Of course I am." No, you have to ask yourself, "Honestly, am I that person?" Because frankly, some of you are not and there's no reason trying to market something that you don't have. There's no reason trying to market knowledge that you don't have.

You just wind up embarrassing yourself. But you can become a person worthy of influence if you're not already. Now if you are a person who's worthy of influence, if you're a person who's done your homework, who's studied, who's put in the hard work and the effort, who has something of value to share, then go ahead and start exercising that influence because it's never been easier than it is today to spread the message that you have that's uniquely yours.

I don't know how you're going to do it. Start up a podcast. I don't know. Start a blog. Go down and talk to people on the street. However it works for you, get busy because we need people to do it. So stop chasing influencers and become one. You know the cool thing?

If you do that, the influencers will chase you. Proven it. Believed it a few years ago. I've proven it myself and you've heard the whole process. That's it. So thank you all for listening to the show today. Thank you for your support. If you would like to support me and Radical Personal Finance directly, please consider going to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron, signing up to support the show.

I would be deeply grateful to you for that financial support. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at LAKings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little