Episode 218 – Steve Kidd

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and today I have the pleasure of having online with me Steve Kidd. Steve, are you there?

I am here. Thanks.

Awesome. Glad to have you here, Steve. I know we were just chatting before we got online. You’re calling in from Kansas. Is that right?

That’s correct, right in the middle of the universe, not well, at least the United States.

Yeah. Middle of the Eurocentric universe, right?

Yeah.

Anyway, so Kansas, for my audience who’s been falling along with me, I know it’s been event since we had our episodes going. We’re still in Florida. So we’re getting used to the winter here, which is, you know, warm and cozy.

Are you guys starting to get the snow?

We’ve had one day of snow, so hopefully we’ll just not have any more now.

Yeah. Well, what I wanna do before we get too far into this is just do a brief introduction and then we’ll just dive into your story. So I’ve got your intro here. Steve Kidd is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, business coach, radio show host, and third generation minister. Mission is life is spotlight amazing hearts and individuals and help them become successful authors and best sellers.

He’s helped thousands bring their message to the world and has [00:01:00] impacted millions in the process. His big heart sets him apart, along with being an extreme visionary, the best in the world at seeing the up level. So, with that introduction, Steve, why don’t you start off by telling us what you’re known for, right?

What’s your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Well, so ultimately I’m a marketing company with a strong publishing division. I work all the time with authors helping them hone their message, but what I really do is I help peer into a person and help them see that they’re even more and greater, and what they’re really meant for, and especially the people whose lives will be changed because of them doing exactly what they were meant to do in this world.

Awesome. So it’s I said we were chatting earlier. I run a podcast production agency. It’s like we have the same sort of idea that, you know, the people that we serve generally, they have a message they’re trying to get to their audience. And so, we use podcasting to help ’em do that. And you use books.

Yeah, [00:02:00] and I do have a syndicated radio show. I love talking to people all the time.

What’s your radio show about?

It’s called Thriving Entrepreneur. And we talk about all the elements of thriving in life and business, and even about the concept of just being a entrepreneur, meaning that you run the business of your own personal life.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and it’s definitely something that as an entrepreneur we all sort of have to figure out and navigate that whole, how do you run your life and run your business and not have one take over the other.

Absolutely.

So what I wanna start with then, now that we sort of have an idea of what you do is your origin story, right? Every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s a thing that made them into the hero they are today, and we wanna hear that story. Were you born a hero or were you a bit by a radioactive spider that made you wanna get into publishing other entrepreneurs?

Or did you start a job and eventually move to become an entrepreneur? Basically, where did you com from?

long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. I think somebody else already stole that [00:03:00] origin story. No, actually I was born to a pastor and his wife, my mother and father my mother’s father being a minister as well. So, I’ve been in ministry for a long time. It just like started everything that I’ve ever had on YouTube, running all at once. So anyway, you know, I was born in the little town of Mitchell, South Dakota to a minister and his wife, my mom and dad. My mother being the daughter of a minister.

And you know, I’ve been in church literally all of my life. But I also learned at a very early age, ministers more than anybody else are the ones who have great calling on their life, but they also have to figure out how to be able to pay for the calling that’s within them. So starting way back at the little age of five years old, my parents had actually purchased for my brothers to sell cards and napkins, greeting cards and holiday napkins, and very quickly decided that they weren’t really that excited about selling.

They both went out and got both paper [00:04:00] routes and then did lawn mowing and things like that. So I came to my mom and said, well, can I go sell them? I actually heard from my brother recently. He said that it was very annoying to them because they would say to me, those people aren’t gonna buy that.

We’ve already been to that house. And then I would go there and come out with a sale from the people. It’s a lot easier to sell when you’re five cuz the power of cuteness, you know?

Cute compels them.

Right. And you know, and I was hooked. You know, I mean, I’ve been in sales and marketing literally my entire life since then.

By the time I was 18 years old, I was actually working as a sales manager for a Kirby company actually selling vacuum cleaners and training sales people.

Along with all with all the things.

Kirby vacuum for a while.

Yeah, I’ve still got two of them here in the house. So you know, and did that and have done a lot of sales.

Started my official marketing company in 1988 after I was out of you know, outta school and out on my own and have been doing that ever since. You know, I was one of the early adopters in the internet. I always say if I’ve been in internet space since before we [00:05:00] had the word internet in society, it didn’t even exist back in the days of bulletin boards and stuff like that.

I was learning and growing, and finding out ways that marketing in the, if you will, real world. Translated over into marketing in the internet space and was really blessed to start on really early with the dial-up internet company. And when I say really early, I’m talking about 24. I remember actually when we bought our first 3,600?

Well, no, not 36. 36,000 BOD modem. So many of you don’t even know what dial-up modems are, and we won’t go into the technical aspect of that, but let’s just say really slow and early days of the internet.

This was before internet explorer existed.

When the internet made noise as you used it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Back before Internet Explorer existed, so I’ve been in that space a long time.

And then in 2007, you know, I actually helped my then wife and one of my daughters, [00:06:00] they wrote a book that was actually a travel guide for the movie Twilight was the number one selling travel guide on Amazon for a movie related travel guide on Amazon for a while there. And you know, from there we were just hooked.

We discovered just how powerful writing books, and more importantly, being a bestseller as, and these days, even though I’m still a full marketing company, all I do is help people with their story and their messaging and the marketing behind it.

Awesome. So you’ve got quite a storied history in entrepreneurship. I had a similar start. Wasn’t quite five, I was 11, maybe 12. And started getting into reading entrepreneurship books. In my first business, I was 13 in high school, I was freshman. And I convinced my dad to give me a loan for 50 bucks to go down to the local big box store and buy big candy bars that we, you know, you couldn’t get on campus.

And took them to school and, you know, like the guy on this street corner with his trench coat and his fake Rolexes, I had my backpack full of big candy bars and I sold them for two bucks a pop and [00:07:00] I bought ’em for 50 cents a pop. And I made roughly, I don’t know, maybe $1,500 in sales before I got shut down by the the powers that be.

And I tell people it was my first government shutdown, cuz they told me I had to have a business license to sell on campus and I was too young to have a business license, so I couldn’t have a business on campus. So I had a government shutdown.

Love it.

And that’s how I got my start. And I’ve been addicted ever since as well.

That’s awesome. I love it.

Yeah. So I wanna talk a little bit about your superpowers, right? And you know, I know you mentioned being in the space of helping people write and tell their stories. Every iconic Hero has a superpower, right? Whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky.

In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you have developed over time or that you were born with that really energize all of your other skills. This superpower is what sets you apart and allows you to help your people slay their villains and come out on top of their journeys.

And the way that I like to frame it is if you look at all the skills that you’ve sort [00:08:00] of collected or developed over the course of your career, there’s a common thread that ties all of them together. And that common thread is probably where your superpower lies. So with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is in this business of helping other people tell their stories.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s interesting because if you think about all the superheroes from all the different comic series, their superpower often also can be a real drain a real stone around them. You know, I mean, it has as much good as it does bad, sometimes you know, and mine is no different.

Ultimately I’m a deeply empathic individual and I try to describe it to people. It’s really hard because empathy has become kind of a buzz phrase these days. And people saying that they’re intuitive and empathic is pretty normal in society. It’s kind of a, you know, really current trend for people to say.

A buzzword.

And I always tell people you know, you don’t really wanna actually be a true empath because those of [00:09:00] us that are, we can tell you that we sense the emotions of people around us without them ever saying a word to us. Mine is extreme enough that I have had times where I’ve actually picked up on the emotions of people driving in a car next to me.

You know, with their windows rolled up. And if you’ve never experienced that, good, I’m glad. I hope you never do. But because of that, it also has created me a deeply sensitive person that really sees into the heart and soul and core of a person their passion and their purpose. And from that, I can really help them be able to go beyond what they thought and whether it be things like going back to those early, early days of the internet, having concepts and talks with people about doing what’s normal for us. Now, streaming video, you know, I mean, you go on and you wanna watch whatever latest movie just came out. You watch it in streaming on whatever particular streaming service you [00:10:00] use, and that’s normal.

Now imagine thinking in that space back when I was first thinking about it, you would’ve had to pre-plan, I wanna watch this movie next week to start the stream running so that it was caught up with you so that you could watch it a week or 10 days from now. And it’s those kind of things that I do that is kind of the seed element beyond all of that is really peering into.

Who are they and what is even more so possible? Now, I’ll tell you the flip side to that. My children would be the first ones to tell you. It can be very frustrating because a person will come to me all excited with something and I’ll be like, yeah, and then you could, and I mean it. Totally excited and absolutely encouraging to them.

But it also can feel like, especially if you’re one of my children you know, it can feel like it’s just never good enough for you. And it’s totally not from that place, but it does have to do with just being able to see the possibilities and the potential. [00:11:00] That absolutely is every one of us.

I often say there’s nobody that was put on this planet to try to balance, to make sure that the carbon dioxide to oxygen balance stays intact and that their only purpose is just to breathe in and breathe out. Each of us has a real true purpose in this world, and I love helping people find it.

Absolutely. And I love talking about empathy as a superpower. One of my best friends has that skill. And it’s definitely an interesting place to be cuz you have the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and not just walk life through them, but like actually understand the way that they view the world and see the world and see their potential from their perspective.

Which is, it’s a hard thing to describe to someone who doesn’t experience it. But it gives you an ability to see them sometimes in ways that they don’t even see themselves.

Yeah, for sure.

And you have, so, how did that lead to you getting into [00:12:00] helping them write stories, write their story?

So it was really cool, you know, I mean, I’ve been working with authors, like I said, you know, whether it be my wife and daughter or other people. And at one point we brought that from working with a few people, taking things like a podcast like this and making it into a book. Taking a keynote speech that somebody already had recorded, turning that in the book. And I began to offer to people, let me help you create your book. And I’ll never forget the day because we were on a Zoom call recording it. My assistant was on the call with me taking notes and stuff, and the way the notes were, it was just kind of like they said this concept and then they said that concept, you know, so it wasn’t word for word.

You know, it wasn’t exact like, you know, like a court transcript would be or something, but just kind of concept by concept. And when they were done with it, I said to them, I said, this is an amazing story that you’ve written. Would you like to hear it? [00:13:00] And they’re like, what do you mean?

I was like, I mean, would you like me to read you back your story right now? And I was able to take from those you know, comment by comment. Notes that my assistant and I had taken and I could actually weave and craft live there for them, their actual story right there in front of them. And that was kind of where it began to build from.

And there’s a whole lot of other nuances that we do these days. I don’t do as many of the live write your book in front of you. It is something I’ll do, but it is one of my highest in services. But in all of that, helping people guide and direct and really see out of what feels like a chaotic conversation, the consistently powerful part of them that is coming out.

So you can see in just hearing them, and hear their bits and pieces, you can see the thread of their story and pull that together for them. And that’s really where that superpower of empathy comes in. But, I want to [00:14:00] talk a little bit about the other side of that, right? And we’ve talked about this a lot on this show, but the superpower always has the flip side, right?

The fatal flaw. And just like every Superman has kryptonite or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw, right? That’s held you back something you struggled with. For me it was a couple of things, right? I struggled with perfectionism, kept me from shipping.

I struggled with lack of self-care for a long time, which meant that I’d let my clients walk all over me and didn’t have good boundaries with communication and my time and other things. But I think more important than how you’ve struggled with your fatal flaw is how have you worked to overcome it so you could continue to grow and continue to deliver the value that you deliver.

There is, and part of it has to do with growing up in church. You know, there that general concept of you know, you shouldn’t charge to speak the word. Those kind of things. And there is a whole lot of mentality that I grew up with. More is caught than taught, is the phrase that made me believe that I wasn’t really worthy [00:15:00] of making money and that doing the things that I did should be given away freely.

You know, to the point where it was detrimental to both myself and my family, you know, and there were a lot of times when we did less than could have been, we had less than because of really meeting that need and fulfilling that, if you will, spiritual aspect of what was taught to us, whether it’s, you know, even though it’s not really true.

And so I really, really struggled with that valuing of myself. And it still shows up. I’m getting a lot better of it, but it still shows up sometimes when I do offer a higher end program to somebody and they say yes. And then you get to that point where you’re like, okay, I’m gonna be charging you, you know?

And, it’s in the back of your head now, you know, it doesn’t come out as verbally, but you know, it’s like, can you believe they’re actually willing to pay me that? You know, I mean, and so, you talked about, you know, [00:16:00] imposter syndrome and I’ve been feeling a little bit like a fraud. Some of that kind of comes up, if you know what I mean.

And then of course, in addition to that, as I talked about earlier, the flip side to the empathy is being very, very deeply sensitive. When I do interviews with a person to help them bring out their story. It has a very deep emotional impact on me, and I have to intentionally, I had to learn ways of being a step distance from it because it was impacting me too much and it would, you know, I mean, an an hour and a half, two hour interview with somebody to craft their whole story or a portion of their story was just, you know, like whole day draining for me just in that amount of time.

And so I’ve had to really learn how to be able to still see that, use that, but not allow it to drag me down and even, you know, in a way, kind of almost kill me because I didn’t know how to control it, if that makes any sense.[00:17:00]

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It’s you know, like I said, particularly with the superpower of empathy, you are draining yourself and filling yourself up with them, and so it would be. If you don’t know how, you know, especially I would imagine early in learning how to control that and use it easy to lose yourself and then hard to get yourself back once you’re done.

So, I imagine over the course of time you’ve gotten better at that, but that would be I see where you’re coming from on that being a difficult thing to do. But on the other side though, the talking about the valuing yourself, that’s something that as one of the reasons I, we mentioned before we got on the the interview something that we run this show for, right?

The whole idea of having a hero entrepreneur is this idea that for whatever reason, culturally, and again, that comes from, it comes from mainstream media, it comes from our TVs, our movies, our books, it comes from our upbringings that for whatever reason, we have this idea that profit, that entrepreneurship, that entrepreneurs themselves are evil, right?

And, you know, they’re, you know, what’s worse in the world than being a used car salesman, right? Like nothing. And you know, you pick up any children’s TV show or any [00:18:00] children’s book and the villain is always some variation of bad guy spills oil on ducks for money. And there’s just this sort of pervasive cultural idea that entrepreneurs are villains.

And so when we get into the entrepreneurship world and we’re looking at the reality of it is what we do is we have an equal exchange of value between parties, right? Cause that’s the way entrepreneurship actually work. That is crashing up against this story that we’ve been told our whole lives, entrepreneurship is evil and profit is evil, and we have to struggle with that story internally.

And, you know, change our own perceptions to understand like, Hey, I actually have a value that I’m giving to this person. And they wouldn’t say yes, they wouldn’t work with me if they didn’t see the value exchange positively for their own lives. And you know, that’s, it’s an interesting struggle that a lot of us have to go through.

So, it’s useful to hear your story there.

So I wanna talk a little bit about your common enemy. And the common enemy is something that every superhero has, right? It’s their arch nemesis. And it’s something that they constantly have to fight [00:19:00] against in their world. But in the world of business, we wanna put it in the context of your clients, and it’s a mindset or a flaw that you’re constantly having to fight to overcome.

So then you can actually get your clients the results that they came to you for. Right. And you know, if you had your magic wand, so to speak, in the moment they sign on the dotted the line, if you could just whack ’em on the head and remove that flawed mindset, what is that arch nemesis that you find yourself constantly having to fight against when it comes to helping people tell their stories?

Well, it’s kind of twofold. I mean, it all boils down into the realm of not feeling good enough. Wondering what our purpose and our value is. It’s really sad how much most everyone in the world doesn’t really understand how important and how special they are. I wish I could give that as a gift to people to understand.

There’s a great story. I promise you it has a happy ending, but it doesn’t feel like it in the middle of it. My youngest daughter, she [00:20:00] was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and was in the hospital for about six months. When she first went to the hospital, she was in complete organ failure on the verge of death.

It was a very terrifying time in our lives. And you know, for my then wife she reached out and she found a mother who was about six months, maybe a year, but on the same journey, same basic age child as what she was on and day by day for her, because, you know, I was home paying bills and we actually had a house construction repair thing happening at the time.

I was home dealing with all of that while she was at the hospital every one of those days. And for my wife, the few comments from that lady, who could show her just the six months, just a year down the road was literally like water to a person dying of thirst. And that’s the [00:21:00] gift that I wish I could give everybody is most of the time we feel like what we have to say.

Somebody else has already said it probably better than us. And we don’t really feel like we have something that is significant or important to give. But what we don’t understand is that there is going to be somebody who’s gonna see us, hear us, and from what we do in this world, it’s gonna make something that maybe they have heard it a billion times before, but in this particular moment, it becomes their life, their breath, the water that they drink to help them be able to through the worst of circumstances and make it through.

And it doesn’t have to be that extreme. It doesn’t have to be, you know, somebody going through a child with a, you know, with a cancer or those kind of things. It could be something as simple as I talked to a person one time, who’d literally had P T S D events around doing dishes.

Now, there’s a whole long story behind that and I won’t [00:22:00] get into their story, but the whole concept was how they had to literally relearn how to be able to turn dishes into a positive, powerful thing in their life. And until the person that helped them see that, showed them how to make dishes, their sanctuary time of their day dishes was horrible for them.

Now, that’s not to say that, maybe anybody else that’ll ever hear this podcast has ever been traumatized over dishes. But for that lady, when she got that message, it was literally night and day difference in her life. And that’s what we need to understand is, is it’s not insignificant what you are doing, what you are sharing with the world.

It’s the very answer to, I often say. There is somebody on Google right now that’s typing, potentially tears, streaming down their face, looking desperate for a [00:23:00] solution. That’s something that you do so easily that you probably, if I ask you what you were gonna write your book about, you probably wouldn’t even think to write a book about it, to share it with the world or anything because it’s so simple and so easy for you.

Like, for example, doing dishes and it’s that very thing that will make such a difference in somebody’s life. And I promised you it’s not a bad story. My youngest daughter is doing wonderfully. She’s come through, she’s actually now officially hit the date where she is considered to be quote unquote cured.

She’s been in what they call remission long enough now that they feel like they they got it all taken cared of. She’s married and living a wonderful life in southern Washington now. So really exciting end of the story. But at the time, each one of those posts by that lady made the difference in literally life and death for my wife.

That’s a, it’s an amazing story, and I totally [00:24:00] understand. The power that is in your perspective, right? Cuz that’s really what you bring to the table with your story is you bring your perspective to it. And it’s the analogy that I’ve always used for people is I use this analogy called the the crocodile infested river.

Right? And you have people who are going through some sort of a journey that are on one side of the river, right? They’re, you know, just to use your daughter’s story, the very first time the doctor gives you diagnosis, it’s, you know, like, what’s going on? You know? Then it’s, why do we have this problem?

And then how do we solve it? And then now you have the precipice of how do we, now that we’re, we know all of these things, I have to jump in this river and swim across the crocodile infested river of becoming better, right? Of conquering cancer and get across to the other side where life is in the promised land, the life and remission, so to speak.

And every problem is like that, where you have some sort of lead up to the precipice. Travel across the crocodile infested river and the other side. And, this other lady who came in was someone who has a boat, right? She’s like on the [00:25:00] river. She’s been across this river before. She’s helped her own daughter or whatever, get through that thing.

And you know, her boat’s got cool shit, right? It’s got a navigation system and she’s got, you know, crocodile shooting lasers. But most importantly, the boat has her as a captain, right? Someone who’s been across this journey before and she can help take you across this river. And really that’s the perspective that we bring, is we bring the perspective of our story, right?

And maybe other people, lots of people have crossed this river before, but you have a unique perspective and your story that you can bring to someone else when you tell your story. And so, I’ve always called that, you know, the power of your perspective comes in when you’re helping someone else cross the crocodile infested river.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, think about it, even from that same example you were using for the person who’s swimming in the river, the guy that has four logs lashed together. is in an amazing place in comparison.

Yeah, absolutely. Even if they’re just a little bit further ahead, they’re like, Hey, I’ve been on this river long enough that I’ve managed to collect some logs. Right? Come join me.[00:26:00]

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And when you get into a point where, like where you are, where you’ve been helping people tell their stories for years, you’ve got systems and frameworks.

You’re the one who’s got that cool ass boat, right? You’ve got the crocodiles integrating lasers, and you’ve got the navigation system. You’re like, hey, if you wanna tell your story, I have all the tools ready. Right? And I know you’re sitting on the edge of the river here thinking I wanna get to the other side where I’ve got my story told and written and published.

You’re like, I can help you do that. Right? And that’s where the service comes in.

Yes, absolutely.

So I wanna talk about the flip side, right? So if your arch nemesis is that imposter syndrome, that, you know, misunderstanding of our own power and our own perspective. The flip side of that is you’re driving force, right? The thing that you fight for. So just like Spider-Man, fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or even Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information.

I wanna know what it is that you fight for with your business your mission, so to speak.

[00:27:00] Well, more than anything, it is sharing people with the world. I fight for your voice. More importantly, for the person that needs to hear what you have to say. I stand in the place for all of my clients holding them to the fire, even as it were for the fact that, again, like I said, somebody’s made a bad decision.

They made it today, yesterday, last week, last month, last year, because they just don’t know any better. They want the answer, but they’ve never had the answer and or they’ve never gotten given to them in the way that you will give it to them so that they’ll finally have that light moment and be able to do it.

And so that’s really more than anything what I do is I stand in that gap.

I was just saying, my wife is a younger entrepreneur. She used to question like she does a cake decorating and other crafty type things. And she would say to me like, you know, I don’t want to, you know, sell my cakes because not everyone would like them.

And I was used to tell her, I was like, the people who don’t buy your cakes, who don’t like them, [00:28:00] aren’t your customers, right? And in the same way, it’s like you don’t have to have, like, your story doesn’t have to be important to everyone, right? It doesn’t have to be important to everyone in the audience or everyone in the city, or everyone on Amazon or wherever you’re selling your stuff.

It just has to be important to the one person, right? The person who’s your customer. And that’s really all that matters. And that’s what you’re fighting for, is you’re fighting for the people that need to hear your customer’s story.

Yes.

That’s amazing. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about some practical things. I call this the hero’s tool belt. And just like every superhero has their tool belt filled with awesome gadgets, like, you know, batarangs or web slingers or magical hammers that can spin around and fly with.

I wanna talk about the top one, maybe two tools that you couldn’t live without in your business to do what you do. Could be anything from your notepad to your calendar to something you use for your marketing tools or something you. You know, a framework you use to do your product delivery.

Anything you think is essential to getting your job done on a daily basis. Top one, maybe two tools for you.

Well you know, most definitely I do [00:29:00] make use of Zoom. The level that I have of it has transcription built right into it, that makes a huge difference because then we’re going straight from speaking. I always encourage people to use, take advantage of speaking to write. That is a huge tool for anybody that wants to do any kind of writing.

You know, when we journal, when we do writing by hand or even typing it in the computer, it’s very cathartic. It’s very internalized. It’s a great way to help yourself learn, and grow. But when we speak to somebody like you and I are having a conversation right now, we are having a back and forth give and take.

You say something and it sparks what I’m saying. I say something in it, you know, it gives you thought you know, words to say those kind of things. That’s the way conversation happens is you know, is in that exchange verbally. And the same really becomes true when it comes to writing your book, when you speak out your words, when you tell your stories.

They then are designed just by the way that [00:30:00] communication works to reach the listener, to be for the person who’s reading the book versus allowing the reader to see into the heart and soul and the depths of what you are going through. And that’s not to say that, I’m not a big proponent of vulnerability, but it’s a externalized vulnerability versus an internal growth vulnerability, if that makes sense.

So speaking to write, and like you said, I even have encouraged people to use the free version of Zoom to speak out what they’re saying versus you know, writing it out. There are very, very few people that I’ve met and I’ve met some people that are amazing actual authors actual writers I should say.

But everybody should be an author. Everybody should be a best selling author. But it’s a matter of getting beyond that ability to be a great writer and just really put your words out there. So that would be the number one tool in my belt is, you know, any of those ways of capturing audio.

I [00:31:00] couldn’t agree with you more on that subject. Right. One of the things that I like to talk about is that like human beings, we are a story born people. Right. And we judge the depth of our relationships on how much of someone else’s story we know, right? I tell my kids all the time, it’s like an acquaintance is someone who’s, you know their name, but not their story and a friend might be, you know, their name and some of their story.

And a best friend is someone you know so much of their story that the only way that you can deepen that relationship is to go out and create new memories together, and what that means practically is that as human beings, the way that we develop our relationships is through the telling and engaging of stories, right?

And a conversation like this, the secret to conversations, to being a great conversationalist is learning how to listen to the other person’s story. And then respond with your own , and connect to each other via your stories. So just like by the basics of being a human being, you know how to speak and tell stories.

So what I’m hearing you say is you can take that same sort of like innate ability and get on the phone with someone like yourself who knows how to draw a story [00:32:00] out and record your story. And then use that, and the conversational tone is going to come across, and your natural ability to tell your own stories is gonna come across because you’re in the natural element of how we already tell stories as a human being.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah. And there’s a lot of power to that. I know, the couple of books that I’ve written all started out with conversations and recordings and is like, I am for better or worse, a talented writer, but I have discovered that being a talented writer does not make you a good published author, it can, but the ability to tell a good story and that kind of stuff, I think is, you know, to your point, being able to write well and being able to tell a story well are two different.

Yeah, I would say the the other and very important tool in my belt these days. This could change, but it’s definitely true right now. Doing self-publishing on Amazon. And by that [00:33:00] more than the self-publishing because there’s a lot to be said for using services like what I do for somebody that helps you.

It’s about owning that account on Amazon. It’s about your email address being the email address that Amazon has the contractual relationship with your bank account that Amazon’s paying. You know, the flip side to that is all of the horror stories I could tell you about all the people. I have to disappoint on a daily basis when I help them understand that even though they have a contract from a very well reputable and well-meaning, I’m not talking trash about the companies at all that says that they own their book.

But the truth of the matter is, is that Amazon doesn’t see them as the owner of the book cuz Amazon doesn’t know that they exist. The author named Field on an Amazon book is literally that it’s a form field. Now there’s a few checks. If you said you were Oprah Winfrey they would want you to prove that you were another person named Oprah Winfrey and not, [00:34:00] you know, the Oprah Winfrey who used to have the TV show and has all the others that she has now.

But for the most part, you can make up a pen name when you’re doing your book and it’ll go through on Amazon. And Amazon doesn’t check that. And the same things becomes true. One of the things we’ve learned through the pandemic is companies that were very strong and have been around for a long time, disappear sometimes overnight.

And if that happens to be the company that published your book, helped you with your book, those kind of things then you have to go back to prove to Amazon, Hey, no, actually this is my book. And be able to keep that going. And so, that’s really important. And, more importantly than that is, you wanna have the ability to do anything you can with your book whether it be create a course, go on a podcast and talk about the content of your book or any of those kind of things.

You don’t wanna have to have permission from your publisher in order to be able to do that. An author that maybe many of you, especially [00:35:00] since we’ve been talking about superheroes, may have heard of Terry Brooks. Even though Terry has written a ton of great books. You know, they’ve made one of his books, they had a TV series that ran for two years here a couple years ago.

And out of all of the amazing books that Terry has done, none of the others have been made into movies. And the reason being is ultimately his publisher couldn’t come to agreement with the movie studio in order for him. Terry wanted the books to go forward and be movies, but the publisher wouldn’t sign off on it.

And therefore we don’t have an entire movie series like we finally got from Lord of the Rings. Once it got to a point where JR Tolkin you know, estate could give permission for Lord of the Rings to finally become a movie.

Yeah, I just, me, and my wife and I watched this the other last couple of days with our kids, the Lord of the Rings movies. But yeah, that’s, when you own the book and you actually own the rights yourself instead of a [00:36:00] publishing house owning the house, it gives you a lot of power and flexibility that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

And I think, the model of publishing while it’s still, it hasn’t changed yet. Where the, I think you’re going to start seeing more and more of your bestseller lists are gonna be taken over the course of the next couple of decades with self-published authors rather than big publishing house authors, because that’s really the way the market is moving.

And so, yeah, I think, it’s a huge tool in the tool belt to understand how that works and, you know, to be ahead of that curve.

Absolutely.

Awesome. So I wanna talk a little about your own personal heroes, right? Every hero has their own mentors, just like Frodo had Gandalf, or Luke had Obi-Wan, or Robert Kiyosaki had his rich dad or you know, Freto, head Gandalf, right?

You know, who were some of your heroes? Were they real life mentors, speakers or authors? Maybe peers who are a couple years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished and help your clients accomplish, so far?

I have been so, so blessed. You know, the list of names, some of which are kind of mind [00:37:00] blowing that I’ve spent one-on-one individual time with people is just amazing to me when I look back at it. You know, of course I grew up reading all of the right sort of books as CS Lewis would call it and CS Lewis being probably the biggest one of all those, but the person that introduced that to me as one of my own personal mentors Dr. Donald Joy.

He was the professor of moral development at Asbury Theological Seminary for a lot of years. And then Professor Emeritus until the end of his life here just about a year ago. Dr. Joy was my godfather, actually. So, you know, if something happened to my parents. I would’ve gone and lived with him and his wife Robbie.

And he was in my life throughout all of my life. An amazing individual has about 40 or so books of himself. When I talk about people who are amazing writers, Dr. Joy is an amazing writer. He’s the kind of person you can send a little one word question email to, and you’ll get back. A well thought out, often well researched.

[00:38:00] You know, page two page email back. And he can type about as fast as he can talk. So, you know, he’s one of those amazing individuals that’s literally been in my life most all of my life. I think I met him when I was in third grade. And throughout the course of all the developments of everything that have happened in my life, I’ve been able to ask him questions, and bounce things off of him, and learn and grow from that.

And you know, that’s just been so powerful in my life. And I started off as a young quote unquote minister, if you will. I was in the music industry and and met so many incredible people throughout all of it. And you know, even because I was in the industry, even got a chance to have one-on-one behind the scenes.

Not like backstage, but like personal conversations with you know, amazing people, most of them being in the Christian music industry. So if I mentioned their names, you may or may not know them. I even toured on, in a group called Continentals with Brian Lennox, who is probably not a name that anybody that doesn’t [00:39:00] read album covers has ever seen, but he’s actually a five time Grammy award-winning producer.

Four albums. And he was just one of the guys in the tour group that I got to know very, very well. And it’s just so many people like that, that have poured their heart and soul into it. And you know, even as a child, I didn’t even know who they were. And later on I discovered how incredibly amazing in all of the world these people were.

And they were just my friends. They were just people that I knew and I trusted and I could go to. And I’m just so blessed to have them. And then of course, you know, I’m an avid reader, so we could go on and on about the CS Lewis’s and the Terry Brooks’s, and on and on. I’ve read their stuff and they’ve definitely influenced both how I write as well as who I am as a person.

Yeah, that’s amazing. And I always love the answers to this question in particular because it always strikes me how often the people who we look up to as heroes [00:40:00] probably wouldn’t even think of themselves as heroes in your life, right? They’re, you know, if someone asks them, who do you think considers you a hero?

They’re not gonna, you know, list you as like, this person thinks I’m a hero. Right? Cuz it’s not really the way it works. In the real world, it’s the people who show up. Right. Who show up and care, and take an interest in your life and show up and do a good job in theirs, that end up being your heroes.

And it’s always sort of been like a subtle reminder to me to be like, Hey, am I acting in such a way today that I am worthy of whatever hero status I might have in the people who look up to me? Right. Cuz I don’t know. I don’t know who looks up to me. And so it’s always been an interesting reminder.

Absolutely.

So I got one more thing I wanna chat about before we wrap up this interview, and that is your guiding principles, right? So one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, I wanna talk about the top one, maybe two principles you use regularly in your life.

Maybe something you wish you had known when you [00:41:00] first started out on your own hero’s journey.

So I have two of them. One is actually based in a Bible verse. I’ve been pretty upfront about you know, the spiritual aspect of my life. Ephesians 3:20 says, God will do exceedingly, abundantly, above all that we can ask or even think, that blows my mind because, you know, those are really extreme words.

Exceedingly, abundantly, above. And then that’s above all that we can ask or even think. Now, I don’t know about you, but like for example, a couple of weeks ago, you know, the Powerball jackpot was up to 2 billion dollars. And I could ask and think of winning that whole entire $2 billion and think of all of the things that I could do with that money when I won.

You know? Now of course, obviously I didn’t win it. But you know, if we have the access in our lives to something exceedingly, abundantly [00:42:00] above all that we ask or all that we could even ask or even think of. How amazingly powerful and how much resource is really available to us if we were to ask them and if we were really truly to believe.

Which brings me to my second one ties so well into it, and that’s the phrase that I use to close my radio show with every time. And that’s, you are uniquely brilliant. You were created for a purpose and the world needs you.

Absolutely. I love that and I heard that verse a million times myself, but I never really thought about it in that context. Exceedingly beyond what you could ever ask for or imagine, and you’re like, I got a pretty good imagination. I can imagine a lot of things and what he’s telling you is like, no, you, I mean, you can imagine a lot, but like your imagination is this little box that is inside the realm of possibility, which is significantly larger than anything you could ever come up with.

Hmm. [00:43:00] It’s kind of like in the Matrix movie when you know, when he’s saying, how do you make this spoon bend? And the little boy tells Neo the first thing you have to realize is that there is no spoon. That’s the same thing that we have to do first in our life, is we have to realize that the box that we’re in there isn’t really a box.

It’s just a box we created, and it’s so much bigger to infinity than what we really have ever allowed ourselves to think or believe.

Yeah. And what’s interesting is I think as a people, we’re starting to realize that probably not as much as it is true, but we’re starting to make the understanding that like, hey, human potential is like we have this box that we consider human potential, that we’re like, Hey, you know, you can’t run faster than four minutes in a mile.

Turns out you can. And as soon as someone did, a whole bunch of people started doing it. And like, every piece of human potential is being tested that way over the course of last 10 years, and over the course of the next 10 years, we’re going to see a lot change in what [00:44:00] we think human capability and human potential is.

Because we don’t know, right? We don’t actually know what real human potential is. And I think it’s a fascinating thing to, like, think about. So.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, that I think is a great place to wrap our interview on the limitless potential that we have. And the ability to, you know, to have exceedingly more than we’d ever ask for.

But I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. I call it the Heroes Challenge. And I do this to help get access to stories that I might not otherwise find on my own. Cuz as you know, not everyone is out doing the podcast rounds like you and I might do. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story?

Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story on our show? The first person that comes to mind for you.

Oh gosh. First person that comes to my mind You know, I have a friend of mine, her name’s Robin. She’s such an amazing person. She wrote her book, it’s called so Amazing. I might not get into this without tears. It’s [00:45:00] called Shattered Pieces Minded With Gold.

By the end of the book, she came to the realization that what she had deemed the shatteredness of her life and she’s been through some really horrendous things that have happened in her life that she was never really broken. That she not only made through it, that not only was it this broken shatteredness that mens with gold that makes it even better, which is a whole Japanese concept, but that really, she was carried through all of it and is so much better than anything she could have ever imagined or even seen in her life.

Robin Ricci, again, her book is called Shattered Pieces Mended with Gold. I could go on and on for a whole another hour of an interview, but if you wanna check out a whole bunch of really amazing authors, if you just go ThrivingEntrepreneur.com, or I’m sorry, ThrivingBestSellers.com [00:46:00] on Amazon, you can see a whole bunch of authors that I’ve worked with that all have amazing stories everywhere from multi-billionaires to stay-at-home moms that are changing the world.

Awesome. Well, I appreciate the challenge, what we’ll try to do is maybe reach out for a way to get introduced to her, and sometimes those people say yes, sometimes, they don’t. But we always get amazing stories when we have those guests come on from the hero challenge, so appreciate that.

And the last thing here is in comic books there’s always the crowd of people who are cheering and clapping at the acts of heroism. And our analogous to that as we close is we want to know where can people find you if they want your help? Or can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey Steve, I would love to get your help telling my story.

But more important than where or who are the types of people that should reach out and ask for your help in first place.

Well first of all, let me give everybody a free gift. You know, it’s like your own souvenir batarang to take home with you. If you go to OngoingWealthGuide.com, ongoing wealth guide.com, that’ll take you to [00:47:00] you know, simple Cart that allow you to get my five steps to ongoing wealth for free.

Inside of that guide is the workshop that I’ve literally just had people in that hour workshop have written, I know one person’s written a dozen books just from what I teach in that workshop. So that’s your free gift to jump into my community. And then you know, ask Steve Kidd you know, @ Ask Steve Kidd on just about any of the platforms and of course, ThrivingBestSellers.com as my website.

You know, anything I can do to help, I’m here to help you anytime I’ve even got, if you get that ongoing wealth guide at OngoingWealthGuide.com, on the last page, I’ve even given as a bonus free gift, you can schedule a time to talk with me for free.

Awesome. So I appreciate that, Steve, and we’ll make sure that those links are all in the show notes below this video. Wherever you watching it or listening to it. Those links will be there. So again, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us here today. Really appreciated it, and it was definitely an interesting [00:48:00] perspective to hear how you help people tell their stories.

So do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

I just wanna say one more time. Somebody’s waiting on you. So number one, absolutely. You do have a book inside of you and it does need to be shared with the world, and there’s somebody who will never get exactly what they need until you are the one that shares it.

Absolutely. That is a great piece of advice. Thank you, Steve.