Ken Rusk: Unlocking Success Without a Suit

It just seems to me that the more you give, the more you are blessed with.

And I don't know why that is, but it just is.

And I'm not saying that you should give so you can get more.

I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is, the more you do,

the more you seem to be blessed.

And maybe that's somebody, maybe that's the big man upstairs saying, you know what?

That person is a generous person.

I'm going to allow him or her to have more so they give more.

Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement, leadership, and relentless growth.

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Ready to break limits?

Let's go!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of McUnplugged.

And today's guest went from digging ditches to building dreams, proving you don't need a suit and tie to earn a seven-figure life.

He's a champion of blue-collar grit, financial freedom, and purpose-driven living.

He's reshaping how we define success in America.

Get ready for the bold, the grounded, the visionary, the impactful, the blue-collar goat himself, Mr.

Ken Rusk.

Ken, how are you doing today, brother?

Great, Mick.

Thanks for having me.

I really appreciate it.

I appreciate you, man.

The work that you're doing for Americans, man, goes beyond compare.

I just want to personally thank you for the voice and impact that you are giving Americans, man.

Really mean that.

Well, yeah, you know, again, I really appreciate you having me on to help to just kind of spread the word, you know?

I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, you look back on.

what you wish you would have known when you were younger and and then you start to say well i've got this ability now to help share this information i wish someone would have shared it with with me so yeah i'm happy to do it i'm glad you're you're having me on to uh help that as well absolutely man absolutely you know i'm mick unplug i like to to ask people about their because

right that thing that's deeper than your why and and i feel like ken you have an amazing because

right like so if i were to ask you man like what's your purpose what's that deeper reason why behind the why of what you do what's what's ken rusk because

You know, great question.

So when I was, when my daughter was 12,

she got really sick and that that started a lot of the things that I'm doing today because I started thinking about what was important in life.

You know, what should I tell her about what she should be chasing in life, right?

Yeah.

And it's just one of those things where as I was working through her medical issues, and she's fine now, but it was a pretty scary five years for her mother and her and I.

And I just remember one gentleman coming up to me and he gave me a lot of resources to help.

I mean, he gave me a plane to fly around the country to get her treated.

He gave me all kinds of things.

And I asked him why he did that because I didn't know him that well.

He was a friend of a friend.

And one of the things that he said to me is,

you'll learn as you become older, as you become more successful, and you're grateful and you're humble.

You learn that to whom much is given, much is expected.

And

that to me was all of it.

I mean, I never forgot that.

And I was always a giver.

I was always a charity guy, but I put it on turbo after that.

And

yeah, I mean, I've collected all the things I want to collect in my life.

I've been able to achieve all those things, and that's great.

But to turn around and grab somebody and say, hey, I've made it to the top of the mountain.

I'm going to turn around and grab you by the arm and help pull you up and maybe shorten your learning curve to success.

I think that's incumbent upon all of us to do that.

Amazing, man.

Amazing.

And Ken, I've been a huge follower and fan of yours, know your story a little bit.

I love going back to you at 18, right?

You had a decision.

You had two options.

For the listeners and viewers, let's walk through that a little bit, man.

So at 18, you could go to college or you could do something else.

Let's talk about that.

Well, even earlier than that, when I was 15, I decided that I needed to make some money to buy my first, you know, used car and take my girlfriend out for pizza or go bowling with my buddies, whatever.

So I signed up with a ditch digging company that was right next to my high school.

And I thought I was qualified to do that.

I can go dig ditches, right?

So I did that in the summertime.

And in the wintertime, I worked in the office.

Well,

what happened there is I got kind of a good feel for the front and the back of the house, as you would say, right?

I got a good feel for how the whole thing ran.

And so when I came to be 18 years old, they said, look, you can go to college.

I would do your thing, whatever you want to do.

But just so you know, we have this position here where we want to send you around the country to open these businesses for for new owners from scratch.

And I mean literally from scratch, Mick.

I had to walk in and I had to design the inside of the building and have people put the walls up and put the plugs here and the phone lines there and everything.

So it was pretty cool.

And I spent, you know, four months, five months in Columbus and then in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Chicago, just starting these companies.

And then I moved on.

So at some point, I was like, okay, I can't live out of a suitcase anymore.

You know, I wanted, I'd gotten married and that kind of thing.

So I moved to Toledo, Ohio in 1986 and opened the territory here, started with six people.

And I think we have over 200 today.

So

it's been a hell of a ride.

Man, so at 18,

you had a lot of wisdom, man.

Like, I'll say some of that was just being 18 and just like, oh, I can do this.

That sounds great.

That's cool.

But I like to think that you had a lot of wisdom at that age.

Like, what was going through your mind

having those opportunities, but more importantly, knowing that at 18, you were also making impact?

Well, you know, the thing for me was, you know,

I read one time, and I put this in my book, by the way, I read one time that, you know, I've never built a skyscraper before, but if I did, I guess the first thing I would do is start with buying some land.

right?

Logical.

I never built a skyscraper before, but if I did, I guess I would then

find an architect to draw me some pens.

And if you keep doing that,

if you keep saying I've never done this before, but before, but if I did, you start to imagine the process that you would have gone through.

And pretty soon, if you ask yourself that 10 or 15 times, you will have already built the skyscraper.

So for me, it was kind of, you know, the only thing I knew was what it looked like where I was, where I had grown up working, you know, the home office.

I knew what it looked like.

I knew what it sounded like.

I knew what the flow felt like.

I knew, you know, where things needed to be.

So I just tried to copy that over and over and over and begin with the end in mind, like they say, you know, in seven habits of highly effective people, right?

And yeah, it just became something that I followed that path because it's all I knew, and it worked out pretty well.

I love it, man.

And you brought up the book.

So let's transition and segue there.

Blue Collar Cash, right?

An amazing book.

It's one that has been a quick reader for me.

And I've given it to some family and friends that I have as well too.

But you talk about three words in that book, right?

Comfort, peace, and freedom.

What do those three words mean to you?

And what should the folks that go pick up a copy of this book, what should they be thinking about when they hear comfort, peace, and freedom?

Well, first off, that to me is a way of life.

I mean, it's something that when Nicole was ill, I just kept, when I was writing letters to her about what should she be chasing and what was life all about, those three words i just couldn't get rid of them i mean they were like yellow volkswagens driving down the highway i could not stop seeing them right so i knew there was something there and i almost i almost devised the like in my mind they're like a triangle like they're independent upon each other for their very existence comfort peace and freedom and um so i figured that was a great place to start because

Everybody has their own nirvana inside their head.

They just don't know how to get it out there sometimes.

And why aren't we teaching people how to use the visual side of their brain, which is the proactive side, instead of the reactive side that we all do all day long?

We react to the weather, we react to the temperature, we react to the conditions, we react to what our friends say, we react to what our parents do, we react to what's in the new, we react to all these things all day long.

And it's almost tiring because we never give ourselves the chance to proact.

Which is, you know what, if I could sit down in a quiet room and just get out some pencils and crayons and a big poster poster board, what would I draw my life to look like?

I mean, what would I want my life, my world to be?

And it's, and for everybody, it's different.

So as long as those pictures give you a sense of comfort, peace, and freedom, no matter what it is, I mean, if you want to chase 15 cars and a McMansion, fine.

If you want to have a house out in the country, fine.

If you want to live in the city, in a condo or in an apartment, awesome.

But just find a way to make that visual enough that the creative side, the visual side of your mind kicks in to push you to make those things happen for yourself.

Because you're ultimately in control of all that.

No matter what anybody tells you, Mick,

you and only you know all those things that are running around in your mind and how you want to live.

So stop listening to other people.

Trust yourself and put it out there.

Dude, like that is so amazing.

It's almost, and for the listeners and viewers, I promise this was not scripted at all.

It's almost like we prepped for this because the next thing I was going to talk about that I love in the book is you talking about visualizing your life, right?

And using that vision mind mapping and that vision mapping.

And it's, for me, it's something that I correlate to my client.

So a lot of the leader, the leaders that I coach, the leaders that I develop, the entrepreneurs that I help with branding, the very first question that I ask them is

this project that you're working on or this quarter or this year, what does success look like for you?

And really not just tell me the words, like, oh, we'll have, you know, $20 million of revenue or this project will be complete when this thing is implemented, whatever that thing is.

Like, I say no, like, truly visualize conceptually

everything that it looks and feels like and write that down or draw that out because just getting to an end point

shouldn't be success, right?

Like talk to the listeners and viewers about the power of that because you and I are totally in sync on visualization.

A lot of people, again, they just go to, oh, well, in 90 days, this needs to happen, or in 12 months, this needs to happen.

But, but they don't know what the it looks like, right?

So, so talk to us about that, man.

The power of that.

Well, you know, there's things like color, there's clarity, there's conciseness, there's detail, there's everything.

There's there's horsepower, and there's dimensions, and there's, you know, flavor, and taste, and touch, and smell and all those things that your senses use other than your eyes to create the visions and so if those visions just swim around in your head they're going to do you no good because they they're in they stay in dreamland they stay in wish and hope land they never get to what i call the timed pathway process where you're actually putting it on a map to make something happen you're putting it on a pathway to make it happen and the cool thing about this is and this is something that I just learned a few years back when I was writing the book You know, when you think of something and you visualize it clearly and you put it down on paper, you've done this mechanical transfer from your brain to the physicality, to the paper.

And what happens then, and I heard this from Tony Robbins and his son Jarek, which is really cool.

You have these neurotransmitters.

I mean, people call it reticular activating systems, but to put it simple,

you have these little electrons in your brain that fire these images back and forth when they live inside your head.

When you put those down on paper, that image, instead of bouncing back and forth, becomes one solid electric current.

And this is science, okay?

And then what happens is your body, your brain says, well, I must already own that thing.

And because I don't, I need to find a way to go get it.

So now you have this whole other person that you didn't even know existed.

It's like Ken and then the other Ken.

And that other Ken is silently pushing you towards getting that thing that you've been thinking so hard about.

I'm thinking to myself, if I can double my output just by visualizing, why wouldn't I want to do that?

It's free.

We all have the software already downloaded in our heads.

We just have to be taught how to use it.

And it's no different, Mick, than dreaming of a vacation in complete detail.

Well, if you can do that, and we're all good at that, why can't we dream about every part of our life?

You know, our business goals, our personal goals, our

health,

our spiritual, our sport, our hobby, our activities, our dog, our cat, what color, what would you name it?

I mean, all the things, you know, your house, your cars, everything.

Why can't we visualize pathways to all those things like we do a vacation?

It's a simple process.

We already know it.

We just have to get out there and start using it.

Dude, totally in sync with you there.

One of the things that I do when I work with like Fortune 500, 1000 companies, you know, if we're working on a 90-day project or plan, and I got this from

professional sports and college sports, I say, okay, in 90 days,

how are we going to celebrate the win?

And most companies don't think about it, right?

Like they don't think about how we're going to celebrate the win.

It's just, no, that's part of the job.

No, it is not part of the job.

If you want to build a winning culture, you better celebrate a win.

I don't care how small or how big it is.

And so then that becomes a fun thing to draw out how we're going to celebrate the win.

And then I say, okay, let's practice that.

And they're like, what do you mean?

And I'm like, Jim Valvano, Dean Smith, Coach K practice cutting down nets, right?

So that their team understood, this is what we are going to do, right?

Bill Belichick, Doc Rivers, Phil Jackson.

practiced the championship parade, right?

They took their teams on the streets that the parades are going to be on so that they could visualize that.

And when leaders hear that, they're like, oh, crap.

And to your point, that version of you that's waiting in 90 days or six months, they're waiting for you to get there.

They've already seen it.

So now your brain has something that it can program and say, okay, if we do X, Y, and Z, this is a win.

I don't think people,

and forget Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 leaders, the...

the blue collar workers and leaders, right?

Celebrate wins.

How important for you, Ken, is it to celebrate wins?

Again, regardless of how small or how big they are, but we need that in life.

My personal opinion, we need to celebrate wins in life.

Well, first off, you know, to be able to anticipate something is a very powerful mechanism.

You know, you anticipate going to Christmas dinner with your family, or you anticipate a vacation, or you anticipate you ordered something, and you're anticipating it coming in.

Those are very powerful emotions.

And, you know, instead of reacting to the world, we need to anticipate more.

That's absolutely for sure.

How important is it to us?

Well, just on the other side of that door behind me, there is a large glass board.

It's a black glass board.

It's huge.

It's like eight by eight feet.

And I have these colorful markers that people go out and they write their anticipations on this board through timed pathways.

Okay.

I want to go.

You know, it's January 1st.

I want to see my relatives in Scotland.

It's going to cost me $2,000.

I'm going to save $20 a week week for two years, and then I'm going to go.

And the begin date, end date, and they write these things down.

And this board is covered with these goals.

They're timed pathways.

There's 50 of them on there at any one time.

And the cool thing is, Mick, as people walk around the hallways, they high-five each other because they see, wow, you're getting close to going to Scotland.

You're getting close to buying that new car.

You're getting close to paying off your credit card.

You're getting close to putting that new deck on the back of your house.

It's like this whole mutual kind of like collective celebration as these things march down their timed pathways.

And I got to tell you, man, as an entrepreneur, a business owner, a manager, whatever you are, when you can get your corporate goals aligned completely and firmly on the same track as people's individual timed pathways, man, look out because that's where the synergy happens.

That's where the momentum comes from.

You are going to drive your company way further than you can drive it yourself with a method like that.

We use it here every day.

Been using it for a very long time and it's a very powerful thing.

I love it, man.

I love it.

Ken, I want to segue into

you and the blue collar world

because

I think there's a misconception a little bit, right?

Like I talk to people all the time and you could have a 2,500 person organization or company, a 5,000 person organization or company, and immediately people think employee size, when you get to a certain number, oh, that's white collar.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

What the company does is definitely blue collar, right?

You could have a one-person white collar type of organization, right?

And so I would love for you to dispel the myth and maybe define or explain in your words, blue collar and what that means to you.

Well, the simplest form of blue collar, white collar is way back in the day when you were a professional, when you were an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor, when you wore your suit around town, you had these big, thick, uncomfortable plastic collars that you would put on top of your suit.

And that, you know, dignified you as somebody that was of higher education.

Okay, fine.

If you were a blue-collar worker, you were typically wearing blue jeans or what they call dungarees, or they would call them Levi's.

And you had a blue shirt and blue pants.

And that's where the word blue collar came from.

It was literally a blue shirt.

So that's where the origin of it comes from.

But when I think of it, you know,

the one thing that people don't recognize, blue collar versus white collar, is when you you check the happiness ratios, 65% of people that are blue-collar people are happy with their careers versus 30 to 38, 35 to 38% of white-collar people who are happy with their careers.

And the reason is, when you're a blue-collar person, you are in control.

You're in control of your input, and therefore you're in control of your output, the quality of that output.

the rate of that output.

You're in control of your day, your time, your schedule.

And most often, you're in control of your financial gain, which means you're in control of that picture that we were drawing earlier.

Okay.

And so there's a whole lot there that people don't recognize.

There's a lot of unsung hero pieces and parts to being a blue-collar worker.

And the best part now is

when they talk about the money you could make, you know, they have that old study where they said you make more money if you go to college.

The problem with that study was, and I looked at it very hard.

The study on the blue-collar side included every job, part-time jobs, newspapers, you know, babysitting, all those kinds of things.

So that dragged the numbers down.

If you take those out and you put skilled tradespeople in against white collar, it's a completely different story.

And yeah, when I see people out there, one of the things that they ask me is, you know, there's a stigma towards blue collar.

And I said, well,

that's kind of created.

That's created by colleges.

It's created by

corporate America.

You need to come to us or else.

That's never been true.

It's certainly not true now.

And the one reason that you don't hear the rebuttal from the other side is people just don't ask us.

Nobody asks us how we're doing on the blue-collar side.

They always ask the corporate world because they feel like that's where the information will come from.

And corporate's fine.

If you're comfortable there, that's great.

But when you find out what some of these blue-collar entrepreneurs are making, you will be shocked.

at how successful these people are.

And

I've been doing my best to try to bring the balance back to that because,

you know, Econ 101 says, where supply is low and demand is high, that's where the money goes.

And that's what you're seeing on the blue-collar side right now.

So I'm just trying to bring my message to that side and say, you know, no matter what, start with the vision you want your life to look like and then understand that you can get there, either blue or white, whatever color you want to be.

No, I totally agree, man.

And one of the things that I find

in the blue-collar world, right?

Because, you know, I grew up the grandson of a

farmer, right?

Sharecropper is

when you love what you do

and you do it daily and you're passionate about it, it's not a job, right?

It's not work.

It's you're you're living your passion.

And oh, by the way, I can make a great living from this passion that I have.

And you talk about that in your book, right?

Like you've...

you've got to love what you do or or it is a job and jobs come and go so so talk to us about that.

Just

you got to love what you do, right?

And I don't care if it's blue collar, white collar.

If you don't love what you do, it's a job.

I think loving what you do needs to be translated a little bit because if loving what you do means what you're doing is gaining the picture that you have in your mind of what your life is going to look like, then that's what it is.

I mean,

in my mind, you know, ditch digging was number 99 out of a list of 100 things that I wanted to do, but I knew that it could give me the ability to create my life the way I wanted it because of the financial side and the control that I had you know I wanted to be a race car driver early on well now because I've worked so hard I've bought some cars and I can race you know on the weekends part-time with my buddies and do that kind of thing at a local track and whatever so I've I've scratched that itch if you will all I'm saying is that loving what you're doing

needs to be defined in, am I creating something cool with my hands?

Am I doing something something that matters?

And also, is that work bringing me the life that I've dreamed about?

Yeah.

Okay.

Am I progressing along the pathway to what I want my life to look like?

Because I can tell you, I mean, I had a guy build an outdoor kitchen in my yard, in my backyard about four or five years ago.

I mean, this guy shows up on a Monday morning with his brand new pickup truck.

He's got his jeans and his work boots on.

He's got an Ozzy Osborne t-shirt on.

He's listening to Led Zeppelin.

He's got his big mug of coffee.

He's got his buddies.

And they're just laughing and having a great time building this outdoor kitchen.

And oh, by the way, the guy made multiple six figures a year in this, owning this company.

So those are the gems that are out there.

And there's thousands of them that where people are trying to retire and they can't because nobody wants these companies.

So there's so much opportunity for people out there who would go be a mentee to that person for a while and then either buy their company or start their own.

Opportunities are insane right now to do that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And speaking of mentees and mentorship, I know that that is a pillar, a core value of who you are, right?

The power of mentorship.

And you coach countless young people on financial discipline.

What's, for the viewers and listeners, what's one mistake that you see people making that can be corrected?

And you don't have to limit it to one.

What are mistakes?

There's a very powerful one.

You know, if you think about the time, let's say you're 21 years old and you want to retire at 63.

That's 42 years.

Well, guess what?

That also happens to coincide with six times seven equals 42.

Okay, why that?

Well, the number seven is the rule that it takes for you to double your money every seven years, right?

So you have six opportunities to double your money between 21 and 40 and 21 and 63.

If you wait until you're 28 to start saving, you have just blown the most powerful double in all of those six doubles.

The reason I say that is because you will pay for it on the back end, the very last double, which is the one that takes your wealth from $500,000 to a million.

In the beginning, the doubles are small.

In the end, the doubles are massive.

But if you wait and you miss that first one,

you're going to be paying for it dearly because the guy standing next to you that didn't do that, he's going to have twice the funding that you're going to have at the end.

And you're going to be like, oh my God, it was only 50 bucks a week.

Why did I wait so long to do that?

I could have saved that money and I could have had this huge, you know, in this 401k, the company would have matched my money and it would have been just awesome.

So that's just one mistake that people make is they think saving is something for when I'm an adult, when I'm, you know, when I'm older, when I'm making a bunch of money.

The most powerful money that you will ever save is the youngest money you'll ever save, which is from 21 on.

I love it, man.

I love it.

What are some other

financial tips or financial strategies you can share with us today?

Well, I think another one is, and it aligns with the first one, and that is you've heard people say pay yourself first, right?

So I think there's another one too.

Pay yourself first before you pay your bills and also pay some sort of a foundation or a cause that's near and dear to you.

And I'll tell you why.

We do a lot of giving around here.

We do it with not just with money.

We do it with time, talent, and treasure, which means we get people together to go do things.

And all I will tell you, Mick, and I can't prove this.

I don't know karma.

I don't know

the great Lord above.

I don't know how any of this stuff works.

But

it just seems to me that the more you give, the more you are blessed with.

And I don't know why that is, but it just is.

And I'm not saying that you should give so you can get more.

I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is the more you do, the more you seem to be blessed.

And maybe that's somebody, maybe that's the big man upstairs saying, you know what?

That person is a generous person.

I'm going to allow him or her to have more so they give more.

I don't know what it is.

But

we definitely focus on that here.

We do a lot of giving.

And, you know, the good Lord just seems to take care of us each and every year.

And that's a great thing.

Amen to that, brother.

Amen to that.

So, Ken, man, like, where can people follow, find you, and more importantly, purchase this book?

Well, if you go to kenrusk.com, you'll see the book.

I also built a course.

It's a simple eight-session course.

It's a mini-course.

It's not expensive compared to most of them out there, which are thousands of dollars.

And the reason I did it is because I was so tired of people with all these books on their shelf.

And I would say, Tell me about that one.

What did you read?

Oh, yeah, I read that great book.

How did it change your life?

I don't know, but I read it.

Okay, well, I didn't want that to happen.

So, I built this really simple course that teaches you how to visualize.

That's all it does.

It teaches you how to use that side of your brain, the proactive side.

And I donate most of the money that I get from that to first responders and gold star families and that anyway.

So, it's not really even a moneymaker thing for me.

I just wanted people to say, I took Ken's program program and I changed my life that afternoon.

I started thinking differently the moment I did it.

Because for me, that's the real win.

The knowledge that I've gotten up in this brain of mine over the last, you know, 61 years, I just want to make sure that if I share that with people, that it has impact.

And so you can find all that at kenrusk.com.

I love that, man.

So for all the viewers and listeners, we'll have the links there.

Definitely check out the course, purchase the book.

I'm going to do something that I do with all the books that I love.

So I'm going to purchase 20 copies, Ken.

Oh, wow.

And for the first 20 people that message me blue collar, and I don't care if it's email, if it's Instagram, if it's LinkedIn, the first 20 that message me blue collar, I'm going to send a copy of the book.

So, Ken, that's how much I appreciate the book.

Let me do this.

Let's say that I'll have

your folks that help you with this work with my gal.

Let's do 30% off of the course then.

It's $179.

We'll give you 30% off that course for the first, you know, like you said, for the first so many people that want to take it.

And

I'll get with Brianna and get you a coupon code for all your listeners and we'll make that happen.

God bless you for doing it.

That's really cool.

Thank you so much.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Anything I can do to support people that are doing good, I'm always going to do, Ken.

And you're one of those people.

Thank you.

You got it.

For all the viewers and listeners, remember, you're because is your superpower.

Go unleash it.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Mick Unplugged.

If today hits you hard, then imagine what's next.

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And most of all, make a plan and take action because the next level is already waiting for you.

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Until next time, ask yourself how you can step up.