118 - 5 Books That Transformed My Journey from Naval Aviator to Seven-Figure Entrepreneur

Rodolfo Rodriguez: 00:07

In this video, I'm gonna share with you the top five books that have made a profound impact in my life that allow me to live an inspired, purposeful life and also to grow multiple companies to the seven-figure level. My name is Rudy. I'm the host of a podcast called The High Profit Event Show and the founder of Wingman Coaching and The Virtual Event Sales Team. Prior to that, I had a 10-year career as a naval aviator, four years at The US Naval Academy and six years active duty. I really enjoyed that career. That being said, I wanted to transition into business and life and the path to do that required me learning and reading a ton of books. In fact, I've now read hundreds of books on the topic of business and personal development over the years and the five I'm gonna share with you are the ones that have made the most profound impact in my life. And again, have allowed me to transition from a naval career to growing multiple companies to the seven figures mark over the previous 10 years. So the main challenge I found when wanting to learn and grow is simply not knowing what I didn't know and not even knowing that I didn't know it. Said another way, because I didn't know where to focus, I basically just read every single book that someone I respected recommended to me. That resulted in me going through hundreds of books, both physically and through Audible over the years. Hopefully this short list and synopsis that I give you will help be a little bit of a shortcut for you in your journey. So without further ado, I'm gonna go through the book overview now, and I'm gonna review them in the order by which I read them, but not to mean that that's any particular order of importance. So the first book was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.

Rodolfo Rodriguez: 01:48

I actually read it back in 2004 when I was a freshman at The Naval Academy. It really taught me how to think differently, how to understand how wealthy people think compared to how poor or broke minded people think. Unfortunately, I didn't grow up in an environment where I had a lot of examples of what wealthy people think like. So this book was actually a really great guide for me. Here are a few of my takeaways. One, I recall or took away the fact that wealthy people actually learn not just to collect a paycheck, that's important, but they prioritize actually working to develop a skill or a skill set. In addition to that, they also work to develop a network. So experience, skills, and network is the reason they would work, not necessarily because they're chasing the higher dollar per hour job per se. So for me, those are my big takeaways. The other big takeaways is this idea of the cashflow quadrant, which I'm sure many of you have heard at this point, but this notion that there's four different areas of skill and development in life that it requires to be an employee versus self-employed versus a B-type business owner, so a business that runs based off of systems, and then also an investor. That being said, I learned a lesson later in my career when I studied under Keith Cunningham, who was actually the mentor to Robert Kiyosaki. He actually went on to give an extra distinction saying that it wasn't intended to be a division in any way that one is any better than the other. Rather, it was intended to be a plus sign to demonstrate that all four are important for an enterprise to work.

Rodolfo Rodriguez: 03:35

You gotta have employees, gotta have self-employees or vendors. They gotta have systems, and you gotta have investors in many cases. They all require different levels of skill, and they're all different games, but they're all relevant, and they're all important. So just that notion was really important for me at that time where no one ever gave me any kind of framework. So simply put, it took me from not knowing to at least knowing how people became financially successful in life. The process, the journey, what that looked like. I then went on to read a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It was actually during one of my summer trainings at The Naval Academy when I was sailing from Boston to Lisbon, Portugal with The Spanish Navy. It was on a ship called The Juan Sebastián Delcano. We were 19 days at sea, and during this time, we were working, we were sleeping, and there really wasn't a lot of time for much more than that, so I read a lot. One of the books I read was Think and Grow Rich, as I mentioned. One of my takeaways at the time from that book is this idea that I could actually reprogram my mind, or program my mind, through the power of affirmation, through the power of visualizations. I also took away the idea of the power of a mastermind, where two or more people can work together in harmony towards the collective good, towards solving a shared problem or a shared objective, and the power that can come from that. In fact, I recently led a mastermind based on the principles of Think and Grow Rich, and I really now understand fully, or at least I believe understand more fully the teaching from that book and the principle of the mastermind. Also a big concept that I took away was this notion of energy transmutation, this idea that everything I'm creating in life requires a certain amount of energy to create that, and so I had to be conscious and aware of, one, creating my own energies, but also where I direct it, and being conscious of not diffusing the energy in too many directions, but being intentional about focusing and channeling the energy that I do have towards projects and work and relationships that are important to me.

Rodolfo Rodriguez: 05:43

Great book, worth rereading several times. In fact, I've read it several times, at least all of these I've read several times. Then I went on to read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. So a dear mentor of mine, who's now deceased, he passed recently, he was a father figure and a mentor to me for about 20 years, and I wanted to be like him, and I asked him, what do I need to do to be like you? His name is Vernon, Vernon Lavia, and he said, you gotta read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. You have to do the Landmark Forum, and you have to read, well, he actually didn't say I have to read the next thing, he said I have to live a principle-based life. So The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, I read, once I graduated from the academy, it was a few years later, in 2008, when I was attempting to do business on the side of my Navy career, and the book taught me why most businesses actually fail. In fact, studies show that 50% of businesses fail in the first year, 80% within five years, 95% within 10 years, and even the 5% that are still there doesn't mean that they're profitable. So my takeaway is, how do businesses that are in the minority actually succeed? Spoiler alert on this one, the common mistake that happens with the entrepreneurial myth, the word E means entrepreneurial, is that what tends to happen is people who have a gift or a skill, to say, like baking pies, which is the example in the book, they get told by friends or family, or they just get like this entrepreneurial seizure, and all of a sudden, they believe that they need to go into business doing the thing that they do, like a pie baking business is an example. What they realize when they do that is that there's a whole new set of skills that are required to manage that business and to be an entrepreneur, or a visionary of that business that they weren't aware of.

Rodolfo Rodriguez: 07:33

Oftentimes that leads to failure if they're not supported properly or educated properly on how to develop those skills as not just an artist, but a manager, as well as an entrepreneur. Another one of my biggest takeaways from the E-Myth, and from my mentor Vernon, is this notion of starting with the end in mind, not starting with, hey, how much money do I wanna make in my life? How big do I want to have a business? But rather, what do I want the primary aim of my life to look like? When it's all said and done, when I'm six feet under the ground or my ashes are spread into the wind, how do I wanna be remembered? What do I want said about me at my eulogy? Once I really created that vision, which is called the primary aim and starting to reverse engineer what life looks like from there, then creating a strategic objective or a business plan or making business decisions based off of that. So it's in support of that. For me, that's been one of my greatest takeaways and also lessons that I've learned from my mentor and watching Vernon, how he lived his life to the fullest, inspired so many because he truly began with the end in mind and he lived a life congruent with his primary aim. So thank you, Vernon, so much for that lesson. Vernon and I then went on to work on the third principle, which he taught me, was living a principle-based life. What that looked like specifically is we started to read the Sermon On The Mount. That's Matthew Chapter five, six, and seven from the Bible. We'd get together about once a week and we'd read it. It's a short read. It took us maybe 10 or 15 minutes. So we read the same thing every week, but every week we were in a different place and we would share how we saw it showing up in our lives. For me, this was really helpful because I had grown up in a few different churches, traveling, going to school, and identified with being a Christian and I didn't really know what that meant.

Rodolfo Rodriguez: 09:21

Reading the Sermon On The Mount was really helpful for me to discover what were the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. The word Christian literally means to live by the teachings of Jesus Christ. The word repent actually means to turn around and walk with Christ. So for me, it was a genuine conversation about, okay, how am I actually living my life as in alignment with how I say I am? That was really helpful to have that and to have those calibrations, adjustments. So I highly recommend that. One of my biggest takeaways, if not the biggest takeaway is at the end of the day, love my neighbor as myself. Treat someone else the way I would hope to be treated if I were to over-summarize. So last but not least, the fifth book that made a profound difference in my life is actually two books written by the same author. It's Power Versus Force and Letting Go by Dr. Hawkins. This was a gift that was given to me in 2017 by my coach at the time, Christian Michelson. It really helped me start to explore my understanding of consciousness and energy. It taught me how to connect with my knowing or my intuition that was beyond just my mind and also to start to explore higher levels of consciousness. It also gave me a framework for understanding emotions, understanding consciousness, understanding energy frequency and how to actually influence that or impact that, and have experiences that were beyond where I was at currently in the moment. It's kind of hard to explain if you don't already get it, but probably tell by the journey that I went on in this book, it was more like, hey, how do I make the money?

Rodolfo Rodriguez: 11:05

How do I be successful? Now how do I run the business? How do I run myself? How do I elevate myself and my awareness or my consciousness? So that was my journey if you just look at these books and what that looks like. Obviously, this is not all inclusive. It's simply the top 5 that came to mind today as I was journaling and reflecting as I continue to read and learn. I'm sure I will update on things. If you got value from this video, I encourage you to, one, if you haven't read one of these books, go buy it, read it. These are ones to put on the bookshelf as well as listen to an audio. Leave a comment, let me know what your takeaway was from this video, I always love to hear that. And share this video with someone you feel would benefit from it. Also we have a podcast. So there's a link here somewhere near the video if you wanna click on the link and subscribe to that podcast. It's more focused for business owners who are running live events. But nonetheless, I do share some of my journeys and takeaways on that podcast. Interview some really remarkable entrepreneurs as well. So hope you've enjoyed this video. And again, be sure to share it with someone that you care about. Thank you, have a great day, bye-bye.

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