The Key to Success – Dale Partridge
SUMMARY
MUST HAVE RESOURCES
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard
The Richest Man in All of Babylon by George S. Clason
Start a podcast that impacts thousands – The Podcasters Secret Weapon
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Our definition of success is based on what we’ve seen in our culture, media, and people we’ve looked up into. The key to success is a wide term. Success is having it all, having a strong relationship with your family, having a strong spiritual life, having a good reputation, physical health, and finances.
If you just build the person, then they’ll build the business.
It’s very easy to know how to start a business. What’s not easy is maturity, the ability to make good decisions, discernment, discipline, integrity, and patience.
The more focused you are in keeping the balance, the more successful your business becomes. The key to success lies in the fact that how much you are good at keeping the balance.
Men or women who can’t take care of their home might be successful for a time but aren’t going to have a long-term success.
Life is all about balance and keeping balance is the key to success.
It is a very difficult time because we live in a world where we you need to do a lot of things but it’s all about priorities and discipline. For some the key to success may be self-discipline yet prioritizing things is equally important.
Discipline for me has always been doing something you don’t necessarily like to achieve something you love.
If you don’t believe your family is more important than your work, then it will show in your actions. The key to success in your relationship depends on how you prioritize your relationships.
An entrepreneur is someone who learns how to make more money with less time.
Not hard work but smart work is the key to success. We don’t start businesses so that we can work more. We start businesses so that we could work less so we could have more time to do those things that we do love with the people that we do love.
You’re not an entrepreneur if your life is all about working. You’re an employee at your own company.
Just being contented in that journey is another process and another personal maturity that I think comes along as an entrepreneur especially in the later years as you start to actually make money and be successful while trying to find the key to success.
If your goal is making millions of dollars, you have to question yourself where your heart is and what your motivations are. Sometimes knowing the inner voice is the key to success.
Make decisions based on what’s the dream, what you really want, and what’s next. Don’t constantly just end on one dream. Defining the key to success is a continuous process.
Be excited for what’s next but at the same time, be happy with where you’re now. Your authentic happiness is the key to success in your life.
Performance addiction comes with as an entrepreneur, which helps you redefining the key to success.
If you have a strong spirit of independence that’s keeping you away from having a relationship with others, you need to break that down and allow yourself to open and create that success story from the maturity that comes with growing up. This is the key to success in building successful relationships.
We tie our success to those negative behaviors.
It doesn’t mean it is normal when it’s common, you need to redefine these both in order to recognize the key to success
Constantly remember what normal is because the world is changing it all the time.
Moral relativism is when what’s normal for you changes. It’s the type of conversation that an entrepreneur without moral code does.
When you try to be steady, reliable, normal, and be clear about what something is, people will follow and look up to you.
TRANSCRIPTION: THE KEY TO SUCCESS – DALE PARTRIDGE
Luis Congdon
Today’s guest was a millionaire by the time he was 27 years old. He’s a father. He’s been invited to launch by the likes of Jack Dorsey. He’s ran multiple, multiple successful businesses and yet at the crux of who Dale Partridge is, is someone who seeks to find balance-the key to success, and tries to live a moral and healthy life where it’s not just business and it’s not just work but it’s a life based on balance, family, and strong morals.
Today, we bring you Dale Partridge to talk about the key to success, morality, and balance.
Kamala Chambers
This is very exciting to have you here, Dale. Welcome! Are you ready to launch?
Dale Partridge
Super excited to chat with you guys today.
What is the key to success?
Luis Congdon
So Dale, you’ve created multiple businesses that are thriving and succeeding. You managed to shift your life from being broke, having a wife who’s working as a dog groomer, you were struggling making at home, maybe $20,000-30,000/year doing sub-par, and not feeling very successful. And now, your life has completely shifted.
One of the things that happen with a lot of people is their life shifts, their ideas of success shift as well. So I’m really excited to talk to you about what is the key to success, what success looks like to you, and what is that even mean? What is success for you now?
Dale Partridge
As we graduate high school and getting into our early 20s and we have this version of success that we’ve typically adopted from what we’ve seen in culture and media and maybe those that we’ve looked up to. I think as we get smacked in the face by reality, as we go through relationships, and as we looked in at certain people and go, “Gosh, I don’t like that about you,” and looked at other people and go, “I really admire that person.” It really starts to form in shape what success really looks like and I don’t think that success is very relative.
The key to success is not very specific. I think that there are different channels of success but I think to have it all, if you will. This has been one of my aim on my journey of success is to have it all. Meaning to have strong relationship with my wife, my family, and my kids, to have a really have strong spiritual life that I’m a Christian guy but just to make sure that’s a priority in my life, which suggests that the key to success is a wide term. To make sure I have good reputation, and that I protect that and the day of the internet where the internet never forgets whatever you say can be construed and pushed against you. We got to be very careful to protect our names and our reputation. And then, my physical health, on top of that, my finances. Together, those kinds of things really make up my success and really help in defining the key to success.
You can tell it. I don’t talk about my business. My business is not something that I do and I think it’s fairly successful as a channel but for the most part, I don’t want to become the wealthiest guy that nobody likes. Mere being wealthy is not the key to success. I don’t want to become the guy that got too busy making a living that I forgot to make a life. There are all these puns that I can just keep going with in terms I don’t want to be the richest guy in the graveyard. That’s the life that I want to stay away from and I define the key to success on my own terms.
I might not be the wealthiest guy that you’ve ever meet but my hope is to become one of the most successful people you’ve ever meet.
Reframing the key to success
Kamala Chambers
I love how you’re defining the key to success for us and reframing it because we, the thriving launchers, do talk a lot about how to further your business, how to take it to the next level, how to bring in more financial abundance, and you’re talking about holistic abundance, abundance that comes through your relationships, your passion, your spirituality, and your finances.
Luis Congdon
And what I like about what we’re doing right now Kamala and Dale, is it really fits the integrity of the show because for a while, Thrivinglaunch was just about business and giving people hard lessons about how they can define the key to success on their own terms.
What I mean by hard lessons is very step by step on how to do something, how to find the key to success in business, and now we’ve shifted the show, and all of a sudden, Dale shows up on my radar and I’m thinking, I want to shift the show because entrepreneurs are people that have lives outside of their business and too easy to get overly focused on the business.
What do you do Dale to keep that balance? Do you think balance in life is the key to success? Because success for me is like this circle I saw that I really love and it was like a tire and it had rings. So this big circle, and there were rings that went up until 10 levels. Then it was cut like a pie. One little slice is your family. The other one is your finances and you fill out whatever you rate yourself as. Maybe 10 with family, a 2 with finances, or you’re a 10 with finances, and a 2 in health.
Then what the coach told us is what if this tire isn’t as full as possible in every spectrum. Then you have an uneven tire and you can’t really move the car. How do you keep this balance going for yourself with everything that you’re doing?
Dale Partridge
There’s no shortage of quick tips to the key to success. If you want to know how to do entrepreneurship, that’s super easy. You can go read 8 books, and you know exactly how to start a business. That’s really easy knowledge. What’s not easy is maturity, the ability to make good decisions, discernment, discipline, integrity, and patience. It’s all these virtues if you will. And so it constantly focusing on how do I become more honest, more dependable, more vulnerable, loving, brave, courageous in certain things, and risky.
There are just so many kinds of balances that I’m focusing on and I noticed that the more I focused on those things, the more successful my business becomes.
If you look behind typically every really thriving business, you usually have a really good leader. Sure we hear about all the bad stories as well but for me, I’m not just interested in being a guy who has lots of money and a really great company and just has 2 divorces.
There’s a lot to be said that is a man or a woman can’t take care of their home. How are you expected to lead anybody outside of that? Those are supposed to be the most important people in your life. If you can’t take care of that, how are you going to take care of this business? How are you going to take care of this other important relationships? Sure, those people might be successful for a time but they’re not going to have long-term success. For me, just finding balance is very difficult.
Dale Partridge
You’re extending plates and one plate is about to fall and you got to invest more time there. Then the other plates start to fall and you got to invest some time there.
We live in a world where it says you got to do a ton of stuff that we always have to be busy. We just have to be on every social network. We have to constantly be reading, growing, doing, and showing the world that we’re doing all these things because they need to know. So it’s a very difficult time.
In my opinion, if I had to break it down to two words, it’s priorities and discipline. Discipline for me has always been doing something you don’t necessarily like to achieve something you love. That’s something that I really held onto is that, “I don’t like getting up early in the morning.” I’m not really a morning person. I’m actually a really good night owl but my life this season, doesn’t allow that. So I get up early and I read and I get like yard work done in the morning. I spend quiet time just kind of having that self-time and have time with my kids. I get to make them breakfast every morning and spend time with them.
The key to success in your life and business is how you prioritize things
Dale Partridge
Then the idea of priorities, if you don’t believe your family is more important than your work, then it will show in your actions. It’s just really sad to me when I see people that are just relationally bankrupt but financially wealthy. So I thought what a life that I don’t want. That’s most of these kind of up and coming, hustling, millennial type entrepreneurs that brag about how many hours they work, “I worked 85 hours last week,” and I’m like, “You’re an idiot.” I just look at that then go, “An entrepreneur is someone who learns how to make more money with less time.” So you make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you work 80 hours a week. You have two $50,000 jobs. That’s what you have. If you could make $100,000 a year and you work 5 hours a week, that’s impressive, right?
We don’t start businesses so we can work more. We start businesses so we could work less and have more time to do those things we do love with the people that we do love.
And so I’m just constantly helping people get those priorities straightened because I believe, the key to key success is how you prioritize things and realize what entrepreneurship really is. It’s not about working a ton and working late until the night, that’s not the key to success. That happens every now and then but if that’s your life, you’re not an entrepreneur. You’re an employee at your own company.
Luis Congdon
Kamala, I know you probably feel the same way. As Dale talks, I’m thinking a lot about our interview with Jay Papasan and how he talked about The ONE Thing, and boiling our life down in each category to the one thing where we get the most success and out of everything he said when he did his research and everything he was doing, he’s like, “We’re boiling everything down to simplicity so that we can create more time for family and for being around the people that we love.”
And just to that on a deeper and personal level, Kamala and I just recently took a trip down to Medellin, Columbia. I was adopted when I was 8 years old. Somebody who thriving launches noticed that I was adopted and I went back and reunited with my family and met my father who I’d never met and I just spent nearly 2 months not really working and being engrossed in Latin family. Latin cultures are very about families, gathering of 30-40 people on a regular basis, not once a year, but a few times a month. That’s how prioritizing your relationships becomes the key to success.
Kamala Chambers
Every single day
Luis Congdon
And I feel so much better. I feel so much more loved and whole. This is what I do business for. This is what I do mindfulness practices for. This is what I do everything for so I can feel more at peace and a sense feel like all of me is being maximized.
Dale Partridge
Totally. It sound like a season where you go, “Man, am I recalibrating how I view success?” One of my big goals is that if I could make whatever number it is comfortable and come from me, I’m not talking about millions of dollars, I’m talking about few grand a year but I could have all the time in the world, that is incredible.
So many times I see entrepreneurs who falsely believe that the key to success is making a lot of money, they go, “Oh my gosh, I want to build this multi, multimillion dollar business.” I’m all about it like do it, right? That’s the best part about entrepreneurship and capitalism.
But a million bucks a year is a lot of money. I like to remind people that. That’s a lot of money and there comes a point, at least in my experience when I made a million dollars, I felt like I’m not really motivated to make anymore. At that point, your priorities are really got there.
If you are performance driven and you just want to show off more things to more people and you got to have like the nicer fit. I just question where your heart is and where your motives are and the need to make so much, the key to success lies in between these lines.
Right now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that. Some companies need to be big but just being contented in that journey is another process and another personal maturity that I think comes along as an entrepreneur especially in the later years as you start to actually make money and be successful.
So when I’m listening and you want to give your designer direction, I would tell them that, “Hey, I’m a lifestyle writer” “I’m a personality-based brand,” if you are, “I want this to represent my whole personality not just my product or service.”
Freedom of choice – An integral part of the key to success
Kamala Chambers
Yes. I absolutely agree with this. When I started off online and decided to take my business online, it was because I wanted the lifestyle. I love to travel. I love to be able to work my own hours and work as much as I felt like. I just want to be completely honest and transparent that I did put in some 80 hours/week. I did work really, really hard in the beginning.
And now, our business is at a place that we can take 2 months off and we’re working 5 hours/week and our business is doing better than it has ever done. We enjoy both success and freedom, which we realize are the integral parts of the key to success. I think it can take some time to get there but the important thing that I hear you driving home is the motivation behind it.
Is it really about the money or is it about being able to live the way that you want to live and embody a sense of peace or a sense of happiness and have the time that you want to have for the things that are really important to you. For me, happiness is the key to success.
Dale Partridge
Yes. Absolutely. Freedom is an integral part of the key to success. For us, it was to live on a farm. So we live on a farm in the middle of Oregon and that was our dream and that’s how we want to have that home-based and we wanted the peace, the quiet, the animals, and the big yard. We want those things and to be honest, that’s cheaper than where I came from in Southern California.
For us, my wife and I, we just make decisions based off of what’s the dream, what we really want, and then what’s next. We don’t constantly just end on one dream like,”This is our forever home and this is it.” We stay for a season, for sure, we’re excited to be in the season we’re at now.
One of my favorite quotes is, “You’re not in content if you want change. You’re in content if you can be happy while you wait for that change.” That process for us has been a journey. For us, we want change. We don’t know what that is right now. We’ve been here for a few years. We plan on hoping to be here for another 3, 4, or 5 years, who knows? But the idea is that we want change and I think that’s important to give permission to people, to have that change like to desire it. Even when you get to the top of that mountain, don’t just sit there, enjoy it for a season and then figure out what’s next. What else are you going to build? What else are you going to do? What else can you add?
We got work to do. We are entrepreneurs. We are creators, right? And we define the key to success on our own terms.
Dale Partridge
And it took me a long time to get that idea where I was constantly 10 steps ahead anywhere I was standing and I was never happy with where I was at.
That’s another thing that performance addiction comes with as an entrepreneur. We have a lot of these people who are broken and trying to prove themselves and get to be valuable or get that affirmation that they desperately need to say that they’re worthy. A lot of those people get that from whatever brokenness of their past but they try to show it through their work, “Oh! Look how great I am!” “Look how famous I am!” “Look how smart I am” “Look how wealthy I am.”
I’ve been there. That’s the reason I could talk about that. That’s the journey. It’s one of the biggest drivers out there but I think as we mature and grow, and realize that’s not really stuff that matters. That’s my own brokenness and I need to be healed from that. You take time to look into that and the need to maybe get right with God or I need to have a serious conversation with my wife. Those things I think we avoid to talk about but I’m telling you.
Dale Partridge
Yes. Absolutely. Freedom is an integral part of the key to success. For us, it was to live on a farm. So we live on a farm in the middle of Oregon and that was our dream and that’s how we want to have that home-based and we wanted the peace, the quiet, the animals, and the big yard. We want those things and to be honest, that’s cheaper than where I came from in Southern California.
For us, my wife and I, we just make decisions based off of what’s the dream, what we really want, and then what’s next. We don’t constantly just end on one dream like,”This is our forever home and this is it.” We stay for a season, for sure, we’re excited to be in the season we’re at now.
One of my favorite quotes is, “You’re not in content if you want change. You’re in content if you can be happy while you wait for that change.” That process for us has been a journey. For us, we want change. We don’t know what that is right now. We’ve been here for a few years. We plan on hoping to be here for another 3, 4, or 5 years, who knows? But the idea is that we want change and I think that’s important to give permission to people, to have that change like to desire it. Even when you get to the top of that mountain, don’t just sit there, enjoy it for a season and then figure out what’s next. What else are you going to build? What else are you going to do? What else can you add?
We got work to do. We are entrepreneurs. We are creators, right? And we define the key to success on our own terms.
Defining the key to success in your marital life
Luis Congdon
You know Dale, I taught the work of Dr. John and Julie Gottman for several years and they’re some of the most renowned marriage researchers on the planet. They have come up with some amazing research. I taught their work to over 300 married couples for several years.
One of the things that they found in their research that defines the key to success and a lot of researches now backed this up and shown this to be true is that people who are happy at home, report being happier at work. And people who not happy at home, report being less satisfied at work. But the inverse doesn’t work. People who say they’re happy at work, don’t certainly report that they’re happy at home. Liking your job won’t certainly impact how you are at home and yet if you’re happier at home, you will directly be impacted at work and that will make you happier, well add to it.
As you’re talking, I can’t help but wonder, was there a moment where you’re just working too much because to get to where you’re at Dale is uncommon for people unless they’ve had some kind of breaking point. The people that go back and focus on home, something happened to them.
For my own personal experience of being adopted and then going back and reuniting with my family and going through that whole journey, that journey happened because there’s something inside of me that I knew that I needed to be healed. To add to that to, I feel like the better my relationship with Kamala gets and the more that we work on things, the more that I become a better partner for her, the more that I actually become a better business person and the better I become in all aspects of my life. For me a better marital status need to do something with the key to success. Did something happen in particular for you?
Dale Partridge
Yes, I think so. Your relationship with self really helps you to define key to success. I had a few moments of trauma in terms of self-inflicted trauma and moments where you look yourself in the mirror and you’re like, “I hate who I am.” And so I had few of those over the last 12 or 15 years. I think that it wasn’t until a few years ago, I’m a spiritual guy so I talk a lot about Christian faith. I’m a little bit different in terms of the very common conversation on that stuff. I started just really taking a lot of the principles I was reading in the scriptures literally and it took me through that process to realize that I had to let something have authority over me.
In my younger years, I lied all the time, sometimes these are the things that I associate with the key to success. That was one of those things that I actually tied so much success to lying. It’s not like blatant lies but I’m talking like you would say things like you stressed the truth or are you exaggerate or that’s a white lie or whatever that might be. What happens is we tie our success to those negative behaviors.
Sometimes spirituality is the key to success
Dale Partridge
If you find somebody that’s really successful and they also have some negative characteristics. They cheat, lie, manipulate, or whatever it is. They tied all those characteristics to their success and associate them to the key to success. I’m successful because of those things. Getting rid of that was really a hard journey over the last several years and just allowing God to have authority in my life to go like, “I’m not going to do that.”
I actually fear God and I’m not going to do that because of that reason. When that happened, it was a game changer in terms of how I started behaving and how I actually act with integrity. I actually went back and apologized to a lot of people that just needed to hear that from me including my wife. These all things actually integrate the aspect of spirituality to the key to success.
There was that moment in terms of the literal look at something and having authority over my life. I had a couple of businesses that have done really well and a couple that have failed. I’ve had the crying moments with my spouse in terms of she doesn’t feel loved and had the wonderful friends that are willing to come up to me and tell me the truth. They would have the bravery and the courage to say, “Dale, you have a booger on your face. You got to rid of that thing.” And so, I’m just wasn’t that interested any longer with friends that just wouldn’t do that to me. I gave everybody permission to do that.
I think through a variety those instances every few years, I was kind of having this like, “Boom!” just like breakthrough like “Boom!” Break through another wall. And it became a little addicting. So I’ve tried to kind of center myself around that, around really great families, and really great men and women who remind me what normal is. Positive relationships are the key to success in your life and in your business.
I’ll tell you. What’s common is, it’s common for the entrepreneur to work himself out of his marriage or her marriage. It’s common for those things to happen. It’s not normal. That’s not normal. It’s normal to be able to balance your work life-the key to success, with your home life and to have a great relationship with your spouse and your children, and have a great relationship at work. It’s common to have a workplace affair but it’s not normal.
It’s common for a 16 year old girl to sneak out and go out with her boyfriend and smoke cigarettes, and even have sex. That’s common, it’s not normal though. As parents, it’s normal that your 16 year old daughter respects and loves you enough to have this conversation and obey the rules of the home and that’s normal.
So I’m constantly trying to remember what normal is and we live in a world that’s changing that all the time. And so I’m trying to define what’s normal and look at that and go, “Okay, this is normal. I need to remember this because the world won’t tell me otherwise. It will tell me the opposite or it will tell me something different.”
Luis Congdon
That’s what I was just thinking. Normal is something we really want to in some degrees define ourselves or know what that is for us because the world is telling us it’s normal to be jacked up on medications and caffeine. Just a very different type of lifestyle that doesn’t feel very good to me are what society and mass media want to tell us is normal.
Dale Partridge
Yes. We just have to come to our own realization and again for me, I just take what I believe in terms of the Bible and I go, “That’s my normal.” Whatever it is for you, I don’t care whatever it is. You just need to define that normal and not let it change because when it changes, that becomes a very weird thing for your business.
It’s not normal for me to get a divorce. That’s just not okay. And so, if that ever changes in my moral code, that’s a big deal. You’re kind of a moving target for what’s okay and not okay.
I think that moral relativism is what the word is for that conversation. It’s like, “Oh! What’s good for me is good,” even if it’s bad for you. I think that’s like the deeper conversation as entrepreneurs, as leaders, like an entrepreneur without a moral code and who’s just like this is good one day and not good the next and that’s good the next day and not good the next. That’s a very dangerous spot for a leader because they’re leading people down their road. For me, I just try to be very steady. I try to be very reliable. I try to be the same as much as I possibly can. I try to be very normal and I try to be clear about what that is.
When that happens, people go, “Oh! Some crazy event in the world happens. Dale, what do you think about that?” “Hey, I’m confused and I need clarity on that. What do you think about that? Can I follow you there?”
And we look for that kind of stuff in the leaders that we follow to create and to have that clarity, confidence, and firm stance on something.
Stay true to yourself-the key to success
Kamala Chambers
We’ve been listening to Dale Partridge really redefining the key to success and leadership.
Luis Congdon
And before we go, Dale, great point about being a safe harbor and being something that’s stable that people can look to and find stability. I think that’s really beautiful and huge encouragement for everyone is we’re all increasing our levels of success or going after success and whatever way that is that for us to still remember some of the foundational keys of who we are and what makes us true for ourselves.
Kamala Chambers
Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Dale. It has been fantastic to have you here.
MUST HAVE RESOURCES
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard
The Richest Man in All of Babylon by George S. Clason
Start a podcast that impacts thousands – The Podcasters Secret Weapon
