Dolly Parton Didn't Make It Look Easy. She Made It Easy.

What is happening? Happy, happy, happy Friday, man. What a day it has been. You can tell when you do what you love to do. I started at 8 o'clock in the morning recording podcasts.

I took a little longer than I expected to. Then I had to get on a coaching call at about 9. That went longer than I expected to. I got off the call. I said, well, I got to do some podcasts.

So I went and did two more podcasts. That went longer than I expected to. And then at 11 o'clock, I have another coaching call. That's going to go longer than I expected to.

And after that, at 1 o'clock, I have another coaching call. You get the point, right? So basically, 8 o'clock in the morning until 2 in the afternoon on a Thursday with continuous nonstop talk.

Got to tell you, guys, some things you're just born to do. Anyway, it's a daily boost from MotivationToMove.com, the positive boost you need every single day to help your life grow, your business grow, everything you need. My name is Scott Smith. Good to have you here today.

Thanks for stopping by. I share that with you because... I don't know why, but not share it to you with because sometimes people think that, man, I need this freedom thing. And I don't know.

I need more flexibility. I'm just in the zone right now. I mean, literally six hours of helping and creating and just doing my thing. And when I'm done, I'm going to be done.

And it's so fun. I just wish. And I hope that you can get that in your life if you don't already have it. When you sit down, you just go, is it easy? No, it's not really easy.

It's kind of hard. But it should be easy, and that's what we're talking about today. My name is Scott Smith. Good to have you. Thanks for stopping by today.

I realized all week long I've given you nothing to buy from me. I haven't said, come, let me coach you. I haven't said, join my school group. I haven't given you anything to give away.

I just put the show, I just forgot about it, kind of in the zone this week. Not really good for business, which means nobody's going to hire me next week because I haven't talked about it. But anyway. You don't have to, because I do my thing anyway.

As we prep for the end of the year, as we make some changes, keep that in mind as you stay quiet. So Dolly Parton didn't make it easy. She made it easy, right?

So I'm talking about Dolly Parton because I did go to Dollywood this past week. We took the grandkids over. Great day. I took my son. My son has an 11-year-old, and we have a couple of cousins.

And basically, we said, here, here's the time saver pass. You go ride all the roller coasters you want to buy, and then I'm just going to do what I do. And I meandered, rode a few rides, rode a couple of coasters.

The kids would not let me go the day without riding a few roller coasters. It's just a lot of fun. Boy, that lightning bolt right there is fun. And the Wild Eagle is even more fun.

Saw a couple of shows, the whole thing, and kind of absorbed the whole Dolly thing. I've been there before when Dolly was alive, and now I'm there after she's gone. And so it has a little bit different impact. And so I started looking into it because I really never studied quite what she had done, but I always kind of wondered.

What did she do? Because she was kind of private about it, and yet so big, right? Only five feet tall and so powerful in so many ways. But she died. She was 80, died in August, and she kind of made it look easy.

She did, and she was funny about it the whole way. But she made a few disciplined decisions along the way very early that she just kind of repeated for 60 years.

Now, it sounds that way now, because we're looking at interviews or looking at research, the whole thing, my guess is it was far messier than that. It had to have been. And if you're going to be a superstar like she is, was, is today, you know it's messier than that. You know there were a lot of bad moments.

You know she was working hard and you're just not hearing that part of it. It's like social media. We don't. But it's really hard to have a career that spans, you know, 60 years and not have too much bad come out of it.

Dig, dig, dig. You can't find the bad stuff. So you got to give that some credit, right? So what's one thing she did that made her a success? She owned her work before she was famous.

The Elvis story is one you hear all the time. The decision that she, what is the Whitney Houston song? Do you remember which one it was? And I, you know, that one, I forgot the song.

We'll always love you, I guess, right? I will always love you. That song she wrote, she wrote that song the same day she wrote Jolene. It's proven. It's on a cassette tape.

She did it the same day. Elvis said, I want to sing your song, but I'm going to own the songwriting publishing rights of that song. She said, no, you won't either.

She decided to hang on to that. Now, if you know anything about how the music business work, he who owns the publishing rights to their song is the one who gets rich.

A lot of members of bands, they're members of the band, but they don't own the publishing rights. So that's what you always want. You want to write the song and you want to own the song. I don't know if you knew this or not, but, you know, people don't get, bands don't get paid to have the song on the radio.

They get barely paid at all to stream. The person who always gets paid is the songwriter. But she didn't know that. Dolly did. So what she did was she decided to keep her work.

She used to say, I think I mentioned this yesterday, that my songs are like my children. In my old age, they'll support me. She hung around with those copyrights and that ownership or catalog. I don't even think she sold her catalog yet.

The Whitney Houston version became the best-selling single ever recorded by a female artist, and it made Dolly rich beyond her imagination just by doing that. She owned her work before she was famous. Stop giving your stuff away, guys.

It's hard these days. You don't have to give it away. People steal it from you anyway. It just happens. Number two, her brand was simply who she was so she could stretch anything into it.

So long before a lot of celebrities out there kind of created their own brands, she started a cosmetics, a lingerie line, a shoe line. That was in her mid-30s.

All kinds of crazy stuff. A lot of people teach branding. Dolly just did it. She stood at five feet tall, knew who she was. She liked to wear high heels.

So she had high heels, six inch heels, warm at home, the whole thing. She trusted herself before a manufacturer would ever trust her. She decided this is just who I am.

I'm just going to wrap it around me. When your brand is simply who you are, everything gets easy. It gets honest as well. I'm kind of a hot mess sometimes, but tell you what, my brand is like me.

It's a hot mess. I don't care. I do what I'm going to do. Some people, they get busted because they were doing something that wasn't them. I don't get busted very often because I just try to walk my talk.

Not nearly as well as Dolly did for sure. Number three, So entspannt kann Finanzieren sein. Mit Easy Credit. She partnered with people, and she kept the vision.

And they kept the vision she had. One thing people don't know about Dollywood is it's not Dolly's Park. It's half her park. They partnered with a company called the Herschel family, and the family operated entertainment parks.

And they just had a rule, basically. They said, hey, we'll run the park, but Dolly's the brand. So if you go there, it seems like it's her park. It seems like she owns it.

She must come there. She must make sure they do the dishes right and everything else, right? No. No. She doesn't own the park. She owns half of the park, which is a lot these days.

Nobody would ever know it, right? Kind of crazy. Her music career, same way. Danny Nozell took over management back in 2005, and he repositioned her. She was a heritage act in 2005, and he positioned her as a superstar.

Sold out a bunch of shows, hard dates before she even hit the tour. She used to fly commercial. No, started flying private. She stayed the creative force and she crowned herself with people who made each part of the business scale.

Redefined herself. A lot of people would not look at her as a superstar, you know, 15, 20 years ago, but just because of branding, she got there. She guarded a private core.

Her public was very enormous. Mine is, I have a big public thing about what I do. But I learned a long time ago, you don't get to know certain things. Her husband, Carl Dean, who ran an asphalt business in Nashville, rarely did he ever join her.

Nobody even knew what he did. It's not distance, it's protection. Her mother said, always keep something back for you. Meaning, meet your own needs, financial and emotional first.

Take projects that you believe can benefit from your particular skill set. 60 years of love story there. Pretty crazy. Again, we don't know everything at all.

We're just kind of looking at, well, what we know now, right? History has a cool way of telling us how good things were. She had a daily rhythm and she protected it. This is probably one of the most important things you could do to be successful.

And all of this stuff stacked back to back will really tell you, starting with owning your own work, right? But her rhythm was this. She usually got up around three o'clock in the morning.

First thing she did was pray. Never left that as a church inside Dollywood. Between three and seven, she did her spiritual work. She was writing. She did business correspondence.

She said because the world was calm and she felt like a farmer. Work begets work. Energy begets energy. Morning routine. Get up early. Get it done. A lot to be said about that.

She tied her success to a purpose bigger than herself, her imagination library. If you go to Dollywood, you walk through the Dolly Parton Experience and they have a, on the wall, they talk, the last thing you go through is the Imagination Library and they have a book counter there. And it's pretty darn big. It says that 332 million books across five countries they've given away.

I won't go into the details of it. You can check it out yourself. But people stand there waiting for that counter to go up one more. And it's real time.

It reports it goes up one more. People stand there and wait for it to go up. How's that, man? She kept building until the very end. A lot of people don't know this, but she seemed really big.

She wanted an empire based in Nashville. Nashville's about three hours from Dollywood, but it took a long time. It took until about 2023. She bought a 12-story Nashville office building, 75 million bucks, turned it into the Songteller Hotel at a museum on the third floor.

I hear it's pretty good. This May, she was sick. Didn't tell us, did she? She said she was still recording videos, visiting Dollywood, working on the Nashville Museum and the hotel and reworking her Broadway musical.

Man, it's crazy what she did. How does this connect with everything we talked about this week? We talked about some productivity, right, this week as well.

Dolly's life is kind of a near perfect illustration of what science says. She made her biggest decision in advance. and just kind of follow through. It was a system that was built and a discipline that ran it for decades.

Something kept in mind there, huh? All right, you know what? I have pushed my podcast to the limit. I literally have one minute before a whole bunch of people are waiting in my school group for the next part of my day.

It's going to be awesome. I've had a great week. I hope you have too. You have a great weekend. I'm going to come back on Monday and do this again as we count down toward the end of the year.

The end of 20 years of doing the Daily Grease Podcast and the mystery of what is to come. I'll see you on Monday.