The Blue-Collar Boom with Ken Rusk

Love in Action

Ken Rusk is President at Rusk Industries and the author of Blue-Collar Cash: Love Your Work, Secure Your Future, and Find Happiness for Life. Ken is a blue-collar construction business entrepreneur who has launched multiple successful endeavors over the last three decades. He coaches and trains job seekers to take control of their lives; especially those without college degrees. He joins Marcel Schwantes to talk about his professional journey and how he gained control of his destiny despite his humble beginnings. Ken was motivated to pursue coaching after realizing that people were not as prepared for life as they should be. In the process of growing his business, he met countless individuals who weren’t taught basic necessities to deal with the challenges of life and resolved that he would do his part to rectify it. [2:45]The three tenets to success are comfort, peace, and freedom. Ken remarks that these tenets are interdependent on each other and encapsulate the true purpose of life. They are all that you need to be successful; however, because everyone requires different things to achieve comfort, peace and freedom, success will look different for each person. [5:21]Marcel asks Ken to give insights about the crisis that the American workforce is facing. He argues that removing shop class from the high school curriculum has prevented millions of children from discovering trades like carpentry, plumbing, and electrical engineering. Replacing it with college prep has only saturated the market with too many college graduates and not enough workers to do jobs where they would have already acquired the technical skills necessary. [7:06]People overlook blue-collar jobs because society focuses on college, Ken claims. Roughly 70 million out of the 165 million working people in the US work with their hands, which is proof of the need for blue-collar workers, but society is white-collar oriented. [9:33]Marcel asks Ken if he believes going to college is necessary in 2021. “If you have an absolute reason to go to college, [you should]... but it if you're going for one of those bland business degrees, you may want to reconsider,” Ken says. He explains why investing in a college degree may leave you worse off than you were without one. [11:13]Ken shares insights about lucrative blue-collar jobs. “Sometimes you just need to be willing to do something that other people aren’t,” he advises. [13:24]A key part of achieving any goal is creating certainty. “To change your goal from an ‘if’ to a ‘when,’ you need to have an absolute start date and an absolute end date. If you put yourself in the position to see the end in mind at the beginning, you will certainly get there,” Ken says. [18:22]Marcel asks Ken how he thinks leaders can show love at the workplace. “First off, we need to get rid of our preconceived notions about what a boss is. Just make sure that you are as excited and involved in the goals and futures of the people that work for you as you are for yourself,” Ken replies. [22:50]ResourcesKen Rusk on LinkedIn | WebsiteBlue-Collar Cash: Love Your Work, Secure Your Future, and Find Happiness for Life