← Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
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John Gafford
Every team, every topic, everywhere. This is believe from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be, escaping the drift. This is the Weekly Drop with John Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you, like, subscribe and comment. And now the Drop. What's up, everybody? Time for another episode of the Weekly Drop. My little solo pod I hit you with once a week. And today, man, I want to talk about something that is a struggle sometimes for me. And I. And I made some realizations over the weekend and that thing I struggle with is ego. It really is. And I saw a couple things that hit me this weekend and I wanted to talk about it. And ego to me is perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with having an ego, but if it is prohibiting growth in you and holding you back, then that is a problem. I'm going to tell two stories from the weekend that made me kind of realize that I got to check myself, if you will, before I wreck myself or stop wrecking myself, if you will. So the first one is over the weekend I went to one of my favorite places to go, which is the Boardroom Mastermind group. It is a elite level group of very high level, high net worth individuals that focus primarily on real estate investing. But it's just a lot of really good people that are really smart and a guy that I just met for the first time, that just came to the group for the first time in our meeting in Boston back in Q3, and I got to know him a little bit then, not a lot we were in the same room. But this dude's name is Leon, better known as the Wall Street Trapper, or Trap as we call him. And you need to look this dude up first of all. So this is a dude that has an amazing story. I'm going to have him on the podcast next week to go through his story in detail. But very humble beginnings and, you know, taught himself the stock market and got to be really, really good at trading options. And now he has built this into a following of millions of people, coaches, tens or hundreds of thousands of people on how to do this. And the guy is just number one, he kills it in the market. Number two, he makes, I mean, infinite amounts of money selling his coaching every month. And the number of orders he gets is staggering. Of people that join his coaching program online. It's staggering the amount of money he's making doing this. And the reason I say this is not necessarily to celebrate his success. Although, dude, you know Anybody that achieves that level of success, I'm rooting for you. But more to the point, it's how this guy carries himself in those meetings, how he carries himself in this group, because he is a guy that understands the stock market intimately. And he joined our group because he kind of got sick of paying this massive tax bill that he had, and he wanted to learn how to invest in real estate and utilize the tax code to lower his tax bill. And you would never know how much money this dude is bringing in every month because he carries himself. And I was looking for the word this morning for how he carries himself through those meetings, and the only word I can come up with is grace. He carries himself in those rooms as. I'm so lucky to be here. I'm so grateful to be here learning from all of you guys. He comes in as a student every day, does not care what anybody thinks about him, does not care about his accolades, does not care about recognition for anything. He is there as a student, first to learn. He doesn't care how you view him. He's there as a student and handles himself with such a way of grace that it's a lesson. And I realized to myself, man, I go into these meetings like this for years, and first and foremost, with me, probably it's important that I come off important. And that's just dumb, to be honest with you, because it's like, I look back probably at the energy and time that I spent looking important in these rooms when I could have been sponging information from some of the smartest guys in the business that do things different than what I do. But instead, I was more concerned about being seen as an equal, an elevated member of the room, whatever it was. Which is just shocking to me that I should have just checked that. I mean, I made an investment for the education, for what I would learn here. And instead I treated it as, how can I be the biggest dog in a room full of big dogs? And that was just dumb. Second example I'm going to make of this this weekend that happened was some friends of mine in a band that was huge in the 90s. They had a number one hit with Good. Better than Ezra. Great. Friends of mine, they're how I met my wife. We've been friends for more years than I can count. Came to Vegas and they played a show. And, you know, these are guys that have been doing it right. There's no break in this. There hasn't been. Like, this isn't a reunion tour. This is what they do. And make records and continue to push. It's what they do. And they just released a new record maybe six months ago, and they're playing this show to about. I don't know, there's probably 1400 people in the room in Henderson, which is where I live, actually, here in Vegas. And we went to the show, and during the show, they played, you know, all the hits, all the stuff, the hits they had that were big hits on radio play back in the day to some. A couple of the new stuff, a couple new smatterings in the new stuff. And then they played some really cool covers, but, like, throw three or four of them that they played that were covers. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, at first, I'm like, you know, that's a lot of bands going on tour, and it's like, oh, we're gonna play something new. And they just kind of play all their new stuff, and they just kind of expect you to do that. And that kind of comes off a little, because you look around the room, and a lot of those people, you know, we're just going to a show because it was a show that was there, right? Hey, we're here. It's in Henderson. We're going to this show. And you could tell there's probably a lot of people that maybe had heard one or two songs, and it was like, oh, yeah, I would go to that. And they were being exposed to this band for the first time. And you see a lot of bands kind of just shoved that new material down people's throats. But what they chose to do by playing these covers were. And these were songs that were great, and they're, you know, other songs from the 90s. And everybody in that room was singing aloud and having a great time. And I realized, thinking about this talk today, thinking about trap, I realized they put their ego aside because they realized their main role was to entertain that crowd, was to make them happy. That crowd wasn't there to feed their ego. They were there to give those people the best possible time. And they got it. I mean, that people had a great time. It was a great show. And I just think in life, man, as you go through, you got to start asking yourself, when you deal with other people or you look at different situations, how am I coming to the table with this? Am I coming to serve you, or am I expecting you to serve me? And there's probably in my life, too many experiences or too many times when I stepped into the ego trap and got myself stuck doing things that I shouldn't be doing because I expected others to be there to celebrate me. I see it. You know, the worst place we see it right now is there's this. There's this fiasco going on with our local board, right? Our local realtor board, where allegedly there's some people that are in power that did some stuff they shouldn't have done. And it's just. It's just stupid, right? And I look at that and I go, if these people were really looking to serve others with all of this stuff going down, they would just get out of the way. But they're not. They're there to serve themselves from the big stupid events they have. That, you know, just the cow stuff, it's just gotten so gross. And there's stuff in and I think all of our lives where we can look at it and say, wait a second, I got to slow this down. I got to pump the brakes a little bit on my ego and ask myself, am I here to serve or is this here to serve me? You know, if you look at the book, one of my favorite authors, obviously I always talked about is Ryan Holiday. Ryan's great, you know, Obstacle is the Way is probably one of the first books I tell people to read when they ask me what they should read. That's one of my first go to's. But he wrote a book called Ego is the Enemy, which I really like too. It was like a whole series in an Ego the Enemy. He talks and tells a story like about Steve Jobs, One of the brightest minds of our time, actually got kicked out of his own company because of his ego. Because he thought everybody there was there to serve Steve instead of Apple being there to serve the world. And when he changed his thinking on that, that's when he became a great leader and Apple became a great company. Because if you really go through this life seeing how you can be of service to others, there's a great saying that says if you want to get everything you want, help others get what they want. And you just can't do that unless you're approaching all of this with a service mentality. You know, with me, you know, we used to have a. You know, I used to do the podcast back in the day with Chris Connell and Colt. Miss those days. Go back and listen to those episodes. Some pretty funny. But, you know, Connell would always have. It was like a bingo card of a couple things that he would always talk about. And one of the things that he would bring up religiously was called the Dunning Kruger effect. It was almost Like a bingo card event. And it's funny, as I was doing research for this day, you know, the Dunning Kruger effect kept coming up because it's really based in ego and how it stunts your personal growth. And what the Dunning Kruger effect is, it says, like, the less you know about something, the better you think you are at it. Like, for example, we've all seen people that go out and like, play golf the first day and they're like, oh, dude, this is gonna be easy. It's gonna be super simple. Then you ask them after the first time they take a golf lesson, how do you think you are at golf? And they're like, oh, I'm okay. But yet the more you learn about it, the more you learn how terrible you really are. And it's like, yeah, somebody's been playing it for three years. Like, oh, worst golfer in the world. Probably not, because they just have now understood how hard it is. It also is why the loudest V voices are normally the most uninformed. Because the people that know the least about a subject are normally the most vocal about it, versus the people that know the most have learned enough to question the knowledge that they have. So if you just automatically, you know, be very mindful of that. If you really feel like you know everything about something and you don't need to learn anymore, you don't no longer need to be a student of the game. Think about my man, the Wall Street Trapper, and walk with grace in those rooms and walk with eyes open and ears open and mouth shut. Because you might be surprised that the limited knowledge you do have might be shaken to its foundation with a little more as you go along. But I think just there's so many examples of our ego. I mean, just recently you look at what was it, Thanos, that deal with Elizabeth Holmes, that crazy lady. It's funny, she tried to emulate Steve Jobs by what she wore, not blinking. For those of you who don't know who she is, she started a company called Thanos, which apparently had this revolutionary blood testing deal where from one drop they could do like a full analysis. And it was a full thing and it was all bullshit. None of it ever worked. And you're talking about, they raised so much money for this company, it was like a billion dollar cap market cap company, and it was all bullshit. And she's now in jail. And what really screwed it up was because she had this image. If you watch, I think there's a book about it. There is. It's called Bad Blood. There's a book I remember, I don't know who wrote it, but it's called Bad Blood and there's they quote, the reason for Thanos happening was she had crafted this image for herself of absolute perfection and didn't want anybody to see the cracks in that. Like, didn't want anybody to see that, oh, there might be a problem here. So she, she continued this facade of just absolute bullshit just to protect the facade that she had built because that was all based in ego. So next time you find yourself in a situation where maybe you want to flex a little more, say something stupid or lie or misrepresent what you're doing, ask yourself, am I doing this to protect this self image of myself that maybe everybody else doesn't see and doesn't care about anyway? Because it's like junior high school, man. What do you tell your kids? Don't be worried about what people think because they're all thinking about themselves. That's not just junior high school, dude. That's the whole, that's everybody. That's the whole world of out roles. So, man, all I can say is like my buddy Kevin Griffin that played that show last week, he has a great book out look it Up. Look up for it. And I wish I had the name of it off the top of my head, but I don't. I think it's called the Greatest Song is the name of the book. It's about collaboration, but he's got a whole chapter that is essentially your ego is not your amigo. I'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com you can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five star review. Give us a share. Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.