Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity

Summary

Podcast Summary: Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity

Episode Release Date: November 22, 2024
Host: John Gafford

In the latest episode of "Escaping the Drift," titled "Harnessing the Power of Adversity," host John Gafford delves deep into the intricate relationship between failure and success. This episode serves as a beacon for listeners navigating the tumultuous waters of setbacks, offering actionable strategies to transform adversity into a stepping stone for remarkable achievement.

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Introduction to Failure and Success

John Gafford opens the episode with candid reflections on his own experiences with failure. He emphasizes that failure is an inevitable part of the journey toward accomplishment, stating, “If you don't fail, you probably aren't accomplishing very much either” (00:28). This honest admission sets the tone for a transparent and introspective discussion on overcoming setbacks.

Embracing Failure as a Catalyst for Growth

Gafford discusses the emotional toll that failure can take, especially when personal passion and creativity are involved. He shares, “For me, an artist that paints a painting and then people think it sucks, right? It's almost how it feels because I take it so personally” (02:15). This sentiment underscores the personal investment and vulnerability that comes with pursuing one’s ideas and dreams.

The "Trunk or Tank" Analogy

A pivotal moment in the episode is the introduction of Mikey Sea Rock’s "trunk or tank" analogy. Gafford explains, “It's either the trunk or the tank. When something happens, you either put it in the trunk or the tank” (03:30). In this metaphor, the trunk represents baggage that weighs one down, while the tank symbolizes the fuel that drives progress. This simple yet profound analogy provides a framework for listeners to categorize their responses to adversity—either as burdens or as sources of strength.

John’s Process for Handling Failure

Gafford outlines his personal methodology for dealing with setbacks, emphasizing the importance of a structured approach:

1. Allowing the Pain to Settle:
   “I'm gonna let it sting me for a couple of days. Because me, when I first take that loss or something bad happens, I gotta let it sting me for a couple of days” (04:30). He insists on giving himself time to process the emotional impact before moving forward.

2. Documenting the Failure:
   Gafford highlights the importance of maintaining a "failure journal." He writes down detailed accounts of each setback, including the nature of the failure, the financial and emotional losses, and potential reasons for the outcome. “I write out exactly what the concept was... how it made me feel” (05:15). This practice helps in analyzing failures objectively and extracting valuable lessons.

3. Identifying Lessons and Avoiding Repetition:
   After documenting, Gafford asks himself critical questions: “What could I have done better? What am I going to learn that I won't repeat?” (06:00). This step is crucial for personal growth, ensuring that past mistakes inform future actions.

Real-Life Examples of Failure and Learning

To illustrate his process, Gafford shares several personal anecdotes:

• Failed Business Venture:
  “I didn't hire enough people to make it work. I depended on myself to make all these outbound sales calls” (05:50). This experience taught him the importance of not overrelying on oneself and the necessity of building a robust team.

• Casting Experience:
  Gafford recounts an unsuccessful audition for a television show, where he mismatched the character description. “I thought there's been a mistake... they wanted me to read for this other thing” (06:30). This incident reinforced the lesson of not assuming intentions and the importance of adaptability.

The Role of Stoicism and Mentorship

Drawing inspiration from stoic philosophy and influential books, Gafford emphasizes the significance of finding lessons within failures. He references Ryan Holiday's "The Obstacle is the Way," stating, “It is the basis of stoicism. It's what Brian Holiday writes about” (07:10). This philosophical approach encourages resilience and the proactive use of challenges as opportunities for growth.

Additionally, Gafford underscores the value of mentorship and having a support system. “You need a mentor. You need somebody that... just want you to listen to me purge this out” (08:00). Having someone to talk through failures without judgment or unsolicited advice can be instrumental in processing and moving beyond setbacks.

Maintaining Reminders of Failure as Lessons Learned

In a unique twist, Gafford shares how he keeps physical reminders of his failures in his office. Examples include a $100,000 bottle of vitamins symbolizing a failed multilevel marketing venture and a script from an unreleased television show. “These are lessons that I've Learned. I have a script from a television show... that script is a permanent reminder” (09:15). These tangible artifacts serve as constant prompts to stay vigilant and apply the lessons learned from past mistakes.

Key Takeaways and Concluding Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, Gafford reiterates the core message: transformation of failure into a driving force for success. He advises against dwelling on failures or attributing them to external factors, highlighting personal accountability. “Don’t hang your hat on outside forces as why you failed, because that makes you a victim” (13:45). Instead, he encourages listeners to take control and leverage their failures to fuel future endeavors.

Gafford concludes with an empowering analogy from "Die Hard," emphasizing self-reliance: “No one is coming to save you, so save yourself” (14:00). This call to action inspires listeners to take ownership of their journeys, using adversity as a catalyst to escape the drift and achieve excellence.

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Notable Quotes from the Episode

• On Failure and Accomplishment:
  “If you don't fail, you probably aren't accomplishing very much either.” (00:28)

• On Personal Investment in Ideas:
  “For me, an artist that paints a painting and then people think it sucks... I take it so personally.” (02:15)

• Trunk or Tank Analogy:
  “It's either the trunk or the tank. When something happens, you either put it in the trunk or the tank.” (03:30)

• Allowing Emotional Processing:
  “I'm gonna let it sting me for a couple of days.” (04:30)

• On Mentorship:
  “You need a mentor. You need somebody that... just want you to listen to me purge this out.” (08:00)

• Personal Accountability:
  “Don’t hang your hat on outside forces as why you failed, because that makes you a victim.” (13:45)

• Self-Reliance:
  “No one is coming to save you, so save yourself.” (14:00)

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Final Thoughts

John Gafford's "Harnessing the Power of Adversity" offers a comprehensive and relatable exploration of how to navigate and utilize failure effectively. By sharing his personal experiences, methods, and the wisdom gleaned from influential literature, Gafford provides listeners with a robust framework to transform setbacks into opportunities for growth and success. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to break free from stagnation and harness their true potential.

For more insights and to join the community, visit EscapingtheDrift.com.

Transcript

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[John Gafford]

$35 connection charge applies 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. Ah, welcome back everybody. I'm John Gafford and welcome to your Weekly Drop. And I gotta tell you man, I have failed. I mean, absolutely. Crash and burn. Miserably failed. And as the saying goes, if you don't fail, you probably aren't accomplishing very much either. And in life, the ball will get rolling, right? Sometimes you can just do no wrong. Confidence is strong. One success leads to the next. But if you're somebody like me that has a lot of balls in the air, and business in relationships and ideas and concepts and things you want to do, you're going to miss way more than you connect with. And I win a lot. But man, I fail a lot. And sometimes those failures come really close together and start to compile on them a little bit. And so when that happens for me, a couple of things that I know. Number one, I've probably drifted too far away from my process of how I deal with failure. So today in this podcast, I want to explain to you exactly what my process is for dealing with these things. But I also go back and revisit some books that I love. Obviously, Ryan Holiday's the Obstacle is the Way my good friend Ari Rastagar his book the Gift of Failure. Pick it up on Amazon. Great book. But all of these little things to remind me of how to deal with these things. And when failure comes, dude, for me it can be gut wrenching because I have sometimes ideas that I fall in love with. And I'm the first one to say I fall madly in love with my own ideas. And when they don't come to fruition or they fail. It's almost like, for me, an artist that paints a painting and then people think it sucks, right? It's almost how it feels because I take it so personally, because so much of what I attempt to do, it is very personal to me, as I'm sure it is to you. And if you don't properly deal with those losses as they come up, then it's going to be a real problem. And it's funny. Coming out next week, on Tuesday. Listen to this. I had Mikey Sea Rock, who's a good friend, who I had him on the podcast. His episode comes out next Tuesday. And just talking about. He wrote a book called Rocket Fuel, how to Turn Failure Into Success. And it was the best analogy I'd ever heard for something he adopted at a very early age. He said it's either the trunk or the tank. When something happens, you either put it in the trunk or the tank. And what he meant by that was, if you put something in the trunk, if you think about that metaphor, it's like, heavy. The back of the car, the vehicle goes. Sags down. Because it's towing all of this stuff. It's carrying all of this stuff. But the tank, man, that's what makes the thing go. So he says, whenever adversity jumps up and bites him or he fails, he looks at it and goes, am I going to use this? Where's this going? It's two choices. There's no more than two choices. That's it. It's going to the trunk, what's going in the tank. And I wanted to kind of show you and tell you how I turn things from. Instead of putting them in the trunk, and I put them in the tank. The first thing is this. I'm gonna tell a story. My daughter had a situation where something that she loves and she works very, very hard at is not necessarily going her way right now. And, you know, my first reaction to that as a father is, well, make yourself undeniable. Like, if you're undeniable, then you can't get bumped out of the spot that you're trying to earn. That's my first. Like, earn it everything. Earn nothing. Given thought process. But then you start thinking sometimes some of this stuff is a little bit outside your control. And my wife wanted me to talk to her right away about it, because my wife is very much super high eq, very. You know, she's an empath, very empathetic. Wanted to try to help Baby Bear right away. And I said, and my daughter is very much like me. Her.

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Her.

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She's very much like me. And I said, nope, you know what? I'm gonna let her. I'm gonna let it sting her for like two days. Because me, when I first take that loss or something bad happens, I gotta let it sting me for a couple of days. I gotta sit in it. And what I mean by that is I've gotta. I've gotta let it hurt, right? I don't wanna hear a solution. I don't wanna hear. I don't. I'm not ready to decide whether I'm gonna put it in the trunk or the tank. It's just gonna sting me for a minute and I gotta deal with that. So let it sting. Then after a couple days, I say, okay, I need to do my failure blog. I need to hit the failure blog, and I need to go through this. And I start dissecting whatever happened as though it was a school project. I'm looking for what happened. And so what I want to write out, I write on top of my blog, and I have a little personal blog, journal, whatever you may call it, that I keep track of this stuff and I write out exactly what it was because five, 10 years from now may not even remember what these ideas were. I write exactly what the concept was. If there was a financial loss that was involved in that deal, I write out what that financial loss was. If it was an emotional loss, I write out how it made me feel. Whatever that loss was in the moment, I write out. The next thing I write down is what could I. What do I. Why do I think it failed? Why do I think this did not work? And I write out every reason why I think it may have gone south. Now, some of that is internal. Some of that is external. Like, for example, in a business that I had that, that, that failed, that did not get the traction I wanted. I just didn't. I didn't hire enough people to make it work. I depended on myself to make, like, all these outbound sales calls to get. To gain interest in this product. And I don't have time for a bunch of outbound sales calls. It's just not something that I have time in the day to do with enough consistency.

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This is to make this work. So I wrote that down. I wrote, you know, couldn't reach the proper market. So before I went went forward with this idea, I should have made sure I had a marketing channel to actually get to all of these people that I wanted to find because it was a very small sect of people and there was really nowhere for me to find to get to them. You know, the next thing I wrote on there was, you know, maybe the price point was bad. Maybe you know, I should have gone, I should have gauged interest before I went all in on some expenses. And then below that I write what could I have done better? Or what am I going to learn that I won't repeat? Like what will I not do again? Then I won't repeat. And with this particular example that I'm talking about, I wrote things like a Do not depend on yourself to be the salesforce. You don't have time, you won't do it. I just wrote you won't do it. You don't have time, you will not do this. You will not be your own salesforce. You can't do anything else ever again where you are dependent to be the salesforce. You don't have time. Don't tell yourself you'll do it because you won't. 2. It was like, don't spend money blindly assuming this is going to happen because you haven't gauged market interest yet. You don't know that you can reach the people you need to reach. That is probably just to tell you in failure, that's probably my biggest issue is I have such blind belief in my ability and skill sets that I will drive headfirst into something. I'm like, yeah, book the room. Sign the $30,000 contract to book the room. We're going to fill it. And it's like, wait a second, maybe you need to pump the brakes. And the problem is I probably wait too long in between times I go to my failure journal because just because I write it out and just because I write out the lessons that I need to learn doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to remember them when it's time to remember them in my office. So many people have trophies, you know, they have like great accomplishments of their life. If you look around my office, I have wonderful things of failure as trying to keep it in my face as reminders. I know that sounds like a terrible thing, but it's lessons that I've Learned. I have $100,000 bottle of vitamins on my desk. If you ever come to my office, I have $100,000 bottle of vitamins. Did I pay 100 grand for a bottle of vitamins? No, but we put up paid $100,000 for all the other vitamins that we bought with that one for a failed multilevel marketing company. Didn't go anywhere. Lessons learned from that. I have a script from a television show in my office that I was right after. The Apprentice, which was a written by a guy named David Flabat who did like Will and Grace and all these big sitcoms. And they saw me on the Apprentice and they wanted me to come read. And when I read the script, they wanted me to read for the lead of this thing, flew me to New York to do it, and they wanted me to read for the lead. And I read in the lead that the character was slightly overweight, kind of chubby, by no means man candy. And I was like, whoa. And then the description of another character was loud, obnoxious, thinks. Think Vince Vaughn from Swingers. So I went to this casting appointment and told these people, you know, hey, I walk in and I go, I think there's been a mistake. I think you want me to read for this other thing. And the guy just looks around with a camera and goes, dude, you can read for whatever you want. And then later on, my friends that are actually in that business are like, no, no, no, the descriptions don't mean anything. You should have just did. But the fact that I went and changed what was happening, obviously I didn't get a call back. Thank God that show never got made, because that would stick any worse. But that script is a permanent reminder of never go into a business assuming that I know what the other people want to do. Just don't do it. So turning your failures, like, again, you can't put them in the trunk. You got to put them in the tank. And the way to do that is, for me, utilizing that journal. Write it out. Write out what went wrong. And this is with everything that happens to you. And for some people that might not want to write, that's okay. You need a mentor. You need somebody that. A confidant that you can talk this out with and say, listen, I don't want you to tell me what you think happened. I don't want you to give me advice. I just want you to listen to me purge this out. But the key to surviving huge amounts of failure is 1000% finding the lessons within. It's the basis of stoicism. It's what Brian Holiday writes about in his great book the Obstacles Away, which, if you haven't read that, that is the number one book I always recommend every. I talk about books a lot on this because I read a lot, but that is the number one book I always recommend everybody go get is the Obstacles Away. That book probably changed my life personally more than anything else. It is a goal one day to have Ryan on the podcast. I'm going to get there. We'll have him on. But you got to do something with it. Wallowing in it is not going to happen, is not going to make any better. And the last thing I'm going to talk about when you fail, don't hang your hat on outside forces as why you failed, because that makes you a victim and it makes you out of control. When the reason for the failure or the major things that happened that caused it are you. And within you, you are in control because now you have the power to change it. Like they say at Die Hard, man, I talk about all the time the henchmen in Die Hard, no one is coming to save you, so save yourself. We'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.

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