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SOLO| Make Money by Building a Better Life - Lessons from my Jordan Harbinger interview
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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the show. On this episode, it's just me, you and the mic and we're continuing on our series of talking about some of the lessons that I've taken away from past guests on the show. So on this episode, we're talking about Jordan Harbinger. Now, if you don't know Jordan, he is one of my favorite podcasters of all time, one of the people responsible for getting me into podcasting because I listened to his show back in the day before it was called the Jordan Harbinger Show. Now it's the Jordan Harbinger Show. But he is consistently talking to some of the brightest minds on the face of the planet and is a skeptical guy, which I think helps his research. Ask. He asks really, really great questions. One of the best podcast hosts, I think that's out there, and won Best of Apple podcast back in 2018. He's had conversations with the best and the brightest from celebrities like Bob Saget and Kobe Bryant, thinkers and psychologists, former spies, people who've escaped oppression in North Korea. He's had just some of the most interesting conversations of anybody that I follow. And I highly recommend consuming some of his stuff. And this is, I don't know, maybe the third or fourth time that I've had him on the show. He's been a good friend and mentor of mine over the years and I always appreciate any time I get to spend with him. So this conversation was a little bit more laid back and should I say friendly, I suppose, like it was more just conversational. I wasn't, I didn't come with like an agenda and a bunch of prepped questions questions for him because we'd kind of already done that like two or three times. And so I actually really enjoyed this. This was a lot of fun for me. So here's a couple of my lessons and takeaways from my most recent conversation with Jordan Harbinger, which, like most of these you can find on Travis Makes Friends podcast either on Spotify or YouTube. Number one, your life is holistic whether you like it or not. We like to tell ourselves that we can wall things off. We can keep the health stuff over here, the work stuff over here, the marriage stuff over there, and we can put all these things in separate boxes and then just focus on this one thing and pretend like it's not going to bleed into these other areas. Well, Jordan blew that up. He talked about how we are fundamentally holistic beings and when one area is broken, it bleeds into everything else. So bad health makes you worse at work. Struggling marriage makes it harder to show up in the gym. You don't get to extract the bad things and keep the good things. It's all one organ. We are one being. We are holistic beings. And you cannot help when you're struggling in your marriage that you like. It's, it's inevitably going to bleed into your effectiveness and your productivity at work or in the gym. And then if you're struggling at work, it's going to inevitably affect your marriage. And if you're, or you're, you're struggling with your health, it's going to affect your energy level with your kids. It's, there's, there's so many aspects to life. So the sooner that you fully engage in that concept, the better off you're going to be. Number two, the I'm doing it for my family story is often a lie that you tell yourself. This is one that might piss off a lot of people, to be honest. Jordan, I got into this and it, and it hits close to home when someone buries themselves in work and neglects their family. The easiest story to tell themselves is that he's doing it for them. But his kids literally told him that they didn't need more toys, they just wanted their dad. It's a rationalization, it's not a reason. And the longer you run that story, the harder it is to undo the damage. Like we talked about on different episodes of the show ad nauseam, his work life balance. That concept, I think, is unrealistic. I don't think that it's possible to have complete balance in all areas of life. And I don't think that it should be that way. Even if it were theoretically possible, I don't think that it should be that way. You're going to have seasons of life where you're focusing more on this thing or you're focusing more on that thing, or, you know, you're. You can only have one number one priority is my point. You can't have six number one priorities. That's not how it works. So some seasons, your number one priority might be your health. Some seasons your number one priority might be your family. Some season, some, some seasons your number one priority might be your work or your career. The hard part is to make sure that you're actually shifting from season to season because you can continue telling yourself this, this lie, that, well, I'm just doing it for my family. You know, it's like, well, you can keep, you can keep telling your kids every day how you're just. That you're working and you're gone and you never see them all the time. You're never spending time with them. You can tell them that it's for them as much as you want, but in reality, all they want is some of your time. And this happened, this literally happened with Jordan was when one of his kids was like, I don't want another toy. I just want to be you. And you, you can't solve that problem by outsourcing it to things. You can't solve that problem by writing another check or sending another wire or shooting another Venmo. The only way to remedy that is through time, because time is your most valuable resource and it is the most scarce thing that you have. And so you can't just tell your kids that they're important to you. You have to show them that they're important to you by actually giving them the thing that everybody else covets from you, which is your time. So don't allow the story of I'm doing it for my family to prevent you from actually being with your family. So that was a really interesting one for me. Number three, a health wake up call doesn't have to be a diagnosis. Sometimes it's just getting off the floor. So the reason we were talking about this is that when Jordan showed up the first.
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I was the first Thing I said was like, man, you look great. I could tell he's putting a lot of work into his health recently. And so that sparked a story, I think towards the beginning of our conversation about what happened. Why, why did this, why did this come up? So his turning point wasn't a doctor visit or a scary number on a scale. It was getting on his knees to push his two year old son on a little two, a little toy train and realizing that he could barely stand back up. That was, that was his wake up call. That was it. That was enough. So he went from 38% body fat to visible abs at 45 years old. So the trigger doesn't have to be dramatic sometimes just a Tuesday morning moment that you can't unse. And, and especially for parents, I think this is a big one for, for most people the difference is that Jordan did something about it. He didn't just have that experience and go, well, I'm getting old. That's all it is. There's just a, it's just a sign that I'm in my 40s, you know, it's just, it's part of, part of getting older. That's was not a story that he was willing to accept. So instead of accepting that story, he did something about it and got into arguably the best shape that he's ever been in at 45 with kids and a career and a wife and a bunch of other things that are pulling, you know, vying for his attention. So it doesn't always have to be a diagnosis or a scary number. It could just be some of these small moments. The lesson though is no matter how big or small that moment is, allow it to sit with you and then actually do something about it. Number four, you should be bothered by the parts of your life that you'd want someone else to live for you. So we started talking about this show Severance, which is an Apple TV show and freaking fantastic by the way. If you like, if you like sort of like these psychological thrillers, I highly, highly recommend watching the show Severance. It's incredible. Funny enough, it's actually, I think, directed by and maybe potentially created by Ben Stiller, who's obviously traditionally a comedy guy. And then the main protagonist in the show is Adam Scott, who's also mostly a comedy guy, but this is not a comedy show. And so it's really, really interesting show, really well done, very well shot. I'm not going to continue talking about it or else I'm just going to basically turn this into an episode. Talking about Severance, but sparked this conversation because the entire. The entire concept of the show, basically, it's severance. So the idea is that the people in the show willingly undergo a procedure that severs their personal life from their personal lives or the personal life from their professional life, rather. So when they go to work, they have zero memories of their personal life. All they know is work. And then when they come home, they have zero memories of their work life. So it's. There's a. There's. There's a moment in the elevator when they go down where they. It switches off. They enter into this other version of themselves. But it sparks this conversation around. Like the ethical problems with that. When you're outsourcing all the work that you don't want to do to another version of yourself that you can't remember, and it's like, well, then, what are we? Are we? Are we are? Or is that the same person? Or are they two different people? Because if you have a different collection of memories for one person and a different collection of memories for another person, is that the same person argument can be made that, no, it's not the same person. So if you could split your brain so that a separate version of you did all the work that you hate, would you? And Jordan made the point that the right response to that desire isn't to find a way to outsource your life. It's to ask why you hate so much of it in the first place. If the answer. If the answer to your problems is I need a severed clone so that they can do all the stuff I don't want to do, then the real answer is, you need to build a different life for yourself. If this is something that would be attractive to you, to where it's like, oh, well, I could make. I can make another version of myself go to the gym so I don't have to do all that hard work of going to the gym. If I can make another version of myself do all the work of my. Of my professional career, and that's all they ever knew, because that would be easier for me, then it's not really like you're. You're answering the wrong question. The question then becomes like, why do you hate so much so many of the aspects of your life? And if you hate that many aspects of your life, then you should probably do something to live a different version of your life. So it sparked a really interesting conversation, and that's what I love about shows like that. So go watch severance and thank me later. Number five, start Niche earn the right to go broad. So this got into a little bit more technical conversation towards the end of this, specifically about content and podcasting, because he ran, Jordan ran this not, not necessarily a dating show, sort of like a. It was called the Art of Charm back in the day. And it was the first thing that I started listening to. But by the time I started listening to it, to be fair, it was no longer about that. It was more about the stuff that he talks about now and then had this split with business partners and stuff like that, and then became the Jordan Armchair Show. But he, he. The show started with this really niche audience and then he pivoted to this wide ranging interview show that he has now and he compared it to steering a ship. You can't jerk the wheel hard left or you lose everybody aboard the shift or on aboard the ship. He drip fed in different content to his audience, let the audience adjust, and then slowly changed lanes over the course of several years. So the lesson is a narrow focus isn't a trap, it's a foundation. And it's much easier to build or craft an audience in the podcasting or YouTube space with a specific niche, a certain type of audience. And you see this happen all the time with people like Rogan or even Diary of a CEO, which is a massive podcast right now. Diary CEO literally started as the Diary CEO. It was just him talking about lessons he learned as a CEO CEO. Then he started interviewing other business people, other CEOs, and then it transformed into what it is now where he's had like Jimmy Fallon and, you know, presidential candidates and stuff like that on his show. So start, start narrow, start niche, and then start dripping in other content as you. As you find appealing to you. And chances are a lot of that audience will follow you along in the journey anyway. So Jordan has this way of taking a pop culture thing, in this case a sci fi show, about splitting your brain in two and turning it into a. A real gut check, applying it to your life, which is like his entire thing. So the severance concept isn't just a thought experiment. It's a mirror. If you'd volunteer to have the work version of you wiped clean every night so you don't have to feel the weight of it, then something's off with the work that you choose. I think a lot of us are living severed lives right now, just without the surgery, right? We go to work and we're one person. We come home, we're another person. We're this group of friends, we're another person. And we tell ourselves that that's just how it is, that's just how life is. But Jordan pushed back on that hard and just said it might be time for introspection. If that's how you genuinely feel, then the body stuff, I was obviously something that I could associate with, empathize with, and I don't talk about it much on this show, But Jordan lost 40 pounds of fat and put on 20 pounds of muscle at 45 years old. He didn't do it because of some transformational self help program. He did it just because he couldn't get off his own floor after playing with his two year old son without grunting. And once he started, changed everything else. Confidence, how he shows up in conversations. And he wasn't wrong when he said that he bleeds into every other area of your life. And I've seen it happen in my own life. You cannot compartmentalize your way to a good life. At some point you got to deal with the whole picture. So, Sal, like I said, section it off into seasons if that feels better to you. It definitely feels better to me. Like, there's been some times in my life where it's like my number one goal, my number one focus right now is my health. I just want to, I just want to get back in really good shape. And, and it doesn't mean that I don't work during that time. It doesn't mean I don't spend time with my family during that time. It just means that like, that is the, that I ruthlessly prioritize in my calendar above all other things. And then sometimes that thing is work and then sometimes that thing is kids. But, but every aspect of your life deserves attention to some degree. And then you're probably going to go through seasons where it becomes the priority. So don't let it get to the point where you have to have a wake up call. Just take charge of that now and you'll find that it ends up being a lot better for you over the long run. So anyway, if you have not ever listened to the Jordan Harbinger show, it is one of the podcasts, one of the only podcasts, honestly, that I have consistently recommended since I started podcasting in 2017, because now it's been almost a decade that I've been doing this, which is crazy. And my shows that I've listened to have evolved significantly over the years. And Jordan show is the only show that I continue to listen to now that I listened to back when I first got started. So go check out the Jordan Harbinger show and all the stuff that he's putting out, you will not regret that. But that's it for this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.
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Oh, no.
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Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.