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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 are continuing along our journey of talking about some of the past guests of the show. The insights, the strategies, the common themes, et cetera, et cetera. And we covered the first common theme on the last episode. Now we're jumping into the next common theme. This was taken by a sampling of about a hundred of my past guests, some of the best people we've had here on the show. And so I told my research assistant, which is Perplexity Computer, to pour through all of the transcripts of these episodes and find some of the things that were recurring inside of those episodes. So this is one of those themes that was kept coming up over and over again. And this was actually one that I was not surprised by. This was one that I, when I was going through them myself, personally, I saw how much it was coming up again and again and again. So today we're talking about environment. That environment is destiny. And that there's probably a hint somewhere in there to change the container first before you start worrying about all the other things. Most people, when they have goals, they want to go reach something, they have a picture of what their life should look like and then they start working toward that picture, which not a bad thing. So far, so good. The problem, though is that typically if you have good goals, your goals require you to change as a person. You can't. And if they don't, by the way, these are bad goals. A bad goal like you should not be able to reach the goal that you set for yourself if you're the same type of person now as you will be when you get that goal. Those goals are easy goals. They're not, they're not worth striving for, in my opinion. So when you find a goal that's worth striving for and it seems a little bit out of reach for you, that's probably a good sign. Now, putting it out on the moon, you know, that could be discouraging in a completely different direction. So a great goal is a stretch goal. It's something that you look at and you go like, oh man, I'm not 100 sure how we're going to make this happen. If we reverse engineer this here, then Maybe we can probably do that, but it's something that's, that's out there in front of you that feels a little bit out of reach. But that's a really strong goal because in order to achieve the thing that you've never achieved, you have to become the person that you've never become. And I find that it is much easier to change the person that you are by changing the environment that you're in. Because especially the younger you are, the more important it is to be in an environment that helps shape you in becoming who you're, who you're wanting to be as your brain is forming and things. But even, even when you're older, it's just easier to do it that way. And it's sort of this conversation about changing yourself, about habits and about goals and actions and things like that. And even in the habit conversation, we see this as a common theme coming up in, in, in those circles. And if you read, you know, the power of habit or you read atomic habits, they're talking about ways to make your goals easier, ways to make your new habit formation easier. If you have a goal to start running every day, then he talks about just leaving your shoes by your bed because it's a trigger that's going to make you do the good habit rather than a trigger that's gonna make you do the bad habit. So it's sort of like identifying what are the triggers that I environment that cause me to take action that is either for or against the goals that I have. So let's take this running example. You want to get in good shape, you want to lose X amount of weight. So you're going to go running or you're going to go for a walk every day. That's the very first thing that you're going to do. Well, the other side of that is that you also probably can't eat the same food that you've been eating lately. If you've been gaining weight, you probably have to change your diet to some degree. So what does that look like? Well, that just means that you probably shouldn't buy a bunch of food that is going to tempt you to eat it throughout the day and have it in your house. Because the volume of discipline that it takes to say no to something that's sitting on your counter versus saying no to something that doesn't exist in your household is a much, much, much less amount of discipline. And, you know, you only have sort of this like, finite amount of discipline throughout the day, right? This like, finite amount of Willpower, so to speak. And there's been some research about this to some degree that basically says that there's not. It's not really an energy tank of willpower in particular. It's more that energy bucket for the day gets dwindled. It's not necessarily in the willpower bucket. It's just the total energy bucket, which makes it more difficult to say no to things later on, which is why a lot of people can stay disciplined all the way up until it's almost time to go to bed. And then they ruin their diet in the last hour before bedtime. So it's like, okay, so step one, let's remove all the junk food from the house. No, no snacking foods, like all the foods that are causing you to be in a calorie surplus. Let's remove those foods from the table. Okay, let's not even buy those foods and put them in the house. It's not to say that you should never touch and eat those foods. By the way, I'm very much a big believer in if you're going to build a sustainable weight loss journey, that you have to reward yourself and you have to eat some of the food that you like, and that should be part of the routine. But if it's not in the house, it forces you to be much more conscious of the decision that you're making, because you're gonna have to get in your car and go drive to the store and get that cookie. And if you're gonna go buy a cookie, buy a cookie or two cookies. Don't buy a pack of 32 cookies that you bring home and then you gorge on throughout the next day or two. So you're probably not gonna put anything in that environment. Okay, so then put my shoes by my bed so that when I wake up, the first thing I see is my shoes. And then the day after that, I'm just gonna walk out the door. Okay? I'm not gonna make a goal to go run 10 miles, day one. I'm not gonna put something on my calendar that is going to take so much mental energy and physical energy away from me that it's gonna exhaust me and make it impossible for me to maintain this habit going forward. I'm just gonna take the next available step. So I'm putting my running shoes on. Now I'm gonna walk out the door. Even if you turn around and about building the habit of just putting the shoes on, going outside, put the shoes on, go outside, put the shoes on, go outside, and you make it easier for yourself to do that while at the same time making it more difficult for yourself to choose the bad things in your environment. So you can kind of craft this environment that allows you to do that. So if you know that you're a, a, a nighttime snacker and that you're gonna ruin your diet in the last hour, hour and a half of the day, then make a conscious decision to maybe if you're, if you're, if your wind down routine is like, hey, it's the end of the day, I'm throw on the office and I'm just going to, you know, engage in some brain rot here for a little bit and have some laughs with my family. Well, then maybe put a TV upstairs, put something away from your pantry, put something away from your kitchen. Because I know for me, if I'm downstairs in my living room watching TV on my couch, I'm much more likely to go to the, go to the fridge and grab another beer or go to the pantry and grab something out of there to snack on or to eat. Because even if it's good food, it's not. In, in this context, we're talking about losing weight. Anything that puts you in a calorie surplus is bad. So, like, the only real free calories that there are is basically just vegetables, which is probably not your snack food of choice. Okay, but even if it's just like, I'm gonna have toast and peanut butter or something that you view as something that is this, there's nutrition here, there's something good about this. You can still overeat that. So it's not necessarily just about putting this junk food out of your house. It's like, okay, I know I'm gonna cheat in the last hour and a half before bedtime. So instead of being right next to my fridge, I'm gonna go get in my PJs, get comfy in bed or my upstairs, you know, living room or, or you know, this game room across the hall or whatever, if you don't have two stories. But if you go watch TV in that environment, just the barrier of having to walk, to consciously make the decision to walk downstairs or to walk into the other room to go to the kitchen, open up the pantry and see what's to eat, or open up the fridge and crack open another beer. Like, the energy that it takes to do that will make it so. It's only on the days where you really want to do that that you're probably going to do that. This episode of the show is brought
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to you by Whatnot I was recently on whatnot the other day, just shopping around, looking frankly, because I was just
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blown away that this is something that
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people are doing with their time. And so I was like, I gotta go see if this thing is real before I talk about it on the show. And so I'm browsing Whatnot, looking around, finding things, and it's crazy to see the volume of people that are just having fun in the chat. They're watching people do live shopping. It's like, it's like, you know, QVC directly on your phone. It's something you need to try, I'm telling you. Not just buying, but the selling piece too, where these people are just starting up pop up shops and businesses, selling whatever product, finding their people, building community, getting repeat customers that come back to see your face as the seller. Not just a logo or a brand, Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses on whatnot anyone can sell. Whether your business is big, small, or yet to exist, people selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than on any other major marketplaces. And that's because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers across whatnot. The number of sellers making over $1 million a year has now doubled. The consistency pays off for those sellers. It's not just a side hustle, it's a real path to building something that last. Because whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app, they're not just browsing around, they're engaged. They're buying. They're coming back. You go live, show off your products
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in real time and turn what you
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so your environment is what crafts you into the person that you're going to become. So ultimately you have control over the person that you're going to become because you have control over your environment. Nobody else has control over your environment the way that you do. So this is one of those things that kept coming up over and over and over again with some of the past guests of the show. So changing your environment is something that just came up over and over again from past guests throughout the show. Guests who made radical life changes didn't rely on willpower inside familiar surroundings. They changed their physical environment first and then let the behavior follow. The same move shows up in addiction recovery, career reinvention, athletic development, creative work. If you're in a ruth and you know something needs to change if you do, if you, if you make an effort to drastically change the container in which you operate, then that container will allow you to become the person that you're supposed to become. Because that new container Will not allow this old version of you to succeed. So couple examples here. First off came from Scott Harrison, who is the founder of Water, said the most important thing for me in getting out and actually staying out was that the entire environment changed. And so if you don't remember this story, pretty, pretty wild. Scott was a very successful nightclub promoter in New York City. So he was at the top of that game, which allow your imagination to run a little wild on what that could mean for a daily life. And that was what, that was what Scott was living, right, like going to bed at noon because he's on a, on a high from working the clubs all night and quite literally on a high from the drugs that he was taking while he was working at the clubs so he could stay up and be alert and do business and then taken sedatives to force himself to go to sleep at noon in broad daylight when everybody's getting up to go, you know, everybody's in the middle of their work day and he's trying to get himself to go to sleep. So he was addicted to drugs, addicted to cigarettes, addicted to alcohol, and he had all these bad habits. Now he was very functionally addicted to those things because it was sort of by nature the things that he was doing in his day job, so to speak, slash night job, I guess you would call that. But either way, he got to this point in his life where he was like, what am I doing? Had a big health scare and basically was like, I need to change a lot of things about my life. But he didn't just go, okay, I'm just, I'm gonna quit this nightclub thing, but let me just look for a job that's adjacent in a similar industry or let me go find a client that spends a lot of money and go work for them. Because he knew that that shift would not be enough to get him away from all of the vices that he had picked up to do that job job. So what did he do? He went and worked for a non profit on a ship off the coast of Liberia, Africa, in a war torn country. And the ship was basically, it was, it was a former cruise ship that they had turned into basically a medical bay. And they had all these doctors from all over the world volunteering their, their vacation time to, to go to Liberia and perform surgeries for free for the people in that country or that region who really needed medical. And so when the way he described it is like, now I, I'm, I'm going from nightclub scene in New York City to being On a boat off the coast of Africa with a bunch of doctors who take their free time to provide services for free. He was like, try. He was like, try lighting up a cigarette in that environment. Like it's just not. There's no alcohol on the ship, you know what I mean? Like there, there's no access to his drug dealers that he knew back in New York City. There's no way for him to get hold of the vices that had a hold on him. So it quite literally forced him into this other environment where he had to change everything about himself or quit or just go, you know what? This isn't the life for me. I'm just going to go back to what I was doing. And that could have been a choice that he made. But my point is that he, he, he didn't rely on his willpower to overcome all of these things. And staying in the same environment, the same culture, with the same connections. Even if he left that world, he changed everything about it and moved to a completely different place with completely different surroundings, completely different peer pressure, different social group, different standing, different goals. Everything completely changed. And that provided this catalyst for him to change personally along the way. And then when he got back, he started raising money for this, this exact charity and then realized that there was this water crisis that was sort of upstream of all the disease ridden countries in Africa and then started Charity Water, which now to date has raised over a billion dollars for providing clean water projects for people all over the globe. I mean, he's made a significant impact on him because he was willing to just say, I'm going to change everything about myself. And the best way to change everything about myself is to change everything about my environment first and then let that new environment craft me and mold me into the person that I ultimately want to become. The second person that's brought up was Jack Carr. He said, I wanted to make a physical and psychological break with the military. I saw so many people that had essentially built this amazing foundation, but it was still a little bit wet. Their feet were in it and they couldn't build upon it. And so Jack Carr is a novelist, an author, and he spent 20 years in the SEAL teams. And so he said that he's like, no, no ill will to any of these people. But what I saw was people would leave the SEAL teams and stay in Coronado, San Diego area and then basically just have one foot in that culture, one foot out of that culture, and never completely make a clean break. And they had difficulty kind of acclimating to the, to civilian life. And so Jack when he was leaving, basically was like, I know I'm going to go somewhere else. I, I have to make a clean break with Coronado and this entire culture that exists here and I got to go somewhere else. So we ended up picking Utah goes out to Utah wr, his first novel. And that novel called the Terminal List ended up getting optioned by Chris Pratt. And then they shopped it around, sold a series to Amazon. So his first ever book in that series got put on Amazon prime as a series starring Chris Pratt. They have a prequel series with Taylor Kitsch that supported that series. Now they're coming up with season three, technically of the Terminalist world, but this is actually technically season two in terms of building on season one. And so now he's got eight books in that series, if my memory serves. And then he's written, he started a new series recently, recently called the Fourth Option. And then he's written a couple of, of non fiction books, military non fiction books in that same time period. So he made a conscious decision to make a break from the environment that he was in, move to a brand new place and adopt this new identity of becoming an author. And worked out pretty well for him, I'd say. Lastly is Dane Cook. He said, you are not your environment. You're not tethered to your environment at all. Think of it as a terrible truck stop. On a, on a very long journey, you pulled into a B bad one, but you're still on the move now. This was in the part of the conversation I was asking Dane about, you know, experiencing what it was like to be on top of the world and then go rock bottom. Because not many people have had that type that like those, the, the, the extreme polarity in their careers that Dane Cook had, you know, early 2000s, he's literally doing arena tours, selling out arenas. I think he was the second comedian ever to sell out Madison Square Garden. He was making blockbuster films, feature after feature. He was on top of the world. And then he had this crazy thing happen in his personal life. Brother stole a bunch of his money. I think they're doing a documentary about it actually this year. But he was talking about this negative, this bad environment that he was in. And he was saying, you're not tethered to that at all. This is the truck stop on a long journey. I happen to pull into a bad truck stop, but I can be on the move. I can now move into a new place where I feel good and healthy and creative again. And now he's kind of pulling out a second act for his career because he was willing to change his environment. So here's what the research says about this behavior change. Science increasingly agrees with the guest that I was just talking about. Machine learning. Analysis of gym attendance and hand hygiene found that context stability, same time, same place was the strongest predictor of habit formation, outweighing motivation level. Even a comprehensive review concluded that context dependent repetition can shield behaviors against the motivational dips that derail willpower based plans. So in short, redesign the queue environment and the behavior gets, gets easier. The, the environment is greater than your willpower. So design an environment that allows you to thrive in your pursuit of this new version of yourself that you're trying to become. So great example of this from, from history would be Booker T. Washington. He was born enslaved on a Virginia plantation. And he heard about Hampton Institute at the time and began walking, walking nearly 500 miles to reach this institute. So he just set out on his own, walked 500 miles away, finished the journey on foot when all of his money ran out. And then that environment's philosophy of discipline, self help became the template for the Tuskegee Institute, which he later founded. He didn't, he didn't want, he didn't wait to become this person in this quite literally trapped environment that he was in. He literally physically walked to a different room that could change him and allow him to become the person that he eventually became.
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Right.
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So this is, it's, it's, it's the truck stop principle. Whatever environment that you're in now, it's just a truck stop. It's just a stop along the journey. You're not stuck there. You don't have to be planted there forever. Think about ways to start crafting this environment a little bit more carefully. I tend to go to big things, especially if you're in a, if you're in a really big rut, man. Like, if there's, if there's just a lot of bad things going on, you, you sort of just are in this like, negative milieu where just everything seems like a drudge and it's boring and it's the same and it's not. I tend to go the extreme and just go like, you know what, let's move, let's get out of town, let's go somewhere else and just literally change my physical environment. But it could start off with just like a different friend group. You go to some meetups and start making new friendships of people who have similar goals that you have. It could be just controlling your inputs a little bit more effectively instead of watching the news or watching just movies all the time, maybe it's listening to podcasts or watching some self help or reading a book or something like that. Those inputs are a part of your environment as well. So you can start crafting sort of pieces of it while you're figuring out if you don't want to take this sort of like big plunge. But sooner or later you might have to also do that, in which case you, it can be undone. You know, people think of this as like a permanent thing, but it's like you could move to a brand new city, stay there for a few months and go, this wasn't for me. But I promise you, you're going to learn a lot about who you are in that process. And probably when you come back to the place that you were in before you decided to move, you're probably going to come back with a little bit more energy, a little bit more reinvigorated to tackle the mission at hand. So this is one of those lifelong lessons and probably one of the most important things that I've learned in my career is that you, you ultimately do have control over the version of yourself that you're going to become because you're the one who controls your environment and the environment is what shapes you to become that person. So make it easier on yourself. It's like, can you change, you know what I mean? Can you become that person in your current environment? Of course, I'm not saying you have to change everything about your environment or become that. And I'm just saying why make it more difficult on yourself? Why make it harder? It's already difficult enough to completely change who you are, especially if you're past the age of 30, 35, and that frontal lobe is formed and you're kind of set in your ways to some extent. And the older you get, that even becomes more difficult. So make, if you, if you truly want the result, then make the result easier for you to achieve by crafting an environment that allows you to be able to become that person in a much easier way. So that's it, this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you guys on the next one.
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Peace.