Loading summary
Transcript11 lines
- [00:00]
Travis
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.
- [00:14]
What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the show. On this episode, it's just me, you, and the mic, and we're talking a little bit today about failure. Failure is a topic that we talk about fairly frequently on, I mean, really all of my shows, because it is probably the thing that holds people back more than just about anything else. And it's not even really the failure itself. It's the fear of failure. And worse than the fear of failure is the fear of embarrassment from the failure, because you're now two steps fully removed from the failure itself. It's like, there's the failure, there's the fear of failure, and then there's the fear of embarrassment around the failure, meaning that you're actually being more motivated by the response that that has yet to happen from people around you who may or may not even be in your life in five years from now. And you're so worried about what the potential response of those people might be if this thing ends up not working out exactly the way that you had it planned to work out from the beginning. And that fear in and of itself is preventing you from trying to take action toward that thing at all. And it sounds really silly because ultimately it is really silly. You're. You're creating a situation in your mind that has never happened and then reacting to the reactions of other people about a situation that has never happened. So, and, and then allowing that to prevent you from living the life of your dreams. Crazy work, honestly, crazy work. But all that to say, I also understand where you're coming from because we are inherently social creatures. We exist in social hierarchies. That's how the world works. And we are trained to see threats and try to avoid threats if possible. And we are much more motivated by that fear than we are by the desire for something better. And we have a negativity bias. So we almost evolved to give in to that type of fear and allow it to control our lives. It's for the purpose of feeling safe. It's for the purpose of feeling secure, to feeling like you belong to a community of people or tribe which also is designed to make you feel safe. So, look, I understand the reasoning, but ultimately, nobody who's ever lived an extraordinary life has done so without failing. I was going to say without the risk of failure. But it's more than that. It's, it's, it's without failing at all. Like they, like ev. They have all failed, every single one of them. Even the ones that you think like their first venture was super successful. They still failed leading up to that venture like multiple times before. And they fail all the time, even in the success of that venture. Look at somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg. First of all, he had several iterations of the Facebook before it became the Facebook and ultimately Facebook and ultimately buying Instagram and WhatsApp and changing the name to Meta and doing all the stuff that they've done now. But even inside of the siloed community of the world of Meta, how many projects have they invested billions of dollars into that just didn't work, that were by all intents purposes failures? But does that prevent him from continuing to try more things? No, absolutely not. Because a failure is not a failure at all unless it causes you to quit. The only version of failure that's permanent is the one that pulls you out of the game. And in life, there's not a coach who's doing it for you. You are the coach and the player. You decide whether or not to bench yourself or to to put yourself back in there. So on this episode, I thought it might be helpful just to go over a couple of the the sort of the action steps that I've taken in my life after a failure. And I've had no shortage of them. To be honest with you guys. I've been blessed to have a couple of things. Chime is changing the way that people bank. They offer the most rewarding fee free banking that's built just for you, not the 1%. Chime members can benefit from up to $1150 in annual fee free.
- [04:36]
It's rated five stars by USA Today
- [04:38]
for customer service because you get real humans 24. 7. You're not just switching banks. You're upgrading to America's number one choice for banking with a Chime checking account.
- [04:47]
Plus you can get up to 5%
- [04:49]
cash back on a Chime card. In your category of choice like gas or groceries, you get savings that grow even faster with 3.75% APY, which is nine times higher than the national average. Plus you get premium travel perks like airport lounge access and 24. 7 travel concierge included with your Chime card. You can even get up to 500 of your pay. When you save with my pay. They also have Spot Me which lets you overdraft up to $200 fee free. I know my younger self would have benefited from this. Chime is not just smarter banking. It is the most rewarding way to bank. So join the millions who are already banking fee free today. Head to chime.com travis that's chime.com travis only takes a few minutes to sign up Right now Chime is a fintech, not a bank.
- [05:38]
Chime Legal/Disclaimer Voice
Banking services from MyPay and ChimeCard provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stated annual percentage yield and cash back for Chime prime only. No minimum balance required. Checking account ranking based on a J.D. power survey published October 20, 2025. For more information on APY rates, my pay spot me and travel perks go to chime.com disclosures this episode of the
- [05:53]
Travis
show is brought to you by Wayfair. Your outdoor space should feel like you. And let me tell you guys, mine
- [05:58]
didn't for a very long time.
- [05:59]
You know, you get all these like hand me down plastic patio chairs and random stuff like that. Well, not this time. This summer we are fully equipped thanks to Wayfair. I'm always surprised at the types of pieces that I can find on Wayfair that match the exact vibe that we're looking for. Every Style for every outdoor space. Whether it's modern, coastal, farmhouse or eclectic, Wayfair has options to help you create an outdoor space that is uniquely yours. You can find everything that you need all in one place and the delivery is something that you can actually trust. There's even installation and assembly services that are available for a truly seamless experience. There's over 20 million verified 5 star reviews which will help you make the right call. They're from real customers, real feedback and real homes. And you can shop with Wayfair Verified, AKA your shortcut to the good stuff. Their team of product specialists vets everything by hand using a 10 point quality inspection so you know that you're getting a quality piece no matter your budget. So get prepped for patio season for way less head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home fairly well.
- [07:18]
But in that pursuit, there's probably been 14 things that I've tried along the way. In fact, let me just, let me just do this. I think this could be kind of fun. Let me see if I can remember all the things that I've tried. And bear with me because a couple of these are going to be MLMs and I'm not a big proponent of the MLM space anymore. I used to be a big proponent of it. I used to be in it. And then when I left, I was still a big proponent of it. And then the more I've gotten to look behind the scenes, the more I've gotten into the world of like, eh, not really my thing. So yeah, so there's. There's a stint of the MLM space and frankly, I don't think it's all bad. I just think that it is coming more and more difficult to tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones, frankly. And so there's more of a chance that you'll end up in one of the bad ones. And then I've seen too many of my friends who were in that space who did things the right way get burned by that industry where their company just decides to shut down their comp plan and switch to a different marketing model or something. And then their $40,000 a month income just goes away overnight. So putting all your eggs in that basket to me is probably not the best idea. But anyway, that being said, you might notice a trend here. So let's go all the way back to college because this is when I started getting an idea to make money, I guess. Well, that's not technically true. I always wanted to make money. I was selling little gummy, not gummy, rubber insects to kids in the elementary school pickup line. In elementary school, my parents got me this little creepy crawler machine and I would make these bugs out of the creepy crawler machine. It's like boy version of the Easy Bake Oven, you know. And I would make these little bugs and then I would take them to school and I would sell them in the line. And that was when I was a kid. And then in, as I got a little bit older, it turned in basically just doing manual labor because we had two acres. And so my parents, anytime I wanted extra money, they were just like, well, there's a bunch of weeds in the backyard, so I'll just go weed for hours on end with a couple of my friends. We get paid five bucks an hour and then kept doing that. And then I had my first quote unquote business, which was a landscaping business with my buddy Andy. And I say quote unquote because we didn't run it like it like it was a business. We ran it like a summer job for high schoolers because that's what we were. And in retrospect, I wish I had a little bit more not vision Just a little bit more insight into what it could have become. Because if I would have known that, I think I could have actually done something with it and learned a lot about managing a business and scratched the itch of the entrepreneurial side a little bit more than scratching the itch of the sales guy side, which I did in my early 20s, but that's neither here nor there. Did this landscaping business for a while. We would. My dad was a real estate agent, and he was working with a couple of investors, but one investor in particular who was just flipping a bunch of houses. And so we, along with a couple of other landscaping crews, would bid these jobs, and sometimes we would land them. And so we would. We'd go in and put lipstick on the yard, you know what I mean? So we would go in, clear out all of the existing weeds and dead grass, and we'd install a new lawn and we'd fix all the sprinklers, install a new timer, mess with the valves and the solenoids and all of that, and get the yard looking good so that he could flip it and sell it. And. And then we would also mow lawns. So a good amount of them were my parents rental properties, so I didn't have to go sell them. And I recognized that that's something that not everybody has the ability to do. But. But I also had to. I also had to pitch it to them, I had to present it to them because my grandpa was mowing a bunch of those lawns at the time. And. And then they had other people, they. They had other landscaping companies. So when I went to them and asked for it, they made me. They made me work for it. They didn't just say, like, okay, sure, you're our son. You can have all this business that we're giving to this landscaping crew. And so we just did it for cheaper, basically. And we actually did the work and, and made sure the lawns looked nice. So we. We had this weekly lawn mowing route and then we would bid these jobs every once in a while. And for us, and at that time, it was like we had walking around money, you know what I mean? Like, we could. We could go like. I had a bank account when I was 16. Yeah, 16 was when I opened my bank account and there was like a thousand bucks in there, which is unfortunately more than most adults have in their. In their savings account. But also, I didn't have any expenses. So I understand that's wildly different. But that was my first kind of stint in entrepreneurship. Kept doing that through High school school started up again after summer, before senior year, obviously. Senior year started up, things got really busy. I had school and football practice and then basketball practice and then all the other things, the fine arts competitions, all the homework and everything. And we couldn't do the labor on the jobs anymore. And so I, for the first time ever, started recognizing the leverage that occurs when you use other people's time for labor and then it frees your time to be able to go sell jobs. So I sold a couple of landscaping jobs before school started and I hired college students to do the labor on those jobs. And I did the math and realized that I was going to be making more money sitting in class than the college students were going to make by doing the labor the job. So I would just go after school and check up on the work and make sure that it was being done properly and then, and then do the specialized work that some of the other laborers couldn't do, like fix the sprinkler system or fix a broken pipe or things like that, or install a timer for the sprinklers. And that continued up through college. And in college I was again very Busy, was taking 18 to 21 credit hours semester because I wanted to finish early and I finished a semester early. And then I had basketball practice in college as well. And so I and then we were traveling a bunch and just things got really busy. So we stopped doing the big jobs and then had the landscaping routes. But it started becoming just really annoying to me. So I eventually ended up shutting that business down. And then right during all of that started the first ever MLM that came across. My my world was this company was a startup called Discover Spark and they were selling online storage as an MLM model. And then about three months into hustling that Dropbox comes out, just like takes that whole industry by storm. And then that company ended up shutting down. So then I still in college and I started knocking doors for a solar company and a couple of my friends it they were making good money and I started working on being a better salesperson, started running a team, got promoted my first week, got promoted twice my first week, then got promoted third time my fourth week and became like a full time rep. And then about a month after that I became a team leader and then I started hiring and training reps. And then fast forward a few months, I was making 70 something thousand a year or so on 20 hours a week. Even though it was technically full time, like they paid me on salary and it was a pretty sweet gig. And Then during that time I would hustle all these different MLMs. So there was one called Wake up now, which was a big company at the time that my buddies were in and started hustling that one. And then another one came along was called Direct Network. So that was a DirecTV subscription thing. Ended up, that company ended up switching their model from MLM to door to door. And then I became a rep for them door to door. And then, and then got recruited to another alarm company. And then while I was at that alarm company I tried this other MLM called Jeunesse, which was a supplement company which then and got, I got recruited into this other company called Enagic which was selling high ticket water machines and sold over 50 something of those through my distribution network at like 3 to 5,000 a pop. And then that introduced me into the water purification space. So I started hustling water machines and started building my own water machine team. I did fairly well with that. That's when I moved to Vegas. And then, let's see. And then that was the last MLM that I did. So there's probably like five or six. I mean we're up to like seven different opportunities at this point and I'm like 23. And then I started into the door to door world a little bit more and I, and I, and I wanted to open an alarm company, like a alarm distributor company for the sub dealer that I was working for. And then the owner kind of pulled the rug out from under me when I, when I moved to try to do that, try to charge me like 20 grand that I didn't have, which was not part of our original agreement. So there's another thing. So we're up to like nine now. And then, and then during, during this time I was first time I started listening to podcasts, audiobooks and all that kind of stuff and started getting more into that space and really wanted to pursue something online but I didn't know how to make money in the meantime. So I tried this sales gig with Home Depot where I was an outside 100% commission sales rep selling roofing and windows to people. And then I did that for a couple months. Hated it. It was the only sales job I did not like that I ever had. So I quit that pretty pretty soon. And then I started studying for my mortgage license. I get my mortgage license, then I start doing water purification door to door, realize that I can make more money doing water purification than mortgages. So I go all in on that. And I took a podcast course on the side to do the podcasting thing, hired a podcast coach, and then while I was doing water purification, I also started my podcast. And then within a year of starting the podcast, I went full time with the podcast, started selling masterminds. We did podcast courses, podcast coaching, podcast community, a software company, coaching company, a mastermind and international retreat company, live events. Like, we're up to, like, 17 different things that I've tried in my life, and then now it's fully the podcast. But my point is to say that out of those 17 things, probably three or four of them are responsible for 90% of the income that I've made in the last decade. So there's no shortage of failures that I've experienced along the way. And this is what the entrepreneurial path looks like. There's ups and there's downs, and then there's ups, ups, ups, and there's downs, downs, downs. And then you just gotta keep going and keep stepping back up to bat. So there's a few things that I've found to be helpful for me during that time, and I will go over those on the next episode because we're running out of time on this one. Hopefully this gives you a little bit of context around my personal experience with failure. And on the next episode, we'll talk a few about a few of the things that have helped me along the way. So that's it for this one. Tune into the next one to hear how I deal with failure in my life, because I am well versed at this point with. With. With failing. So that's it for this episode. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Peace.