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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 if the thing that makes successful people successful is also the thing that ruins those who don't make it? What's up guys? Welcome back to the show. This episode, just me, you and the mic, we're just talking. Just, just going back and forth. Well, really more back than forth. But you know, you know what I'm saying. We're talking a little bit today about optimism. I find that there are certain topics that just keep coming top of mind and during certain phases of recording this podcast. And optimism has been one that's been top of mind recently. For whatever reason, a lot of people I've been talking to this topic has been coming up more and more frequently. And so I figured why not dedicate an entire episode to really breaking this down as much as I possibly can. So almost every high achiever that I have talked to on the show, which is now, I think over a thousand, which is pretty crazy, they have some version of a belief that sounds irrational from the outside. From there, there's no way that they would be able to logically defend this belief in themselves. They think, you know, the business is going to work when the numbers aren't there, they think that the comeback is possible. When everybody else has moved on, they think that they, they think are the exception to the rule. But optimism has a shadow. Sometimes it gives you the energy to do the work that you need to do and sometimes it can convince you that the work is optional. And we can move into this version of optimism that actually becomes harmful to you, which to me is basically the entire world of the secret of the manifestation gospel that's been, that's been preached in the self help world for the last decade or two. And this is the, the danger in doing so. Because if your optimism begins to switch from a motivational tool to a delusional belief that it's all going to be totally great, then it can actually prohibit you from putting in the work that's required in order to make sure that the result that you're believing in is going to come. So the same belief that lets someone to start a company, write a book, launch a podcast, rebuild their life can also blind them to the so what I have seen from some of these people, and it's not just the people I've had on my show, but it's all the people that I've listened to on other shows and people whose books that I've read, they just have this sense, this, this quiet, delusional optimism that the future can be better than the evidence currently suggests. And more often than not, I think this is like one of those core things that helps people actually take the action required of them. But then the goal at that point is not to become more optimistic. The goal is to become more calibrated. It's to follow it up with the practical steps that are required in order to be able to achieve the thing that you're trying to achieve. So on this episode we're going to talk a little bit about the science of optimism, self belief and overconfidence. And then practical way to decide when to trust your your inner sense of belief and when to when to pressure test it. So the world tells ambitious people two opposite things. And the first one is just believe in yourself. Just believe everything's gonna be just believe in yourself. The second one is be realistic. Well, the problem is that both are incomplete. If you only believe, then you can drift into this fantasy land that doesn't allow you to actually see anything come to pass.
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But if you're only realistic, then you may never actually attempt anything that requires you to believe in this alternate potential reality. So the real skill is knowing when optimism is few, excuse me, is fuel, and when optimism is fog. Because both of these things are required. And I've, I've fallen into this trap in the past because when I was younger. I just, and I think this is probably true for most young people. It was easier for me to have this delusional sense of optimism that like, it was like, yeah, I'm gonna, yeah, of course I'm gonna achieve this thing or accomplish this goal. And then what happens as you start getting a little bit older and life starts and you start realizing that it's not as linear of a path as you had originally intended it to be. And so I then moved into this world where I was maybe perhaps too realistic, where that sense of, of trying to live in reality prevented me from chasing after some of the bigger goals and dreams that I had because I was allowing it, I was allowing my newly formed life experience to tell me that, okay, well, maybe that's just not possible. Maybe just that version that I was expecting to happen, maybe that's not possible. It's just not. It's not doable. Because if you look at all of this, and here's the reason why and here's the logic behind it, and here's all the data that I'm looking at. It's like, yeah, some. Is all that stuff important? Should you have the data? Should you understand what the risk is? Should you understand what the potential reward is? Of course you, you have to do all of those things, but if you do it so much that it prevents you from having the belief that it's going to be possible for you, then you're actually not going to take the first step. You're just going to sit in this constant state of ruminating rather than doing and ruminating. Let anybody do anything. You actually have to do something at some point. So let's go ahead and, let's go ahead and jump into a couple of the things that I found while I was researching this. Okay? So this is why successful people often look delusionally optimistic. Okay? If someone's trying to create something that does not exist yet, the evidence will basically always be incomplete at the very beginning. There is essentially no evidence that the thing that has not been done can be done. So optimism provides this almost psychological bridge between the facts as they currently are and the potential future. So starting requires this asymmetric belief that when you're building this new company, you're launching a new show, you're writing a book, you're entering a field that is rife with competition, you're rebuilding after a failure or something like that, that you have to act before the market or the audience world has confirmed that decision, which is why, which is why you, you see Some of those cliches online and they're cliches for a reason, sometimes because they're actually true, where you see like the, the, the picture of the pioneer with all the arrows in their back because they're the ones that kind of forged this new path that allows other people to go in after them. But at the very beginning, it's going to be met with a bunch of people who are starkly against whatever it is that you're setting out to do, because it is by definition new, it's by definition different. And that always scares people. There's always a level of fe along with the unknown, just psychologically for most people. So there's this phase where nobody believes in you except for yourself. And you have to get to the point where you then have evidence that what you're preaching is true so that some people start going like, you know what? I think this person's onto something. And then, you know, you fast forward and you're extremely successful. The thing took off. Whatever it was that you're working on, you proved it and it's working and everything's going well. And then everybody wants to take credit for having believed in you at the beginning when they absolutely did not believe in you at the beginning. So getting started on the thing, actually doing the work to accomplish the thing that scares you requires this, this sort of asymmetric belief in yourself without any evidence that what you are saying you want to accomplish can actually come to fruition. Optimism protects effort during uncertainty. Psychological capital research treats optimism as one element in a broader cluster that also includes resilience and self efficacy. And that cluster has been linked with better work attitudes, behaviors and performance. So it, it, it treats optimism as just one element in this broader cluster that includes all these other things. But what, what it, what it really helps with is protecting the level of effort that you're willing to put in in the meantime during the uncertain period, during the time where you're like, I just, I, I don't, I, I guess I don't really know this is going to work or how it's going to work, but I have a belief in myself to be able to figure it out. Belief actually changes your behavior. There's a psychologist, Ben Dura, who did some work on self efficacy frames or self efficacy, and he frames belief and capability as a driver of behavioral change. So the belief comes first, then the change comes second. And later meta analytic work linked self efficacy with work related performance. So believing in yourself, there is something to that, like we talked about earlier, that that people tell you, just believe in yourself, believe in yourself, believe in yourself. Because it actually does have this immense power on affecting change in your life and encouraging you to take action, even though you don't have much evidence that the action that you're taking is actually going to bring the success that you want. But I would say that the most useful kind of this is, that's why I use the word quiet. This quiet delusional optimism. It's not hype, it's not, it's not shouting affirmations at yourself in the morning. It's not public bravado. It's not trying to fake a certain level of status. It's not the, it's not fake it till you make it type of a thing. It's just this internal almost expectation that things will work out if the effort that you put in also matches the belief that you have in yourself. So a lot of people think optimism means expecting everything to work out. I think the better definition here is expecting that your actions still matter. That really is the difference between childish optimism and useful optimism. Childish optimism says this is going to be easy. Useful optimism says this is going to be hard. But I can figure it out. It's not the belief in your skill at the thing, right? Because again, you have no evidence of that. Like if you're just. If I was just like, hey, I'm going to go be a country music star but I don't know how to play the guitar and I don't know how to play the drums and I don't have any contacts in that space, you know, it's like, it's not necessarily a belief in my skill set as a country music artist. It is just my belief in my ability to be able to go figure it out if that is the thing that I want to accomplish and if you have that sort of delusional self belief, then that's what enables you to start practicing the guitar for eight hours a day or taking these gigs across town when you could opt for something easier. A chill night in with your friends or your family. Like you're going to take more action in that direction because you believe delusionally in some way that the crazy wild goal or expectation that you placed on yourself is actually doable.
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So where in your life right now are you waiting for proof that you may only get after you begin? It's sort of the chicken versus the egg thing. You know which one comes first. You, you. You have to have the belief enough to do the action so that you can gain the proof to then further enforce the belief, to then for take further action to then get more proof to then further enforce the belief and then to do over again. But if you're just waiting for proof, it's probably not going to come. You have to have this delusional self belief first and then you can move into the action piece and then you get some proof and then you start the cycle all over again. So optimism itself is not automatically delusion. But to understand when it works we need to get specific about what it's doing inside of the person. So here's some of the science behind useful optimism. This is something that moves beyond just positive thinking. The productive version of this is agency. It's deciding on pathways. It's the energy you put into the thing that you're working on. It's the persistence to push through the callous, building rejection riddled phase that prevents so many people from continuing along the path that they want to continue down. It's not the belief that things are just going to magically work out. It's the belief that goals are reachable, routes can be found once you're on the path and that the effort is worth spending. Snyder's hope theory defines hope as a goal directed system made of goals, agency and pathways, which makes it a practical cousin of app of optimism rather than passive wishing. And hope can be a really powerful tool and put hope into the same category like some of these psychologists do. It is not passively wishing that things are going to happen for you. Because if we define hope as a directed system made of goals, agency, pathways, then then we can further define what these things. So goals, you know, your optimism needs a target. Things will get better is weaker than I'm going to create a better product or I'm going to make 50 calls or I'm going to go to the gym, you know, five days a week or whatever. Like the, the, the optimism needs a target. It can't just be this broad brush stroke of like I just believe it's going to be fine. You have to put a goal there and then agency. Optimism needs the belief that can act which is where the self efficacy matters. Because believing that you can execute changes. Believing what, believing that you can execute rather changes what you attempt and how long you actually persist in that attempt. And then pathways. Optimism needs multiple routes. Hope theory is powerful because it does not just say believe harder. It says that the hopeful person can continue generating paths around the obstacles that will inevitably be in the way. And then it requires resilience. Optimism supports recovery after setbacks when it helps someone inter interpret failure as information rather than identity. So you can start seeing how all of this is required. Like this, this, this delusional sense of optimism is required in order to be able to get to these places. Because you're not going to make it. If you, if you, if you don't have the belief that, that I can act and change something. If you don't have the belief that there are multiple paths to the same goal. If you don't have the belief that I'm going to figure this out, then you're not going to enough to the obstacles that are in your way and the problems that are going to inevitably arise. You're not going to have the mental fortitude, fortitude to continue along the path. If you do not have this, this sort of sense of that, that you're going to be able to figure it out. So the most useful optimists are not people who think that nothing bad will happen. They're people who believe that the bout that the bad outcomes that they experience in the journey are not the end of the story. They do not deny Obstacles, they keep generating pathways, figuring out ways around the obstacle, through the obstacle, over the obstacle, underneath the obstacle. They figure out how to make it work regardless. So one quick filter for you to think about is, is your internal optimism attached to a goal, a pathway, a next action, or is it only attached to the desired outcome? Because if you continue just to allow yourself to ruminate on the desired outcome without any action in that direction, no goals, multiple paths to see it come to fruition, then you can actually experience some of the dopamine that you would get from actually accomplishing the thing by just thinking about accomplishing the thing all the time. So again, the, the self help tropes of like visualization and visualizing having the success and things like that can be helpful in some cases, but they can also be the thing that prevents you from taking any action to get there. So, so the, this is the correct form of optimism, is to have all of these other parameters in there. And it's the ver of optimism, optimism that we should protect. But there's another version that feels almost identical on the inside and looks completely different in the results. And that's the dangerous version of optimism. It becomes dangerous when it stops producing effort and starts protecting the ego. When your internal sense of identity is attached to only the outcome and nothing else, then it can actually prevent you from the effort that's required to go chase the goal. And you hear this all the time from people. It's just like, well, I could have been a blank, but I had to do blank. Like I could have been an actor, but you know, I had some great promise and I got this scholarship and I was on Broadway. But you know, this life event happened or this circumstance occurred and you know, and, and I, I just figured that I, that that should not be a path for me right now. But you know, maybe it will be someday. And it's like that idea of someday is killing more dreams than anything else because it's, it's because, because the optimism has no feedback, because you've never actually tried to do the thing. Like you're, you're just putting off the start date because to your internal identity to imagine a future where that could have been on the table, but you were too afraid of what it would do to your sense of identity around that thing to even pursue it to begin with. So you can just tell yourself for the rest of your life, I could have been a great, whatever standup comedian, I could have been a great author, I could have been a great podcaster, I could have been a great business owner, but, you know, just wasn't in the cards for me or whatever you're telling yourself because you're so afraid of the feedback of the, of the journey and what it would do to your internal identity. And, and so it prevents you from taking the first step to begin with. So optimism bias research describes a tendency to revise beliefs more in response to desirable information than the undesirable information, which means people can become better at absorbing good news than bad news. And research on older adults found an age related reduction in updating beliefs from undesirable information about future negative events, suggesting optimistic updating can matter for health and financial decisions. Hey guys, Travis here. Just letting you know that sometimes on the show I go a little bit longer. I try to keep these things, these solo shows pretty short, like 10 to 15 minutes. But sometimes when I get going, I just can't stop, if you know what I mean. So this, if you're listening to this message, that means that this episode is being put into two parts and the first part is now coming to a close. So be sure to tune into the next solo show to hear part two of this episode. Episode. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you next time.
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