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Travis
I was recently on whatnot the other day, just shopping around, looking frankly, because I was just blown away that this is something that people are doing with their time. And so I was like, I got to 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, 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 side hustle, it's a real path to building something that lasts. 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 in real time and turn what you love into real income. So search whatnot whnot in the App Store, download it today and get started selling right away.
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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money
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podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free
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30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on
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the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis.
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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 on our journey of going through some of the recurring themes and commonalities of a lot of the past guests that I've had on all of my podcasts really throughout the years. And the topic of this episode is about the dark chapter about being honest in a way to build trust with your audience. And it's not necessarily for the purpose of building trust with your audience, it's just that you shouldn't be afraid to be honest with your audience because it will inevitably help to Build more trust. So the guests who have built the deepest audience trust throughout their years didn't. Didn't sanitize the worst years. They didn't wipe that away and only talk about the good times. They owned those things fully. You know, the drugs, the affairs, the failures, the misaligned careers. And that honesty became the credibility that made everything else that they were working on land really well with that audience. So the cleaned up story is significantly less powerful than the full accounting of what happened. And it allows the audience to relate to you a little bit more, because that's part of it. I've never talked to a successful person who just had a linear path to success. That it's always like, up, up, up, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, up, up, down, down, up, up, up, up, up, down, down, down. It's always this kind of the, The. The roller coaster story. And so if you pretend like everything was just straight, not only does the audience feel less relatable or you, you feel less relatable to the audience, but they might even start distrusting you a little bit because they, like, we just know intuitively that's not how it works. Even, like the greatest stories of all time are the greatest stories because there was. There was a. There was an upset because there was a downturn, because there was an obstacle. If it's just a story of somebody winning constantly over and over again, it's less interesting. It's not as fun, it's as entertaining, it's not as valuable. The, the. The story is, is built in those periods of struggle. So first off, first guest that we're sort of highlighting on this episode come. It's Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity Water. This direct quote came from him. He said, the best that I could come up with for a tombstone would be, here lies a selfish man who got a million people drunk. And this is him talking about when he was at the height of his career in the New York City nightlife scene. He was a club promoter in New York City, one of the most successful in and crushing it by all outside standards. But he, at his core, knew that there was something more that he could have to offer the world. And when he had this sort of health scare when he was like 27 or 28 years old, this is the realization that he had that the best I could come up with for a tombstone would be, here lies a selfish man who got a million people drunk. And he was like, this has to change. I have to change something about what I'm doing. Slash everything about what I'm doing in order to pursue this higher calling in my life. But he was extremely honest and vulnerable about the fact that he had allowed himself to get to this point, noticed that something needed to change, then changed it, then turned it into, you know, charity water, which has raised over a billion dollars and provided clean drinking water for tens of thousands of people across the planet who had no way of accessing it before. So he was extremely honest about that, and that was the. The struggle in his life became the success story. Next one would be Garrett White. He said something occurred, something traumatic. I didn't know what the trauma was. It forged disconnection and dysfunction for me sexually. It created confusion and with intimacy and connection, and I had no idea. And this is one of the favorite. One of my favorite parts of the conversation I had with Garrett, because Garrett is. I mean, he lives this mantra. He very much is extremely honest, almost to a fault with everything that he's going through, but it allows his audience to connect with him and like that. The people that love him love his stuff, because he's not just out here touting his mansion and his. His supercars and all the material success that he has. He's also extremely honest and completely vulnerable about how he got to that point and the. How he was on the brink of divorce and the affair that he had. And. And this is ultimately what led him to build this company, which has now done tens of millions of dollars in revenue, was that he was coming off the back of a big failure in the mortgage industry because of the housing crash in 06, 07, whatever that was. 08, maybe, and. And then meetup group, this men's group, where everybody was going around introducing themselves, and they were all doing the typical thing, which is they stand up, they say what they're working on, they touch on the highlights, and give a bulleted list of all the accomplishments that they've had to let everybody in the room know who they are, what value they can add, and all that kind of stuff. And Garrett just stood up and was extremely honest about everything. It was just, like, struggling. My marriage, my. My business just went under. Starting over from scratch. And when he stood up and declared that in front of everybody, the entire group sort of started following suit. And they were like, actually, I'm. Actually, I'm also really struggling with this thing. I'm struggling with this thing. I'm struggling with this thing. And that was the inception. Point of what became Wake Up Warrior was that there was the realization that even the people who Appeared to have it all together, still had all of these things that were going wrong on the back end. And so he was able to kind of step into that role and lead from that position of being vulnerable and being real about what that dark chapter looks like, what that lonely chapter looks like. The next quote comes from Dane Cook. If you don't know who Dane Cook is, he was at one point probably the biggest working comedian in the world. He was selling out arenas, he was making film projects and all of them were hits at that time. And he said your character doesn't come from success. Success gives you nothing but accoutrements, gives you a big house, a bunch of stuff. Makes no difference until you have breakdown moments or when someone you love is in need. That's the only place that you can become something is in the, in the struggle moments and not in the success. And if anybody knows what it's like to be on both ends of that, it's him because he, he had this massively successful huge career and then hit a, hit a, a bottom moment after his brother stole a bunch of money from him and just was bad mental health and a lot of that ended up snowballing and affecting his career in a really negative way. And so he had some time to sit with that and ask himself some questions and be really thoughtful about it. And I got a lot of, got a lot of respect for Dane and his willingness to sit with that and come out on the other side having been a better person.
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and again, it's not fun to admit your failures, especially when, especially if you have a business that is sort of reliant on people trusting you for your expertise. Like, and that, that's one danger I think about the coaching industry or info industry or quote unquote guru world is that's why people become gurus. I think that's sort of my take on it, is that people become gurus so that they can pretend like everything's okay. And then when things, when shit's hitting fan, they just continue pretending like everything's okay. Because they think in their mind that if they're vulnerable about this failure that they had, that the people who follow them will stop following them, stop trusting them for their advice. And so they almost double down on that and start developing this, this God complex where they think that they're untouchable. And then inevitably it all comes crashing down in a way that's completely out of their control. So be careful if you're in a situation like that. And, and by the way, I'm not telling you that you have to like every new person you meet, you gotta be like, I'm struggling. You know, we're going to get a divorce and I'm. My business is one. Like, you're not going to unload all of your grief on everybody. Okay? There's a difference between being just like a negative Nancy who's always talking about all the bad things in their life and how the world is against them and it's this woe is me pity party story. That's not what I'm talking about here. It's just the willingness to admit that things aren't going according to plan. And it's the ability to stand in that and allow, you know, people to potentially form an opinion about you that you may not like. But it also, it also is necessary to piece together the story of the success on the other side of this. So be, Be honest about the struggle. Be honest about the, the dark chapter, even, even in a like, smaller context, in maybe like a sales conversation. Because that's sort of the world that I come from. I remember having sales reps who would just if, if our product or our service had some sort of a chink in the armor. Whenever anybody would challenge that in the sales conversation, they would freak out and inevitably just lying through their teeth about it or avoiding the question altogether. And if you lie or avoid the question, then again people start not trusting you, which obviously and they should stop trusting you. So my advice to them was always just like, just own up to the things that, like, if they ask you a question, just be honest, just tell them the truth. It's like, oh, that's actually something that we're working on. But right now our servicing agreement does not allow for us to do whatever unlimited filter replacements or our warranty has this limitation here. If there's any point that I could give to such and such competitor, be that they do a good job with xyz. But it seems to me that what most important to you is these other things and then sort of redirect them back into the things that you're doing well. But you don't have to, you don't have to lie, man. And you shouldn't lie. And you should be as honest and forthright as you possibly can. And ultimately that's going to build trust. It builds trust to tell people about a weakness in your armor. It tell. It builds trust. And even better if you can do it before they bring it up. You know what I mean? So in some of those situations, I would Even beat them to the punch and say something like, now, now, before, you know, before you bring it up or before we get into this other thing, there is like, one thing I want to make sure that you're aware of, and that's that we do not ever touch this particular thing, or we don't, we don't service that piece of the machinery, or we don't, you know, give them the bad news, like rip the band aid. And people, people will tend to trust you a little bit more if you're just honest about those things. Sort of like that, that entire idea of everybody sharing that we're the number one company for xyz. And it's like, how is you. Is every cell phone provider the number one 5G provider in the country? You know what I mean? Like, sometimes just be honest about what you're actually doing. And, and, and people will tend to trust you a little bit more. What does the research say about this? How you narrate your dark chapter measurably shapes your future. Two longitudinal studies found that people who told redemption stories, bad to good sequences and agency themes in their life, in their life narratives showed improving mental health trajectories. Pennebaker's expressive writing paradigm found that just three to four sessions of writing about difficult experiences reduced physician visits and improved immune function over months. So even the act of talking about it or writing it down, even if you're not sharing with a bunch of people, just being willing to go to that dark place yourself, improved their actual immune function, which is pretty crazy to me because your mind and body are so closely related. And if you are sort of avoiding this thing, this obstacle, this failure, this, name it, whatever it is, then it is only going to be more detrimental to you personally and to the people around you. And if you're building an audience, it's going to be detrimental to their trust in you if they find out from some other person that this is what happened. So just be honest, be willing to talk about it. Because sometimes that is the answer. It's the thing that you need in order to be able to move past this, this tragic thing that happened in your life. Frederick Douglass, forbidden by law from learning to read, traded bread to white children for reading lessons and traced letters in shipyard timber. And he later wrote that learning to read gave him the language to articulate what slavery actually was. And the very wound became the source of his voice. So he, even in the midst of this insanely terrible situation that he was in at that time, he was still, he was still finding Ways to articulate what. What this trauma meant to him. And the only way that he could do that was by learning how to read first by trading some of his bread to other kids for. For reading lessons, tracing letters in shipyard timber, which isn't exactly the best place to write letters. So he. He used that thing that was the source of. Of his struggle and turn it into the source of his success. So, look, I've had this happen personally to me multiple times where I was working on something, didn't go how I planned, and I allowed that to stop me from doing the next thing because I just didn't want anybody to know about it. I wanted to keep it secret, keep it to myself. But then the more I shared about it, the more I talked to other people about it, the more I was willing to be honest and vulnerable about it, the less power it had over me. More I was just like, look, people that are close to me, they know that this happened. They know that I messed up with this thing or I failed on this thing, that this is a regret of mine. But they also know that that's the human experience, that we do not just. We do not just get to live regret free and failure free, and only get to choose the successes that we've had. So the sooner that you're willing to admit the things that you're going through, especially. Especially to the people who are closest to you or the people who you are trying to build tr, the sooner that you'll be able to move on from it, and the more those people will trust you, sort of counterintuitively. So don't shy away from the struggle. Embrace the struggle. And a lot of times, the struggle is where the success actually comes from. So that's it for this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Peace.