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SOLO | Make Money by Thinking Clearly, Asking Better Questions, and Embracing Failure - Lessons from my Trey Gowdy 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 is going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the show. On this episode it's just me, you and the mic and we're talking about our series which has been my lessons and takeaways from a lot of the past guests that I've had here on the show. And of course you can go check out the full conversations with these people. But these are sort of just like, hey, done so many conversations at this point that I feel like I have done myself a disservice by not making more out of the content that that we initially released together. And so this has been a lot of fun for me just to go back through, find some of the gems, some of the people that I've had on and, and distill some of the lessons and takeaways that I've gotten from them. So today's episode's about Trey Gowdy. Trey's a former congressman and district attorney out of North Carolina and he's a multiple time New York Times bestselling author. Frankly, just a really dude to have a conversation with. And if you, you know, can remove politics out of the discussion, which I always try to do even when I have political people on whether they're political commentator or they're a congressman or something like that. I try to go into more of generic, you know, self help, personal development, education type lines of questioning and conversation rather than talking about politics. And so this is one of those ones. And Trey's just a successful guy with a lot of really good stuff to share. I was very much appreciative of him taking the time to come to the show. His books are, are fantastic. Start, Stay or Leave is one books and the other one that is that I'm blanking on right now is about communication. But ask. Oh man, I'm, I'm totally blanking on the book, Something about Asking, though, it's basically like how to Ask Better Questions. And it's one of the best books I've ever read on that topic. And I've read a few books on that topic, frankly, because I'm a podcaster. But he came at it from the, the, you know, being a former district attorney and then being a congressman and learning how to ask questions in a better way to lead people along a path as a form of persuasion, essentially. So really great stuff. So here's a few of my lessons, my takeaways from my conversation with Trey Gowdy. Number one, losing and failing are not the same thing. Trey opened with the most striking line of the conversation, which is Jesus Christ himself lost the vote to Barabbas. The crowd chose a murderer over Jesus. By every conventional measure, that's a loss, but it didn't fail. Trey's point is that we conflate loss with failure too often. And that framework is really what ends up destroying people. Because it, what happens is if you view the, if you view the, the loss as a complete failure, then the fear of that failure will prevent you from getting started like you are. You are creating an outcome that is negative before you even started to try the venture. Like you, you've not even gone down the path. Like in your mind, you've already written it off as something that you're not going to do because you're so afraid of the version of this thing that ends up in you failing. When in reality the loss is just lessons. It's just learning. Like you, you either win or you learn. The only way to completely fail is to take yourself out of the game. So if you just stay in the game, of course there's going to be failures, of course there's going to be losses. That's part of the journey. It's, it's, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. It's, it's inevitable. It's going to. Is what drives me crazy about when, when people, esp. In the political sphere, this happens more often than not. But it's like, oh, let's go look at this person's, you know, 30 year history and find. Let's highlight these three losses and, and talk about, well, they're a loser and they, they had this bankruptcy and they had this bad thing happen and they did that. Like they, they're not competent and it's like, well, of course, like they're in the game, they're not on the sidelines. And a lot of the people that are making these observations are people who've spent their entire life on the sidelines watching the game. It's very easy to critique the players when you're not the one playing the game. So losing and failing are not the same thing. Real failure in Trey's definition is not trying, it's not getting started. The person who never runs doesn't lose. They just never play. Like you if that, that is a worse, that, that's a worst case scenario to me. Like, you never even tried. So like I would rather do business with somebody who's tried and failed than somebody who's never tried because you're, you're, you're taking yourself out of the game before it' started. And that is more of a working definition of failure than trying the thing and not succeeding at it, at least the first time. So losing and failing are not the same thing. Number two, logic should set the course emoji emotion gets to ride shotgun. Trey spent his career as a prosecutor where, I mean, he had to use logic to his advantage. And so his framework was use the logic to set the direction, then let your emotions and intuition color the experience. So don't put emotion in the driver's seat, but don't kick it out of the car either. Because people are emotional and they make decisions based on emotion. So you have to have enough of a logical through line in order for that person's emotion to make the decision that you want them to make and then have enough proof for them to logically justify the emotional decision that they're being led to make. So the mistake that most people make is letting pain avoidance or excitement override a clear eyed, crystal clear look at what the evidence is actually showing. So I like that he brought this into play and he didn't just because it irritates me. It's sort of pet peeve of mine when people talk about how, you know, they're just not emotional and we remove emotion from the equation and whatever and it's like, theoretically that sounds awesome, but ultimately we're all emotional human beings, so we all make decisions on emotion and then try to justify them logically. And even the people who would identify as logical, clear headed thinkers are still people that are being driven largely by emotion and then, you know, just are trying to justify that decision with logic. So you can't kick emotion out of the car, but you want it to take a, you know, secondary role compared to the logic. So we have like, we have this one track and this is the logic of the conversation but we have to color around that logical through line with the emotion in order to be able to move people to a decision, in order to be able to persuade somebody to join your point of view more than the other person's point of view. And in his case it really, really mattered. He's a prosecutor and he mentioned a couple of different types of stories that he prosecuted in his book and they're just, I mean I, I can't even go into them with. Because I would not do them justice and would not do those victims families justice if I tried to explain them off the cuff like this. But there were real stakes. I guess what I'm trying to say in, in his career where it was like, if I do not persuade this jury of people to prosecute this person and, and sentence this person, then, then this terrible, terrible person is going to walk free and this family is not going to get any sort of closed loop or any justice for the loss of this loved one that happened in a terrible manner. So he, he was dealing with this on a level that, that I, I can't even understand being in business. Like, it's just not the same thing. The stakes were much higher for him. So I appreciated the fact that he was like, look, logic's important. Yes, we need people to be able to justify their decision logically, but ultimately people make decisions based on their emotions. Marvel Television's Wonder man, an eight episode series now streaming on Disney. A superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director. Action Simon Williams audition for Wonder Man. 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Oh, number three, be ruthlessly honest with yourself about who you actually are. Self awareness might be Trey's deepest conviction. He knew he was never going to be a basketball player. No matter how many camps his parents sent him to. He knew he had a fear of failure and, you know, was willing to engage with that without flinching. He pushed back hard on lying to others, but reserved his real contempt for lying to ourselves. So he, he was obviously saying lying in any context is not good, but lying to yourself is probably the worst version of lying. Because the quiet self deception that keeps people locked in situations that don't fit them is more rampant than people even lying to other people. And then you can convince yourself that lying to other people is okay if you're constantly comfortable with lying to yourself. So be, be ruthlessly be brutally honest with yourself about who you actually are. This does not mean to be mean to yourself, by the way. This does not mean to, to treat yourself like a second class citizen. Because, you know, I see this happen all the time too. It's like, well, for the people look at it as a notch on the belt. It's like, well, for the pursuit of self awareness, I'm going to berate myself for the actions that I'm taking or the actions that I'm not taking that I should be taking. And then you become your own worst critic. And then you build a story that suggests that you're incompetent, you can't do any well and that, and then you buy into that and then you find more evidence to suggest that that's the truth. And then you just build this lie internally that's even worse than the opposite in a lot of cases in pursuit of self awareness. So it's not saying that like be mean to yourself. It's just saying don't lie to yourself about the situation that you're currently in and people will respect you more for that. I found. So be self aware, be honest with yourself about who you actually are and stop lying to yourself. Number four, ask better questions instead of making better arguments. This showed up a couple of times during the conversation. Once in his three non negotiable life skills, and then again in the story about meeting Bono. He asked Bono why he wrote a song about Judas Iscariot. 45 minutes later, Bono's staff was trying to pull him away. So it was like one of the situations where it's like I'm meeting this person who I've held in this high regard for a long period of time and you have a tiny opportunity to be able to say something. And he asked them one question about why he wrote a song about Judas is scary.
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It.
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And then it propelled him into this conversation. And his answer enough to where his people were like, hey man, we gotta go. You can't spend the next three hours talking to this guy. We got like, we got something next on the schedule. So people want to talk. They, they just want to be asked something that they haven't been asked a thousand times before. So if you get really good at questions, you can move people better than statements will ever be able to move people. And man, I, I very, very much in agreement on this. One of the reasons I wanted to have him on the show, I was thinking a lot during that time about asking questions better. How do we, how do we frame this better? How do we capture attention better with these types of questions versus just trying to, you know, brute force your way into conversations with people based on your perceived level of expertise or knowledge or competence or success or whatever it is. It's like, especially when you're talking to people like a bono, like somebody who's just at a level of success. And most people will never ever be able to understand or touc, touch or feel or, or, or, or know at all. When you're talking to people like that, they get constantly berated with questions. And a lot of times it's the same stuff. And so if you want to stand out from the crowd, you gotta be better at learning how to ask questions that are different than all the questions that that person's been asked a thousand times from other people. Very, very simple, not always easy, but ask better questions instead of making better arguments. Number five, be very careful who you let speak into your life. Trey watched people get paralyzed by comments from strangers on the Internet. People who have no real knowledge of them, no real stake in the outcome. And so he's not engaging in social media specifically because he refuses to let anonymous voices online define his self worth. I have been, I have fallen prey to this myself. I've, I've let anonymous voices online control what I put out and what I don't put out for, for quite some time and not quite some time, I'll say it was like it's phases. It's like sometimes when I'm, when I'm in a, when I'm in a, a downturn or things aren't going the way that I wanted to, then I'm more likely to internalize the negative things people online are saying. And then the opposite is also true. When things are going well, I'm more likely to say you don't know what you're talking about because things are going well. But you cannot allow anonymous voices to define your self worth. Know yourself well enough that the outside noise has a hard ceiling on how much damage it can do. Spend more time with your. Spend more time with the people who actually know you and who know your intentions and can sort through the nuance of the conversations that you're having. Just try not to let those outside voices define your self worth. Be very careful who you let speak into your life. Again, great conversation with Trey Gowdy. Go check out the full episode with him and then pick up a copy of his books. And in fact, before I jump off of here, I want to do him justice and figure out what the name of that book was. It's going to drive me crazy. Start Stay or Leave was the first one, which is the Art of Decision Making. A great book. Doesn't Hurt to Ask. That was the one that I kept trying to think of and he's written several other books, but these are the two that I really liked and two that I thought were really good. Doesn't Hurt to Ask is the one that I was referring to about asking good questions. And like I said, it's really helpful when it's coming from somebody who is asking questions in a very high stakes environment as a prosecutor. So using the power of questions to communicate, connect and persuade. That's the subtitle of the book, Doesn't Hurt to Ask. I highly recommend picking up up a copy of that or listening to the audiobook. He reads the audiobook. It's also really good. But yeah, that's it for this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.