← Travis Makes Money
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- [00:00]
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 podcast. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the show. On this episode, it's just me, you and Mike. And today we're talking a little bit more about the lessons and insights that I've taken from some of the past guests that I've had here on the show. And today's topic is all about failure. That failure is data. And let me tell you, I have mastered this whole thing of failure. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how many things I've tried in the last call it 10, 12 years, but it's more than the number of years. It's probably like 15, 16 different ventures, businesses, startups, a bunch of things along the way and the majority of them are failures and but a couple of them have done pretty well. And it is at the, I mean it's just the barrier to entry. There's no way to avoid failure completely. If you, if you want to build any sort of a life that is extraordinary, failure is sort of a part of the process. So today we're talking a little bit about failure. The guests with the longest careers that I've talked to share a specific relationship with failure. They don't treat it as the final verdict. Just because you failed does not mean you are a failure. And if you adopt the identity and call yourself a failure, then you will probably continue to fail. Because if you believe you're a failure and that you can't win, then you're never going to try anything. And not trying anything thing is the definition of failure. Not actually trying things and failing with some things. Because as I stated earlier, failure is just a stepping stone to success. So they don't treat it as a final verdict. They treat it as information. It's feedback, it's data. And in, in, in my podcasting journey, I've sort of realized it's like a lived operational philosophy that shows up in how these people actually make decisions after a loss. So this pulls from a few conversations like Paul Pierce, professional basketball player Bernard Hopkins, who is a professional boxer, beat, I think, kind of really well known for beating Oscar De La Hoya back in the day. Rennie Couture, UFC heavyweight champ Trey Gowdy, he's a congressman. And bestselling author Donald Miller, who's the founder of and, and, or, excuse me, the author of Building a Story Brand and founder of Story Brand, sold over a million copies of his book Steve Sims, the Real Life wizard of Oz, really good friend of mine. Rest in peace, Steve. And Garrett White, who's a big online entrepreneur. So this sort of pulls from some of the conversations that I had with these folks. And so here's a couple of direct quotes that came from these conversations with people who learned how to master failure to the degree that it led them to the successes that they had. So this was from Paul Pierce. He said, I wasn't afraid to fail. I've never even looked at failure as failure. I looked at it as a learning process. And there was this really great clip that was circulating for a little while with this reporter who asked Giannis Antetokounmpa, who's also an NBA player, they asked him after he, after his team got kicked out of the playoffs, they asked him, was this season a failure and if you got some time, you should go look at it because Giannis answered, handled the question masterfully. His team just got kicked out this is the press conference right after they lost. So obviously really big emotions still would have been easy for him to sort of blow up on this reporter. But instead of blowing up on him, he just kind of asked him a few questions and was like, is every season that we don't win a championship a failure? He's like, is, is Michael Jordan won six championships, so every time he didn't make it past the first round of the playoffs, that's a failure. He's like, no, it's not failure. We just go back to the drawing board and we figure it out and we come back again next year and we try it again. And it was a really, really great moment, A good reframe and on it, like I said, he hand, he handled the, the situation really well because he didn't blow up on the guy. He just kind of, you could tell he was really irritated with it. And, and then as soon as he finished answering the question, he moved on to somebody else. But in, in sports, I think it's a really good example because there's so many factors that dictate whether or not a team is going to win a championship, especially if it's team sports versus solo sports. And so I liked, I like that Paul Pierce said this because he's a, he, he won the championship. But he, you know, isn't typically on people's Mount Rushmore of basketball. Even though he's a top 75. You know, he was in the top 75 NBA players of all time when they did that event a couple of years ago. And so he didn't look at it as, as failing. It's not a failure, it's not a loss. It's just, it's just learning. It's feedback.
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- [07:41]
Travis
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- [08:50]
state Bernard Hopkins said the same thing. He said it wasn't a loss, it was a lesson. Everything that I didn't know that I know now was a lesson. If you take any loss as a lesson, you don't look at it like you got fired or that you lost your what you know, you, you, you fail even if he was wrong, it's still a lesson to you not to be wrong again. So again, somebody who is in and this person's in the arena of solo sports, obviously boxing is sort of, you know, team sport from the perspective of you got your trainers and the people in your corner and things, but when you're in the ring, it's one on one. And he was even talking about this from the perspective of it's not a failure, it's not a loss. It's just this is, this is the, the benefit of being around people who operate on a high level like this. It's just the way that they talk. Like when I get around, When I get around these types of folks, all of them talk about failure like this. Then you get around normal folks and you see that there is this massive fear that failure is on the horizon. And that fear of failing prevents them from taking the first step. And oftentimes it's actually a little bit worse than the fear of failure, in my opinion. It's more the fear of embarrassment. It's the fear of what people's perception of them will, will be if they happen to fail in a public setting. And like I said, that to me is even a little bit worse than fearing failure in general, because you're not even fearing failure for what it means for you. You're feel you're fearing failure for what it means for what others think about you, and then allowing those people's feelings about a future event that may or may not happen dictate your decisions now, which is objectively a silly way to go throughout life, but we all do it and you're subject to this. Before I started my podcast, I almost didn't start it. Of that exact reason I knew, you know, there's some things that you can build sort of in private, you know what I mean, without launching it publicly and letting people follow the journey. A podcast sort of by definition has to be public to some, to some degree, obviously. Like you have to get people to listen to it, so you gotta kind of be public with it. And I knew that there was a bunch of eyeballs on me when I started the show. And there's several people who were actively rooting for me to not do well with it. But ultimately I made a decision a long time before that that I knew that I was the only person I had to wake up and look myself in the mirror every single day. And all the people whose opinions I was worried about that I was allowing to dictate my life probably weren't even going to be in my life in a decade from now or a decade from that point, let alone at the end of my life when I'm sitting on my deathbed and thinking about my regrets from my life. And it's just like, if you don't, if you're not willing to take the step to the potential embarrassment, then you don't ever get the feeling of freedom that you gain when you just take the action anyway, because it doesn't like people are going to think what they're going to think regardless of what you do or don't do. So if I didn't do that and I ended up doing something else, they would have just looked at that other thing and thought the same things that they were thinking about me with the podcast. It was like, why not just do the thing that I actually really want to do here? And Trey Gowdy actually brought up a really interesting, you know, lesson from history when we were talking about this. He said, you get to define what failure is. He said, Jesus Christ himself lost a vote to a guy named Barabbas. The stakes were pretty high for that choice. He wound up dying, but didn't fail. Losing and failing, to me are two different things. You have to define these terms and, and defining it, I think, can give you again a little bit of freedom to be able to make the decision that, you know, you need to make. Now, this does not mean to, to not weigh out decisions and ask yourself what the risk is, ask yourself what the reward is, and then figure out if it's a worthy decision. I'm not saying to just go willy nilly throughout life. And then, and then, you know, I kind of have been playing a lot of chess lately again. I was something that I did a lot when I was a kid, and then I haven't really played a lot in a long time and so finally downloaded the Chess.com app and just been playing a bunch of chess recently. But it's sort of, you know, when I'm, when I'm playing a game and I'm in a position where I made, I made a dumb mistake, I made a bad move, and then the other player takes a important piece off the board, it's really easy just to go on tilt and be like, oh, screw it, that was a dumb decision. And then you stop weighing all of your decisions and you stop looking into the future and planning two or three moves ahead, and you stop strategizing and you just start moving pieces. And that is destructive. That's a destructive habit, right? Just moving pieces willy nilly across the board because then you're just going to start losing more and more pieces. So it's sort of the same thing in life. I'm not saying that you should just start moving your pieces around the board and you know, mistake activity for good behavior. That's not what I'm, what I'm suggesting. I'm just saying that if you know something, if you know something is going to be really important to you, if you have this inner feeling, this gut, this intuition that tells you, I don't know how this is going to happen, but I do know that it's something that I need to do then. And then you've weighed the pros and the cons and you feel good about the decision and then you're allowing the fear of failure to prevent you from taking the first step. That is sort of where the problem lies. So what the research says about this in entrepreneurship specifically, failure can be a tuition payment rather than the verdict. The final verdict like we've been talking about. Chinese entrepreneurial data showed that prior failure positively influenced re venture performance through the meditating through. Excuse me, through the mediating role of entrepreneurial resilience. Resilience. So it showed that people were more likely to be successful with a later venture when they had failed at a previous venture. And I actually had an investor tell me that one time when I was pitching for my company. He's like, he, he said he would not invest into founders who never had a failure because in his mind it meant that they didn't fully understand the ramifications of the money that he was placing with them. So in, in my, and I remember thinking at that it was a little bit jarring when I heard that for the first time because in my mind I was like, wouldn't you founder who's had a bunch of successes, like why would you be looking for the failure? But now that I've had a few failures under my belt, I understand completely what he means. Like you just, you take things more seriously. The lessons that you learn through the direct experience of failing are so much more prominent and so much more memorable than the ones you learn in a book. Which is unfortunate, but that's kind of the way that it goes. So yeah, the, the, the ability to have success in a later venture was depicted by the idea that they probably already had a failure.
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Travis
confirms that serial entrepreneurs outperform first timers because the experience effect is real, though survivorship bias is acute and the fail fast narrative can normalize reckless decisions was kind of what we're talking about earlier. The lesson here is learning from the failure, not just allowing yourself to engage in it without thinking about it right? Like you still want to figure out. You know, do do a SWOT analysis or whatever the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Figure out all of the potential risk behind the decision. But then once you have a clear idea, make the decision and just be comfortable with whatever happens. And again, I come back to chess because it's top of mind for me recently. But you know, you you could sit and analyze the board forever, but there's a timer. You know what I mean? So you can't just sit there on the sidelines and stare at the board or else you're going to lose the game. You got to just move a piece and you move the piece to the best of your ability, with the information, the knowledge that you have, the skill set that you have. And then when you move the piece, you just got to be okay with whatever happens right after that, and then go back to the drawing board if it doesn't go the way that you wanted it to go. The part where this kind of breaks down as an analogy though, is in chess, you're playing against somebody else and their goal is for you to lose. In business and entrepreneurship, you, you might have competitors in the market, but they're not actively trying to make you lose. They're just trying to win. And both of you can win in that type of a competitive market. You can be like collaborators. And it's not always, it's not a zero sum game like something like chess is. So, so a good historical depiction of this is from Nikola Tesla. He quit Edison's operation after his AC ideas were dismissed as, quote, splendid but utterly impractical. And he briefly dug ditches to survive and by 1888 had been awarded seven AC motor patents that became the global standard for electrical distribution. So this setback was just the data that he needed to figure out where he was going to go next. And a lot of people now actually credit Nikola Tesla more for the invention of electricity than they do even Thomas Edison himself. So, yeah, losing and failing, they're not the same thing. And if you can reframe what those things mean to you. This is something that we've tried to talk to our kids about and obviously it doesn't go super well with a five year old and a seven year old when they, when they lose something, you can tell them all day that it's like, oh, look, you know, you either win or you learn there is no losing. And you know what I mean, these are different terms. And you can, what did you learn that you can win, you know, and, and so for them, they, they are really emotional about it. But I understand because I'm still emotional about losing, even if it is playing uno with my family. I don't like losing in general. But I will say there was a period of time in my life where I disengaged from a lot of the things that lit me up growing up because I knew I didn't have as much time to work on those things. And I was so afraid of losing because of, of whatever, like just a dumb thought in my head about reputation, of being a winner, that I would only engage in things that I knew I could win. And I stopped like having fun. I, it took away the fun for me because I was so afraid of losing and, and knew the work that was required of me to get good at this thing, whatever it is, ping pong or pool or, or chess or basketball or any of the things that I really enjoyed doing growing up. I kind of disengaged from those things because I was just like, I hate losing so much and I don't have enough time to get good at this thing. Like I was, I'm just gonna pull myself out of the game and then I miss out on fun and memories. And it's just like, this is, this is silly. Why? Because I, I, I want people to think that I win everything that I do. Like that doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. And it's impossible to win everything that you do all the time. And so this is a siloed example. I was doing this in little games and things like that. But this is what people do with, with real things that have real stakes in their actual life where they, they, they don't want to engage in thing because they're so afraid of failing. And that people will think that they're a failure, that they just don't engage and they don't ever try the thing that, that, that really lights them up and the thing that really would make life worth living and make their career worth having and give them purpose and meaning and like all the things everybody's searching for, but they, but they keep putting it off. Because failures is a potential thing on the horizon. So do not allow failures, or the fear of failure, or the fear of embarrassment because of failure to dictate your life. Most of the people in your life that you're worried about, like I said, aren't going to be there on, when, when you're on your deathbed. They might already be gone or they might just not be engaged in your life at all. So it's, if you start thinking about it from this catastrophized example of thinking about your deathbed, then it starts putting things into perspective. That makes you go, well, these 12 people whose opinions I care about right now, they're probably, they're not likely to be in my life in 10 years from now, let alone 40 years from now or 30 years from now or whatever the timeframe is. So why am I allowing them to dictate what I do with my life until I reach that point in my life where I can't do anything about any of it and all I can do is sit there and meditate on the fact that I wish I would have done more when I had the time to do more. It doesn't make any sense if you extrapolate out that concept all the way through to your deathbed. So yeah, I know this one's easier said than done, but whatever you gotta do to be able to overcome this is worth whatever work you have to do to figure it out. So that's it for this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in everybody. We'll catch you on the next one. Peace.
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