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SOLO | Make Money by Unlocking the Leader Within: Lessons from Vicente Fox
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- [00:02]
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- [00:31]
Travis
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's going on, buddy?
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Podcast Host
Welcome back to the show. On this episode, we are continuing along our journey of lessons that I've taken away from previous guests on my podcasts. And on this episode we are talking about a guy by the name of Vicente Fox. Now, if you do not know who Vicente Fox is, he made the rounds on the media quite some time ago. I want to say, man, if memory serves me right, it was probably the first Trump election, the first presidential campaign that Trump was involved in.
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Travis
So 2016, I would say.
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Podcast Host
But anyway, he was the president of Mexico and he was in the news cycle a bunch because of the whole I'm going to, you know, when Trump said he's going to build a wall and then make Mexico pay for it. And then he was the president of Mexico and he was like, we're not paying for it. So anyway, he got really well known during that time period and I knew who the guy was. And then I doing this sort of like press junket thing at a charity event. And he was one of the people that was on the docket to interview. And I was like, oh, that'd be really interesting. Talk to somebody. I mean, it's not often that you get the opportunity to speak to somebody who is the former president of a country. So I said, yeah, let's do it. So did that episode. And here are a few of my key takeaways from my time with Vicente Fox. Number one, leadership is already inside you. Most people just never go looking for it. He made this point pretty bluntly. He said, every human being has the attribute of leadership. The difference between people who live extraordinary lives and people who live ordinary ones is not talent, it's awareness. The exercise that he prescribes is very simple. Go within, ask yourself the hard questions and find out what you're actually here for. And he just said, most people just never do this, they stay on the surface. So leadership, isn't this something that you, you know, you get sprinkled with some leadership fairy dust when you come out of the womb? It's not how it works. Everybody has the same level, the same potential for leadership inside of them. It's just that some people never activate it, never get to the point where it's, I guess, important enough, or they have bought into some version of a story in their mind that tells them that they can't do it or that they're not worthy or some other, you know, reason or really excuse as to why they can't lead or be in a strong position of leadership. So leadership's already inside you. Number two, Purpose without performance is a daydream. This is probably one of my favorite takeaways from this one. He is. He gives some really sharp distinctions here. Having purpose isn't enough. Purpose needs to be met by performance. And he talked about purpose a lot. And he talked about how important it is to have purpose and how people tend to thrive more. You tend to find more happiness, more fulfillment, more meaning when you have purpose. But purpose outside of performance is just a daydream, and it needs to be met by performance. You have to actually do things. You have to make things happen. So he watched plenty of smart, passionate people in business and in politics who could describe their vision brilliantly and then do nothing with it. They were. They were dreamers. They were just daydreamers. They would just sit there and live in a version of the future that was never going to come to pass because they never put in the work to actually see it happen. And a lot of times those can be the worst people because they. They sort of have this belief in their potential, and yet they are finding themselves on the sidelines when it comes to actually taking action. So you have to actually make things happen. The ones who rise are the ones who convert their vision into action every single day for decades. It's just the same damn answer that we hear from everybody else, which is you can look for all the tips and the tricks and the hacks and the pointers, as many as you want to. You can read as many books as you want to, listen to as many podcasts as you want to, watch as many YouTube videos as you want to, but ultimately, if you never take action, you're just going to be in the same place. So marry your purpose with your performance. Number three, real world experience is worth more than a degree. This one's a little controversial, maybe a
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Travis
little bit of a hot Take here
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Podcast Host
from, from Vicente Fox. Because he's a, he's an older guy. I would say when I interviewed him, he's maybe early 70s. I would, I would place him at maybe late 60s. But obviously when he was going to school, that made a more significant impact on people's resumes back in the day than it does now. And I think a lot more people are concerned about it, about real world experience than they are a degree at this point. But back in the day that wasn't true. And he said flat out that when he finished at Coca Cola, because he had a really high leadership position in Coca Cola, he valued his career there more than his university education. And then turned around and said his years running small family businesses taught him even more than working at Coca Cola did. Not because school is worthless, but because you, you just don't truly understand a lesson until you've had to make payroll on a Saturday. You know, like until you've been in the weeds. The stakes a lot of times is what makes the learning real. Which is one of the things that I talk about sometimes as it relates to consultants. Don't get me wrong, knowledge workers are great. Consultants are great. Coaches are great. You should have a lot of those things in your life. However, if you're dealing with a consultant who has exclusively just been in the books their whole career, right? Like they, they, they went to a prestigious university and graduated with honors and got into an amazing MBA program and finished at the top of their class and then worked on Wall street and got directly into consulting at a big consulting firm. And then they're the one that's helping you with this problem. Not to say that they can't. Okay, Obviously they're very qualified. I'm not trying to say that you should never listen to those people. They're wrong all the time. I'm not saying, am saying is that you should take it with a grain of salt. This literally happened recently. I was at this party. It was, it was a birthday party for a friend of mine and basically me and my wife were the only people there that were not a part of the company that he worked for because he, he works a lot.
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Podcast Host
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Podcast Host
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Travis
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Travis
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- [09:36]
Podcast Host
so the majority of his other friends are people who work for the same company that he works for and it's sort of this consulting type business and everybody there had opinions about because he kind of threw it to the floor. I was asking him a question or two about something I was working on and respect the guy thinks a smart guy asked him some, some advice. He's given me some good advice before and he kind of like threw it out to the floor a little bit to all the other people that were there. And again, really bright, really smart people, hardworking people, they consult businesses for a living and they all threw out, you know, some similar advice to, to what the other people were saying in the group. And I remember listening, like listening to the advice and obviously and I took some of it to be fair, but when we were leaving because some of it was about my wife's business too, our Saeed bull shop that we have. And I remember leaving that conversation and I just looked over at her and I was just like, hey, just as a reminder, this is not to say that the advice is bad, but just remember that zero of those people that are advising us on what we should do with our businesses, zero of them have businesses. Okay? So just take the advice with a grain of salt. Again, it doesn't mean that it's wrong. It doesn't mean that they don't know what they're talking about. It just means that like you, you, you, you haven't been in the weeds. You, you haven't. It's like, it's like somebody being you officer out of come, you know, coming out of officer candidate school and, and then blindly giving orders to people who've literally been fighting wars in the trenches overseas. Like it's, it's just a different level of experience. And it's like again, does it mean that they're wrong? Does it mean that they're dumb? Does it mean that they don't know
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Travis
what they're talking about?
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Podcast Host
No, of course not. It just means interrogate the advice a little bit more. Just think about it for a second, ask a few questions, make sure that it's the thing that, that it's the path that you actually want to take that feels right to you. Maybe run a, somebody else who has been in the trenches and get, you know, that, that full picture from, from multiple people and make sure that everybody kind of fully agrees with this. But yeah, I remember leaving that and being like, they're, they're all great, they're smart people. I'm not, not saying anything bad about them. I'm just saying like none of them have businesses so they, they, they're, they're not in the position that you're in that we're in. Like they didn't take the risk. They, they are employees, they work for a company and collect a paycheck. And again, not bad, but you know, it's just a different type of experience. So interrogate that advice a little bit more. Number four, go with your heart when reason runs out. Fox used a beautiful Spanish word which I'm going to completely butcher, but he said Cora sonatas, Gut feelings, callings of the heart. He credited them as, as much as any plan or strategy for where his life went. And when he left the CEO chair Coca Cola Latin America at 32 to go back to farming, there was no spreadsheet that recommended that he just followed something that couldn't fully justify. And that's the move that most people can't make. And it's the one that sometimes will, will change your life for the better in a lot of ways. So I, I've, I've gone back and forth on this one because here's the thing. We are emotional creatures. Almost all the decisions that we make in life probably, I mean really 100 of the decisions that we make in life are emotional decisions. Even if you think that you've logic them to death, they're, they're, they're the decisions made emotionally and then justified logically. And when you are quote unquote, listening to your heart or listening to your gut or you have a gut feeling about something, you shouldn't just ignore it for the purpose of trying to figure out from a logical, you know, brain led perspective what, what you should do next. You, you can't just ignore those things because here's, here's the difference. Your conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time. Your subconscious mind can focus on up to 50,000 different thoughts at any given time. It's a, it's a, it's a supercomputer and it's processing data const. And a lot of times that intuition is basically it's, it's a gut feeling that's based on the output that your supercomputer subconscious has given to you. But your, the logics in your brain, the, the, the. Your conscious thought cannot fully comprehend the scope of information that your subconscious mind is sort of making the decision on if that makes sense. Like you're. It's going to pull from this hidden file of a memory that you had of a bad situation with a person who is douchebag back when you were like 9 years old. And you would never reference that as a reason for not working with this person that's in front of you now. But your subconscious mind is like, is gathering all of that data, gathering all that feedback, and then serving it to you on a silver platter when you're meeting this person. To say that, like, sounds good, but they're just something off.
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Travis
I don't know what it is.
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Podcast Host
I can't put my finger on it. There's something off about this person. Sometimes that's probably just your gut trying to save you from a bad interaction because it's recognizing similar body language patterns or similar tonality patterns, or it's recognizing that the eyes are kind of shifty. It's telling you, it's trying to tell you something. Okay? So I'm not saying to make all of your decisions based on what your gut tells you to do. Okay? I'm not, I'm not telling you to just like, follow your, follow your heart, follow your intuition all the time. Okay. What I am saying is that it shouldn't just be simply ignored because you can't quantify it on a spreadsheet. Okay? Sometimes it's worth listening to your gut. Number five, the shortcut to happiness is serving others. Fox said this with the. Or this was the, the guiding conviction that he took from his education. And it's the thread that ran through every chapter in his career from, from being the head of Latin America Coca Cola, to farming, to politics, being the president of, of Mexico. The. The foundation work that he did. He kept asking which path gave him the most opportunity to contribute the most to that compass is what eventually pointed him toward the presidency of Mexico. So the shortcut to happiness is serving others. You find yourself in a position where you're just like, kind of purposeless. You're lost, you're not sure what you should be doing. Take some action. And that action being something to just help other people might just be the thing that you need. It might just lift your spirits. It might just be helpful enough for the other person that eventually be helpful for you as well. So find gratitude, find purpose, find what you should be doing with your life in service of others. And I don't think that you'll ever regret that. So that's. Those are some of the the key lessons, key takeaways that I took from my time with the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox. But that's it for this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you guys on the next one where I talk about my conversation with my buddy Keith Yackey. So be sure to check in and check into that episode. Anyway, thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you next time. Peace.