CO-HOST | Make Money by Investing in Yourself, Building Relationships, and Trusting the Process

0:00your listening to the Travis Makes Money Podcast. Everybody, welcome back to the Travis Makes Money Podcast. I am not Travis Chapel. I am Travis's producer, Eric. And typically, when you hear me on the show, I am sitting across from Travis. And we're having a pretty casual conversation about a trending headline. We're reacting to financial advice from the online world's gurus. Or we're just shooting the breeze about different finance advice that I'm kind of fielding questions to Travis. But on today's episode, I'm doing something a little bit different. I'm actually reaching into the vault and pulling out a snippet of Travis's conversation on another podcast called The Coachable Podcast with Entrepreneur Tori Gordon. And on this show, I was listening back through it and Travis dropped some absolute gems when it comes to the topic of believing and investing in yourself, including the ridiculous amount of money that Travis has spent on personal development. He just gives all the numbers out. And it's still mind-blowing to me when I hear just the sheer amount of

1:01financial investment that Travis has put into himself. It is absolutely wild. And there's that. There's how to build more confidence. This is a really great 20 minutes of just Travis dropping pure gold. And so, yeah, that's what you're going to listen to right now. Let's get into it. Whatever I had, like Dan Flacian was a great example. Somebody that I just respect a lot. I love the way he builds his businesses. I like the way that I like his philosophy. I love how much of a giver and connector he is. There's just a lot of things that I like about him. So I wanted to connect with him. So I joined his mastermind. Now, I was 100 grand. I did it two years in a row. It's like when I look back at the last six, seven years, six years, it's been like $400,000 or something that I invested directly into me. And like I said, some people might frown on the pay-to-play for relationships thing. But it's like, I never look at it like paying for a relationship. I look at it as paying for an opportunity to create a relationship. That's not guaranteed. It's not guaranteed at all. There's a lot of people that come into groups like that. Again, especially when you get to the higher price,

2:03when you get to like the higher price tags like that, like you pay a hundred K for a group, the expectations are through the roof on what you're going to receive from this group. It's like, I paid a hundred K. I better get this and this and this and I better get that. I better get this thing. And like you become this like this vacuum of value where you just want to suck all the value out of everything that you can possibly get instead of coming into the group and changing your mindset into how do I add value. And it's a really weird do that when you're the one that paid that much money to be in there. But like I said, the goal for me when I jump into rooms like that is to leave the room with real relationships and friendships. And obviously, the friendships with the people in the group is much more attainable because when you go to the events, they're not running around making sure the events going really well. But through the years, that's what's allowed me to create close good relationships. A lot of people in that group, in the 100-million-mastron mine group, which has led to business in several different businesses that I have. It's led to different business partnerships and it's like, it's completely multiplied. Every time I've made one of those decisions to just invest on a high level

3:05back into myself and at the beginning it was really, really scary. I threw it all on a 0% credit card when I first started. I filled up, it was a $42,000 credit limit. Wow. And it was 0% interest. And I filled it up with coaching, masterminds, my website, travel events, going to events, hotels, flights, all of it for investing directly into me. But by the end of that zero interest period, which I think was like 12 to 18, I think maybe 18 months, I think it was a chase freedom unlimited. It was a personal card. It wasn't even a business card, which was a mistake that I learned at the time. If you're getting credit cards, put it in the LLC because it doesn't go against your personal credit. Right. Anyway, I filled up that card for you $2,000. But before I ever paid a diamond interest, I paid off the whole card with income from the business that I was building. It was a big risk. I hesitate to say that sometimes on podcast because I don't want people to go out and pull out a credit card and make dumb decisions. But to me, it was like I was never buying new equipment and getting myself a MacBook and

4:06I wasn't spending my money on fun, frilly, television, gaming systems, type things that I could have convinced myself I needed for my business. I had a $60 USB microphone for the first three years of my podcast. You know what I mean? With a Zoom or Skype. Yep, me too. But I was 40 grand in on events and hotels and masterminds and relationships and all these other things, which are the real things that are going to make sure that you actually have a business and a way to continue making money in the next three to five years. So it was always a factor of like once it worked, once the first time worked, where it was like, oh, I can act like John, we've hung out. Now I get invited to this event, in Australia, I'm a speaker at this event in Australia, not a podcasting event. And like all the other speakers we had, speakers were treated afterwards and I find myself hanging out with Pat Flan and Jordan Harbin general, these other people that are big names in that podcasting world. And now I'm just hanging out with me and my wife and like eight or nine of these speakers because I met this one person

5:07who did this thing, who invited me to this thing and I went to it and I flew all the way to Australia for the first time to watch John speak and connect with podcasters that were there. And then that connected me to the event host who invited me back as a speaker the next year because he saw that my podcast was going well. It was just every single piece of that was just like, oh, this this actually worked. So why don't I try doing that again and then again and then again. And then you know, the network just continues to expand because it becomes easier to add value once you become a more valuable individual. Right. Now it's like I can add more value to John in a single email introduction than I could with three days of my time five years ago. I mean, so much easier when you start building valuable connections and becoming like I said, a person of value, your network always increase in direct proportion to the amount of value that you can add to others. Absolutely. And that's why it's always so important to continue working on yourself as well. Yeah. And I think just one other piece that you brought up there is that don't is to not get hung up on the wrong things like needing the perfect equipment or the right studio or like

6:09to get started. It's just get started. Yeah. Get started and follow the bread crumbs. Yes. Like when this person introduced me to this person or this person recommends this book, go read it. You know what I mean? Well, I believe that's the universe, God, whatever you want to call it. Like dripping you these bread crumbs is just like keep keep just doing the next right thing. Totally. That's all you can see. Yeah. Is the next step. The next step. And you can't even though you can be thinking 10 years ahead, you don't necessarily have the forset for for site for how all of those bread crumbs are going to link together until you're looking backwards. And you now are telling the story and it all makes sense why you needed to go meet this person in order to get to this relationship in order to have this experience and gain this skill. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. Yeah. That's Steve Jobs nailed it on that speech for sure. I think that that the dots are only joined looking back. It's just it's the only it's the only way it's the only way to do it is you just got to take the first step and not know how it's going to unfold. That's why I have like like when I picture myself in five or

7:1010 years, it's really like specific to a certain task. Yeah. It's more like what do I want my life to look like. So I have a doc it's called in in five years. And it just describes my ideal day in five years. Where am I waking up? What am I looking at when I wake up? What's the view that I have and my drinking coffee? Like what? Like I try to picture everything in my life that I want to have there. But I also know like it is almost almost useless to try to think the exact way that it's going to happen. Even though like I'm going to picture how my life how I want. And then reverse engineer the work that's going to take to get that. Right. With also remaining change ready. While also remaining at the same time saying like okay well this path is kind of closing before me. So why don't I just kind of like alter and go on this path and see where that leads to. Just being adaptable. Yes. The things as they unfold. Absolutely. I mean you this is why you're such a high value person and you hang out with so many high value people. Why you have so many friends. Why you have the show and the success that you do. I'm just curious given that you have talked to

8:13some of the best in the business. Who were there any people that you were just like so excited to interview or talk to and who are they and was there anybody that you met that surprised you and wasn't who you thought they would be or how they would be. So the it's funny because I used to not have a good answer for this question and then I interviewed Shaq and now he's my answer to that question every single time that's asked because it wasn't just a it wasn't just like a cool thing because it's Shaq and everybody knows who he is and he's obviously a big personality and there's plenty of things to talk about. It was that he was my childhood hero. Like he was painted on the wall in my room growing up. I had pictures and bobble heads and plaques and jerseys and everything was Shaq. It's a big basketball fan and I was in LA County. I grew up in LA County so the Lakers were my team and the 2000 2001 kind of Shaq Kobe Lakers were my team and so when me and my friends would play basketball outside it was like my buddy would be Kobe and I would be Shaq you know. When I got the opportunity to talk with them it was it was just like a complete really cool full circle moment

9:16because I had looked forward to a conversation with Shaq since I was like six. Yeah seven. So that was an easy one now to answer. The was there anybody that surprised me? Yes but never in like a really negative way it was just kind of like oh I wasn't expecting that but it never never there was never one where I like reached out to somebody that was like really well known and we had a conversation and I was like well that sucked. Right. Yeah. Well actually I take that back because there was one there was one that like it was it's almost kind of like well known. I'm not going to say his name but it was kind of well known in the in the podcast there's like inner circle of podcasters that had interviewed this guy and I like reached out to them after I did it and they all totally agreed. Yeah same exact experience but he's like a famous business author that has yeah like I said I'm not going to say that I'm not going to throw him another bus but that one was like what what did what do we even just talk about? Right. Did you even hear my question? Are you even hello? Are the lights on? Yeah right yeah it was it was it was odd to say the

10:17least so yeah that was that was an interesting one but the majority of them would just be surprising in a way that like oh we took the conversation somewhere I wasn't expecting. Yeah yeah and I guess just to wrap this conversation because you've given so much valuable advice and just perspective for the person that's you know where you and I were at the beginning of our journeys or maybe they're a little bit further along but they haven't yet seen the results kind of fully come to fruition and they're wondering should I keep doing this should I keep investing like I feel like I've been trying I feel like I've been putting one foot in front of the other but like their big opportunity hasn't come yet or they haven't gotten that break or had that big revenue month or whatever it is like what do you say to those people who are like yeah that sounds great and I'm so glad you made it and things have worked out for you but they're in a season of self-doubt yeah I'm a I never try to get people to have the same dreams that I have so that being said my number one piece of

11:20advice is always try to go get more clarity increase your level of self-awareness and ask yourself is this what I want if you're like sometimes if you're feeling extremely burnt out it's just it's just because you're not aligning with who you really want to become and you're chasing this version of success that isn't meant for you like you're you're climbing a mountain that you don't want to climb and that to me is a pretty poor case scenario is if you work on something for a really long time because you feel like that's what you should be working on you climb up this mountain you get to the peak and you're like I actually wanted to be on the top of that mountain right not this mountain so sometimes you might just be climbing the wrong mountain and it's worth just taking a step back and getting some clarity around around you know I'll just go spend time on myself is what I do yeah luckily I have I have a really understanding and supportive wife who allows who allows me to take off sometimes just for like a day or two by myself keeps the kids at home and I just get up by myself I smoke cigar with I try to for me it's like smoke in a cigar with a really good view I just I think think really well when I'm just like enjoying a good view smoke in a cigar and

12:22thinking by myself not with my friends I'm not on social media I'm talking about you being with you and by the way if you can't do that or if that sounds daunting and that's a really big issue and probably is the underlying problem of why you're not getting what you want because you don't have a good relationship with yourself yeah you can't spend a time alone with yourself without having to get on social media or calling somebody or talking to somebody else it's an indication that you are not okay with the version of you that you currently are there's something that you you don't trust yourself so you don't even like spending time with you and if you don't like spending time with you how do you expect anybody else to like spending time to like you know actually want to spend time with you so it that's like kind of bear like baseline because when somebody gave me that advice I was 21 or 22 I was like you're out of your mind it's an entire day by myself it wasn't what what would I do I don't even know like what do you talk about it sounds like the act of a crazy person you know but like now it's like when I go speak at something or like you know I was in Dallas couple weeks ago doing a few live podcasts on stage at some business conference I went by myself I was on there for three days I was looking forward to it I spent the entire day

13:24by myself like they invited me out to go like party you know that night with some of the event you know happenings or whatever and most of the time I would do those things because again I'm a networker and I like going to those types of things I think there's more value sometimes in going and hanging out with people after the event and there isn't even like sitting next to them at the event right so it was out off out of character for me but I was like no I think I'm just gonna go take myself out to dinner and go see a movie and like just be with me be with my thoughts think think for a little bit get some get some clarity get some grounding again and again like if if you can't do that there's there's some there's some things that are happening and it's probably the fact that you just don't trust yourself there's there's you're telling yourself you're gonna do stuff and you don't do it and you have you have no self confidence because you'd never keep the promises you make to yourself and and that's probably why you're not achieving the things that you want to achieve because you're never doing the things that you know that you should be doing and so you have this really negative relationship with you and then ever that that negative perception of yourself rubs off on everybody around you and it prohibits you from moving forward

14:28but then the if you do go out by yourself and actually sit down and and have that time I think that I think that you just kind of gain more clarity around what you want where you're headed and and do you want those five-year stocks that that helps me yeah like literally like I think of every moment of that day what is what is that what does that mean you know like I want to wake up and I want my curtains to open automatically like timed curtains at 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. or whatever yeah open up and then the sunrise and the sun pours into my room and I can get that light first thing in the morning and I want a coffee maker right here so that I can just have coffee that's already poured waiting for me like there's just certain things that I that I know that I want yeah and so it's it's a realigning of who I am who I am currently what I want in the future and who do I need to become in order to have that and am I on the road to becoming that person and if not that I need to adjust change paths or something yeah but yeah so hopefully hopefully that

15:29absolutely that's like a mic drop for everything you just said for the person who's afraid and avoiding being with themselves and the realities that might appear when they actually do slow down enough and the person that is committed but needs to remember why they started and what they're really really what they really really want and need to be reignited or that how much that's worth it yeah because you become away with that and you know that that's still the version of life that you want then it's just a it's just part of it right you're gonna have slumps and you're gonna feel like crap for like weeks at a time sometimes it's just it if you're doing again if you're ever want to do anything extraordinary those times will come it's just a matter of like you have to learn how to deal with those times and you have to learn how to mitigate stress you have to learn practices that take you out of feeling anxious and put you into feeling productive you know just if you come away from time with yourself and you're still like nope I still know that this is definitely like for me right now this is where I gotta go but I still feel like I'm a slump

16:30you it's just it's part of the journey well and I say too you can make that slump mean two things that I'm not cut out for this it's not gonna happen for me maybe I missed my shot you can make it mean that or you can if you knew without a shadow of doubt and in those moments of quiet with yourself you remember like if this is this is my path this is gonna happen for me and if I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would have that life what would I make this season of my life mean right now oh totally and that means oh uh that I was just part of the process yeah and I think that's one perspective that doing a podcast helps with tremendously because I talked to so many people and get so many people's versions of their story and what happened the upsides and the downsides and the good times and the bad times and every person but I've ever interviewed that's has any level of success with no exceptions has had bad times happen so if you're if you're feeling that way and you look into the future and you can see the version of success that you're going to

17:33attain and you believe that it's going to happen like I would rather believe that's gonna happen than believe it's not gonna happen because we really don't know you know because love is a world yeah right exactly but you can choose to believe that it won't or choose to believe that it will and if you choose to believe that it won't it's just gonna end in anxiety and stress and depression or other things we choose to believe that it will can lead to a path of opportunity and positivity you know what I think so why not choose to believe that it will if I choose to believe that it will then I can look back at this part of the story and like would I always tell myself in bad times is like this is gonna make a really cool part of my story something if you just frame it that way I agree one day when I want when I'm on stage in front of 10,000 people or when I'm riding my New York Times bestseller or when I'm emailing my million plus subscriber email list or whatever you know whatever success means to you or whatever when when I'm telling this story to my even if it's not if you don't have aspirations of stages or books or podcasts or any of those things and you just want to be successful and have a good family it's like when I'm telling my grandkids the story of how I built generational wealth for our family from nothing like what part of the

18:37story is this going to be right this is this is just gonna be one of those one of those parts where now my grand kid is going through something and they're 19 and they think it's the end of the world and I can be like hey I was 30 yeah and I was going through this really difficult time and I thought that's 11 years old than you are right and it was really really difficult if you're gonna go down that path this things are gonna happen but look at where we are now because you stay committed to the process and you're an awful long term you're committed like you know what I mean it's just how are you going to frame that time in your mind because when I think of back to the version of me that was so upset and so so just like felt back-sabbed by people who like didn't believe in me and you know the friends that just completely ghosted me and how sad I was about that you know I could have never seen where I would be now and how that would all come full circle and how it would all end up okay you know but I would tell myself like looking back on those stages where they were there were hard times and there will be hard times in the future is just like how can I stay connected to that that way of thinking that like this two shall pass and this is part of it and

19:44you don't know how it's gonna end up right so it's like it's actually gonna be okay and I think people need to hear that especially when they're in in the season that like I don't know if I'm gonna make it out of this yeah but if you don't quit and you you stay committed to it like you and I have talked to many many many many many successful people they didn't get there as a byproduct I'm not failing or not going through those hard times so just know that you're in good company yeah right exactly yeah and by the way you have permission to take the day off you know like I wish somebody would tell me that earlier you don't when when sometimes that you're feeling that way you're just you're just feeling that way yeah emotions are fleeting like we're part of the human experience is experiencing the entire range of emotions that we have it are supposed that's what makes us different like we we will have you will be emotional and you will have those emotions now you don't want to make a habit of just not doing something when you don't feel like it obviously you always want to make sure that you're pushing through those things but every once in a while if you're just

20:44like if you're not feeling it and it's four o'clock and you know that you know you got another two hours left and it's just like I don't even know what I'm doing this for you having this identity crisis like sometimes it's okay just be like you know what I'm just gonna pick it up back in the morning because it could literally just be that you need some sleep yeah it's okay to take your foot off the gas because sometimes slowing down is the best way to speed up yeah you need to rehydrate like literally it could just be the fact that you're but you're dehydrated and you're tired yeah so take take off early watch your favorite show on Netflix for an hour drink some water and go to bed early and get a get a fresh start in the morning have some athletic grades have some age you want you know what I mean yeah it always brings me back to life some delicious vitamin of edgyman I love you for that