Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
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From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift, this is the Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, The Drop. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Jon Gafford, and welcome to your Weekly Drop. And I got to tell you, man, I have failed. I mean, absolutely. Crash and burn miserably failed.

And as the saying goes, if you don't fail, you probably aren't accomplishing very much either. And in life, the ball will get rolling, right? Sometimes you can just do no wrong. Confidence is strong. One success leads to the next. But if you're somebody like me that has a lot of balls in the air and business and relationships and ideas and concepts and things you want to do, you're going to miss way more than you connect with.

And I win a lot, but man, I fail a lot. And sometimes those failures come really close together and start to compile on them a little bit. And so when that happens for me, a couple of things that I know, number one, I've probably drifted too far away from my process of how I deal with failure. So today in this podcast, I want to explain to you exactly what my process is for dealing with these things.

But I also go back and revisit some books that I love. Obviously, Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way. My good friend Ari Rastegar, his book The Gift of Failure, pick it up on Amazon, great book. But all of these little things to remind me of how to deal with these things. And when failure comes, dude, for me, it can be gut-wrenching because I have sometimes ideas that I fall in love with. And I'm the first one to say I fall madly in love with my own ideas.

And when they don't come to fruition or they fail, it's almost like for me, an artist that paints a painting and then people think it sucks, right? It's almost how it feels because I take it so personally because so much of what I attempt to do, it is very personal to me, as I'm sure it is to you. And if you don't properly deal with those losses as they come up,

then it's gonna be a real problem. And it's funny, coming out next week on Tuesday, listen to this, I had Mikey C Rock, who's a good friend, who I had him on the podcast, his episode comes out next Tuesday, and just talking about, he wrote a book called Rocket Fuel, How to Turn Failure into Success, and it was the best analogy I'd ever heard for something he adopted at a very early age. He said it's either the trunk or the tank when something happens. You either put it in the trunk or the tank.

And what he meant by that was if you put something in the trunk, if you think about that metaphor, it's like heavy, the back of the car, the vehicle goes sags down because it's towing all of this stuff. It's carrying all of this stuff. But the tank, man, that's what makes the thing go. So he says whenever adversity jumps up and bites him or he fails, he looks at it and goes, am I going to use this? Where's this going? It's a two choices. There's no more than two choices. That's it.

It's going to the trunk. It's going in the tank and I wanted to kind of show you and and tell you how I turn things from Instead of putting them in the trunk and I put them in the tank The first thing is this I would tell a story my daughter had a situation where? Something that she loves and she works very very hard at is not necessarily going her way and right now and

And, you know, my first reaction to that as a father is, well, make yourself undeniable. Like if you're undeniable, then you can't get bumped out of the spot that you're trying to earn.

That's my first like earn it, everything or nothing given thought process. But then you start thinking sometimes some of this stuff is a little bit outside your control. And my wife wanted me to talk to her right away about it because my wife is very much super high EQ, very, you know, she's an empath, very empathetic, wanted to try to help baby bear right away.

And I say, and my daughter is very much like me or her. She's very much like me. And I said, Nope, you know what? I'm a letters. I'm gonna let it stinger for like two days because me, when I first take that loss or something bad happens, I got to let it sting me for a couple of days. I got to sit in it. And what I mean by that is I've got to, I've got to let it hurt. Right? I don't want to hear a solution. I don't want to hear, uh,

I don't, I'm not ready to decide whether I'm going to put it in the trunk or the tank. It's just going to sting me for a minute and I got to deal with that. So let it stay that for a couple of days. I say, okay, I need to do my failure blog. I need, I need to hit the failure blog and I need to go through this and I start dissecting whatever happened as though it was a school project.

I'm looking for what happened. And so what I want to write out, I write on top of my blog and I have a little personal blog journal, whatever you may call it, that I keep track of this stuff. And I write out exactly what it was because five, 10 years from now, I may not even remember what these ideas were. I write exactly what the concept was. If there was a financial loss that was involved in that deal, I write out what that financial loss was. If it was an emotional loss, I write out how it made me feel. Whatever that loss was in the moment, I write out.

The next thing I write down is, why do I think it failed? Why do I think this did not work? And I write out every reason why I think it may have gone south. Now, some of that is internal, some of that is external. Like for example, in a business that I had that failed, that did not get the traction I wanted, I just didn't hire enough people to make it work.

I depended on myself to make like all these outbound sales calls to get to gain interest in this product. And I don't time for a bunch of outbound sales calls. It's just not something that I have time in the day to do with enough. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify is there to help you grow. Shopify helps you sell everywhere from their all-in-one e-commerce platform to their in-person POS system. Shopify has got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into

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That's $50 off with code POD at BlueNile.com. This is to make this work. So I wrote that down. I wrote, you know, couldn't reach the proper market. So before I went forward with this idea, I should have made sure I had a marketing channel to actually get to all of these people that I wanted to find because it was a very small sect of people and there was really nowhere for me to find to get to them.

You know, the next thing I wrote on there was, you know, maybe the price point was bad. Maybe, you know, I should have gone, I should have gauged interest before I went all in on some expenses. And then below that, I write, what could I have done better? What am I going to learn that I won't repeat? Like, what will I not do again that I won't repeat?

With this particular example that I'm talking about, I wrote things like, A, do not depend on yourself to be the sales force. You don't have time. You won't do it. I just wrote, you won't do it. You don't have time. You will not do this. You will not be your own sales force. You can't do anything else ever again where you are dependent to be the sales force. You don't have time. Don't tell yourself you'll do it because you won't. Two, it was like, don't spend money blindly, assuming this is going to happen, because...

You haven't gauged market interest yet. You don't know that you can reach the people you need to reach. That is probably, just to tell you in failure, that's probably my biggest issue is I have such blind belief in my ability and skill sets that I will drive headfirst into something. I'm like, yeah, book the room. Sign the $30,000 contract to book the room. We're going to fill it. It's like, wait a second. Maybe you need to pump the brakes. And the problem is

I probably wait too long in between times I go to my failure journal because just because I write it out and just because I write out the lessons that I need to learn,

doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to remember them when it's time to remember them. In my office, so many people have trophies. They have great accomplishments of their life. If you look around my office, I have wonderful things of failure as trying to keep it in my face as reminders. I know that sounds like a terrible thing, but it's lessons that I've learned. I have a $100,000 bottle of vitamins on my desk. If you ever come to my office, I have a $100,000 bottle of vitamins.

Did I pay a hundred grand for a bottle of vitamins? No, but we put up paid a hundred thousand dollars for all the other vitamins that we bought with that one for a failed multi-level marketing company. It didn't go anywhere. Lessons learned from that. I have a script from a television show in my office that I was asked to go read for right after the apprentice, which was written by a guy named David who did like Willie grace and all these big sitcoms. And they saw me on the apprentice and they wanted me to come read.

And when I read the script, they wanted me to read for the lead of this thing, flew me to New York to do it. And they wanted me to read for the lead. And I read in the lead that the character was slightly overweight, kind of chubby by no means man candy. And I was like, Whoa. And then the description of another character was loud, obnoxious. Thinks think Vince Vaughn from swingers. So I went to this casting appointment and told these people, uh, you know, Hey, I walk in and I go, I think there's been a mistake. I think you want me to read for this other thing.

And the guy just looks around with a camera and goes, dude, you can read for whatever you want. And then later on, my friends that are actually in that business are like, no, no, no, the descriptions don't mean anything. You should have just said, but the fact that I went and changed what was happening, obviously I didn't get a call back. Thank God that show never got made because that would sting any worse. But that script is a permanent reminder of never go into a business meeting assuming that I know what the other people want to do. Just don't do it. So,

Turning your failures, like again, you can't put them in the trunk. You got to put them in the tank. And the way to do that is for me, utilizing that journal, write it out, write out what went wrong. And this is with everything that happens to you. And for some people that might not want to write, that's okay. You need a mentor. You need somebody that

confidant that you can talk this out with and say, listen, I don't want you to tell me what you think happened. I don't want you to give me advice. I just want you to listen to me purge this out. But the key to surviving huge amounts of failure is 1000% finding the lessons within. It's the basis of stoicism. It's what Ryan Holiday writes about

in his great book, The Obstacle is the Way, which if you haven't read that, that is the number one book I always recommend. I talk about books a lot on this because I read a lot, but that is the number one book I always recommend everybody go get is The Obstacle is the Way. That book probably changed my life personally more than anything else. It is a goal one day to have Ryan on the podcast. I'm going to get there. We'll have him on. But you got to do something with it. Wallowing in it is not going to happen. It's not going to make any better. And the last thing I'm going to talk about

When you fail, don't hang your hat on outside forces as why you failed because that makes you a victim and it makes you out of control. When the reason for the failure or the major things that happened that caused it are you and within you, you are in control because now you have the power to change it. Like they say at Die Hard, man, I talk about it all the time, the henchmen at Die Hard, no one is coming to save you.

to save yourself. We'll see you next week.

What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.

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