Resilience and Further Proof Colt is a Pod Person EP 36
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From the art of the deal to keeping it real. Live from the Simply Vegas studios, it's The Power Move with Jon Gafford. Back again, back again, back again, back again.

You know what, guys? I don't even know. I don't even know what episode we're on. Seven. No, it's not seven. Seventeen. I do know this. No, I do know we're still maintaining our north of 10,000 subscribers, which I like. So thank you very much if you are a subscriber to the podcast. This is The Power Move. I'm your host, John Gafford. To my left, we have Colt, the Mormon City Viper. Oh.

Oh, I like that. Mormon City Viper. That was a good one. Yeah, I told you I had a good one today. I know, I had a good one today. You're talking about the Mormons and this is why he comes with it. No, we're not talking about Mormons, but you're from Utah. You're from Utah, so here you go. Mormon Town Viper, I like it. And as always also, the counselor Chris Connell. How are you, sir? Living the dream. Living the dream indeed.

Well, you know, today I want to talk about something on the podcast that we're going to talk about. We've got some current events that we've got to talk to. But the main idea that we're going to talk about today is resiliency. Because I think a lot of people, you know, you see the memes with the guy digging for the gold and then it's just on the other side and he quits and like, I'm going to get a beer and all that stuff. And I think there's a lot of jokes about it. But I think a lot of people don't realize that when you look at

People that function at a high level or people that have great success, they do it through resiliency. One of the things when people talk back to my apprentice days that I was the most proud of, I've talked about it before on the show, is the fact that when they gave us personality tests to get on the show in the first place, and I tested higher in resiliency than any other candidate ever did. And I'm actually kind of proud of that when you look at the people that were on that show. I thought it was pretty good. So I want to talk about it today in detail, but there's a couple things we want to talk about first. Obviously, finally, you know...

Back to football. Let's talk about it. Talk about resiliency. Yeah. Was he going to retire? Was he going to retire? Of course he's going to retire. He had to wait to get his bonus as it came up. But here's the question. Did you see the retirement text? Did you see the Instagram text? I did. Brady retired. I saw it. Colt, do you even know what football is? No. Who's Tom Brady? Who's Tom Brady? Exactly. He's not Tom Brady. Who's Tom Brady and why should I hate him is the question you've got. I know. No. But the big controversy, obviously, is he came out and thanked basically every single member of the Bucs organization down to the

Waterboy and the person that handed him his jock every day and made no mention of that other little football program that he happened to play with for several years. The New England Patriots. The Patriots or anybody else remotely associated with that. New England is mad, big mad. I know, they're huge mad about it. Big mad. So here's the question, all right? I'm going to give you guys a several part question. Number one, should...

Tampa Bay, retire Tom Brady's jersey just to pour salt in the wound as quickly as possible. A thousand percent. How do you not? Yeah, you have to. I walked in and got you a bowl. Who did you have, Jameis Winston or something? Who was the guy before that? I think they're going to get Jameis back if you want to be honest. I mean, I don't know. They don't care. They got a vacation. Yeah. You know.

No, I think that's it. So if I'm the Bucs, I think I'm hanging the jersey as fast as I can just to pour salt in the wound. And Gronk. And Gronk. And Gronk retiring both. Just to be a complete troll, throw up eight Bs too. But, okay, that begs the next question. How big of an asshole is Belichick? I mean, is it that bad? I think they were both smart enough to know they needed each other.

For a while, and I don't think that relationship was as strong as good as people assumed it was. I don't. Right? Like, I think people know, hey, we can be partners because we're making money together. I mean, it's just like band members. You see them on stage, you think things are great, and you find out they don't talk to each other for years. Thank you for Oasis for keeping it real. Just go ahead and kill yourself right on stage. Yeah.

But I think that's where it was. I think they were smart enough to know, hey, we got a good thing. We're making a lot of money. We're having great careers. Let's not mess it up. Right. But I don't think there was a love there. John and I were talking about that yesterday. Actually, you guys were talking about, oh, we only do the handshake deals with the handshake deals. No. I get that. But at the end of the day, though. Okay. One of us was saying that in the meeting. When you're in business together, you know, there has to be a certain amount of deference, right? Yeah.

Like these people that look at individuals and their organizations as pawns are impossible to work with. Belichick looked at you as an X and O. If you can do this for me, I'll keep you. If not, I will cut you faster than a day long. So he did that with all these players. He tried to trade away Gronk. Gronk retired to not be traded. But Belichick didn't care. He didn't develop any sense of interpersonal relationships with anybody. The first time he tried in his career was with Cam Newton.

- Yeah, how that works. - How that works, yeah. - 'Cause if you treat people poorly, if you treat them as units of capital or labor, right, you're not gonna get any interpersonal connection at the end of the day. So I have no sympathy for that. - You know, I feel like this is, we gotta pivot away from this 'cause I can see Colt just, I can see his eyes just rolling off, blazing over. But let's talk about, you know, we try to educate you about things, how the world works, but you and I got an education this weekend. - Sure. - I think it was amazing.

Connell and I actually went to our very first quinceañera, which was Colt's daughter, which was amazing, which was a beautiful event.

There was a lot of things. What made it so cool, I think, for the gringos that were there were we didn't know it was going to happen. It was like a surprise party for us. Yeah. Because there's like a lot going on there. Surprise wedding. Yeah, it is. It was like a wedding with no groom. Well, it cost the same. Well, that was the whole thing. So quinceanera for the gringos means 21, and that's the legal drinking age of Nevada. Yeah.

You were plying Colt's daughter with liquor all night. I was slipping her booze like crazy. Quinceanera means, what I'm told, 21. Yes, 21. So in Mexico, I think it's something else. Yeah, it means something different. So in America, quinceanera is a big deal because you can finally go to Marquis. You can finally drink. You can finally go to Marquis. I appreciate both coming. I know it's kind of a...

You guys all had early mornings and stuff, but man, the DJ had to finally cut it off. It got a little drunk fest. You know what I'm saying? I was so sick at one point. I looked at Gidget and I go, do you think I could just go lay down in the car? You guys finish this up. I wanted to go lay in the car. Not from drinking. My call was raging. Yeah.

But Quinceañera is very interesting. I mean, it's a huge, huge deal. People don't realize. And, you know, it was funny leading up to it. You guys include it, but everybody. What do I wear? What's a gift? What's this? What's that? People haven't gone to it. And, you know, I think when I tell people wear a suit or, you know, maybe this is how much money I give them, I think people are like, really? And it's a wedding. Yeah. It was costly. It was legit. No, you can tell. Mariachi was good. Well, you can tell.

Well, Mario Archie was good. You can tell, though. That's big business, man.

oh that that cat that cat that was running the hole brought the dancers and doing the announcements and stuff and i'm getting the feeling that was like the third time they had done that routine that day probably yeah it was that was a serious hustle on it but no it was it was a lovely event it was it was awesome i appreciate you guys coming yeah a lot of cowboy hats a lot of cowboy hats and sunglasses i like that what's funny is that is something that people don't realize is how underserved sometimes markets are yeah yeah so you get this huge cultural event i mean that is

You could buy a car probably for what you spent on a quinceanera. I gave my daughter the option. I told my daughter, I go, what do you want, a quinceanera or the car you want? Literally the car you want, right? So she might still be able to buy one because at least you had a lot of guests there. But at the end of the day, you're talking about underserviced markets, and I know you guys have done that with Clear Title. She's smart. She leveraged you to get to us. She's getting them both. That right there, you know what that is? Let me see if I have the power move.

Yeah, that gets the actual horn power move noise. It gets the one. Good job, Mia. That's a power move. You guys have done that recently with Tidal, haven't you? What's that? Walked into an underserviced Latino market. Yes, we have. Yeah, our office that we opened, we vertically integrated a Hispanic brokerage here in Las Vegas. I'm not going to say a brokerage is Hispanic because that's just stupid. No, no, no, but it can cater. No, this particular company caters primarily to that demographic. A lot of their agents are Hispanic, a lot of their clients aren't.

In the first month we're open there, they opened 21 files last month. You know what? It's just one of those things to me where people overlook those underserviced markets. If you're going to walk in, find that niche that works, right? If you want to talk about a business lesson, my friend who's a prominent DJ in town, he's a Latino gentleman. Wait, what does he do? I'm sorry. What's his job? He is a DJ. Sorry.

Okay, no more sound effects. Now I know where it is on the board. I can't help but think about it. He manages a bunch of venues and stuff. So they had this one venue that was sort of underperforming as a thing. So he's like, no, no, no, we're making this Latino. Like, we're going Latino. We're going Latin. Line up around the block now. Because if you cater to people that...

Here's the other thing, though. Latinos know how to party. Yeah. They know how to drink. They know how to party. But they know how to enjoy themselves culturally, right? It's a good time culture in my experience. So, you know, finding those underserviced markets, I bet you there are a ton in this town. Oh, sure. Where people are not catering to them, other than maybe a couple of handful of people. Yeah.

No, the guy obviously had the quinceanera down. I mean, dude, there was pyro, which for the record, when it went off the first time, I was like, okay, we're going to have a straight up great white event in this place. This dude is bouncing repetitive sparklers off of a drop ceiling and

I mean, a solid 60 seconds at a time. It wasn't bouncing. It was gushing. It was gushing into the drop ceiling. Fire hosing into the ceiling. Yeah, I definitely looked for the fire escape. Yeah, I thought we were going to have that, and then the floor was moving. You guys, like I said, left, but the dance floor got crazy, and it was moving. I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to collapse the dance floor. It was interesting. But, no, the niche market, and sometimes people don't realize how –

I mean, my wife does very well, and a lot of it's the Hispanic community, right? But I always see Hispanic agents trying to get away from that. They want to go do million-dollar deals. And the story I always say about that is I knew a guy in California. He was a number three –

agent and all of coldwell banker in all of california number one was some guy out of la jolla number two was malibu and you got this guy selling little properties in indio california volume and he just volumes but they'll refer you five ten fifteen different people you know loyalty because you know it's like if we go to mexico and want to buy a property we're probably going to look for the guy that speaks english and whatever you know so i'm on day 700 of duolingo spanish i would love

Chris was doing good. I thought Chris was the opposite. We kind of had, you know, the English-speaking crowd over here, Spanish-speaking crowd. There was definitely a line. And Chris went over there and had fun. It was like the Rio Grande right through the middle of that party. Yeah, it was. I went straight to John Wayne over there, and I went to go hang out with the.

Yeah, we found out they had like all Don Julio in 1940. They had all the good stuff too. All we had to do was hablar un poquito espanol. And all of a sudden, the good tequila came out. Chris Day for a while, your daughter was super cute. She was my little buddy. My little buddy. You educated us

about... You educated us about Quinceanera, so thank you very much for that. McConnell educated me and you this week about something. And I got to tell you, if you are an NFT person, which I support a couple NFT projects because I actually know the people that are running them, that's fine. But...

If you want to understand the blockchain or NFT, this was the best thing I have ever seen on it because I don't think this guy has a dog in the, he didn't have a dog. It was very, it was an objective. Dude, it is objective. Go to YouTube right now and Google line goes up the problem with NFTs. And it was jaw droppingly shocking. And when you start to see this guy unravel, you know, the purpose of NFTs, what they're for, what they're the real idea behind it is,

And essentially what he's talking about is I had no idea how clunky the blockchain actually was. So everybody's like, oh, the blockchain's gonna replace everything. Guys, it don't work that well. - Really eye-opening. - Yeah, it was eye-opening how you think it's exact data and everything, this thing. Guys, there's times when you can have two separate validators validate the data on the blockchain and create a split.

And then which one's right? You don't know. Yeah, and you can't fix things. There's no court of law. You can't delete stuff. There's nobody to appeal it to. If your nudes are leaked on it, it's in there forever. This is exactly what I thought. Because at one point, there's one point they're talking about, which things I didn't know about this. If you have a wallet on like MetaMask where they're saying you should put all your medical records. If you have somebody's MetaMask address, you can just drop an NFT into their wallet and-

and put a virus in it that can nuke everything else in their wallet. So imagine this. So I get a picture of, let's say, Kim Kardashian, you know, doing whatever with whatever rapper of the week, and I put it in an NFT and I drop it in Kanye's wallet. It's stuck there because he can't delete it because if he opens it, it nukes everything. It is crazy the exposure you have. Now,

The general consensus of this entire thing, and I really, really like this because this guy broke down and was very, very, very sad. Very well educated. Very well educated. It was not short. This is a two-hour video. Two hours. Two hours. I watched the whole thing. It was enthralling. But essentially, he's talking about, you know, if you look at the reason for NFTs is because the way that crypto works, it's not like a central, cryptocurrencies in themselves are not like a central banking where they can add more currency out. You need some demand in so people can pull profits out.

out. So they're like, we need a vehicle to create, to force people to buy cryptocurrencies. So that we can turn our crypto into money and get it out. And essentially that's what it is. So look, am I saying that there's force? And then they talk about the cult of personality that NFTs become. And you walk through the Wall Street bets mentality where like,

They're like, you know, all these guys are like, you know disillusioned with the future and this is their chance man This is the chance. This is the one chance they have rampant milk to the rampant middle class And if you think about some of the places we've been in some of the meetups we've been to that's the guys in the room like

They perfectly describe the entire crowd of these NFT meetup things we've been to. It was all of these guys. It was spooky, actually. It was. How accurate? It was dead on accurate. The thought process, the socioeconomic background, the education level. The reasons for it. The reasons for it. You can't criticize this because you're just a loser if you don't understand it. You don't understand it, yeah.

You just don't get it, bro. You just don't get it. You don't get it, bro. You don't understand. We sat here in this room a couple weeks ago talking about, no, no, no, I get it. But I don't think you understand why I get it. And what you're not seeing is Eminem's not going to hang out with you because you have the same thing that he does. Right. Right.

It's who's a greater fool. And Eminem can throw half a million dollars away into the ether because someone says, hey, this might appreciate the four million because there's people that want to be in this club and they may get together or whatever. He can take a flyer. I want to say it one more time. Line goes up. The problem with NFTs. Keep going, Cole.

No, I was going to say, I think that, you know, us, we've been through a lot of market crashes. We've seen stuff, right? And I think we're all three business people that look at stuff as show me A, a tangible good, or B, you know, common sense of how this goes. And common sense to me, I always tell people, I get what you're telling me. I don't get what you are telling me because tell me the exit plan. Like we always say, it's a hot potato game. And it's going to be-

You know, you're going to make your money. Some of these guys, if they're smart, they'll get out just like in the 90s. 50% will. 50% will burn. 50% will burn. A lot of people got out of it and they're worth still a lot of money. There's a lot of people that didn't, lost everything. And I think that's what it is. One, is that going to happen? Is that tomorrow? Is that in three or four years? Who knows? But...

People always just assume we're smarter than everybody else. But guess what? Like the Goldman Sachs, those, all these people, they're, they're watching this. They're dumping money in and they'll be the first thing. Well, like it's the little stuff too, man. That's so scary. Like it's,

The thing that I thought was the scariest about it was like, you look at like, even like the good morning, good night in the discords. Like if you're in a discord, do you realize that the good morning, good night, that is programming you. And it is done on purpose. So if you're in a discord and you're using GMGN, good morning, good night, when you're in a discord, you're not doing it.

You have been programmed, my friend. That was done to you. That's not courtesy. That's done for a reason. You know what's really also smart, John? How he pointed out that this is not a zero-sum game. No, it's not. So you always think, okay, we said this too, and I make the mistake of thinking, okay, half the people to the last sale that goes down are going to get burned. Yeah.

all this whole crew, two thirds of it are going to get burned because of gas fees and all that stuff. Fees on top of it and inefficiency. Again, well, that's the inefficiency of blockchain and how easy it is to manipulate because it's not regged. Because like, for example, when your gas fees are sky high trying to make these trades,

A lot of it is because there's bots in there running the damn fees up because the guys that control it. Like the whole purpose of crypto and all of this was to deregulate and get away from the man. Guess what? They're already running all of this. You just don't know it. It's like it's worse than that because you can't see it.

And it's just, it was so eye-opening for me. And look, if you want to make money in NFTs, God bless. I hope you kill it. Best of luck. I just don't want you to be the guy holding a hot potato and understand. Go into it with your eyes open and understand what you're doing. You kind of share it against somebody when you say that, though, right? When you think about it, you're like, hey, I hope you can rob enough banks and not get caught. Right.

Well, you're going to smoke somebody. Yeah, just remember, if you're winning, somebody's going to lose. You are hurting somebody. Somebody's going to lose. There's somebody in the end of the bag, right? And you're not selling any value or whatever. You're gambling. So if you want to take that gamble and you say that we're all soldiers, it's like when the mafia kill each other, right? You knew what the game was. You got involved. So maybe I don't have a ton of sympathy for you. Right.

But there's a lot of institutions now promoting to elderly people, hey, you should have 5% of your portfolio in crypto. I heard somebody say 10% the other day. But again, why are they saying that? Because the banks are people that trust you to do the right thing. But again, the banks and these guys, they're already kind of getting it. They need to get out. They're behind the scenes. They need you to put your money in because they need their money out. It's a grift. We always talk about it. People have no...

no idea how much money is out there and there are funds that can move markets. Whether it's real estate, whether it's stocks, bonds, it doesn't matter. They can move markets and if you don't think they're in the NFT game, the Bitcoin game, you're nuts, right? They're in the marijuana game. They're in everything. These guys have, when you have $40 billion behind you, you can change markets, right? Blackstone and new homes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. What are you going to do? Compete with them? No.

- No, you can't. You're dead. - They can move that market. They can move it way up. - Yeah, anyway. Well, that's enough about NFTs. I think everybody should, if you are investing in NFTs, even if you're doing well, I think you owe it to yourself to watch that, to understand. - A strong perspective. - You gotta treat it like a good gambler. - The problem is I try to be fair and balanced. In my thought process, I've only heard the people and friends that I have that are making money and we're doing this and I'm gonna make a million dollars in NFTs and I'm killing it. That's the only people I've got in my information.

And this wasn't even presented in a way that why this is just the reality of some of this math. And it really does pattern the economic crash. It really does. It's crazy. But now I want to skip over and talk about what we want to talk about for the episode today, which is resilience, which we talked about. So,

You know, I think people really love the other day when we kind of started breaking down Stoicism Little Books. So this is a book called Resilience by Eric Greitens. I'm not going to, of course, read it. We're just going to discuss some high points of it. Can we talk real quick about Joe Rogan and Neil Young? Whatever's going to come out of your mouth, you can say yes. That's stupid, right? Have you noticed everybody's like small town? Who gives a shit if you're off the platform? Neil Young's the biggest person. The other one was some guitarist. Can I tell you the only thing that pissed me off about that?

Did you see the articles this week when they were saying, oh, Spotify's stock crashed because of Neil Young? Dude, every online service provider's stock crashed. Everybody crashed. Neil Young had nothing to do with it. That's not where I was going. Where are you going? Can we just say that probably the worst song ever made is Journey's... Don't Stop Believin'. Don't Stop Believin'. No, no. Worst song ever. Nope, nope. I know the worst song ever made, and I can tell you right now. Well, it's top three. Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. No. Four non-blondes.

What's up? Oh, what's going on? Whatever it is. Dude, I hate. Really? That's interesting. That song? Built This City by Starship. Oh, yeah. Come on. No, no. Oh, no, that's on the same level as Journeys. Unlistenable. So Journeys Don't Stop Believing is so awful because it's the cringiest white man anthem ever made. It just has this thing about...

There's this website called What White People Like. No, no, no, no. Number one song that gets the bros going. What is it? Don't Stop Believing by Journey. No. I disagree. I disagree. What would you say? Mr. Brightside by The Killers. No. You throw Mr. Brightside on the bro. My mom will start. They go crazy. My dad will start.

journey journey by a mile all right okay mr brightside might actually be number two but journey is and i don't like mr brightside you're defending journey that's

I thought you'd have some sort of hatred. It just got so overdone. It was so overdone. People pretending like it's their favorite band. Like, it's not a cool band. This is like saying Europe in the final count is your favorite band. No, no, no, no, no. Whitesnake's my favorite band. You know what it is? If you're a person of a certain age, as I am, I'm older than all of you,

You weren't at the skating rink shooting the duck and a couple of skate changes direction. Dude, that was the pinnacle of your young adolescent life was going to the skating rink. Anybody that did the skating rink, man, that music. I did, yeah. Dude, you told me some stuff about the OG Def Leppard on. Dude, I mean, I had a Def Leppard shirt. I remember when Journey came out. Journey's on my air.

I was young, but I remember it. Did they have the skate? What was the ice skating rink? Well, it was the snowball making competition. But at the end of the day, it's not that I had a problem with Journey in 1986.

My problem with Journey was 2006 when The Sopranos came out, and then everybody rediscovered this goddamn song, and it never went away. Is that like the worst? It was a 20-year break where I hadn't heard it. It's Dreams by Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood Mac. Same thing. I do like that song, but after I'm like, all right, enough of it. Everybody stop putting it on your stories. It's just when it's overdone, it just became this white man anthem for like frat boys in the 2000s.

And it was like, why are you doing this to me? I think Limp Bizkit had that market corner pretty much, I think. He looked old. Throw some break stuff on your end. You want to break stuff anyway. Yeah, I want to hear some Limp Bizkit stuff. Do you need me to fill time now? No, no. I mean, we're going to get started because we're going to lose it. Why are we at 23? Why are we at 23? I got it. All right, well, let's talk about resilience. Let's talk about the show as he always does.

First step to building resilience is to take responsibility for who you are in your life. If you are not willing to do that, stop wasting your time reading this. The essence of responsibility is the acceptance of consequences, good and bad, of your actions. Personal account, yeah, dude, I mean, personal accountability is everything in life. If you are not willing to take, accept that you had something to do with your wins and you had something to do with your failures, it's done. It's weird that you mentioned that when we were specifically talking about Joe Rogan, who came out with that 10-minute statement

where he goes, look, I'm not trying to put out misinformation, but I need to do better. I need to do better at balancing perspective because I have a platform and it's this and that. I didn't mean to, but it turns out that I am. I take responsibility for it. I thought that was huge. Loved it. I thought it was great and I thought it spun the whole narrative on its head. But I don't think people do it.

yeah i still like neil young and his music yeah i'm good with it he can dislike what i have to say or whatever and i take responsibility for it but i still like you neil young yeah and you know what that does yeah it makes him the bad guy which just like i don't need to hate my haters i don't need to put more hate out the energy we talked you know we talked we were talking about that too that that you know like we talked to my daughter people don't talk up or two oh sorry people don't talk down yeah they should talk up

One hundred percent. So somebody's talking mad smack about you. It's because something about you has triggered an insecurity or jealousy in there. And, you know, so when somebody's talking bad about you, think about that way. They're really actually just there's something missing. But more important, I'm going to take that one step further into the realm of personal responsibility.

Because, dude, I've talked shit about people before. Everybody has. And I've tried to get a lot better about it later in life. And the reality of it is now when I feel the need to talk smack about somebody, I say to myself, let's be honest about what is it that they have that I'm somewhat jealous of. And this is an interesting little exercise you can do next time you feel the need to do this. Ask yourself, what do they have that I'm actually sort of jealous of?

And then do one of two things. Look at the flip side of the coin or figure out how to get it. Because like, for example, like sometimes you see people and they're out all the time partying like, oh, look at this guy. He's a drunk. He's always out doing this. And the reality is if you're married, but if you're married with kids and home responsibility, you kind of miss that freedom. So when you look at that and you feel that twinge of jealousy, like this guy just can go out and do whatever he wants and blah, blah. And then you're like, yeah, but he probably wakes up by himself a lot. Yeah.

He's probably home alone a lot. So you got to look at the flip side of the coin. I think if you start bringing it like that to look, but if it's something that they have that you don't, maybe instead of talking smack, maybe reach out and say, Hey dude, that's awesome. How'd you get there? Help me get there.

So swallow the ego a little bit and get in and do that. Well, the ego is number one. You know, the only people I've talked shit about in the recent history are Jackson Mahomes and Brittany Matthews. Oh, my God. OK. Horrible. Sometimes people just deserve it. Sometimes it's not because that's going to cost his brother a million. It's literally because these are what awful people look like. And I don't want their behavior model. He'll cost his brother. And when I see a guy drinking a party and I don't talk shit about that guy, I go, man, I remember that.

That was a great time. It's not like I sit here and look for that either, but I'm just using that as a rough, great example. It is 100%. I sit there and there's some people on social media that bug the shit out of me. I'm talking crap and I'm like, good for them. I am jealous that they can go act a fool on social media because I won't. Good for them to have that. One of my most famous quotes from The Apprentice that I got was, dude, it's to live by.

Stop pointing the finger start pulling the thumb if so if something goes wrong with you instead of looking for the outside source of what caused the pain Look inside to what you could have person looking you do about it What can I have done definitely to make that or what can I do about it? Even if I don't like something? Yeah, well, if you have legitimate grievances Well that brings us to this right here Which is this which is what happens to us becomes part of us resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences they find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives and

In time, people find that great calamity met with great spirit can create great strength, which I really dig. You're either winning or learning. Yeah, dude. Don't try to shuck things off. Use that pain. Learn the lesson and get better. Either win or learn. Yeah, that's it. Get stronger. When we're struggling, we don't need a book in our hands. We need the right words in our minds.

When things are tough, a mantra does more than a good manifesto. You know, I love this. I always say, yeah, I get that. No, I dig this. Cause I always love to say, you know, education without action is entertainment and is great as cult segues are in cold. They are.

Fabulous. I mean, they're just spectacular. And we try to be entertaining. Like if you don't actually take something that you hear here and put it into actual practice, you're not really going to get anywhere. So rather than hopefully if you're listening, take that. We hate Tom Hanks.

and go do something with it. Go to his Instagram page. No, do not. Go to Twitter and let him know. You're going to get some psycho who's going to go injure Tom Hanks now, and then we're going to... No. Again, counselor. Go ahead. Do not reflect the power move or the associates therein. That being said, words, guys, words. Words. Use words. Oh, God. Use your words. There you go. Team Hanks. Team Hanks. But I think that, again, you know, hat...

Prepare for things to go poorly. Make a decision that, look, if something happens to me next time, next time something bad happens to me, what am I going to do? How am I going to react? How am I going to talk myself through it? You don't have to have an actual circumstance in front of you to do before you make a decision on how to handle it. I always tell people, it's like in real estate when we deal with clients,

The reason that our clients are so happy with the agents that we have at Sylvie Vegas and how they're trained to work is we walk through every projected pretty much scenario of what could happen in the deal, good and bad.

And then because it's much easier for them to agree to a hypothetical scenario than one that's actually in front of them. And then once they've agreed to that hypothetical in a previous conversation, if it comes up, it's easier to go back to that previous decision. And it's the same way with yourself. Like you've got to have a process that you develop in your head to deal with stress and deal with problems. Priming. You've got to prime yourself. And if you've never really thought about it,

Now might be a good time to think about it because we're right at the break. So we're going to give you a break. We're going to come back, talk about more about resiliency and how you can apply it to your everyday life. And then Colt's going to probably side, you know, I'm sure he's going to take us somewhere. I got a lot of things on my mind. Yeah, he got a lot of things on his mind, guys. So you'll definitely want to come back. We'll be back in a minute.

Hey, it's John Gafford. If you want to catch up more and see what we're doing, you can always go to thejohngafford.com where we'll share any links that we have things we talked about on the show, as well as links to the YouTube where you can watch us live. And if you want to catch up with me on Instagram, you can always follow me at thejohngafford. I'm here. Give me a shout. Back from the break for part two of today's episode about resiliency, where we're discussing the book Resiliency by Eric Greitens. And yeah, I think if you missed part one,

You should go back and check it out. But if you're here on YouTube, whatever it is, if you're on YouTube, do me a solid. Hit the like and subscribe. And actually, whatever you're listening to us on, if you're on Spotify, if you're on Apple, I normally don't pander for the reviews, but it does help. Yeah, for sure. Why not? I mean, just throw some reviews. Hey, man, it's not hard. Thanks. Five stars. Hopefully, look at it this way. It's kind of like Uber. Okay, it's like Uber, though. There's the driver, and then there's the rider. So I would like you to grade it on me, the driver's performance, and then the driver's performance.

Not so much Colt the Rider's performance. Well, in all fairness, John, you got to be careful because at the Quinceañera, a guy did come up to me and go, hey, are you one of the guys on Colt's podcast? Are you serious? Colt's podcast, bro. Did he say it in Spanish? Colt's podcast. You know what? I don't know why.

I was hoping you guys would die in Egypt. Look, look, look, look, look, I'm not there yet. God willing, one day I'll be sure. But you know, this is boys. This is our podcast. Let's be honest. It is our podcast. And in cult, I just, I don't, would we have more than 10,000 subscribers? We'd have cold. I would. Zero chance. Would you be here? No, no,

No. If Colt wasn't here, would I be here? No. I see you all the time. Spending these times with Colt is the highlight of my life. I appreciate it. There's a lot of Chris's there. Chris became real friendly at the bar. Everybody loved Chris at the bar. Chris was in the bar line, met a lot of my family. Yesterday we jumped on the jet to go to Kansas City and I needed Chris for some stuff that we had to talk about. And he wound up sitting in the back with like

the Russian videographer. And like, like where I would have been like looking for the earbuds about five minutes in, Chris was like, no, I mean, no, I would have asked like,

I mean, I could live in wherever the shit we're talking about. Siberia. She goes, I'm from this small town in Siberia. And it's like, what, like 10 people? No, no, it's very small, though. 650,000. That's not too small. Yeah, that's a major metropolitan city. That's it, yeah. It's Winnipeg. All right, well, let's jump back in to talk about resiliency.

And this says when we're struggling, oh, we talked about that already. This is skipping on that one. You'll have to go backwards and hear that one if you want to do it. One of the reasons you are suffering right now is precisely because the purpose of your struggle is unclear. What are you working toward? What are you fighting for? Who are you going to be? And again, I think that's about having clarity of purpose, clarity of self, clarity of all of those things. If you don't have that,

I think it's like what we say about stoicism. If you don't know to which port you sail, no wind is favorable. Yeah, that is a great statement. And I think it's so funny, man, how these resiliency books go so hand in hand with stoicism. Yeah, I mean, it just really does. I mean, resilience is basically everything, right? Discipline. Because resilience is a form of description of discipline.

And discipline is something that, do you know people that don't struggle with discipline, that it's just completely natural? So do you know people that are highly disciplined that are unsuccessful? And the second part of that question, do you know people that don't struggle with discipline in general? Everybody struggles with discipline. Every single person you've ever met struggles with discipline. Do you get up early? Do you eat the right things? Do you do all these things, right? Everybody struggles with it. Professional bodybuilders that come out on stage and look absolutely elite

They still struggle with their diet. They struggle with the discipline. They look at the cake and they go, whatever. If you don't, you're a psychopath. You're a crazy person if you don't struggle with discipline. I want to give up the, I'll stay up late and party and binge this Netflix show. I'm not going to go to bed early and eat healthy or whatever. That's the number one struggle for a healthy lifestyle. Well, I think the reason that people suffer with discipline is just what this says. They don't know

who they're fighting for. They don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They don't know what they're working toward. They don't know. - Exactly. Look at those people on the path though, like I said, a professional bodybuilder. Their goal is more important to them than the chocolate cookie or the donut. So that direction to, oh, I'm amazing.

That direction, though, keeps them on track because they know what they want. It's a path. I want to be Mr. Olympia. I want to be Miss Nevada. I want that thing. When your goals are more important to you than the bullshit around you, you'll achieve them. It's just a decision. Cookies. Are you going for cookies? You know what season it is. Top five cookies. No, we know what season it is right now.

You guys don't know anybody with little girls if you haven't got that. Oh, is it? It's time. Am I the only one that doesn't like Girl Scout cookies? Yes, you are, Colt. I do not like them. And you should not be surprised by that. You are the only one. Yes, I know. This is more shocking than Star Wars. Girl Scout cookies? Star Wars. I'll listen. You know what? Chris started talking to me, and I don't remember. We started drinking about something about he's on board with my Star Wars sucks. Oh.

Maybe you were drinking too much. I'm pretty sure you did. I'm not. You're not even arguing this, right? Top three cookies? What's your top three cookies? All Girl Scout cookies? No, they wouldn't even make the top 20. Okay, cool. What are your favorites? Just the whole planet. Okay, watch this. Here it comes. Ready? Same time. Favorite cookie. It's going to be Fig Newton, isn't it?

It's going to totally be Fig Newton. You know what? They're not as bad as they... Tell me they're that bad. They're not that bad. They're terrible. That's not a cookie. It's like a biscuit. It is. Or is it? They say on the package cookies. You know what? Oh, the Delta biscuit? It's not a cookie. Oh, the Delta ones? All right. What's your favorite cookie? The biscotti cookies. Those are solid. That would be number three. I love biscotti. Biscotti cookies are solid. A homemade chocolate chip cookie. Yeah. That is just... But it has to be...

Like flat. It can't be nice and fluffy. I don't like the big fat. I like them. Like a flat one. It's got to be flat. You ever stayed at one of those Hampton Inns? Yeah, they got the cookies right there. You get warm. Yeah, yeah. The warm cookies in Melbourne? Yeah. What were the...

Back in, this might be for you, back in the title days, what were Otis Spunkmeyer cookies? Otis Spunkmeyer. Every title company had Otis Spunkmeyer. I would go with the Delta biscuit. What are they called? Biscotti. Biscotti. A good pumpkin. Pumpkin? What the hell? A pumpkin cookie? Dude. Dude, what? Okay, listen, listen. A pumpkin with chocolate chips? Hang on, stop, stop, stop for a second. No. Look, look, look, look. You like white chocolate? Hang on, hang on.

Here's a message. I don't know if you can hear this in space, but whatever alien life form has programmed your pod person to come to the planet... We've discovered him. You've got some serious glitches in your programming. Debug before you send the message. I don't think they make pumpkin cookies. I don't think that exists. What? First off...

I will fly Delta over any airline just to get the Delta. But you can buy them at Costco. What is a pumpkin cookie? A pumpkin with chocolate chips in them? Oh, phenomenal. When it's pumpkin season, oh, I'm bringing you guys some. What is it?

pumpkin season. October and November, right? Is there not a pumpkin season? I mean, I guess autumn. Have you ever had those cookies? They're almost like butterscotch cookies. I don't like butterscotch. Top three worst. Let's just go worst cookies. Number one is an Oreo. Oh,

man i do love an oreo oreos i'll give it some for that oh a dunked oreo yeah no in milk oh yeah you're a psychopath you cannot you can eat a dry chocolate chip cookie which makes it a better cookie than an oreo no i can eat a dragon but you can't get the knockoff oreos you ever had knockoff oreos like high hose or hide yeah try to save 50 cents the worst worst decision ever i'm all about a good deal but you gotta get the original pumpkin cookie like

With a chocolate chip? I've never seen this. You'd give me 13 lifetimes and I'd just start naming flavors and I would have got that. Never seen it. I'm a big pumpkin fan. I'm a big pumpkin fan. Pumpkin chocolate chip. What's the worst cookie? Oh, gosh. One pick, not top two. What's the worst cookie? Anything with raisins in them. Who puts raisins? I'm going snickerdoodle.

really oh really i like the snickers no i'm sorry i'm sorry no no no no sorry the pecan sandy that's the one i want anything i don't know it's a pecan if you're from the south but that's one like my grandmother always had her house and i'm like oh great yeah my grandma always said something they had some shitty cookies but

Here's a kind of underrated thing. What kind of grandma has shitty cookies? She's German, so everything was like lard. They were like Russian Germans. Everything had lard in it. You know those Danish... Here's a thing in my life that I've never thought about. They never had anything in them in my family. That was like for sewing needles and all that shit. Yeah.

I don't know if I've ever sat down and taken down a tin. The weird thing about the tin is that they're supposed to all be the same cookie, right? But to me, they taste differently. They're like different shapes. Yeah, there's different shapes they taste differently. Okay, for the two people still listening to us, thanks for hanging in there. We're going to get back on resilience. You, my friend, if you're still listening to us, are showing an eye level of resilience. That's the test. I say you're still listening to this nonsense.

that we are babbling about. So here we go. Practice builds habits, our habits are our character. When it comes to virtue, practice makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference. Yeah, in a little episode of my house yesterday,

Son came down. Mom's like, do you have any homework? No, I don't have any homework, Mom. I'm going to be up here on Xbox. Mom's like, yeah, whatever. Looks through his stuff, finds he has a little bit of homework. She's like, hey, get down here. You have homework. He comes down the stairs. I call for him. He comes down. I'm like, bro, what's up? Mom says you have homework. He goes, I don't have any homework. Like, dead serious. And then he comes out and he goes there. And I walk around the corner. I go, did you really just walk downstairs, look me straight in the face and lie to me about something this stupid? Yeah.

And I was like, man, and that's what he got. Honestly, that's what he got punished for was that. Cause I was like, look, there's a saying that like, if you lose money, you've lost nothing. We're not a saying Harvey Keitel said in the movie. I don't know what it was. If you lose money, you've lost nothing. If you lose time, you lost something. If you lose your character, you've lost everything. And, and,

you know, you chip away at things and being truthful is so important with that. It's crazy. But, but, you know, but your habits, your habits are what you do. I mean, if you, you know, show me your habits and I'll show you your future. I think that's what it is. Building those habits in your habits or everything. And a great book for that, which is not on this, we're talking about is atomic habits.

If you haven't read that book, I highly recommend that as well. Well, you sit there and look at Peyton Manning, look at Tom Brady. They are not the most athletic people out there, but they are having it. DeMar DeRozan went 7 for 13 from the free throw line in a game the other day.

So he sat through this video footage of DeMar DeRozan just at the free throw line shooting 250 free throws. Because he was so disgusting to himself. He made 250 free throws. So the ACC, the center, whatever, in Chicago was all broken down. All the chairs were up, and there's just a picture of –

a guy in DeMar DeRozan shooting free throws 250 times. I go, I don't even really follow his career, but now I like him. I like that guy. He's like, that's not going to happen again. That's the kind of stuff that I see and go, you know what? That's just a really great attitude. Oh, phenomenal.

Next one, smiling and breathing. These three, these simple, wait, I'm sorry. Smiling and breathing. These are simple things. Exercising and serving. These are simple things. Being grateful and gracious. These are simple things. Acting with humility, acting with courage. These are simple things. Some people try to make this business of living way too complicated. And I think it's true. I think people get in their own way so often.

I think people can't, you know, how often do you say, man, if that guy could just get out of his own way. Just himself in the foot. Antonio Brown. Yeah. Oh God. Geez. Number one. Number one. Antonio Brown is the poster child for that. Get out of your own way. Stop. If you go through life, something came up the other day and this person was just like, oh, everybody's against me. It was that whole attitude. Yeah.

Oh, if I did this, oh, this person did this. And I go, have you ever noticed what the number one common denominator of all your problems is? You. Weird, right? Yeah. Because I've had that problem. Yeah, everybody else seems to do this to you. Everybody's an asshole. Everybody's an asshole. Everybody's an asshole. It's like, you know what? It's funny. I bet you I could go talk to...

100% of those people. And have a good conversation. They'd be like, hey, what's going on? How are you? Yep. No, I totally agree. And smiling is such an easy thing, right? Saying thank you is such an easy thing that can change everything. You know what you should do? You should go up to more women and tell them to smile more. They love that. They love that. Smile, hot pants. I'll get you a long way. Just walk off and say, you're welcome. You're welcome.

You're welcome. Just kidding. The thoughts of Billy's a cold-ass. No, that was Connell. That wasn't me. That's a good person. Yeah. No, no. Don't give. It's just that. I'll take all the hatred from the Tom Hanks fans, but don't pull a whole thing of women against them. It is weird, though. Like I said, it is funny, though, when you do see men telling women things like that. Oh, yeah. Hey, why don't you smile more? I've seen it happen.

and live and I just like why would make you think you should do that my sister who in an alternate life was a flight attendant for Delta right and one day she said she snapped she goes I was on she was like a 14 hour shift or whatever it was it was crazy and

you know, she's working her ass off and some guy goes, Hey, you should smile more. She goes, smile. She goes, okay, now you smile and I'll smile back. And the guy smiles. She goes, now hold it for 14 hours. Yeah. Oh God. That's not, that's pretty smooth. I thought she was going to be. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

Well, I love this card, this little comment, which is courage overcomes but does not replace fear. Joy overcomes but does not replace pain. What that means is I think so many people look for emotions to fade, things to stop. It's going to be yin or yang. And there's always some balance and resiliency of understanding that, you know, dude, if you – when you go to the high dive and you jump off and you jumped off the high dive when you're a little kid, you were scared to do it at first.

You got the courage to do it, but the fear doesn't really go away. It just diminishes. You just know you're going to be okay. You just know you're going to be okay. To know quantity. Yes. Now you can quantify that fear. There's always a twinge, a little bit of worry. I mean, every time, you know, people would say, oh, you're a great public speaker, this and that. But every time I walk onto a stage, I still have a twinge of, oh, okay. I mean, every time I do a real estate deal, same thing. And I've done, we've done...

thousands all of us but still every time I'm like oh here we go you get a little you know anxious a little thing that's cool it's because you're not a psychopath yeah thank you yeah no but if you don't if you can't balance it I'm not a psychopath if you get in the UFC ring that was we recorded that so now he can use that against you for oh I meant figuratively he's actually a pod person

No, but you take a UFC fighter that walks on the ring. I don't care who you are. It's that whole Mike Tyson quote. Yeah, you're scared every time. I'm scared. I'm breaking him down, breaking him down, breaking him down my mind. And then all of a sudden I step in and I'm a god. Yeah. Right? And the fear goes away. But the fear is there as you're walking into the ring. You can have all the fake bravado. You can pretend to be tough. You can be these guys when they're standing there being tough or whatever. They're nervous. If you literally have no fear, you're rabid.

Right? You're an animal. You're not really a human because there's always a risk of loss. Right. Who's undefeated in the UFC? And everybody who's been defeated got punched in the face. They didn't have a great time getting knocked out. No. So that's going to be in your mind because that's how we survive. You have to understand risk. Yeah. And I love this one because this is, we talked about haters earlier, right? Yeah.

This is the number one thing that haters don't understand about people who are successful, which is this. Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably coexist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes. Oh, yeah. You know, you look at the

You look at what I'm doing right now, where I invested in Nick Marietta's company and we're doing that. And, you know, I'm rolling. I mean, you know, the number it's, it's north of seven figures. I'm going into that deal. It's a, it's a big investment.

And it's essentially the same setup and the same kind of a deal that I did five years ago where I lost seven figures. But I learned so much from that deal about what not to do. When we looked at this deal, I realized that everything that that deal was lacking and what made it fail is what makes this successful. And even in the short amount of time that we've been doing this, I mean, the difference is just night and day. But two things about it. Number one, you

You know, you're talking about I took a seven-figure loss over here a couple of years ago. So there was a second when I had to look at myself in the mirror and say, am I really willing to throw this across the table again? Am I really willing to do that? Here's the nice thing about seven-figure losses. What's that? It means you'd made seven figures. Right.

No, no, no, no, no. Think about it. No, no. Oh, we've done something else that I had seven figures to lose. That's right. So you know that you, here's the thing. It's, it's the quiet desperation of the lives that most men are leading. The Henry David Thoreau quote. Yeah.

the quiet desperation, they don't have a million to lose. So when you know that you can make a million, that loss, like you said, you take the good with the bad. You look at it and go, okay, I've done this before. I've gotten here before. Yeah, I took a bath here, but I learned, and it counterbalanced off some other things. So life shakes out, right? But I don't want to belittle that loss because it wasn't just, I mean, dude, that was a soul-sucking loss.

four year siege of emotional stress and Harvard PhD in business. It was. And law. It was brutal. I mean, it was lawsuit after lawsuit. It was absolutely brutal to take that, to take those lumps. And I didn't get a couple of handled pretty.

pretty cheap. You did, you did. But I didn't, but here's the thing. I didn't get over it. No, no. I'm using that, I'm using that knowledge, that pain, that stuff to get, to do this and drive forward. So you've got to have that courage. It's like when they say people, so yeah, I don't, so somebody looks at me and says, oh man, that dude's so lucky. Yeah, buddy. You haven't been through, everybody's got water. I have paid for this. The bags of shit I've eaten on the way. I've eaten a lot of shit. It's like when, you know, if you're 40, 50 years old,

And you're starting over. You're not starting over. You know, you're not starting over without all this knowledge. Now you have all this knowledge to go step into maybe a new venture or something. But that's what happens, right? And that's a whole, you miss 100%. Colonel Sanders, buddy. Colonel Sanders. I love the Colonel for that reason. It doesn't matter. You miss 100% of all shots you don't take, right? That's exactly what that means. Mm-hmm.

All right, moving on. Eric Hoffer studied the reasons why people voluntarily give away responsibility and join mass movements and or mobs. One quote he collected came from a young German who explained that he joined the Nazi party to be free from freedom. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. So, um,

I did a college presentation for a professor in a class. He gave me 100% on it. Came over to my apartment. It was my final exam. Greatest class I've ever taken in my life. Where is this going? No, no, no. In your apartment? In terms of a real educator, a philosopher professor, one of absolutely everyone's favorite who's ever had him. And I took the allegory of the cave and I mixed it with Nine Inch Nails happiness and slavery. And just the concept of

The guy on the Plato's cave allegory, right? Like there's this whole world going on and all you know is this life of shadows. Are you happier knowing that there's this life going on ahead of you or would you rather be part of the allegory, right? And Trent Reznor's happiness and slavery, there was a lot of parallels lyrically. So it's just, there is a lot of happiness in slavery. There is a ton of psychological dissonance. You dissipate. Well, the freedom of not having to make decisions. By not having to make decisions. Nope, I can't. The wife said I can't.

There are men that love that. - Story of my life. - So if you're the kind of man that likes that, good for you. As long as you don't resent it as well, right? As long as you don't resent the slavery, you have to take it with it. - Yeah, now get home and make our sandwich. - Get the chunk left. - The longer you hesitate, the hairier and scarier the fear becomes. The longer you hesitate, the more likely you are to turn around and crawl back under the covers. Screw that, Walker, it's time to begin.

so essentially what it's saying is josh mcdaniel's yeah man no that's that's the dude you know the obstacle is the way yeah obstacle is absolutely the way the longer you procrastinate i mean how many times you've seen kids do this where it's like jump off the diving board jump off the diving board and it's like

it's like forever to get it done. And then they do it and they're like, Oh, well now I'm going to jump off the roof. And you're like, dude, like, come on. Or if they sit there too long, then they psych himself out. I'll never jump off of it. Right. And same with the business. If you psych yourself up too much and you'll never go do it. I mean, sometimes the whole analyst, you know, analyze for outside. Right. Like,

Well, it's like Tony Robbins, though. One of his things is if you can't, you must, which maybe that's to sell seminar seats, but at the same time, I like some of it. It's like when people say, oh, I can't do that, then you must. Have you ever done a backflip on a trampoline? Yes. You can do a backflip? I mean, would I do it now? Yeah. No, have I done it? Yes. But you know that feeling. Do I have stitches under this eyebrow because of it? Once you've done it, the fear is gone. You go, oh, okay.

But getting up to that point is personally one of the most difficult things I ever did as a kid. Yeah. And so getting my kids to do it now, I've taught Ava how to do it. I've taught other people how to do back flips because you take their responsibility away a little bit and you flip them over. Like, I got you. Yeah, I got you. Once they get that, though, they're doing it on their own because most things like that aren't difficult. It's just the unknown, right? Right. Falling backwards is the unknown. Right. Yeah.

Millions of people in all walks of life in every endeavor create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They rather, as Socrates wanted, focus on what they have than who they are. Which I think that's, you know, I mispronounce Socrates because it's been a long day. Socrates. Socrates. That's how they say it in the South. But I think what they're trying to say there is...

There's always the excuse. There's always the excuse on getting this stuff done. And I'm going to tell you, that's a big difference in some of the deals that we've done here. How many people in real estate say, oh, I don't have the credit, I don't have the money to get these deals done? I can't get it done. That deal we did in Arizona today for $2 million. We bought a house for two, we're going to sell it for four. You know how much money we're going to have in that deal? Zero dollars. Hopefully not a lot. So we got the whole back end financed, all the construction finance, and I got the front end finance with GAAP funding.

It's going to be there. We'll have zero dollars in that deal. We'll make a million dollars. There's a way. Yeah, there's a way. There's a way. There's a way. There's always a way. I kind of read that as people focus on

The tool is not the character, right? Do you think a lot of times that comes into the concept of materialism? Well, no, no, no. What I'm saying is people tend to look at what they want and they immediately start analyzing what they don't have and why they can't get it. Can you read that again? Yes. Millions of people in all walks of life and in every endeavor create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They'd rather, as Socrates warned, focus on what they have than on what they are.

Meaning, rather than seeing that the answer to your solution, the answer to your problems is probably within you. If you just push forward and find it, it's like, well, I can't do that because I don't have this.

Do you know how I read that? For some reason, it really stands out. It's when people adopt an identity, not on who they are or what they've done. It's what they present or what they show or whatever, right? You get the guy with the Ferrari. He's a Ferrari guy. He'll let you know he's a Ferrari guy. Or you get the guy with a lot of tattoos. All of a sudden, the tattoos become their personality, right? They focus on the things that aren't.

who they are their character right all right i like this too yeah oh i'm the tattooed realtor whatever that like that's not a personality character not that there's anything wrong with being a tattooed realtor no no no the guy right because there is a tattooed realtor is there yeah but he's got like the rap and the poster and i go i'm like but that doesn't tell me anything about you who you are or your character yeah it tells me what you have and how you present yeah

But what does that have to do with how can I trust you? Well, that goes along with everything I tell everybody. That's one of my big pieces of advice to entrepreneurs is don't let what you do become who you are. Because what you do could dramatically change in a couple of years. Like don't be the NFT guy.

be you as a guy who buys entities because precisely yes you but it happened because owning nfts isn't a personality yeah but but people are making it that way like i love rap well that's not a personality yeah that's a that's a thing you enjoy your personality should be no i'm a person i have character you know blah blah blah okay dad i look at it as like

just because you don't have a Harvard degree doesn't mean you can't go do stuff. Like some people, like my wife's that perfect example. She doesn't have that education. She doesn't have the tools, but her character will,

will push further past having those tools. She's got other tools. Yeah. She's got the characteristics of being that way. So there's a lot of ways to look at it. The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses in the gym and out there on the road long before the dance and under the lights. Muhammad Ali right there, baby.

That's a great one saying that. Yeah, when DeMar DeRozan takes his next set of free throws, I bet she's banging him out. He ain't missing. What you will become is a result of what you are willing to endure. Are you willing to work hard, to think hard? I know that you are. You always have been. That goes along with, that's the Rocky quote,

It's not how hard you can hit. But it is discipline. Is that the most played out movie quote right now for motivational speaking right now? Well, just because we always go to night's games. Oh, we see it. That's true. That's what it is. Are you going to night's game tonight? No. Yeah, I'm going to. Do I have tickets? I don't even know. No, I don't think I have tickets. It went off tonight. It was good.

I'm supposed to do that which is good, but now back to this so again We talk about you know what you were willing to endure hard times. Be hard make great Easy times great hard hard men create easy times easy times great softness Yeah, so so understand man that pain that the problems that that adversity that's hitting you in the face Understand that yeah, it sucks. I mean nobody likes it. Nobody's enjoying it Nobody wants that but that's what's making you who you are going to become

And I think social media is doing the service people because everybody's just seeing the top. They're not seeing that hard stuff, right? They don't see you at two in the morning freaking out over a lawsuit because, but they see you on a private jet. You know, people don't, people do not see those things. Like I always tell people, you know,

Michael Jordan's career was not that amazing, right? Like, I mean, it was amazing, but there was... Sorry, say that again? No, no, but he went through hard times, right? Like, he went and tried to do baseball. No, no, no. But more than that, Michael created adversity out of thin air for himself. Yeah. He just decided... No, he just decided...

The Knicks are my nemesis in earth, and I hate all of them. And that's just what he decided. Pistons. Oh, my God. He just decided. Isaiah Thomas. I'm going to absolutely murder this guy. I'm not playing with him on the Olympic team. No. He just decided it. So if you don't have any adversity, again, you need to create some. Here's also something to think about.

Everybody wants a sugar daddy until daddy wants some sugar, right? You see the handbags. You see the handbags. Oh, boy. Who's filming that Instagram story? Who's filming that Instagram story? The hand's a little shaky. You know what I'm saying? The hand's a little wrinkly. A little shaky breathing in the background. You see a liver spot in there. A few liver spots. How do I do the filter? How do I hold the button? How does the filter work? There's no button on the screen. It's flat. It's flat.

Jesus. Great, nice handbag. Anyway. Nice handbag. Oh, boy. But we're the person who seeks to lead and has not suffered, who claims responsibility on the grounds of a spotless record. Yeah. Yeah. I mean... There's a guy in town that kept saying, oh, I'm undefeated as an attorney. I go, what you're basically saying is you've never done anything. Right. Yeah. And it's literally the worst way to advertise. I'm undefeated. Could you imagine if you said...

I'm a commercial broker. I've gotten every single deal I've ever done. No, you haven't. It means you haven't taken any flyers. That way you're not trying them because you're just sitting there. You've disserviced your clients how many times then? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I love this one real quick. So when we rob people of their pain, when we don't allow them the possibility of failure, we also rob them of their happiness.

I think this is probably with child rearing the number one thing, dude, the helicopter parents, you gotta let your kids lose. You gotta let your kids fail. You know, this is, you know, my wife is an incredible parent and she's all about it. And sometimes, you know, it's like I have to stop her sometimes. And I'm like, why are you doing this? Like, why are, like, why are you in here cutting stuff out for a science fair board?

why are you doing that? I know. Like take him to the store, let her do it. They just want to do such a great job. They want there to be the best. I, my kids at like fifth grade had to do this big presentation. Like you have to dress up like somebody in the past and decorate this whole thing. My kids thing look like shit compared to everybody else's. And I'm like,

That's because my kid did it, right? Like everybody's sitting there. I'm like, I couldn't do that. There's no way a fifth grader is doing it. Do you remember that Simpsons where they did the costume dress up and they give Lisa the award because Homer helped her with it? And they go, well, we know these other kids can't see it. So you're obviously the only one that did it yourself. You know what I think the baseline for that should be? If my kids forget something that they need to take to school to get a grade on and they don't get it,

I don't think we should take it to school. I think that was your responsibility to get it and make sure it went. And if you were irresponsible, you should do that. Do you want him to go to UNLV or Notre Dame, though?

That's a good point. We're still in that place where it don't matter. And keep in mind, full disclaimer, my kids get straight A's. But you got to let them fail. My kid, when he started playing video games, my oldest kid would get so pissed off. You know what I went in? Went in and kicked his ass all day long. Every time he wanted to play, I'm like kicking his ass.

And video games are physically assaulting them. Both. Oh, good. Throw the remote at him after I scored a goal and then threw the remote at his face. Yeah. Is that not good parenting? Eat it. Take it. No. No. It's really abusive, actually. Terribly abusive. You're terribly abusive. It turned out. Well, guys, unfortunately, we're out of time. There's more of this that we could have gone into. I think you got the general gist. And if you're interested in learning more about resilience, I like this book. I read it. Again, it's Resilience by Eric.

Gretens, check it out. It's an easy read. It's not a long read. It's not a stereo instruction read. It's not Marcus Aurelius meditation. Grab some pumpkin cookies. I don't know where you get pumpkin cookies. How have you guys never heard of pumpkin cookies?

I think I've had people have made, because you need humans to make them. Yeah. No, you don't store. Yeah. You don't store buy those. That's why they're so good. Yeah. Maybe you just have better friends or chefs that are bakers in your life that we do. But is this a Hispanic thing? No, absolutely. It's probably a white person thing more than anything. It sounds like a pumpkin. It's got to be. That's pretty white. Pretty white. Are they pumpkin spice cookies? Yeah.

God, I found cinnamon toast crunch powder. No, just powder so I can put in my coffee now. Phenomenal. What? No? We're going to come in. Colt's going to be snorting lines of cinnamon toast crunch powder off his desk. Neil, pick me up. Neil, pick me up. All right, guys. As always, if you like what we talked about today, make sure you tell a friend if you hated it. Tell two because it doesn't matter if they're talking good about you as long as they're doing what, Colt? Oh.

Talking about you. There you go. See you next time, guys. The Mormon Cobra. Hey, it's John Gafford. If you want to catch up more and see what we're doing, you can always go to thejohngafford.com where we'll share any links that we've things we talked about on the show, as well as links to the YouTube where you can watch us live. And if you want to catch up with me on Instagram, you can always follow me at thejohngafford. I'm here. Give me a shout.