Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
Thu, 12 Dec 2024
After a weekend of eye-opening experiences, I found myself reevaluating the role of ego in personal growth. Picture this: at a Boardroom Mastermind Group meeting, I crossed paths with Leon, the Wall Street Trapper, whose humility in the face of massive success challenged my own perceptions. His story of rising from humble beginnings to triumph in the stock market was fascinating, but it was his graceful approach to learning and growth that left a lasting impression. This encounter, coupled with the inspiring energy at a Better Than Ezra concert, where the band skillfully blended new material with classics, left me pondering the virtues of staying grounded and continuously evolving. Throughout this episode, we explore the pitfalls of ego, drawing insights from Ryan Holiday's seminal works, "The Obstacle is the Way" and "Ego is the Enemy," and examining how unchecked ego can stifle success, using Steve Jobs as a poignant example. We unravel the complexities of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the critical importance of maintaining a service-oriented mindset. The cautionary tale of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos serves as a sobering reminder of the catastrophic outcomes that ego can unleash. By the end, it's clear that embracing humility and a lifelong commitment to learning are more valuable than any facade of perfection. Join me as we embark on a journey of self-reflection and growth, one that prioritizes authenticity over artifice. 💬 Did you enjoy this weekly drop? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️ If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford ************* 💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space. ➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company. ➡️ Streamline Home Loans - An independent mortgage bank with more than 100 loan officers. The Simply Group, A national expansion vehicle partnering with large brokers across the country to vertically integrate their real estate brokerages. ************* ✅ Follow John Gafford on social media: Instagram ▶️ / thejohngafford Facebook ▶️ / gafford2 🎧 Stream the new Weekly Drop here: Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9 Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283 ************* #weeklydrop #johngafford #ego #personalgrowth #humility #success #boardroommastermindgroup #leon #wallstreettrapper #learning #growth #betterthanezra #concert #authenticity #selfreflection #ryanholiday #theobstacleistheway #egoistheenemy #stevejobs #dunningkrugereffect #serviceorientedmindset #elizabethholmes #theranos #cautionarytale #humbleapproach #openmindedness #perfection
Chapter 1: What realizations did John have about ego?
And today, man, I want to talk about something that is a struggle sometimes for me, and I made some realizations over the weekend. And that thing I struggle with is ego. It really is. And I saw a couple of things that hit me this weekend and I wanted to talk about it. And ego to me is perfectly fine.
There's nothing wrong with having an ego, but if it is prohibiting growth in you and holding you back, then that is a problem. I'm going to tell two stories from the weekend. that made me kind of realize that I gotta check myself, if you will, before I wreck myself or stop wrecking myself, if you will.
So the first one is over the weekend, I went to one of my favorite places to go, which is the Boardroom Mastermind Group. It is a elite level group of very high level, high net worth individuals that focus primarily on real estate investing, but it's just a lot of really good people that are really smart.
Chapter 2: Who is Leon, the Wall Street Trapper?
And a guy that I just met for the first time, that just came to the group for the first time in our meeting in Boston back in Q3, and I got to know him a little bit then. Not a lot. We were in the same room. But this dude's name is Leon, better known as the Wall Street Trapper, or Trap, as we call him. And you need to look this dude up, first of all. So this is a dude that has an amazing story.
I'm gonna have him on the podcast next week to go through his story in detail, but very humble beginnings. And taught himself the stock market and got to be really, really good at trading options. And now he has built this into a following of millions of people, coaches tens or hundreds of thousands of people on how to do this. And the guy is just, number one, he kills it in the market.
Number two... He makes, I mean, infinite amounts of money selling his coaching. Every month, the number of orders he gets is staggering of people that join his coaching program online. It's staggering the amount of money he's making doing this. And the reason I say this is not necessarily to celebrate his success.
Although, dude, you know, anybody that achieves that level of success, I'm rooting for you.
But more to the point, it's how this guy carries himself in those meetings, how he carries himself in this group because he is a guy that understands the stock market intimately and he joined our group because he kind of got sick of paying this massive tax bill that he had and he wanted to learn how to invest in real estate and utilize the tax code to lower his tax bill. And you would never know,
how much money this dude is bringing in every month because he carries himself. And I was looking for the word this morning for how he carries himself through those meetings. And the only word I can come up with is grace. He carries himself in those rooms as I'm so lucky to be here. I'm so grateful to be here learning from all of you guys.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from Leon's approach?
He comes in as a student every day, does not care what anybody thinks about him, does not care about his accolades, does not care about recognition for anything. He is there as a student first to learn. He doesn't care how you view him. He's there as a student and handles himself with such a way of grace that it's a lesson. And I realized to myself, man, I go to these meetings like this for years.
And first and foremost with me, probably it's important that I come off important. And that's just dumb to be honest with you. Cause it's like, I look back probably at the energy and time that I spent looking important in these rooms when I could have been sponging information from some of the smartest guys in the business that do things different than what I do.
But instead I was more concerned about being seen as an equal elevated member of the room, whatever it was, which is just shocking to me that I should have just checked that. I mean, I made an investment for the education for what I would learn here. And instead I treated it as how can I be the biggest dog in a room full of big dogs? And that was just dumb.
Chapter 4: How does ego affect personal growth?
Second example, I'm going to make of this this weekend that happened.
was some friends of mine in a band that was huge in the 90s and a number one hit was good better than ezra great friends of mine they're how i met my wife we've been friends for more years than i can count came to vegas and they played a show and you know this these are guys that have been doing it right there's no break in this there hasn't been like this isn't a reunion tour this is what they do and make records and continue to push forward
It's what they do. And they just released a new record maybe six months ago. And they're playing this show to about, I don't know, there's probably 1,400 people in the room in Henderson, which is where I live, actually, here in Vegas. And they went to the show. And...
During the show, they played all the hits, all the stuff, the hits they had that were big hits on radio play back in the day, a couple of the new stuff, a couple of smatterings in the new stuff. And then they played some really cool covers, but like three or four of them that they played that were covers. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, at first I'm like,
you know, that's a lot of bands going on tour and it's like, oh, we're going to play something new. And they just kind of play all their new stuff and they just kind of expect you to do that. And that kind of comes off a little, because you look around the room and a lot of those people, you know, we're just going to a show because it was a show that was there, right? Hey, we're here.
It's in Henderson. We're going to this show. And you can tell there's probably a lot of people that maybe had heard one or two songs and it was like, oh yeah, I would go to that. And they were being exposed to this band for the first time. And you see a lot of bands kind of just shoved that new material down people's throats. But what they chose to do by playing these covers,
And these were songs that were great, and they're other songs from the 90s. And everybody in that room was singing aloud and having a great time. And I realized, thinking about this talk today, thinking about Trap, I realized they put their ego aside because they realized their main role was to entertain that crowd, was to make them happy. That crowd wasn't there to feed their ego.
They were there to give those people the best possible time and they got it. I mean that people had a great time. It was a great show. And I just think in life, man, as you go through, you got to start asking yourself when you deal with other people or you look at different situations, how am I coming to the table with this? Am I coming to serve you or am I expecting you to serve me?
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Chapter 5: What insights did John gain from the Better Than Ezra concert?
And there's probably, in my life, too many experiences or too many times when I stepped into the ego trap and got myself stuck doing things that I shouldn't be doing because I expected others to be there to celebrate me. I see it. You know, the worst place we see it right now is there's this fiasco going on with our local board, right? Our local realtor board.
where allegedly there's some people that are in power that did some stuff they shouldn't have done, and it's just stupid, right? And I look at that, and I go, if these people were really looking to serve others with all of this stuff going down, they would just get out of the way. but they're not. They're there to serve themselves.
From the big stupid events they have, just the cow stuff, it's just gotten so gross. And there's stuff in, I think, all of our lives where we can look at it and say, wait a second, I gotta slow this down. I gotta pump the brakes a little bit on my ego and ask myself, am I here to serve or is this here to serve me?
If you look at the book, one of my favorite authors, obviously, I always talked about is Ryan Holiday. Ryan's great. Um, you know, obstacle is the way it's probably one of the first books I tell people to read when they ask me what they should read. That's one of my first go-tos, but he wrote a book called ego is the enemy, which I really liked too.
It was like a whole series in an ego, the enemy, you know, he talks and tells a story like about Steve jobs. One of the, one of the brightest minds of our time actually got kicked out of his own company. because of his ego, because he thought everybody there was there to serve Steve instead of Apple being there to serve the world.
And when he changed his thinking on that, that's when he became a great leader and Apple became a great company. Because if you really go through this life seeing how you can be of service to others. There's a great saying that says, if you want to get everything you want, help others get what they want. And you just can't do that unless you're approaching all of this with a service mentality.
You know, with me, you know, we used to have a, you know, I used to do the podcast back in the day with Chris Connell and Colt. Miss those days. Go back and listen to those episodes. Some are pretty funny. But, you know, Connell would always have, there was like a bingo card of a couple things that he would always talk about.
And one of the things that he would bring up religiously was called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It was almost like a bingo card event. And it's funny, as I was doing research for this day, you know, the Dunning-Kruger effect kept coming up because it's really based in ego and how it stunts your personal growth. And what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, it says like,
The less you know about something, the better you think you are at it. Like for example, we've all seen people that go out and like play golf the first day and they're like, oh dude, this is gonna be easy. It's gonna be super simple. Then you ask them after the first time they take a golf lesson, how do you think you are at golf? And they're like, oh, I'm okay.
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Chapter 6: Why is humility important in success?
But yet, the more you learn about it, the more you learn how terrible you really are. It's like, yeah, somebody's been playing it for three years, like, oh, the worst golfer in the world. Probably not, because they just have now understood how hard it is.
It also is why the loudest voices are normally the most uninformed, because the people that know the least about a subject are normally the most vocal about it, versus the people that know the most have learned enough to question the knowledge that they have. So if you just automatically, you know, be very mindful of that.
If you really feel like, you know, everything about something and you don't need to learn anymore, you don't no longer need to be a student of the game. Think about my man, the wall street trapper and walk with grace in those rooms and walk with eyes open and ears open and mouth shut.
Cause you might be surprised that the limited knowledge you do have might be shaken to its foundation with a little more as you go along. But I think just there's so many examples of her ego. I mean, just recently, you look at, what was it, Thanos, that deal with Elizabeth Holmes, that crazy lady. It's funny. She tried to emulate Steve Jobs by what she wore, not blinking.
For those of you who don't know who she is, she started a company called Thanos, which apparently had this revolutionary... blood testing deal where from one drop they could do like a full analysis and it was a full thing and it was all bullshit. None of it ever worked. And you're talking about they raised so much money for this company.
It was like a billion dollar market cap company and it was all bullshit. And she's now in jail. And what really screwed it up was because she had this image. If you watch, I think there's a book about it. There is, it's called Bad Blood. There's a book, I remember. I don't know who wrote it, but it's called Bad Blood.
And there's, they quote, the reason for Thanos happening was she had crafted this image for herself of absolute perfection and didn't want anybody To see the cracks in that, like didn't want anybody to see that there might be a problem here. So she she continued this facade of just absolute bullshit just to protect the facade that she had built, because that was all based in ego.
So next time you find yourself in a situation where maybe you want to flex a little more, say something stupid or lie or misrepresent what you're doing, ask yourself, am I doing this to protect this self-image of myself that maybe everybody else doesn't see and doesn't care about anyway? Because it's like junior high school, man. What do you tell your kids?
Don't be worried about what people think because they're all thinking about themselves. That's not just junior high school, dude. That's everybody. That's the whole world about roles. So, man, all I can say is, like my buddy Kevin Griffin that played that show last week, he has a great book out. Look it up. Look up for it. And I wish I had the name of it off the top of my head, but I don't.
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