Episode 176: Failure Is Not An Option | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 1

Today, we're going to talk about failure is not an option.

Remember, we're putting 2021 behind us. By no means do I ever have anything in 2021 that I was like, oh, man, I wish I wouldn't. Went through that. Because even the most challenging situations help you grow if you approach it from the right way.

Greatest setbacks can be your greatest setups.

I'm so tired of that saying. It's been so useful. Every preacher, every motivational speaker. Greatest setbacks could be your greatest setups. Okay. Anyway. Okay, let's.

Somebody hasn't heard that, and they're like, whoa, write it down.

And then I just destroyed that. Well, okay.

Failure is not an option, Chad. You know, I always try and ask you when we're. When we're prepping content for podcasts, is there something specific to your heart that you want to share, that you want to encourage agents with, that you feel like we need to hit on? And this time it was, yeah, you want to talk about failure is not an option. And you've been wearing your shirt for the past few weeks, too.

Oh, I have washed it just so.

Yes. I'm not convinced.

You'Re wearing the same shirt, too.

I love this shirt. I wear this shirt all the time.

I know you do.

What was I saying?

Golly.

About failure. You failed. You failed. Way to go. Apparently, it was an option.

But he keeps going. So he's not failing. He did need some help, but he.

Oh, here's another old saying. You don't. You don't fail unless you stop trying.

Yeah, another one. But I still say that. True. You only fail when you give up. And that is true. Or you die. One of the two. Because.

So. So wait, what. What you're saying. If that's. If that constitutes.

But, then I'm in heaven. So I didn't fail.

Yeah. I was gonna say, if that constitutes failure, then every single person's last act of living is failure. If death is failure.

If you cost it yourself. If I. That's why I'm trying to be careful nowadays as I get older, to not do stupid stuff. You know, I. I don't want to. I don't want to stand before God and go, I told you not to climb on that. Well, the view was so good from there. Yeah. Anyway, so.

So why. Why did you want to hit on this, though? Like, what's the.

I want to start the year off right. I want people to get that mindset. Failure is not an option. And I'm going to hit some very sensitive areas but if you, you would never be overweight. Now as someone that used to be 262 pounds, you would rarely have relationships, marriages, whatever, fail. It rather rarely be in financial issues if you had that thought process. Failure is not an option. Why do I say that? My wife and I have been married for 28 years now, by the way, we just had her 20th anniversary.

Happy belated anniversary.

She stuck with me the entire time. Not only that, she, I mean, my wife, I'm going to do a shout out. I mean, she is literally the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life next to Christ. And the reason why I say that is because she stands by me. Even when we had some challenging, major challenging times. And our motto has always been we never use the D word, we never talk about divorce. It's never an option. No matter what our challenges are, it's never, we will never give up on each other. We will never give up on our kids, and we will never give up on our son in laws. Even though they make it obvious, an opportunity many times over and over again to test that. Oh yeah, but they don't. They're awesome. But you know, failure is not an option. Anything that I know the Lord wants me to do, failure is not an option. There's nothing that can deter me from that direction. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to get hit backwards or hit down. But you know, I also surround myself with people that if I get hit so hard that I can't make it back up, they're right there going, hey, let me yank you back up here. Let me get you back on your feet. I mean, you're one of them. I mean, Grant's one of my other son on my kids, my wife, I have friends, I mean they, they know me and sometimes they'll just go, whoa. I mean, I just had my executive vp, Josh come in and he goes, you know what, you need to rest, you need to relax. And you know what's crazy though? So that happened about a month or two ago. And I, I, he goes, you need to rest and relax. And then I think you at the same time said something like the guy that got away for three days or something. Yeah, yeah. And so I didn't tell you this. So I go to H E B, which is our grocery store here.

Oh, if you don't have one.

Yeah, you're missing the Lord's grocery store. But so I'm helping them try and bag and I cannot get the bag open any and I'M getting. He goes, I said, I'm sorry. This bag's giving me a hard time. And he goes, maybe the bag's telling you you need to rest.

The guy at the heb.

The guy at the. The checker guy. So I got Josh. That came the morning, then you said it later. And then the grocery guy tells me, maybe the bag's telling you you need to rest.

And maybe after he hears it, you know, half a dozen more times, he'll actually start to take it seriously.

I'll rest when I die. And on vacation, I do. Well, I don't even know. No, we don't rest on vacation.

Usually.

That's what. You know, Mexico is not one of our favorite places to go, by any means, But I love Mexico from the standpoint of I'm not a resort person that stays at the resort.

Yeah, you like to go.

When you go to Mexico, there's not a lot to see outside of Mexico. You know, once you've seen one of those pyramids, you've seen them all, you know, all the same thing. Maybe we'll do a couple things here and there, but we usually stay at the resort. And I'm sitting around all day, and I'm going, okay, I kind of get this. But I go into that vacation with that expectation. So that's what I'm getting. That way, you can't say, well, you failed because you rested. Wait a second. That didn't come out right.

You know, it's funny. Elon. Elon Musk, he talks about that idea, the rest, and it is amazing how much being rested will catalyze success. So I think it actually ties in very well with the topic today about failure is not an option. But Elon Musk was asked, like, okay, so you're working 16 hours a day? And he's like, yeah, seven days a week. Yep, pretty much. And they go, so when do you sleep? And. And I want to say that he sleeps for six hours. I think he said six hours. But they ask him, so you're working for 16. You sleep for six. That's already to 22 hours. You've only got two other hours. Like, you know, how are you doing both the work and even that much sleep? And he goes, well, I tried to sleep less, he said, but what I noticed was that overall productivity actually went down. See, productivity is not just the amount of time that's spent. It's the efficiency with which you work. And so his productivity went down even though he had more time to actually work.

Mine does production, so my Magic number is probably six, maybe seven hours. I mean, that's my magic. But if I sleep more than seven hours, my productivity will go down as well because I feel too groggy that day. So you know, when we, when I approach every day. And how do you get set in that mindset where failure is not an option? It's really simple. Live for more than yourself. You know, my day revolves around trying to help people be better than what they were. If I interact with them or contact them, I want them better than what they've ever been. And so my everyday I get up, it's like, well, how do you get, how does a nursing mom get up at 2am in the morning, 4am at the morning, 6am in the morning? Oh, by the way, they didn't go to bed till midnight and they had to take care of all that. How do they get up? Because they know if they don't, that baby's dead. You know, if you're a nursing mom, if you're a husband and your wife's not nursing at bottle woman, get your butt up and feed the baby. I mean, that's someone that fortunately my wife nursed all four kids and I didn't have to do that. I can easily say that you couldn't.

Do anything more than pac.

You know what though? I do remember though, there were times where I could tell my wife was exhausted and I did get up with her just to sit with her.

Yeah.

And. Or she is incredibly frustrated. She'd start crying because she's so exhausted, which I totally get. I mean, if I could go back now when my babies were little, I would absolutely change so many things because I had no clue and I didn't understand how much of a drain and how hard it is for a stay at home mom to be a stay at home mom. I just, I didn't take that. But in her mindset, failure is not an option. Why? If I don't feed that baby and take care of that baby, that baby's dead. And so I look at that every day I get up. There's people in my life that I come in contact with that I need to be very intentional and direct with. Including my wife and my kids. They come as top priority. And of course I've got to make sure I am getting better and better, that I talk about this all the time, how I view subscriptions, I pay for that, subscribe to that I learned from. Why? Because I need to learn from people that are better than me in areas that I'm not And then I can also help other people get there as well. So the key to failure is not an option, is always living for more than yourself.

Yeah. That's so good. You hit a few things in there that jogged a memory of an idea. And it's all about motivation and discipline. You know, if you can operate with motivation, you're going to do a better job. But it'd be naive to think that motivation is always going to be there. And that's where discipline kicks in. And if you don't have discipline, failure does start to seem like an option.

Yep.

You start to kind of imagine, well, what would it be like if I actually didn't do this? And you mentally start coming into alignment with the failure, because discipline hasn't taken over yet. So if you. And it's obviously better to operate from motivation. It's just a better flow of energy. It just. It works better if you can be motivated. But we. That it's not always there. And when motivation leaves, discipline has to kick in.

That's why when I go into an appointment, and if it's a very challenging appointment, it doesn't go the way I wanted it to, or things just went bad. My next appointment, I go in there totally refreshed, ready to go, giving it my all. Why? Because it doesn't matter what happened before, it matters what's happening now. And that person right in front of me now deserves my undivided attention to help them be better than what they were before I walked in.

Yep. That's so good.

And if you approach that with relationships, with your business, with whatever it is, you are always going to come out ahead. Because I'll tell you what, if I was just relying on me sometimes to be motivated by myself, there's. Sometimes I would not be moving. I'd just be going. You know what I think, like, the other day. Remember the other day? Is anything yesterday or the past 15 years? So that's the other day. But I came home after work and I fell asleep on the couch. Now, anybody that knows me, me falling asleep on the couch, I'm probably sick if I'm gonna fall asleep because it's so rare. So I wake up, my wife's gone.

Yeah.

My son's gone. I'm like, what the heck's going on? Like, did I sleep all the way through? I've never got raptured. It got raptured. I didn't think that because the food was still.

Shed got left behind.

The food was still on the. On the burner. And obviously it was off, but there's still food out. And my wife does not leave food out like that. And everything's, like, kind of normal. And I'm going, oh, man, I should have been a better person because I'm stuck behind.

But apparently. So my wife went out shopping with my son and.

She said, yeah, Zach came downstairs and said, dad's asleep on the couch. And then I guess Rachel went to Leilani and said, dad's asleep on the couch. Because I just. I don't do that. But I was just so tired from the day. And the reality is I could easily do that if I didn't have that drive of I've got to keep pressing forward. And like I said, do you get tired? Absolutely. You do. Do you get frustrated? Absolutely. Do you worry about things? Absolutely. But does it consume you or do you sit there and go, this is just another obstacle in front of me?

Yeah.

And there's certain obstacles in life that you need more momentum to get going. I prepare every day as a giant is going to pop up in front of me, and I'm ready to do that. You know, it's funny, this we. Leilani, I were looking at this video last night, and this really cool black panther, you know, it's just. I would love to have one. That's the only kind of cat I ever agree with. It's got to be a black panther, a bigger, you know, I don't know, lynx I could do a links to, or jaguar.

Are you talking about to own?

Yeah, to own, absolutely. And she goes, yeah, but you know what? I said I could have that. And she goes, or could have you and it could eat you. And I said, no, David killed the lion and the bear to prepare him for the giant. This cat would just be another obstacle that I just have to kill.

Yeah, there you go.

But, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I was just gonna say, I. I think one of the keys to this, to success in anything, and this. This goes over into all areas of life is being present. So my dad used to tell me all the time, Caleb, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Agree.

So you can't do something right if mentally and emotionally you're not invested into that at the time you're doing it. So the. The thought process is, if I come into work at 8 o' clock and office hours don't start till 9, and I'm here for that hour, but mentally, I'm not here, I might as well not be here. I might as well be at home doing something totally different or Wherever my brain is, it's like you've got to be on wherever you are to be on. If you're hanging out with family, be present with family. If you're resting, do what it takes to shut everything else off so that you can actually rest. I think that it's a, it's a figment of imagination to think that we can get the reward of something but just simply by doing it without actually being present while we do it.

I think this video Leilani showed me, it was this guy and girl, husband, wife sitting next to her and she goes, repeat after me. And rest is for. And then you're supposed to say rest is for. And then people being healthier, being something like that.

And.

And the guy goes for losers.

I was like, it's so good. But remember, here's an easy way to determine why failure is not an option. If you focus on things, failure doesn't mean anything because it's a thing. It's a thing. You know, if you fail to buy this car, if you fail to buy this house, it's a thing. If you fail on emotions, emotional, a relationship that's now a person. So that's where I decipher what am I going to hit really hard. And people ask, well, how big of a house do you want? I'm fine with what we have. I've always been fine with what we have. Do I want more? Yes. But why do I want more? I want a big ranch where my kids can build homes on wherever they want. You don't have to be right by us, but you know, they can build their homes wherever they want and they can have that freedom to do whatever they want on that area. I want the relationship side where my little grandkid could take his little 4x4 Ford truck and drive over. My daughter could do the same thing in a Ford truck. I am never buying a toy that says Chevy on it, I can assure you that. But anyway, I do like Chevy trucks. They do look sharp. I. I'll go back.

You just don't like the wheel.

It's a wheel wells you got. It's like these big old. Okay. It's like the muscle bound dude with chicken legs. Yeah, that's really what it is. A Chevy is a muscle bound dude with chicken legs. That's what it is. That's what it comes down to. So we're going to leave you on that note for failure is not an option. But once again, we want you to start 20, 22 strong. Knock it out of the park, kill it make it your best year ever. Not just numerically, relationally make it your best year ever.

And I want to open myself up in my time, my schedule to have conversation. So I do business strategy sessions with agents like you. They're not a part of the fmo. They're not a part of the academy and just strategize and talk through. We're starting a new year. Okay. I've done this for dozens and dozens and dozens of agents. It's not that hard.

It probably is. I've been mentored by this guy. So to be able to actually have.

A conversation with you, which is amazing.

Well, I put on a good show.

And the medicine helps too.

But to have that conversation and really line out a good strategy plan for your 2022, I would count that an absolute honor to get to have that conversation and speak into your business.

And of course we are going to keep for 2022 the famous saying of happy selling.

Sam.