Episode 105 - Andres Gamboa A Podcaster To Stand-Up Comedian, He Never Takes Himself Too Seriously

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. So, oh, my gosh, you guys, it is so cool to be able to interview this next guest because you have heard me talk about this company probably a lot. I don't know if it was specifically by name, but when I sold books door to door, I worked for a company called Southwestern. And the next guest, I got introduced because he is currently doing a podcast where he actually gets to interview people that are basically former people that have sold books. And a lot of things you do when you've done something that other people have done, it's just a natural bond because you already know what it took for that person to do that thing. And. And so it just immediately gets you connected to who they are and to what they're about because, you know, you've been through a similar experience. So there's just this special. I don't know, the special, like, moment in time that you've had the same experience, the shared experience, even though you don't even know each other. So I'm really excited to get to interview our next guest. So I'm welcoming Andres to the show. Hey, Andres. Hey.

Thanks for having me on. That's exciting. I call it. I call it shared trauma. That's.

Oh, my God.

Experience is a word for it, I suppose. But it's like. It's like when two Marines meet and they're like, yeah, we do share, like, some positive experiences. Like, we've. You know what it feels when it's been a long day and you've been sitting at zero, and then at the end of the day, some mom feels sorry for you and she buys something. Like, we get that, but. But mostly it's like that corner that you cried on on Tuesday when it was raining, and you're like, what am I doing out here in West Virginia? Or whatever.

Oh, yeah, my favorite. I loved the rain. That was my favorite because everyone always felt bad for you when it was raining, and that was Just a way to always get sales, so.

That's true. Fair enough.

Yeah, I'd love to start off and just have you share. So I said a little bit about you, but I'd love to have you share your background, your story, and then we can kind of take it from there.

Oh, man. Where do you want me to start from? Like chapter four? Or do you want me to go back all the way to the beginning? I mean, it's a long story.

I did interview your brother and he did tell me about just even your parents and you guys coming here and basically going through that process. So why don't. I'd love to hear it from you. Just sort of what that experience, then kind of fast forward to where you are now.

Yeah, that's great. Very long story. I mean, when I say long story, you can write a book about it, as in, as in someone has. But okay, so my parents, My parents own a business that produced construction materials. Essentially it was sand, it was a quarry, I think it's what they're called in English. But back in Colombia they were. You take dynamite to the mountainside and just create construction bricks and sand to create cement and all the other stuff that you can make out of sand. And which is really lucrative because in Colombia a lot of the housing and buildings are made out of concrete. Here you drive around, you see like two by fours when a house is being built. That was so brand new when we moved here because that's not what we were used to. But anyway, long story short. So also background is the Colombian government had been at war, civil war with the farc, which is Google. It's a communist guerrilla group that was about at the time, at its height was like 16,000 members. And they were wreaking havoc now that Pablo Escobar had died in the 90s. They were like kind of experimenting with using the drug trafficking as a way to fund their efforts. And so where all of this comes into play in my life is my parents. Their place of business was about an hour away from this army base in Colombia just outside of Bogota, which is where I'm from. And it got blown up by or partly blown up by the farc. And so my parents were asked to help and so they gave. And I mean there was, I'm sure there was some business deal struck, but obviously my dad's the ever patriot, gave away a lot of stuff to help the army kind of get back on its feet in that base. So then the FARC to find out about this. And yeah, we were being Chased and almost murdered. So it's much, much more details of this. But long story short, we had to run because we were being threatened. And so we ended up moving to a town called Grand Island, Nebraska. I don't know if my brother told you about this, but yeah, we moved to Grand Island, Nebraska. So, you know, we went from 9 million people 2,600 meters up in the sky and nestled in a vast beautiful mountain surrounded by jungle city metropolis to Nebraska. It's not the same thing. So yeah, and we moved here. I grew up there, I went to school there, went to high school, learned the language, learned the culture, tried to assimilate as best as we could. Still are. I suppose that's a never ending thing. Yeah. And then went to college, sold books. I went door to door selling books to Southwestern for four years. Wow, that's a whole story. I mean you could write. Literally after 150 episodes of my show, I could tell you I could write books about the stories from that. And then, yeah, just kind of kept going. I didn't really know what I was doing. I went and worked with a company called Primerica. It's like an insurance company, insurance investment company, really great company. Only positive reviews of that. But things kind of change. I did a couple things here and there was live the life, did great. And then some years, not so hot financially and emotionally. Dealt through a lot of adversity, personal and external. And then, yeah, then the podcast started happening. And that's kind of what I'm up to now, where it started just as a hobby. Something where I thought it'd be kind of fun to talk to people about their experience on books door to door. Because like you said, there's always this automatic connection. And I'd always experienced that with people that I would meet that I didn't sell with, that they would have sold 10 years, 20, 30 years before I did. And I still had this connection. So that turned into from a hobby to a company. And now we're expanding and scaling to be a production studio for other podcasts that are growing that need kind of the structure where people might not have the time to do the whole thing. So we do the thing for them. So we're doing the thing.

Let's talk about your book too, what that is.

Sure. So the book's called the Cost of Citizenship. It was published on March 7th of 2021, which was a 21 year anniversary of my dad first coming here. My dad came here four months before we did. And on the anniversary of it, I Published a book, you can find it. I'm not here to necessarily self promote, so yeah, if you're interested to go look, look, you'll find it if you look for it enough. It's Google. But anyway, yeah, the book is about the story of our life, of my life, specifically from my perspective as a child and kind of what I remember coming through. So the experience of finding about my parents and what was going on, our parents being truthful to us breaking it down, that we were going to have to move countries and what that meant to a 7 year old because I was young, super young when I came here. And then it goes up to the point where we become citizens which thus the name cost of citizenship. So all the hardships and things that you can imagine that could happen to an immigrant family from Colombia in Nebraska.

I'd love to talk to you too because when I was talking to your brother, he was telling me you're his older brother, so he's younger than you and you got him to sell books. And he was telling me how you were able to get him to sell by kind of identifying the why with him, why he wanted to do it. And I'm just wondering, you're so young then how did that even come up? How did you know that was so important and how did you, how did you do that with him and for yourself, obviously?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things in that one, when you grow up. My wife has her master's in psychology and she's a counselor, she's like a licensed therapist. And so she actually kind of broke this down for me. But basically part of it was you're going to have to grow up a little bit earlier when you, when you live the life of an immigrant, especially when you come here, not on purpose. Some people come here and it's, they're a different kind of immigrant, which is also, it's hard in its own way. But they come here by choice. Like they maybe their parents found a job in the United States and they moved here from Europe and ended up here. And then there's a much larger majority like me where it's my brother, where we moved here and we were just a lot younger. And so what that does is it two things. One, you have to kind of grow up faster because I was the child interpreter for my parents like everywhere we went. So what that means is, you know, I'm learning about real time of what's happening and the truth of the matter of we were going to be murdered and My dad had a gun to his head, and we had experienced this, but then I had to translate this story to the lawyer. You know what I mean? And so I'm seven or eight or nine or whatever, right? So. So that's one way it kind of matures you faster, and then the other way is you. We were all at ground zero here. My parents didn't know how to raise me to be a United States citizen. They knew how to raise me, how to be a Colombian, but we weren't in Colombia, and so we kind of had to figure it out on own. And identity plays a big role in this because you're kind of not at home here. Then you go back and visit there, and you're not at home there. So to answer your question, as far as the why and understanding that part of ourselves, that was something that was kind of almost by default instilled in us when we were kids, because we were always chasing the why of why we came here. So to think of things as why do we do it first? Instead of what is it and how is it done? We would always think of the why first. And so for me, even selling books, I knew fairly well why I wanted to go out. For me, personally, it was the first time in my life that I got to choose to do something hard for me. I had heart surgery when I was 5, and that was difficult for me psychologically and physically. Didn't choose that. I was just kind of born with that problem. I had to move to the United States when I was seven. And, I mean, pick a thing that's hard about that. And I didn't choose that for myself. It was just kind of thrown. It was cards that were dealt to me. But Southwestern was the first thing I got to be like, all right, I get to choose the cards. And these sound hard. And I want to prove to myself that I can do something hard, that it's not just my parents, and that I can challenge myself through it. So that's why I did it, went and came back. And as you've probably had people on the show who have talked about Southwestern, it changes you. It's really. From a traumatic standpoint. It's. It does. It makes you. It challenges you in ways that are way different than most of the things that you experience, particularly with, like, rejection and just facing yourself. And so I come back, my. I feel confident. I feel the. Not the kind of confidence that is easily taken away from me, but the confidence that says, I know what I can and cannot do. I'm aware of myself and myself capabilities and I'm aware that I don't need to explain express them everywhere all of the time. It's like this quiet confidence and you can see that in a person sometimes you can see it often when you meet someone and they just seem like they know something. And I wanted to know that. So my brother sees that and immediately I could tell he was interested in learning this mentality. So I knew that I could just tell, right our chemistry maybe just because we were close and I understand him and he understands me and we've dealt with, you know, he's really the only person in the world who's experienced this whole thing with me as far as moving. We have another brother and he's experienced a lot of our hardships as well. But he was born here, so he kind of comes into the story much later. And his role in our lives is just as important, but it's different because it's just not as early. And because I understood that from my brother, I knew that all this like talk about money, all this talk about travel wasn't really going to entice him because he. We had traveled and we have had a really cool life up to then on its own. And it was interesting. So for me it was helping him understand and putting him around people who I knew he wanted to be like. And that's what I did. So I took him to one of the conference drs. For your listeners who don't know what that is, it's like a seminar. That's a company wide seminar and all of the who's who of that company show up there. And so I brought him to that and I knew that once he witnessed that energy and that mentality where it was not just me that had that, but it was that I was just a small fish and a big pond of people who were way way sharper, who were way, way smarter than I was. And he was going to see that and go, ooh, all of these people know something I don't and I want that. So that's kind of where that why I thought that was good enough because that's the only thing I did. I brought him to that and then never talked to him again. And then he showed up at sales school. That was it. So sorry, that was a long answer.

But that's great. It's great. And then for people that made this could be their first episode they're listening to. Do you mind just sharing what Southwestern is? I sort of explained it a little bit in intro.

Right. It's a cult. No, I'm just kidding. It's not. It's a. So I've talked about Southwestern. So, like, that's part of my life now. So Southwestern is a company that recruits. It's a quote unquote publishing company, which it is. They publish books, but they publish books to help families with education. But that's not really what they're like. That's what they do. How they do it is they recruit college kids. And they've been doing it since 1855 or something. It's literally the Civil War for 150 years. And they recruit college kids to go sell these books door to door for 80 hours a week, Monday through Saturday, 8am to 9:30pm just straight commission, no guarantees, no housing, just go. And you have to go and deal with the adversity that that can be. They transfer the kids to a different part. So I was then going to school in Nebraska. I went to go sell in New York. And, you know, the Louisiana kids go sell in wherever they. We all switch around. And so you can make a ton of money doing that. You travel, obviously. But more than anything, you just learn to deal with adversity in a way that's pretty relatively safe to life. And so it's, it's. Some people do one summer and that's all they need to do. And some people do 30 summers. I feel like sometimes now they do like, I think the most that's ever been done is like 13 or 14. But they end up sticking around the company and moving up in the, in the, in the chain of the corporate ladder. But. But yeah, that's kind of in a gist what Southwestern is. And it's full of people who want to be and believe in positivity and hard work, sometimes to a fault.

You mentioned kind of coming into adversity, like from after you were done with Southwestern and then the insurance job and then before Ponytails podcast. Did you kind of channel through your Southwestern days to get through that or what? What helped you?

Well, part of the problem was actually Southwestern. So my first two summers I did great, sold a lot of books. I think I made 20. Well, in today's, the way they pay today would be like $32,000. In the summer it was like in units, people wouldn't understand that, but in dollars, that's about how much I would make today if I had done the same thing. But then my second two summers, my third and fourth, not so good. And I had to deal with myself and not going to work and not being A person of integrity and saying I was working, but when I actually wasn't. And so there was a lot of mental stuff going on too. My parents were getting divorced at that time too, so there was some of that stuff going on. And it's weird being a 20 year old or like watching your parents marriage fall apart in your 20s because that's when you're thinking of like meeting someone. But all of a sudden the people that went through all of this adversity went, marriage, that's too hard. Moving countries and trying to survive, piece of cake compared to marriage. So, so that had a lot to do with it. And so part of the problem was I needed to, I should have left, I should have come back for two more summers. I think there was a point where I knew that and I still tried to keep it anyway because I was stubborn and I was prideful and I said I need to go and do this because I got it. But sometimes, sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's okay to just go, hey, this is enough. It's not necessarily quitting, it's more just saying everything that I needed to learn from this experience. Personally, I have learned other people who've been in my shoes need to learn more, and they did. But as far as I can go, this is. As far as I can go, this is all I needed to get from me. And they've gotten everything from me that they needed. So I'm good and I'm at peace with that. But I didn't really feel that way at the time. And so part of the problem was that there's, there's a strong energy sometimes in southwestern to stay and continue, which is why people jokingly call it a cult. But, but it's just, it's just people, it's just college kids who are trying to lead other college kids to what they believe is the best option for them. And so it's not their fault. It's just kind of the way it just ends up going. And so once you leave, you kind of look at it from the outside perspective and you understand. I see. Like, maybe this is, this is, this is a good move. Maybe I should have done this a couple of years ago. Go. And that shift in identity and integrity and all this other stuff kind of really put me in a weird place mentally that, to figure out like, okay, who am I? Who am I? Because for the last three years or four years I've been this door to door college kid and I've, you know, I, I've was at the top of it where people knew who I was. I knew that I would have dinner with the president of the company because I was doing great. And then now I'm nobody and my brother's in it and he's doing great as well. And so it was this weird dynamic going on while at the same time, you know, trying to figure out how to deal with my parents and like, what I knew from life falling apart, you know, it was just like a weird, you know, storm that came through and just weathering it and navigating through it. I needed to figure out who I was. And I did. I mean, it took me a few years, but that was probably the, the, the, the biggest turning point was that. So. But I did keep part of, to answer your question, I did keep part of it. Self talk discipline, you know, staying to a schedule, having, having realistic self talk, which is a key versus positive self talk. It's not the same thing. And really having awareness of yourself, I think is, is the biggest key that you can learn in life is just knowing yourself. And once you know, if you know that, then really nothing, nothing can get in the way.

Yeah, I. There's so much in that. That's so good because I actually was just writing the intro for my book this morning. And it's so funny because I. When I started my book, I thought it was gonna be on like all the do the thing that I've done prior to selling my company. But it turned out that after I exited the business, that's when I had the major identity issue, which sounds like what you had, where it's like, then that's when almost the do the thing really started. Cause that's when my struggle really started. Before that, I was almost in this bubble of movement and going. And so it's been really important to me through this podcast to not just help people do the thing, but also to help them do the thing out of alignment. Because what you said about staying those last two years, and maybe it was too long, but you're sort of just following along with what you thought was expected of you. I think it's such good reflection to know that now because that's something you're going to carry with you in life. And actually even more today, I published an episode of someone that she had the same job for 21 years and left. And I call that doing the thing. Like totally doing the thing. Right? Because all of a sudden you're like, wait, this isn't the right path for me. I'm quitting this job. And that's such a big risk in your mind. Right. Because that's 21 years doing the same thing. So it's just timely that we're having this conversation.

Yeah. There's a book called Scary Close by Don Miller. I don't know if you've read that, but it's a little bit more about relationships, particularly like finding a romantic relationship. But that's not why I was reading it. It talks a little bit more about intimacy between two people. And it could be, again, it could be applied to a marriage. It could be applied to a boss relationship, like a work relationship. But in the book, he talks about how he went to this camp to learn a little bit more about himself. And one of the things that was the number one rule at the camp was that you couldn't talk. You could talk about yourself, but you couldn't talk about what you did for a living at all. And it was the hardest part for him. And really a lot of people who were there because there's so much attached to. Like, if I was to ask you, so what do you do? Or who are you? You might say, oh, I'm a. I'm an author or I'm a comedian or. But because people attach that identity to what they do, and it's really difficult when you change that, especially for that person that was in job for 21 years. That's a rough if that's how they've always identified. That's a tough, tough thing to overcome because all of a sudden that's gone and then what's left is just like this emptiness. And who am I? I don't know. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's. It's difficult to not. So that was a lesson I learned is to not attach myself to what I do. To just have that be a part of. Just kind of like my clothes. Right? I. I'm not, I'm not this shirt. I just wear this shirt. I don't. I'm not a podcaster. I just run a podcast or whatever, or write books or whatever.

Yeah, I like that. So what do you think helped you with that?

Who.

Who am I question? When you kind of went through that.

That question had been. It popped up a lot in my life in different aspects. I kind of alluded to this a little bit, but I went back to Colombia and my family treated me like I was a foreigner, which is really. I mean, talk about just heart wrenching, because the whole time in Grand Island, I'm here in Nebraska trying to say that, hey, look, salsa dancing is great and Shakira is awesome and we're not all drug dealers. And I know. I promise. I love America. I watch college football. I swear, like, these things that I think are part of being a United States citizen and I'm. And I'm being treated as a foreigner here, and then I go home and I have to go, no, I swear. I know. Like, I'm. And then it turns out I'm neither. So that was. That was hard to face. And that's where I really learned the lesson of identity, where it's. It's all about understanding just why you do things. It goes back to like, that, why. And so why. Why do I get up in the morning? It's not to be an American citizen and it's not to be a Colombian. So that can be part of who I am. Because that's not why I get up, right? And I don't get up to do a podcast and I don't get up to do stand up comedy or to write my book or whatever. I get up because I want to make a difference in the world. And I get up because I am a person who likes to lead from the front and inspire people quietly and work diligently but behind the scenes and then share the wealth of success once it's happened to the people that deserve to be acknowledged. And so that's. That's where I get my identity from is just more about character. And what. What about me? Do I want to be embodied by what I do and how I do it? And so that. That's kind of where I got that mentality about is just how you do anything is how you do everything. And so even the littlest things to like how I kiss my wife and how I hug her and how I treat my dogs or how I clean my rooms or in my house. Right? Or how I. And I fail often, by the way, part of my identity is I fail often, but I fail forward. So that's okay. But it's just trying to strive to. Not perfection, but just to be just the best version of myself today with whatever it is that I have to deal with. Whenever. Some days are good, sometimes they're not so good, but that's okay.

So how did you. How did you get in tune with that on your. Why? Because that's pretty introspective. What got you to get there?

I just. The actual how. How to. I just spent a lot of time by myself and. Which is hard because I'm aggressively extroverted is what I like to say. But I had to learn to be alone and really understand what I. What my character is, what I believe in, what my weaknesses are, like what my strengths are. And in between that, just understand, like I literally wrote down, this is what I can do, this is what I'm capable of, and this is the balance that I want to have in my life. People talk about work, life, balance, but it's not even just about that. It's about balance of energy and mental energy and physical energy and emotional energy, because those are some things that people don't always think about. I had always had it in my head that working hard was this idea of like pounding the pavement. This is what I would think of this person just grinding like a hard at construction or like these physical labor jobs. But sometimes you can work really hard and just sit there all day on a computer and that's hard work. And so not do not being that person. Because sometimes you have to work hard emotionally. And so as long as I was balanced and all my engines were running, there's also the spiritual side of it too, right? Like the spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. And making sure that all of those cups were all like not full, but not empty, either that sometimes one would be more full than the other, or whenever some of them might be running low, but to make sure that then I would take water from one to pour to the other. And that balance was really key because then it just allowed me to understand this is what I am not capable of, this is what I can believe in, and this is what I can let go of. And that helps me. When it comes to arguing with people about politics, when it comes to arguing with people about business, when it comes to arguing with people about marriage, parenting, whatever, I can understand who I am. And so therefore, based on who Andres, this idea of Andres is, then I can navigate whatever challenge or discussion or argument or whatever.

So I'm wondering a few things from that. What other questions would you ask yourself? So besides going through your strengths and your weaknesses and then saying, this is what I can do and this is what I'm capable of, is there anything else that you would ask yourself to be able to come to that conclusion?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of people often think of from the physical standpoint, just because that's what we experience the most readily. Like, it's like, if I told you I'm standing up or I'm sitting down, that's the quickest way to identify where or who you are. But if I tell you, how are you feeling? Give me an Actual emotion. That's hard for people to sometimes. And I work to really get good at saying I'm frustrated. And that's different than angry, which is different than sad, which is different than frustrated or whatever. Annoyed. I really clearly understand or try to understand in myself how I'm feeling at any given moment. I'm really like, that's what I'm chasing. And that was hard for me. The other side of is mentally, like, if I feel confused, that's a feeling. But that's also could be like a mental thought. So understanding all of those different ways that you can be is huge, because then you can control that, and that's way easier than just letting them control you. And so those. So in my head, I was always. I was going to, how am I feeling? And, like, I'm always asking myself, how are you feeling? Are you excited? Are you sad? How are you thinking? What are you thinking about? Where are your thoughts going? What are they taking you in the right direction? What am I doing? Okay, I'm standing. And it really helps you ground yourself and be back to now and the present. And being back in the present, it's just. It's that. That really. From just being grounded again, it's really simple to go from there because then you. All the stuff that was foggy kind of clears up, and then you know what you need to do, what you need to say or how you need to do it and how you need to say it. For me, personally.

Yeah.

So I would always ask myself that. What's. What's going on? Check in. Oh, and be aware of yourself.

Yeah, you're just. You're checking in on yourself. It's funny, I just watched. I just heard about this. These. You know those conversation cards. Have you seen those before? I just heard of Big Talk. Someone mentioned it on my podcast. I don't even know, a couple weeks ago. So I just bought the book that bought the cards. Basically conversation prompts to get you to talk deeper. And I noticed the girl that created them also has a TED Talk. And so I just watched that this morning. And it's like all these really deep questions, what do you want to do before you die? And things like that. And then she realized after she created it and this whole, like, from the TED Talk, it. It shares this. She created them. She's doing it for connection. And then she realized it started from her being isolated in college and feeling that sadness of that first year of being alone. So she got connected. But then as it starts to grow, she got disconnected again. And realized it's because she needed to ask herself those questions. And that was amazing because you wouldn't think those cards would be for that. So now I'm rethinking it. Almost got me to rethink everything. I'm okay. So all these conversation cards I have now, you can ask yourself those questions.

Yeah. And it's also important on that, too. There's a book called the Untethered Soul. I don't know if you've read that.

Book five times now. I guess I have to.

Great book. Great, great. Honestly, I think every college student should read that. It's. It's a lot on understanding yourself. Like, it's all about this. And to me, this is. This has been such a theme in my life, to know yourself. I think Socrates was who said that. But to me, that is such a key to everything in your life that there's that. It doesn't mean you're gonna have a successful life or. Or unsuccessful life by whatever metric you're measuring. It just means that the life that you live will be lived according to who you are. Which wouldn't you want that? Because some people don't do that. But on the same note, that how you're not your job or what you physically do, you're also not your emotions, and you're also not your thoughts, which was another big hurdle for me, because sometimes I would often think, because I think this or because I believe this, this is who I am, that's not true. Because all that stuff changes as you grow, as you experience different things in your life. And so that book really taught me to be aware that I'm just experiencing sadness. I'm not sad. I'm experiencing sadness. So when I can detach myself from the emotion again, I can easily control it because I know that I'm just experiencing anger or at the same time, I'm experiencing happiness. And people might go, well, that's great. That's why you want to feel. No, you don't. You don't want to feel happy all the time. That would suck. Because then you wouldn't experience the lows or happiness wouldn't be as appreciated. And so it's like, oh, I'm experiencing happiness. Andre's. Whatever being is inside this meat and bones is experiencing muscle fatigue on my calf because I played soccer yesterday. And I'm experiencing this feeling of connection with you because we're having a good conversation, but I'm also experiencing the. A little bit of stress from work I have to do for next week or whatever. Right. And so that's okay. I can have all of those things. But that doesn't tell me about who I am. I'm just noticing that those things exist and then I can do something about them and deal with them. Way better than just I'm stressed and hungry and my leg hurts. I don't know. That's. That's what I've learned.

That's so good. Well, cool. I guess I gotta get that book. You know when you hear something huge three times.

Yeah.

To get it. Yeah.

You have to. It's so good. If you're listening to this, don't buy my book. Go get that book. It's gonna do way more for you than my book. If you happen to be on Amazon and you want to get both for sure. But honestly, don't even. Just go get. Just go get the Tether Soul and write your own book. It's okay.

Okay. So I'm ready to. I'm gonna go through. So. So one of the things I've been doing on this podcast is I've been dissecting a formula for how people do the thing. And so I've basically written down like all the common themes of what everyone's done. And I put them down, I put each thing on a little index card, a three by five card. And I really want to come up with an acronym for it. So that was easy to remember. So all of a sudden the word game came up and I was really excited because game is great, right? Because life is a game, essentially. And then. But I was missing a couple of the letters. So anyway, I ended up. So the name of the acronym is I'm game. And what I also identified after I interviewed all these people, came up with the patterns, is I realized that programs use it too. And Southwestern is one of the programs where I was literally unconsciously.

See trauma.

Yeah. Unconsciously taught this formula from college, which is funny. And then since then I became even more curious. And 12 step programs use it, certain gyms use it, but they're just not talking about it. So I'm gonna go through it. And then I think I wanna talk. I was trying to decide. Cause there's so much to talk to you about, but we only have like a limited amount of time in terms of this. But like as far as when with a podcast, you get this like special. I don't know how you feel, but it's the special magic that you feel because you're getting this chance to be connected with different people and you can really get to know these Patterns. I just feel so powered with so much amazing information just from people that I've met. And I'm thinking you have just from hearing your podcast, I'm thinking you have a similar kind of experience. Yeah. And so when I. We're going to go through the pieces of the formula and then maybe just share kind of your thoughts on each piece and how you've seen other people or yourself use it if that sounds good.

Sure. And I will do my best to keep it brief. But yes.

No, just no, don't keep it brief. We're good. Okay. So the first one we already talked about but let's see if there's anything else. So we talked about. I and I'm game is identify the why.

Is there anything else you think that was good just from people you've met or from your own experiences that could help people identify the why?

All another book and I'm sure most people at this point have heard this book, but Simon Sinek has a book called Start with why. Really really good. And he also has a good TED Talk on this old YouTuber. You can find the whole thing. But yeah, he basically talks about most people that do really well understand their why first and then the how and then the what they do. And so that's. That's something that I've always really attached to as well. Is just someone who really had a profound effect without ever meeting them. Was. Was him with. With that idea of like people who start with why are in the end up usually have a higher probability of figuring out what they're doing better because they know why they're doing it first. And that's what people have to buy. That's what people have to sell sometimes, whether you're in business or whatever. That's. I would say that's starting with that why like that and understanding those principles that he teaches in that book. Really huge. Would say for that aspect of it anyway.

Yeah. What do you think is your biggest takeaway in terms of someone being able to identify their why?

I used to do this with. I used to do a little bit of business coaching and what I would recommend this isn't for the book but for me, this is what I would do. I did this for the podcast. I did this for my book is I would just start with why are you doing this? And then become a four year old and then go but why? Well, because I want to have. For me I could say something like I want to provide for my wife. Okay, but why? Well, because I want to. And then you Just keep going until you end up crying. And if you haven't cried, then you're not there yet. And that's. I know that sounds traumatic, but honestly, that's what I would say. I'm not, I'm not anybody to tell anybody what's new, but if you want to do that this way and if, if I sound credible enough to you, cool, but do that. And that's, that's, that's what I would say. I did that for both the book and my podcast, and it worked both ways.

Okay, so now we're moving on. So we've got the I identify the Y and I'm game. And now we have the M M is mindset. Because you need to have the right mindset to do this.

Absolutely, yes.

So talk to me about that. What do you think? Same question. I want to know what powers you the most. But then also I think you have this special sauce just from having all these interviews. So just what your perspective is on someone to be able to really get the right mindset, to be able to do the thing.

158 episodes or something. We've done, I would say, and we've had a variety of people, people who just started out their careers, people who are at the end of it. We've had people who had. Who are super really wealthy and we've had people who aren't, but they love what they do. But almost. I wouldn't say across all of them, but I would say across 140 of them at least. The theme, whether it's explicitly said or just implied, is the mindset is take what you're doing seriously. Do not take yourself seriously. And that mindset of it's not about me and it's about what I do and like and why. And the why. You start with the why and now you find out, like what you're doing. But. But don't be so cool, so grandiose, so quote unquote badass that you forget to like laugh at yourself and just let yourself fail. Because that's so. To me, that is the been the most common thing that people have said is this. You just never take yourself too seriously. That allows you to fail gracefully and learn from them. That allows you to understand that it's not about you. That allows you to get in the right mindset as far as really working on your mission through your craft. And I think that's been the biggest thing that I've learned through my interviews and the podcast is do not take yourself seriously. It's okay if you mess up, it's okay. If you fail, it's okay. If it. If you suck at it, it's all right. But just keep working on the craft. What you do is important. You're not important. Sorry.

It's funny because originally I had for the book one of the. Because I was just the. I was writing down formula pieces based on my experience before I started doing the interviews, and one of them was keeping it because those are some of my best memories at Southwestern. It's just how much stupid stuff I did as I was selling books, so. But then I realized it was kind of bigger than that, which is controlling your attitude, which is where don't take yourself seriously is.

Yes.

It's really your attitude.

Yeah, 100%. And this is what I mean. This is another way of saying the exact same that. Because what happens is people have this. Man, I hate it when people do this. People are like, oh, you have to have a positive attitude. That doesn't mean you have to be positive all the time. Sorry, it doesn't mean that. It means attitude is another word for perspective. Just the way that you choose to look at the world. And so what happens is people think, case in point, you talk about the rain. So sometimes, like, really, we sold books door to door. Books like they have. They're made of paper. And it rained and it sucked when it rained. Now your perspective on it was great, which means you had a positive attitude, right? Because people did feel more sorry for you and so they would let you in the door. But I hated it when they do. They would do this training sometimes and go, oh, you have to have positive self talk. It's not rain. It's liquid sunshine. Or it's this idea of, I. I love working in the wet. And that is such garbage because nobody believes that. And then your brain knows you're lying to it. And then it just. And then you start really resenting the fact that you have to try to stay positive through this. It's stupid. So when I was training my brother, I would say, hey, look, look, look, look, look. They're gonna tell you to be positive about rain. Don't say that's. That's bullshit. Here's what you wanna say. You wanna say, look, it sucks to work in the rain. And you're like, oh, gosh, it's negative. No, it's not. It sucks working in the rain. But here's the thing. You. And when you say you, you say I your self talk.

Right?

I am a person of integrity. And I said I was Going to work regardless if it was raining or if it was sunshine or whatever. And because I'm a person of integrity, it doesn't matter that it sucks to work in the rain, because I'm tough. And I came here to do this, and I did this because it was going to be hard. And this is the day that I came out here to learn from, not the day that everybody bought. And it was sunny and 80 degrees and no light breeze from the. That's. That's. Anybody could do that day, but not many people can do this day, and I can. And I'm a badass, so I'm gonna go fucking do it. That is way more powerful than some slicker sunshine. You know what I'm saying? So. So the perspective on that is about you and who you are and not what's going on around you. And if. And if you aren't taking yourself too seriously that, oh, I'm gonna get wet and be cold. It's not about you. Go, get going. Don't take yourself so seriously that you're gonna get wet, get wet, go. But what you're doing is important because people are expecting you to do the work. And some people really need what you're selling, and so go do it for them. Don't do it. Don't make it about you. Life is important for other people, so get over it.

I really like that. It's. It's like an easier access point. I interviewed a wilderness therapist, like, a few weeks ago who helps kids out in the wilderness overcome a lot of mental health stuff. And she was talking about how when you ask, you want to get a kid right, when they're having a hard time to think what is good about today? And she said a lot of times they can't even access that because that's like a fake thing. They're. Nothing's good. So she. She starts it with, what doesn't suck today? And there's something so cool about that because it gets that open. It's okay. Well, I guess it's not raining today. Go back to the rain. It's not raining today. That doesn't suck. And so it almost starting. It's like a. It's like an easy entryway for them to start thinking positive. I just thought that was really, really, really aligned with what you're saying too.

And again, just Southwestern would teach this idea of just. And again, it's not their fault, but it's just this idea of always be positive. And it's like, you can't.

The balancing. I was Talking about earlier, sometimes you need to feel bad to let it out. And so it's okay. It's okay that you're not okay. What's not okay is for you to just let it consume you. You don't have to let that happen. You can let it be, but you don't have to let it be you. Yeah, and that's, that's the difference. So the mentality is don't take yourself so seriously that way and keep it positive from a perspective standpoint, not from a positivity standpoint.

I love that. Yeah. I'd love to also ask you, with this mindset, don't take yourself seriously. What are just some ways you do, you're able to have fun where you're able to. While you're still doing the thing. How do you keep things enjoyable? Here's an example. Well, so I just recently saw this, this two minute video and it showed stairs on the left side and then an escalator on the other side. And they're basically recording a video and they're showing all the people only going up the escalator. Then this whole team comes and they put piano steps like they painted and they put like some music things and then they show everybody going up the piano steps just because of that one change once you have that outlook. So I think what I'm just looking for is just more of a general, like stuff because once I saw that, my mind just blew up with like, well, what else could be done? Oh, when I was talking to your brother, he had a funny one where he was saying they would at three, they would give each other like a sticky note of like a dare they had to do that day and three o' clock they would do the dare. And so now I'm just like, oh, how can I incorporate that? So I think I'm looking for those kinds of ideas to help me think of, oh, okay, I could make this more fun by doing whatever it is.

On my brother's thing. But this is something you could do practically at home, especially if you're working from home, which because you guys heard of the flu, right, that was happening last couple of years, cough that was going around. So on that note, I actually did this with some friends where we called it the three o' clock role, similar to my brother. But how to do it, not on the book field, but to do it here is you just find another person that you know, a friend, maybe it's your spouse or something that also is working from home and you guys set your alarms and at 3 o', clock, we would do the 3 o' clock roll. So in the book field, even if you're with a mom showing them books, the beep would go off. And you just, excuse me one sec. And you just. Literally in their living room, you just do like a roll, like a summer, like a, like a whatever kind of role. You on the ground, whatever. But then we got more fun. So we started doing things like the Bigger and better game. I don't know if you remember that, but basically you started with a clip, a paperclip, and every door you say, hey, if the mom was cool, you go, hey, by the way, we're doing a trade up. So you got to trade me something for bigger and better. And some people would end up with from a paperclip to a pen, pen to a nicer pen, nicer pen to whatever. And people ended up with TVs MacBooks. It was kind of crazy. So that was kind of fun. On a practical standpoint, what I like to do is listen to stand up comedy as I'm just kind of working because sometimes I'll just. Unless it's something that you really need to focus on. But sometimes it's just busy work that you're doing. If you have that hour, oh man. Just throwing out some comedy in the background. Just all of a sudden you just hear some crazy punchline and you're like, wait, what? Just go back and listen to that again. Hold on a sec. And you just take five minutes off. Just listen to that whole bit again. Because that was wild. That's a good thing. As people listen to podcasts or music, I sometimes throw that stand up stuff on. And then a good thing is rewarding yourself. So if you have certain amount of tasks, make the reward really, really good. Really, really fun. Could be something you have to FaceTime a person and tell them a joke. Or it could be something where some people reward themselves with food. That's a good way to kind of stay motivated with something funny that way. I personally enjoy the show Rick and Morty. And so if I set myself two hours of work, the show Rick and morty is about 22 minutes an episode. So if I really, if I go, okay, look, I'm gonna do two hours straight work and then I'm going to take 20 minutes off, but I'm going to watch an episode of Rick and Morty and then, and I'm okay watching. I don't feel guilty about it. I let it. I let work go and focus on where I'm at. Oh, man. And then that show's done. All right, back to work and I do another two hours. So I don't do that all the time, but whenever I'm, like, lacking motivation, I just give myself that. If I'm going to. If I'm going to only be working at 80% today, then I better make that other 20% really fun. So that way it's 100% full of good.

And then did you have any one that you've interviewed that had something that was also fun, that they do?

Fun? I haven't interviewed this person, but Mark Row. Mark Rao is probably the best person.

Yeah, my person, though. He was my sales manager.

That's funny. Yeah. Mark has a whole bit on just different ways to have fun on the book field. My brother and I one time had one of these. It was kind of similar where he. Mark was suggested that sometimes you'd have two people working door to door, and they'd be following, like, one is learning from the other. And so what he suggested is pretend like one of them is a mute and the other person's there to translate. But with my brother and I, what we did is we only spoke Spanish. And so. And so I would be his translator in Spanish or in English. So it was just. We. I would. He would say some of those. We waited. And no offense, we would wait until we met someone who was very clearly not Spanish speaking. We'll just put it that way. And we. And we would just say funny things in Spanish. Not about them, not at their expense, but just say the most ridiculous things in Spanish and then just translate it to what we knew to be the sales talk. And so we would be selling the book. Book while translating. It was just a good way to have a blast.

So, okay, we're moving on. So we're on G. You. I know you know what G is.

Let's see. Wait, I'm game. So we got. Identify the why. What's your mindset? G would be goal setting.

Yes.

Yeah. So what's your favorite? And then this could be you or people you've interviewed. Favorite hack for goal setting. And actually, it's technically goals because I wanted to keep it more simple, but same thing.

Yeah. I mean, we've all heard about the realistic. Right. Make them measurable. That jazz. So, yeah, do all of that. I think that for me personally, the best time that I remember following up and really executing a goal was when I wrote the book. I wrote the book in two months or really 68 days or something like that. From blank to published. And it couldn't have happened without goals. I mean, it was just simple as that. It comes down to crystallizing. I'm sure other book people have talked about this on your show. When it comes to how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. For me, I looked at the process of writing a book. I knew that the quickest I could get a cover editor, formatter and stuff like that was a month. And that means that out of the two and a half months that I had to write it to go get it out, I had one month to write it, because then the other month had to be spent on the publishing process. And so that made. Okay. So then I said, how many words do I need to write for this book to be quote, unquote, completed? That I got told 55,000. I got a coach, self publishing school, by the way, great option. And they told me, like, you need to write 55,000 words. And I said, all right, how many days do I have to do that? 30 days. Okay, so then it's just math, right? So you take 55 divided by 30. Turns out I needed to write about a thousand words a day every day. And then a couple of Saturdays in that month, I had to do like 5,000 to just really crank out to make it. And that's what I did. Literally.

Yeah. So it's basically reverse engineering the goal because you figured out how many words you had to write, and then you figured out the number of words you needed per day to make it happen.

And then you got to do the thing. You got to write the thousand words.

And then so the next piece is a. Which is accountability. So I'm wondering from there, how did you kind of measure yourself for accountability? Did you mark down that you did the. The words, or was it just the act of you doing it was a way to hold yourself accountable.

Great question. There's an app called Habits Checklist or Habits Tracker. And I shared. So this was all. The book was published March 7. I started writing in December 28. And at the new year, I had a couple friends who we shared our habits. So some of it was basic stuff. Brush your teeth every day, which some people struggle with that. Some of the people do a sit up once a day or whatever. For me, it was write a thousand words. And usually we did a good job because everybody was just trying to. Even if it was a simple goal, everybody committed to getting that thing done. Even if it was something as simple as call my mom today and you can share with your friends and it notifies you when each person got their thing for the day done, it was the same thing every day. And so I would see throughout the day, my brother, for example, he got that thing done. My best friend got this thing done. My roommate got that thing done. And so for me, I needed to get that thing done. And so it was kind of cool because at first.

I was trying to find the best time of the day to write the thousand words, but it turned out that it was always just going to be at the end of the night. So what I would do is I would start at 10:30 at night and try to get done before midnight to give myself pressure. But what was Sweet is by 11:00 clock or 11:30, some of the friends that I had helping me stay accountable were texting me going, oh, and we're in a group chat. It's like, oh, man, is he going to get it in today or not? Is he going to finish it? And I'm like, I got this. So I'm typing it out and sometimes it was like 11:59 and sometimes it was 11:30, but I would. It was a pleasure to just hit that check button and then just know that that notification was going to get sent to everyone going, I did it. And so, yeah, that was a great way to do it.

So they were really holding you accountable both by being there doing it also. And then also they would mention it if you hadn't done it yet.

Yeah, yeah. And so you're like, yeah. And it was crazy when I did the last bit and I hit that 55,000 mark. Oh, my gosh. You ever had a zit that just been bothering you for a while, like in your ear or something, and you just get it? It felt better than that.

That's good. Yeah. And then this leads us to M, which is my people. So it sounds like that was a part of it. Because you're surrounded because there's two pieces to that. Right. You could have just been in that group with them and then you all doing it, but no one kind of holding each other accountable. So it's everything piece kind of goes in line with each other. So, so was that group the my people part, or did you have an extra part where you were tracking habits.

And things like that at that point? With that and also with the podcast, you know, there's a group of people who you bring in together. It's like your team. Right. And they don't have to be doing even working at the podcast, but just we're just committing to. We're all Going to work harder. Our thing for that day, and knowing that someone else is working hard so I can't let them down. That was huge. And then there's also those side that makes me think of like my people. I can't write a book by myself. Somebody needs to edit it. Somebody needs to write the. Do the. Do the COVID design. Somebody needs to do the formatting. And so what that also makes me think of is having key players in your life and the thing that you're doing to either A, help you in the things that you're weak at, or B, help you, coach you in the things that you're strong at. But you need direction. Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you don't need a coach. And so that's. That's important too. And so having that team selected at the podcast, it's, for example, I hate. I hate doing like little. Sending emails and all that stuff. And some people love doing that stuff. That's like, they're very. That kind of stuff. They. It's just. It gets them excited. So I got someone on the show who loves to do that, and they'll do it very, very willingly for me. I love hosting. They would not like hosting at all. And so it works really well because choosing. It's kind of like a chessboard, right? Pawns are important. People think they're not. They're some levels. They're just as important as the queen, not maybe not as powerful or not as important at certain points of the game. From a standpoint of you need all 16 pieces to win that game. And so they all do different things and they all can do things that the other can't, but you need them all to win. And so that's kind of how I think about it.

Okay, moving on to the E. So the E is educate.

Books on that.

Yeah, well, yeah, that's right. Huh. That's been. Your big thing is reading books.

Somebody said in Southwestern, in five years you're going to be the same person plus people you meet and the books you read.

And man, I mean, that's it. Just learn. Be a student of the game. I've learned more about. I probably. If there was a degree for podcasting, I probably have earned it in the last year and a half. You know what I knew when I started this as a hobby. 0. What I know now is probably enough to know what I don't know, which is more than most people. So just learning that. That getting to that point is huge. And then going from there and continuing to grow and educate yourself. Huge. You can't, you can't do it without coaching and, and, and educating yourself. So.

Yeah, and then there's part two to that, which is educating others, which you're doing, like by coming on here today and by having your podcast. And do you have other ways that you. That you do that where people are learning from you?

I don't know that I know enough to learn or to teach others, but I think the thing that I would love to teach is that it's okay if you don't know. You know, if you don't know, it's okay if you're new. It's okay if you don't, if you're nervous about it or if it's something where. I think what I learned and what I wish people would learn about my podcast, for example, or my journey through this podcasting thing is, is you don't have to have all the answers. You don't have to have even the clearest, most realistic goals or like all the things that we talked about. It just straight goes back to the why. And that's what I would love for people to learn. I did this thing. I'm doing this thing. I'm feeding my dogs. I would say I'm feeding my family, but my wife says I can feed myself. Thank you, but. So I say I feed my dogs. This is what I do full time. I run a podcast full time, which is crazy to think two years ago, because I didn't know shit and now I still don't know that much more. But if I can do it, if I could get this far with what I knew, then anybody could get as far as they wanted, want with what they don't know and what they do know. You know what I mean? And so it's okay. It's okay. Just jump, do it and learn and learn from it and just be a student of the game. That's what I hope to teach others. I think I never thought about that, but if anything, I was going to teach people. It's that just, you can do it. Because, hell, I'm just. I'm just some kid from south polka to man.

I'm not this awesome, cool, huge nut. Now. This is. I'm just talking to people on a microphone.

It's actually, it's. You're speaking again to another thing that it's been coming up for me, which this idea of the breadcrumbs, and I'm just sort of following breadcrumbs. And I think that what. What is so cool about the podcast is it kind of leaves to this endless possibilities because these conversations get to keep going and then new ideas. I might be getting one of the books that you mentioned. Now we have a relationship where we're able to keep in touch on podcasting or books or whatever it is. And it's just this. You never know where it's going to go. And. And then that was another thing I talked to somebody about yesterday. She said sometimes it's okay to have your goal be a rough draft or it's a hypothesis. It doesn't have to be so specific. And I think you really spoke to that too, because I think where people get stuck in that analysis paralysis is when they think they have to know every single little thing. And I like that you were able to express that.

Yeah, absolutely. Done is better than perfect because you got something to show for it. And so people always get stuck because they don't have the answers or they don't know. What if this happens? Well, I don't know what if anything happens? We'll figure it out. You're not gonna die from it. Nothing's gonna kill you. And if it does, well, you know, you die trying, which is huge. So might as well go for it.

Yeah. I should have worn my shirt. I have a shirt that says, but did you die?

Exactly. Oh, my gosh. Listen, I almost died multiple times, so I know what it looks like to almost die. Ain't come close. Doing this podcast ain't gonna kill me. Doing whatever you want to do, doing your thing ain't gonna kill you. Go for it.

Yeah. So what do you think's the hardest thing for people?

Action. That's another thing that's been a common theme in our. In our show is just been people talking. We actually have asked this question, like, what do you think people don't, like, succeed? Or you. If you don't even move, you're not going to get. I mean, if you're at point A and you want to get to point B, or even if you don't know if it's where point B really is, that's okay. But just move. Because if it's really hard or really resistant in a way that's not flowing, because there's hard in not flowing and hard in flowing. So let me give you an example. Let's say that I want to get from Omaha, which is in the middle of the country, right, almost dead center, to Portland, which is where I live, right? That's northeast. Now, if I don't know any of that and I start heading, let's say towards Texas. And it starts getting hotter and hotter, and it's January. I might go, wait a minute. This can't be right because it's January. It should be getting colder, and it's not. But at least the fact that you moved gave you an idea that you were heading in the wrong direction. So even if that's making a mistake or failing, at least you move, though. At least you have a better understanding. Okay, so let's go back. Maybe we don't go from there when we start moving in a different direction and I started going towards New York and I just see these skyscrapers, I'm like, well, that's not what Portland's about. Still moves the wrong direction. Still failed. But now I know it's definitely not south and it's definitely not east. Now I'm narrowing my choices, right? And so eventually, maybe you got unlucky and you had to go through the entire country before you ended up in Portland. Or maybe right off the bat, you went straight northwest, and, oh, my God, wait, that looks. The Rockies. It's hard to climb a mountain, but I know I'm heading in the right direction because I knew I was supposed to hit mountains, and it's hard. And then I keep going and all of a sudden gets. Things start getting mossy. All right, here we go. Here we go. Right? And then you end up at Portland. Look at that. We did it. We're here. So either way, staying in Omaha to try to find the GPS and try to. Don't just fucking move, man. That'll tell you everything you need to know, and you'll learn and become a different person along the way. That's what I think.

So you have one piece of advice for people on how to do the thing. What would be your advice?

You need confidence or courage, and that's it. Courage means that you're scared. Confidence mean that means that you're not scared. But to be honest with you, sometimes you need a little bit of both. Sometimes it's just one or the other. If you're scared, do it anyway. Just go, do it. Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump. It's okay. It's okay. And I mean, don't overexert yourself. Keep the balance and all that stuff. But on the other hand, if you're not scared, then go with that. Go with that and use that confidence. Use that. Use that talent, that ability that you were given by whatever you believe in, gave it to you, and make it good. Do good. Do good and do it. Well, but either way, just go for it. I hate the Nike thing. Just do it. Because people always just associate it with that, man. Like, seriously, move. Movement is life. Go, go, go, go, go, go. Lightning bugs. They're only bright when they're moving. So be lightning bug. Go do it. Go. Get the hell out of here. Go do it. You've listened to us enough. Just hit pause or go to the next episode if you want to, but while you're going to the thing, listen to more of those episodes, but just go do the thing.

What do you think help would help someone be able to build confidence?

Yes. Yeah. Fail.

Oh, man. We live in a society where failure is the F. And so we grew up in school, right? And you go to school, and if you don't get an A or if you B, that's okay. C is okay. But then F. Oh, F. No, Good fucking F. Good. Great. You effed it up. Good effort. Eff it up, man. Because what happens is you learn negative experience is better than no experience at all.

And then eventually becomes a good experience because life happens to kind of do its thing, right? But the best way to build confidence is just to go mess it up. That's the biggest thing. I think books can also teach. One of the biggest things is you knock on the door. No, thank you. Knock on the door, gun to your face. Knock on the door. Knock. Not right now. Knock on the door. Get it on my porch. Knock on the door. No, no. Knock on the door. You want to sit down? Yes. Okay, you sit down. We don't want to buy. Okay, cool. Knock. But you get to the point where you don't even care about the no anymore because it's just. You're just so over. And people go, oh, that's confidence. No, it's not confidence. I'm still scared of getting told no, but I don't care anymore. But I would have only learned that to not care by going and. And knocking on those doors and getting told no all those times. Same thing with anything else in life. Failing often and failing forward is the best way to build any sort of confidence. Because you can't be any worse. If you suck, can't be any worse than sucking. Then you get bad, Then you get okay at it, then you get good at it, then you get great at it, right? But if you're already good, great. There's confidence right there. Good job. You did it. High five. Good job. But if you suck and you have no confidence in it all, just try it. It. Try it. All the different Ways mess it up. Don't take yourself so seriously that, oh my gosh, what if I fail? Who cares about you? Golly.

Fail and you'll get some confidence.

Okay, I really, I. I forgot I wanted to circle back to your standup comedy. Do you mind sharing? Sharing that also just how you got into that.

Oh, yeah.

What that's like.

Yeah, yeah. If, if, if I was given a green light to do a standup special for Netflix or something, I would quit the podcast and I'll sell it. And I would. And I would writing and I would just go, do stand up. Like, that is my. If I was born here, just put on the surf to do something, it would be to do stand up. Comedy book guy, Brandon Q. Met him through selling books, obviously was doing comedy, and I knew he was doing that. I'd always wanted to do it, which is a long story. But long story short, I had done some public speaking. I really enjoyed when people laughed on purpose, like when I tried to make them laugh and they would. But it wasn't a stand up set. It was just trying to be inspirational. Met him, he's doing stand up. And I go, hey, how did you do this? He goes, I go to Second City. I'm taking classes. Second City is a huge comedy school in Chicago. Like the big ones. Colbert, Corel, these big names all went to school there. Seth Meyers, John Mulaney. And I go, wow, you must be learning a ton. He goes, yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. And somehow I made the pact with him that if he ever moved to the same area that I was living in, that I would do stand up with him. He goes, all right. You mean that? Yeah, sure. He's living in Chicago. I live in Lincoln. Come on now. Well, hell, she freaking meets Amanda Peterson at the time. Now Amanda Q. His wife, and she lives in Omaha. So he moves to Omaha and he calls me and he goes, hey, did you mean that when you said you were gonna do comedy with me? And I go, yeah, but I'm not living in Chicago. He goes, I know, but I am in Omaha. So that's about 45 minutes drive for you. You're gonna do a stand up set with me next week. We're gonna do it. Five minutes, do it. That's all the instructions he gave me. And I'm like.

So. But I wanted to, like, in my heart, I'm like, this is it. So I went. He prepped me emotionally, right? He said, hey, look, listen, might do great, but honestly, statistically speaking, it's probably gonna Be awful. You're probably gonna get booze or you're probably gonna get no laughs. Don't worry about it. It's okay. We're just here at an open mic. It's just practice. It's okay. It's just part of the. Well, I got up there and I got laughs. So this drug, I mean, I've never done meth or ecstasy. I can't imagine it feels anything as good as when you do a joke on purpose and people just laugh. Hooked. And that was in February 1, 2017, at the Barley Street Tavern in Benson, Omaha. And, yeah, after that, we just started going and we just kept working on our craft. I loved it. So we started writing, and I really got into it. He taught me a lot. And as we kind of just progressed, I just got better and better and better. Started getting paid gigs, and I was paying my rent in Nebraska, just telling jokes. That's what I was doing. Yeah. And I was, like, living off of my comedy, which is. I mean, it's not a ton. I was. It's not expensive to live in Lincoln. That's the only reason. But. But still, like, it was enough to pay my rent. And I. And, you know, it's funny because we talked about goals right then in my head, I said, oh, someday I'll do comedy. And I went and did. Stand up on a microphone, open mic. And I go, okay, well, hell, now what I do. And then the next goal is, someday I'm going to get paid to do comedy. And I got paid 50 bucks my first time. A year later, I was like, oh, my gosh. But now what? So then I go, okay, someday I'm going to pay my entire expenses on my jokes, on my jaja jazz. And I did. And so it just kept going that way. But then we talked about it. But the cough, the flu, the COVID thing, the pandy came through, and that really made it really difficult. And now that I live in Portland, it's still kind of hard to kind of get back onto it because it's just new, and there's a lot of complications that just require a lot of time. And because I'm doing the podcast, I really need to prioritize it well. So that is something that I still kind of try to do, but because of the complications that are not in my control particularly, I just kind of have to wait, sit tight until things kind of normalize here anyway, because it's very. Still not too bad. But compared to, like, Lincoln, it's still very difficult to do comedy.

How did you even plan for that first routine. How did you even come up with what you were going to say without really being prepared?

Yeah, I mean, well, luckily I had some public speaking experience, so I wasn't really scared to talk in front of people. That wasn't. Now some people have that fear. So, I mean, that's again. And if you're listening, you want to do this and that's you. I mean, if you want to do stand up, it's kind of part of the deal. So figure it out, do it scared. But for me, I wrote like a speech and I just went through and I wrote what I wanted to write about. I took all the jokes that I remember I had said before things every time I made people laugh and I wrote a speech about it, regular old speech. And then I said, okay, well what doesn't need to be here? And I went through and I cut out out all that until I kind of got a diluted version of just funny parts. And then that's when I went and told. And that was it.

Wow.

That's how, that's how I started.

That's a great story.

It was crazy. I don't even know honestly to this day, like, I've met some, I've opened for some cool people and I've had some really amazing shows where people like 150 people showed up. I've had crowds of like 500 people sometimes. I've done the Nebraska State Fair and every time I'm sitting there, like looking at the crowd before I go up, I'm like, I can't believe I'm about to do this. This is so crazy. This is the stupidest thing in the world. I got nothing to say to people. This is like people listening to this, maybe they're hoping to get something out of this and hopefully they did. From ideas that you shared or I shared maybe. But that's not what comedy is. Comedy's like I have nothing. There's no point for you to listen to me. But you're fucking here. All right? So what's the matter with cell phones or whatever the hell? Yeah.

Do you, once you got comfortable, do you, do you plan what you're going to say beforehand or is it free, Free flowing?

It's like kind of style thing and a method thing. There's different ways people do it. Brandon, for example, he would say every word verbatim, exactly how he wrote it. I tried that. That was like one of the one I've bombed. Obviously everybody bombs, but the times that I've bombed, the worst was when I really tried to memorize. So I got away from that and I just kind of have an idea and then I just go, okay, this is kind of what I want to say about this topic. That I think it's funny and then we'll just see where that goes. And then, then I do it and then I. If I'm an open mic, I'll record it and I write down what I want. Went good. But I never have cassette lists of the joke about Ariel and the joke about Pablo Escobar and the joke about superheroes. Right. But I don't really. I remember the specific punchlines that work really well. But sometimes I'm in the middle of a full on show and an idea hits me as I'm up there and I just go with it. And all right, that just made its way into the lineup.

That's when you're like in that flow, right? Because you're just.

I get. That's something right now in my life that I'm trying to figure out is how to get into that flow. Not doing comedy. Because when, when they say my name and I get up there and I start doing my bit, something clicks. If I knew how to recreate that, I would recreate it in my podcast and my book writing. Now I do, I sometimes I do achieve that flow when I'm doing other things, but it's not, it's not a switch like that. God. When I'm doing standup though, it just, it just. And I go, oh, it's on. And I just, it's so I, I did stand up when I was visiting Nebraska about two weeks ago and that was the first time I did like a full 15min minutes at. In over two years. And you think it's rusty or whatever? Nah, I got. It was like as if nothing happened with COVID It was back in 2019 and I was just back on it. It was the strangest.

That's so cool.

Yeah.

I don't know. Is there anything that I did not ask you that you wish I did, man.

No, I talked too much. So maybe to shut up. Ask me to shut up. No, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, I'm an open book and if you ever, if you have more questions or if you ever want to do this again, I'm happy to talk about as we progr. Progress in our shows and our perspective lives, but I don't think there's anything you miss. I think, you know, that's, that's. He. That's that's all I got. That's not who I am, but that's a little bit about me.

Oh, and then tell people how they can hear about you or your podcast, your book and all the good stuff you've got going.

Sure. The book, it's called the Cost of Citizenship. You can find it on Amazon. If you type Andres Gamboa, which is my name on Amazon, or just the Cost of citizenship, it'll come up if you buy it. The one thing I would ask you to do is leave me a review, even if it sucked. Even if you're like, this book's terrible. Just. That helps. Even just reviews in general help. Just be honest. That's all I care about. And then the podcast is called the Ponytails podcast. Ponytails and stories. T A L E S not like your butt, not your tail, like a horsetail, but ponytails. And that's because we tell stories about ponies, which is what we call people who are buyers. Yeah. You can go find it on Apple Podcasts wherever you're listening to this right now. We're also there. And again with that, I will say leave a review here for this podcast and for hours. If you end up listening, please does help us a ton as creators. Is huge. And yeah, that's. That's. That's it. Stand up wise. I. I don't foresee myself going on tour anytime soon yet because of what's going on with. I mean, maybe, but. But yeah, I don't really have a YouTube page or anything for my Stand up. So I'll let you know. You can follow me on it. Yeah. Coming soon. You can go to Instagram, you can follow me. Arg, B, M, F. Those are my initials. Arg, B, M, F, G or whatever. Whatever the Instagram, Facebook, whatever the thing you're on. Twitter, all of. Whatever. All that. Yeah.

Thank you so much. It's been so much fun getting a chance to talk to you. And then I'm going on your podcast. So I'm excited about. It'll be my first interview. I haven't done an interview yet with anyone.

Oh, sweet. Oh, we'll make it. We'll have a blast. Just like this one. It'll be good. Except for that one. For that one, we do encourage. But if you want to. To, you know, have a beer or wine or something with me, you don't have to. I'll usually match the guests when it.

Is because I'm doing that 75 hard thing right now. But I'm almost. I'm almost done. So it's no alcohol, but we'll see if it's. I can't remember what day it is. I'll have to see if I'll be.

Then we'll fucking reschedule it. If you have to celebrate, we'll do it on the day you're done and be like, congrats, let's get drunk.

Maybe. Maybe we should do that. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm down. That's fine.

Okay, cool. Maybe I'll look at it. Because that sounds a lot more fun.

I mean, we don't have to. We don't have to drink. Some people are like, I'm 30 years sober. I'm like, oh, okay. We'll just do water. It's fine.

Water. Well, thanks so much, Andreas. It's been great.

Yeah, you bet. Anytime.

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