541: Failure, Success, and the Current Economy with Russell Gray

We all love winners.

We love hearing about the big wins and the perfect track records. It feels good. It feels safe. It instills us with a sense of trust.

But I’ve been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are long-term winners have had profound moments of failure from which they learned invaluable lessons.

Those are the people I really want to hear from. They have the kind of knowledge we all need as we navigate through life. It’s called wisdom.

Surgeons have a saying: “If you’ve never had a complication, you haven’t done enough surgery.”

In my surgeon days, I had a handful of complications. Let me tell you—they are no fun. You stay up at night replaying things in your mind, trying to figure out how you could have done things differently—how you could have had a better outcome.

Even when unavoidable, those complications teach you something you’ll never get from textbooks.

It’s been no different for me when it comes to business and investing. But I take comfort in knowing that even the greatest investors of all time had their moments of failure and rose from the ashes stronger and wiser. Warren Buffett. Ray Dalio. Every big winner has a story of failure.

And while it may be cliché to say that we learn best from mistakes, I truly believe it. The good news is that those mistakes don’t have to be our own. Learning from other people’s mistakes can be just as effective.

This week’s episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is with Russell Gray—a guy many of you already know from his podcasting and radio career.

Russ lived through 2008 up close. He took a beating, and he talks openly about what went wrong.

But that period also changed the way he sees the world—in a good way. It changed how he thinks about risk, leverage, and what actually matters when things stop going up.

That mindset is a big reason he’s been successful since then. It’s a conversation worth your time.

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at [email protected].

 If you let the debt run, at some point you fall into a debt trap where the interest on the outstanding debt consumes all of the available discretionary income, and then you’re borrowing just to service the debt.

Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast coming to you from Montecito, California. Before we begin today, I wanna remind you there’s website associated with this. Podcast called wealthformula.com. It’s where you will go if you would like to, uh, become more, uh, ingrained with the community, including getting on some of our lists such as the Accredit Investor Club.

Of course, it is a new year and there are new deal flows coming through. Lots of opportunities that you won’t see anywhere else if you are a, an accredit investor, which means you. Make at least $200,000 per year for the last couple years with a reasonable expectation of doing so in the future. That’s 300,000 if you’re filing jointly or you have a million dollars of net worth outside of your personal residence.

If you, uh, meet those criteria, you are an accredited investor. Congratulations. You don’t have to apply for anything, whatever, but you do need to go to wealthformula.com. Sign up for the Accredited Investor Club, get onboarded. And all you do at that point is look at deal flow, and if nothing else, you’ll learn something.

So check it out. And who doesn’t want to be part of a club? Now let’s talk, uh, a little bit about today’s show. You know, um, we all love winners, right? We love hearing about big wins, the perfect track record. It feels good. It feels safe, gives us a sense of trust. But the thing is, I’ve been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are, what you would call long-term winners, have had pr