Join Angie Austin and Jim Stovall as they dive into the profound insights from Jim’s Winner’s Wisdom column, ‘Going Back to the Well’. In this episode, Jim shares stories about the legendary B.B. King, his inspirations, and why returning to the roots is vital in today’s fast-paced world. Jim highlights the importance of revisiting the original ideas that have shaped various fields and how they continue to influence new generations. He also touches upon the teachings of literary giants like John Steinbeck and the indelible impact they have on writers even today.
Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey there, it’s Angie Austin and Jim Stovall with the Good News, and today we’re talking about his Winner’s Wisdom column, Going Back to the Well. And Jim, I have to tell you, my mom’s going back to your well because she’s reading another one of your new books that I just received, and it’s a compilation of your columns.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, fantastic. Yeah, I’m not even keeping up with that like I should because I wrote six books last year, and they’re all kind of coming out a little at a time, so… Huh! I am glad to know that. But this column came initially from my friend and colleague, B.B. King, one of the great blues musicians of all time and and when my ultimate gift the book was turned into a movie they let me work on the music I mean I use somebody in yet 20th Century Fox said let the blind guy do the music so you know I got Bob Dylan and a BB King and Willie Nelson Patsy Cline Aaron Copland put together just a really cool soundtrack well but what I didn’t understand is is that when they first put together a movie, they do a rough track. And it’s just something so that people can watch. And you cannot watch a movie without music. It’s just horrible.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s so true.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so they just pull music and put it in there. Well, they put this B.B. King song, A Thrill Is Gone, in there. And it was great. Well, then I found out where they were going to put something else in. uh and i called and said look i man i cannot see that scene without that we got to have that and they said jim that that’s very very expensive but finally the producer called me and um said when’s your birthday and i told him he said i’m giving you bb king for your birthday and and if you watch the ultimate gift now off of netflix or wherever you get films right there’s a great scene with bb king doing that well i got to meet him and then i went to new york for his 80th birthday and you know and it was amazing because uh just to see all the people that were fans of this guy. And then he had a guy, Hubert, who had been his band director for many, many years, handled the horns and the orchestra and everything. And, you know, I stayed in touch with Hubert after that, and I said, you know, how’s the old man doing? Because B.B. King died at age 89 getting ready to do another show. He did 200 shows that year. And I said, how’s the old guy holding up? And he said, you know, he struggles a little here and there. And he said, I always keep my eye over my shoulder on him, make sure he’s okay. But he said that every three or four nights or once a week, it’ll happen. We’ll be playing somewhere, and the old man will just come out, and the guitar is screaming, and he’s just old himself, and everything’s amazing. And I’ll look over my shoulder, and one of the young guys will be there. Eric Clapton will be there, or Carlos Santana is sitting there on the front row watching him. And the old man just puts on a show then. And it was fun. But when I asked B.B. King, who really inspired you? And he said, oh, all the young guys and everybody else inspires me. But he said, there are times you just got to go back to the well. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, everybody that does what I do, we were all inspired by a guy named They’re recorded in the early 1930s, Robert Johnson. And he said, so we all go back to that at some point and do that. And I thought, what an amazing thing, because we have a tendency in our information age to build on things, to build on things, to build on things. And maybe you’re reading biblical commentary. Maybe you’re listening to someone’s idea of the news. But every once in a while, man, if you don’t want to get tripped up, You’ve got to go back to the original and see what somebody said. And, Ange, you know, you’ve been in news. Today, so many things you’ll say, someone will be reporting that someone else is reporting what a guy said. And then, you know, they check with each other, and, oh, yeah, we have three sources on this, but they’re all quoting the same thing, and you don’t really know what you got. So every once in a while… It’s good, whether you’re getting inspired or informed, to go all the way back to the well and get some pure information.
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, when you talk about going back to the well, for instance, the work of John Steinbeck that you mentioned in your article, what is it that some of these people have that is so inspirational? Because you said you’re keenly aware that only a handful of writers have ever risen to the level of Steinbeck, and same with B.B. King, right, in his genre. Yeah. And you see how they inspired others. So tell me what they have that’s so special, or in particular, John Steinbeck or somebody of that stature or status.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, the sixth book I wrote last year was a sort of a sequel to a Steinbeck book he wrote 60-something years ago. And Because of that, I read everything he had written and a lot of his compiled letters, and I had read what Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had said about him. Of course, he won the Pulitzer Prize, and in the ultimate, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. You know, when you look at the people that he inspired, and then I go back and read his stuff, it’s what I would imagine it would look like if you were an aspiring sculptor to look at Michelangelo’s David. I mean, Steinbeck’s prose is just immaculate. He is just so, so, so good. And, you know, when Hemingway admires him and Fitzgerald and Carl Sandburg and some of the most amazing writers of the 20th century, you know, you’ve got to look at this guy and say, what is it about that? But he also, you know, he was read by very common people. A lot of people had to read his Grapes of Wrath when they were in high school or East of Eden or of Mice and Men and so forth. They still hold up. They’re amazingly well-written, and they’re just good stories. And so that’s what intrigued me so much, and I learned so much about the craft of writing from guys like him. And you just, you know, every once in a while, you can read all the modern guys and everything else, and then you just, you know, I’m going back to Ernest Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald, or in this case, John Steinbeck.
SPEAKER 05 :
So you’ve been in TV for more than 30 years, and you talk about your TV, your writing, your movies. You’re dipping into so many wells here. What do you want us to take away, your readers to take away from going back to the well?
SPEAKER 03 :
one of the things I learned from TV and you remember this back in the day before everything was digital, it was analog. And every time you made an edit, you lost a generation and you’re making a copy of a copy of a copy broadcast tape. Uh, you know, you, you could get down four or five generations, but then if you’re going to mess with this anymore, you better go back to the master and lay down a new track. And it’s kind of, it’s kind of that thing. But, uh, You know, I think it’s good to keep in touch with the cutting edge stuff. But from time to time, you need to go back and see what inspired everybody. And that’s, you know, what I really want people to understand, you know, in my field of personal development. You go back and you read Napoleon Hill because virtually everyone since his time has. You know, almost 100 years ago, almost everybody quotes him. I mean, he influenced everybody. So it’s good to go back and see what made the difference. And I think that’s an important thing to realize.
SPEAKER 05 :
I love that example because I forgot that every time you would do an edit with the old stuff that you’d lose a little bit of quality. All right. Since we did miss one week, Time Machine. That’s your next column, the most recent one. So tell us what you’re teaching us in the column Time Machine.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I think here in Western civilization and here in America, we have a tendency to to be really scattered all the time. We’re distracted, we’re scattered, and some of the Asian philosophies and some of those people, they’re more focused than we are because some of them don’t have as many distractions as we have, or whatever the case may be. But success comes when you have a compelling… driving force and you get total focus on it and so many people today they’re distracted with whatever’s on their phone at any given moment but then when they get down to do something they’re feeling you know they’re worried about well i i didn’t handle that very good yesterday or last year i’m guilty about this i should have done that instead of this or they’re worried about something in the future that may or may not ever happen you know hey i haven’t got my taxes done yet i got to do that i got to pick up junior from the uh for the wrestling, and I’ve got to go here. They’re never really totally focused in the moment. If you’re going to succeed at the highest possible level, you’ve got to bring all your energy to that thing you’re doing right now. I always go back to my late great friend and mentor, Coach John Wooden. He said, before you do anything, great or small, no matter what, phone call, meeting, Undertake any task. Before you start, ask yourself one simple question. What would I do right now if I were amazing? And boy, that idea really brings to bear the idea that I need to be in the moment. I need to be totally focused on this conversation I’m having right now with Angie Austin. Doesn’t matter what happened last hour. Doesn’t matter what I’m going to do after this interview. What matters right now is bringing the best I got to this project right now. And if you can do that with everything you do, you’re going to be an amazing success.
SPEAKER 05 :
What would I do right now if I were really amazing? I think it’s over a decade now that you and I have been radio friends. And finally, I think I’m going to meet you in person in May. But of that over a decade, you’ve told me that at least five times. You’ve used that example. What would I do right now or what would I do next if I were truly amazing? And I’ve thought about that many times over the years because it can really make a difference in your next move, your next interaction, your next experience. interaction at work, your next project you’re working on, your next move while you’re on vacation with a group of friends, meeting new people, experiencing new things. You could not only have a positive influence on your own life, but you can really have a positive influence on others around you and i think we can think about examples of people that positively influence us and negatively influence us or have very little or no influence on us that are just kind of a wet noodle you know just kind of like like you know interacting with like a grapefruit Nothing special, not great, you know, not bad, just kind of meh. So if you put that in your mind, what would I do next if I were truly amazing, it can really make a huge difference in the quality of your life and those around you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, you know, we’ve all been at a party or at a business function where you’re meeting and greeting different people. And we’ve all met that wet noodle guy that you were mentioning that, you know, frankly… He’s not paying any attention to me at all. He’s looking around the room to see where’s the important guy I can meet. But I’ve had the opportunity to interact with several presidents, and great politicians, great business people, they have the ability to meet hundreds and hundreds of people in a line. And for that six seconds… They make everybody feel like you’re the most important person in the world. And I saw them do that. And when I do book signings now or after an arena event when I meet and greet people, I stay totally in the moment. Because for this man or woman or this young person right here, This is the one moment I’m going to have. I’ll probably never see them again. They’ll probably never see me again. And, you know, if I’m distracted or I’m not paying attention or I’m yelling at somebody else or whatever, I mean, you totally ruin their moment. That six seconds is their moment. You know, I remember one of the things that when I studied Harry Truman and I wrote a novel, including him as kind of a character in the novel, and I went back and reread some of his stuff. And when you’re the president, you have a guy that schedules every moment of every day. And he’d gotten behind because the ambassador from somewhere went long, and the scheduler said, we’re going to scrap the Eagle Scouts from Iowa and tell them we can’t do that, and then we’ll move on to the meeting with the Supreme Court aide. And the president said, no, absolutely wrong. We’re meeting with the Eagle Scouts from Iowa, and we’re going to get the photo, and I’m going to shake their hands, because these young people will tell their grandchildren, about this 10 minutes they spent with the president. And if we don’t have 10 minutes for that, we don’t deserve the right to do anything else here. Tell the Supreme Court guy to hold on and we’ll be there. But, you know, he understood the power of the moment and staying in the moment. And that’s what really matters.
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, I get so much out of talking to you. JimStovel.com. We’re out of time. Thank you, my friend. Be well.
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
Estes Park is locked in to the mighty 670 KLT.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hello there, friend. Angie Austin and Jim Stovall talking about his winner’s wisdom column. And this week, it’s emotions and economics. Hello there, Jim.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, hello there, Angie. It’s good to talk with you.
SPEAKER 05 :
I’m fighting a month-long something or other. My friend had RSV, so I don’t know quite what I have going on. You always think you’re going to beat it, right? So, sorry, I’ve got a little bit of a cold going on. How was your weekend?
SPEAKER 03 :
Weekend was great. One of those where I probably had plenty of stuff I should have been doing, but Ms. Crystal and I needed an R&R weekend, so we just enjoyed the time and I read a little, caught a couple ball games, and we caught up with some friends. So it was wonderful. One of those weekends that Monday morning I was glad to say, hey, let’s get back to work. It’s great.
SPEAKER 05 :
Now, if you read a high-speed book every day and you read a little this weekend, does that mean you read two books over the weekend each day or a book and a half?
SPEAKER 03 :
I actually had a couple of books read. I wanted to read that I’ve had on my list. And these are books that I read at normal speed. One is an autobiography that Cher wrote, and one is one that Robin Williams wrote. And they both read the books themselves. And so listening to them in their voice is worth slowing it down. So, yeah, I did those in addition to my other books.
SPEAKER 05 :
You said Robin Williams and who was the other? Oh, I would love that. Okay. All right. Now, that’s neat. Yeah, I like to listen to the voices as well. All right. We’re talking about emotions and economics. You’re up over 60 books now. I think you wrote six last year. You said that they’re starting to come to the house and arrive as my mother’s perusing through them. And it’s funny. She likes to tell me all about you when she reads the books. And I’m like, yes, I’m familiar with Jim, Mom. I’ve been talking to him for over a decade. Yeah. It’s just funny. She likes to teach me when she reads. So what is emotions and economics about?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, personal finance is about 90% personal. And that’s where the emotion comes from. The economical part of building wealth and becoming a millionaire is fairly easy. it’s controlling the emotion and as a blind person myself i’m always amazed when people get caught up in optical illusions or you remember there was a deal oh a couple years ago where there was some kind of picture of a girl in a dress and everybody was arguing it is it orange or is it green or whatever it was and different people saw this dress in different ways And I remember all our teams sitting around the conference room one day, and we were having lunch, and they were arguing about it. You know, they passed it around, and everybody couldn’t believe that somebody else was seeing it differently than they did. And I think that is just absolutely fascinating. People can see, and you still don’t know what color something is. And, you know, it’s very important that we get those kind of, emotions and opinions out of the way. For example, from 1991 to 2011, there’s 20 years there, from 91 to 2011, there was a great bull market. You could have made a lot of money in the stock market with the exception of the 2008 mortgage meltdown. But even with that, institutional investors, you know, hedge funds, mutual funds, professional investors made double-digit returns, way over 10% returns on their money. For a 20-year period, that’s a staggering amount of money because when you do that, you know, you will double and redouble and redouble. So you’ll have about eight times your money in a 20-year period. Well, during that same 20 years, the average individual investor, little mom and pops out here that are managing their own account and they’re picking their own stocks, they actually lost money. They were below zero. And the difference is the emotion. And I think it’s really good that we’re talking about this right now. Because with all the things going on in the politics and the world news and everything, the markets have been bouncing up and down. And people understand, you know, if you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to buy low and sell high. They get that. Everybody knows that. But they don’t do it. And as in most things, Angie, we’ve talked about it. We don’t fail because we don’t know what to do. We fail because we don’t do what we know. and the market will go off 2%, 3%, and people will panic and say, I’m getting out. Well, that’s a bad time to get out. Now, we always have to remember the Stovall rule, which is do not have money in equities or in the stock market that you don’t have a five-year horizon on. If you’re going to need this money sooner than five years, get it out of there. It needs to be somewhere safe and reliable, dependable, that’s not volatile. But if you have a five-year horizon… You don’t have to worry about it. I mean, the 2008 meltdown, as we were talking about, that was one of the worst times in our lifetime to be in the stock market. But if you were in then and you just held on until 2011, you were in positive territory. You made money. And if you have a five-year horizon, that will take care of the vast majority of your problems. But the thing that the institutional investors do that individuals and people like you and me too often don’t do is, is they’re on autopilot. They’ve already decided when it gets to this point, I’m selling. I don’t care what’s going on in the world or who’s mad at who or what the tariffs are doing. It doesn’t matter. When we get to that point, I’m selling. And if it drops below this point, I’m a buyer. I’m buying more of this. And they will actually do that. They’re on autopilot. And if you can do that and get your emotion out of it, it’s easy. You know, everybody understands buying cheap when they go to the mall or go to the grocery store. And, you know, but can you imagine someone going to the mall and saying, well, I really like that, but I don’t want to buy it. It’s too cheap. It’s come down. I don’t want to buy something that they, no, that is just ridiculous. That’s what we all look for, except when we talk about our investment money. And then people, well, you know, I don’t want to sell that because it’s gone up. I mean, look how high it is. I don’t want to get rid of that. Yeah, you do. I mean, but so those are the things we talk about today. And it’s just a matter of taking the emotion out of it And great pilots understand this. And they’ve told me, you know, when you’re in a fog and you can’t see where you’re going, there are times you would swear you’re flying straight and level and you’re really upside down and you can’t tell. And so you have to trust the instruments and you have to trust, you know, what you’re being told and you take the emotion out of it. Because if you go with what you feel, you’re almost always going to be wrong.
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, we have investment accounts for the kids. I think it started around for Riley, 12 or 13. The girls have theirs as well. They work summers as a lifeguard. And my daughter actually has a, she’s going to college, you know, to play volleyball, but she has a job interview. And she said, where’s my resume? I said, have you made a resume? She was like, I’ve got a resume because I’ve been in the other part for two years. I said, no, I don’t believe you ever had a resume for your lifeguard job. She goes, well, how do I make one? What do I do? And I’m like, well, we can make one before Monday. But, you know, make sure that they want one. It’s for daycare. And there’s a lot of teenagers working there. So anyway, she’s going to do that. So what’s my point to all this? My point is my husband puts their checks right in their investment account. Well, guess what? Guess what that leaves them with to buy everything else? That leaves them with mom. So my husband’s like, well, let’s tell them no. And I’m like, well, they need things like lotion and shampoo and shoes and pants and everything else. So, I mean, that’s fine. But when they want things that to me are a little bit like exorbitant, like they might want jewelry or like my daughter wanted an eyelash curler that’s $25. Well, mine’s $3. So, you know, I’m not buying yours for, you know, $25 or whatever. But it’s interesting that, yes, they’re great investors because they have the bank of mom.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and it’s tough to be the bad guy. It really is. But, you know, and it’s good to let them start handling the money. I remember when Miss Jessica and I started to, you know, I became her guardian and we had to go through finances and, you know, and I had put her on allowance for all of her stuff and including her school expenses, housing and everything. And I suggest we don’t have money for that unless we take out something else. And so I sent Michael, my driver, I said, go over to the bank and get a monthly allotment for getting cash. And he brought it to me, and when we went over to pick up Jessica, I said, let’s go in the house for a minute. We spread it out on the dining room table. This is your money for the month. And she said, we are rich. I said, well, let’s see how you feel here in a minute. okay, we’re going to take out the rent money, there it is, for your apartment at the university, and then here comes your tuition money, and there’s your food right there, and your utilities and your fees and your health care and all this stuff, and here’s the money you’ve got left over to do whatever you want with. Now, if you want to go do this other trip and this thing, where would you like to get that money? Which of these discretionary accounts would you like to not spend money on this month? And all of a sudden it started making sense to her because those real Benjamin Franklins are staring at her.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, those real Benjamin Franklins are staring at her. So what is the biggest problem people have with investing?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I think they get emotional. They get in and they look at it. I’ve told you before I put my brother in a – oh, wow, an IRA way back when he started his little tiny construction company. And I said, hey, it’s going to come out. Don’t look at the statements. Don’t do anything. Don’t touch it. He forgot he had it. I mean, you know, it was pizza money back in the day. And then later on, he needed a bond on a deal. And his bank president said, why are you buying a bond? Why don’t you just bond it yourself? You’ve got the cash. And My brother said, no, I don’t. What are you talking about? He said, well, you have nearly half a million dollars in your retirement. He said, no, I don’t. He said, yeah, it’s right here. And he just had never looked at it. He’d forgotten about it. But if he’d been looking at it, you know, in the mid-’90s, we had a downturn. In 2008, we had a downturn. It would have scared him to death. But, no, you just don’t look at it. I mean, it just doesn’t really matter. Because as long as you’ve got that five-year horizon and you’re diversified properly, it really doesn’t matter. And for people listening to us, what do I got to do to diversify? You can go to any broker or any online thing, Fidelity, Vanguard, any of them, and you can buy an S&P index, Standard & Poor’s, and all you’re doing is you’re buying a piece of the 500 largest companies in the world. And that’s all you’ve got to do. You don’t have to pick winners and losers. You just figure the tide’s going to come in and all the boats are going to go up. So I just want to buy a percentage of everything. And if you do that alone and just forget it, you’re going to get very wealthy.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. And if you could just forget it. And it’s interesting, too. Another thing people do is they get all nervous when their retirement accounts are moving around. And, you know, in my younger years, I wouldn’t even look at them that much. I just knew kind of where I wanted everything to be. And on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t, you know, mess things up, you know, mess around with where I had things. And my husband, he loves to look daily, and then he’ll send me this list, and it’ll have the kids’ accounts, our accounts, my retirement account, a property that we sold, that account. It’s all divided into these different pots, and then you can see what each pot has done. And you’ll be like, look at how much we lost today, or look at how much we made today. And I don’t know. To me, I… can’t get into that because it’s not real to me like the real amount is in 10 years it’s not i’m not upset if you lose 100 grand in a day right it’s like okay you lost 100 grand a day it doesn’t mean anything to me because it’ll be back in a month or at the end of the year or whatever so why why get so engrossed in that but maybe he thinks it’s fun
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve always been grateful that they don’t put the other things you spend your money on in the newspaper or on quotes. Can you imagine? Here’s the value today of Angie’s house. Whoops, Angie’s house dropped a little today. And of course, her car’s down another 300 this week. And, you know, that would scare people to death. But you don’t see it and it doesn’t scare you.
SPEAKER 05 :
That is so funny. All right. So, Jim, what do you want people to take away from the article this week?
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, go on autopilot to the greatest extent you can. Have your investments come out regularly. They go into an account. And as long as you’ve got a five-year horizon, put them in an index, buy the whole market, and just don’t worry about it. And you’re going to be fine. Now, other brokers will tell you, well, you may need to get more sophisticated and do other things. Yeah, later on, if you have big money and you want to do that, it’s fine. But I’m going to tell you, You can become a millionaire and reach your goals by just doing that. You don’t have to get cute. You don’t have to do anything else. But if you get emotional and start bailing out at the bottom, you know, it’s like getting on a roller coaster. If you get scared, the worst thing you can do is try to jump off. You try to jump off in the middle of the ride, and they’ll take you to the emergency room. So you just need to hang on and realize what you got in for the long haul, and everything’s going to be fine. Just relax, guys.
