Meet Travis Dykes | Musician & YouTuber

We had the good fortune of connecting with Travis Dykes and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Travis, do you have any habits that you feel contribute to your effectiveness?
When I first started working at my career and business, I always thought that if you are not working until 5am every day then you’re not going to succeed. But after gaining some success within my career and being around people who are way more successful than me, I realized I got it all wrong.

What has helped me succeed in a very powerful way is what I call “understanding your workflow”. Being around many successful people, I learned that their workflows for how they achieve and produce their best work consistently is through how they understand how they get the best out of themselves.

I personally don’t feel like this is talked about enough, but learning and understanding what it takes for you get your highest level of consistency and quality out of yourself is the best habit that has single-handedly improved my success rate immensely.

The way this is discovered is by studying yourself and learning from the best successes that you’ve had until this particular point in your career and understanding what things you did or didn’t do, that either led up to that moment that you got your best work out of yourself.

This could be, getting a really good night of sleep that made you feel better the next day or even getting up early in the morning and doing a workout; all these things have an effect on our workflow.

Discovering the physical, mental, and practical aspect of your workflow will help you improve rapidly.

To give you a more specific example that was really pivotal for me was, getting up at 6am to workout, pray, and read my Bible before starting my day put me in an incredible state of mind every day. Then learning what my priority of tasks were for the day and attacking the highest priority tasks at the beginning of the each day before lunch time. This caused my effectiveness and use of my time to grow in an immense way in every day that I worked.

So I would say take the time to learn yourself and write down a workflow/routine that gets the best product out of you every day you work.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
When I started my music career at 18 years old being bass player and session musician, I honestly had no idea where it would take me, but I knew one thing. I’m suppose to serve others in whatever I did. So in the process of learning and sharpening my skill as a musician I learned that many of the people around me at the time, would never share or help others who were trying grow as musicians as well, because they were “competition”.

This lead me to think, how can you truly serve others if you can’t even let go of what’s been given to you? So from then on if anybody would ever ask me about any technique or trick that I had I would give it to them willingly and try my best to help them understand it.

As this went on, it lead me to starting a music school when I was 21 years old to help people learn techniques and skills to get them to be able to play in their churches and in the professional music industry. The school was a great success. But I realized that there was a ceiling to teaching very quick. Within the first year I had over 37 students and was touring with music artists, working for a church part-time, and recording in the studio almost every single week. I was completely overwhelmed,

What I learned is that being a music teacher doing private lessons for people would never scale upwards, because I hit my teaching limit the first year of having a music school, so the only way to scale was to find a better way of teaching to the masses.

So after disbanding the school a couple of years later, I took to YouTube and started getting serious about posting lessons, vlogs, behind the scenes content to help people in a bigger way. After launching into the youtube world I realized, this was the avenue that I wanted to live and grow in.

When I started my channel at first I would never keep up with my subscriber count because that has never been the point of my content, but one day somebody asked me. “Hey how many subscribers do you have on YouTube?” and I said “let me take a look”. So I took a brief look and saw a 1 and a 2 and told them “Oh, I have 12 subscribers”, but when I got back home I realized I had 1.2k subscribers and my videos were getting a couple thousand views per video and I didn’t even know it.

So from then on I started posting more and more videos on YouTube until I had my first viral video that hit 1.8 million views and then I felt like these videos actually may be connecting to people. Until this day I am still posting to weekly to my YouTube channel and currently have over 115,000 YouTube subscribers to date. From my channel I have launched a content business and clothing brand selling digital courses, books, clothing, and music.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Being in Nashville, TN there are many places I would want to go, but I would first take them to a really great breakfast spot in west Nashville called Loveless Cafe for some breakfast, then to my favorite coffee shop called The Well Coffee and chat for a while then go to one of favorite greek restaurants called Greko Street Food in East Nashville.

After rolling out of that place I always love to take friends to drive down the famous Broadway street where there is live music happening in so many music venues and restaurants that you can experience just by driving down the strip and rolling down your window. The last part of the day I would take them to this great desert spot called The Baked Bear where we can get some of the best ice cream sandwiches in town.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Without my wife Caitlin Dykes, I would definitely not be where I am today or where I’m going. Love ya babe.

Website: https://travisdykesmusic.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tdykes/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHUc4ksPHmLibjWtUIjKUeg