How to Stay Laser-Focused On Your Dreams (Even When Everything Goes Wrong) with Seth & Tori Bolt

Hal Elrod (0:02)

Hello, and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.

If you've got 10 ideas pulling you in 10 different directions, today's guests, Seth and Tori Bolt, are proof of what happens when you pick one and refuse to let go of it, even if you've struggled to get the results you want up until this point. Now, I need to start with a confession, though. My wife and I just got back from staying at Seth and Tori's Bolt Farm Treehouse in Tennessee, and it was without question the most extraordinary romantic getaway of our entire marriage. Now, in this episode, I'm about to be a little over the top talking about it today, and I already know it. I've sent their Instagram to more people than I can count. I quote them in random conversations, and more than one friend has assumed I'm getting a commission. I'm not. I have zero financial relationship with Seth, Tori and their company. I just genuinely cannot stop talking about what they built. And after you hear their story today, you might not be able to either. Now, if you're not familiar, Seth Bolt spent 23 years as a founding member of a Grammy nominated band, Needtobreathe, sharing stages with Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, playing late night television, racking up more than 10 albums and billions of streams.

Tori Bolt was an aspiring journalist in Houston the night she interviewed Seth's band before a show and everything changed. But what neither of them saw coming was that the real story of their lives would not be the music. It would be a tree house that Seth built with his own father and their own two hands on the family farm, meant to be a surprise for Tori for their wedding anniversary or their honeymoon, I should say. But it eventually would cost them their house, get them run out of an island community by neighbors who tried to legislate them out of existence and land them living in an RV twice before it turned into one of the most talked about hospitality brands in the country. Now, be sure you stay until the end because you're going to hear how a rock star and a reporter turned a homemade wedding gift into a world renowned mountaintop destination for couples and how faith, discipline, and a refusal to quit turned two people living paycheck to paycheck barely hanging on in a camper into founders of a place my wife and I now consider sacred ground for our marriage. It is my great pleasure to bring you this conversation with Seth and Tori Bolt.

Seth and Tori, it is so good to see you again.

Seth Bolt (2:59)

Good to see you too, man.

Hal Elrod (3:00)

It's only been what, a few days? I know.

Seth Bolt (3:04)

It's an honor to be here.

Hal Elrod (3:05)

Maybe a week. Time flies, man. Look, before we dive in, I have to tell you about something before we even get started because I don't say this often. I told you this in person, but I want everybody watching or listening to hear this, which is, my wife, first of all, I just got back from staying at your Tennessee property, Bolt Farm Treehouses, and it was, without exaggeration, the most extraordinary romantic getaway we have ever experienced. We did not want to leave, right? I asked y'all, how much to live here full time?

Is that an option, right? And what was cool, I told you this too, that I binge watched y'all's Netflix series on how you built this dream of yours, and I was so inspired. So I was like, this is cool that I love y'all as a couple, but the fact that I get to have you on the show and hear and share your journey and how you created this magical place that so many couples are rekindling their love, saving their marriage, taking it to the next level, all of the things. So thank y'all for what you do, and thanks for being here.

Tori Bolt (4:02)

Thank you. What an honor. That is such high praise coming from you and y'all are well traveled. And I'm just so glad that you got to experience the heartbeat of what we do, because it's not about building a tree house or, you know, like, yes, there is an amazing view, but it is all about setting the table for couples to really like all remember why they fell in love in the first place.