26 Harsh Lessons I Learned in 2025 | Ep 927

24:21I'm going to live in the country and I want a ranch. All right. There's nothing wrong with doing that. It's just that most of the time when you pick your belief set and you pick your personality off the shelf, the reason that you do that is because you didn't actually reason for yourself. meaning there's probably not a hundred percent of hipster worldviews that you agree with there's not a hundred percent of redneck worldviews that you believe with if you believe in that that if that's you right and so if you actively think about all the components of your life which is like what shoes will I wear why do I pick these shoes what makes a good shoe for me why do I wear these shorts what makes a good short for me why do I wear this shirt as silly as that may sound You choose every single component of your life and you either choose to live it by default or live it deliberately.

25:10And the people that are interesting typically have multiple components that they reason for themselves that get put into one box. And so then when people see them, they double take because they're like, wait a second, these pieces don't go together. And what does that do? It makes you interested. And so let's say that you have the body of a meathead and you dress like a redneck, but you quote ancient philosophers and you're also extraordinarily wealthy. That's weird, right? That's odd. And so if that's you, then you will probably attract attention. And so a lot of people want to live a unique life, but they take all their decisions from pre-canned boxes off the shelf, out of the box.

25:58And so I think that asking yourself, what do I want? And does this thing help me get it? Are the questions that begin to lead down the path of agency. Because if you approach every component of your life with that lens, you'll often find that the things that you took off the shelf don't. The politics you vote for, the people that you, the sports teams that you root for, all of this stuff that you've built your life around, Not at all. And so having high agency is higher cost in the short term because you actually have to make these decisions and also suffer the rejection of decisions that other people who might all dress like hipster not agree with because you didn't take the same belief out of the box or off the shelf as they did.

26:40But it's lower cost long term because you don't find yourself 10 years down the road wondering how you got here. How did I marry this person? How did I start this business? Why am I dressed this way? Do I even care about this stuff? Why do I vote like that? You got here because you never questioned your decisions and just went with the flow. You went with what everyone else was doing, but everyone else is unhappy, mediocre, overweight, in debt, and divorced. Why would you be like them? And so the only way out is by turning in words and saying, what do I want? And does this thing help me get it?

27:16And if the conclusion that you come to is different than everyone else's, great, because you don't want to be like them. So you should hope to find discrepancies between what you decide and what other people decide, because it means you have begun the path of thinking for yourself. Maybe you like a movie that your friends don't like. Instead of saying, I mean, it's okay. Don't hold back. Be like, I think it's a great movie. They're like, well, you're an idiot. You're like, okay, I like that show. That show's trash. Okay, don't watch it. Look, that's it, right? Oh, why do you wear such lame shoes?

27:43Why do you wear jean shorts. Alex, why did you wear the little sandals for two years that I wore that were really weird? Because at the time that those shoes served what I wanted. I wanted, because I was at the beach a lot because Laila and I were traveling. And so I was like, I wanted somebody to go to the gym. I want somebody to go to the pool. I want somebody to go to the beach. I want somebody that can climb. I want somebody to go to a restaurant. That's why I was close to close to shoes. It gets me everything I want. Great. Alex, it doesn't look cool to who? Who does that look not cool to girls?

28:07I'm married. I don't give a shit. Who does that not look cool to guys? Why do I care what they think, right? I don't even know how to say anything. Like, why would I care about any of that? They're not walking in my shoes, quite literally. These are comfortable. And if you don't like them, wear whatever shoes you want. And so I think that when, and this actually has a tie into marketing, which I think is important, which is like, if you want to make content, you want to build a brand of some kind, the brand has to get built from the bottom up. You have to reason from that perspective. What do I want?

28:37Does this help me get it? And when you think that way, you actually be able to build a unique brand because no one will have the same exact life experience as you. And when you do that, that is what creates the unique combination. And you'll be able to defend why you believe what you believe. Because if you cannot explain why you believe what you believe, you believe what someone else told you to believe. And you never questioned it. Number six, a hard conversation up front can save you millions of dollars and years of life. So Rockefeller said this, which is a friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

29:06So the big thing here is I used to say, I used to hear people say, I only can do business with people via Handshake. And people that I just met when I was really young were like, oh, if we have to draw a contract, I don't want to do a deal. And I was pressured into doing Handshake deals when I was younger with people that were quote, more experienced because I didn't want to seem, you know, disintegrous or unintegrous, right? A dishonest person, oh, I need a contract. And then I just realized they were complete scoundrels and full of shit. And so then I went the other extreme, which was like everything has to be in contracts, which I think by and large would serve you really well for anybody who's starting out your first 10 years in business.

29:43If you do 10 years of business with someone, you will be able to get to the point where you can have handshake agreements. But you do not extend trust to someone who has not earned it. And I think that there's different levels of this. If an employee comes to the business, of course, like you have to extend trust, right? But if we're talking a business partnership, well, then like we should have a track record here. We should have a large data set of behavior that I can look at in different circumstances where I know that you will behave in this way. And so for me, trust is believing that the person will act in ways that are similar to the way they have continued to act in the past.

30:18Right. They're consistent. And I want to be real with you for a second. So I said this year was a tough year. I had eight lawsuits this year. Right. And most of them were at the very beginning of the year. And I dealt with almost all of them. and here's the part that people won't tell you. All my lawsuits have been with people who are friends of mine or friendly. And if you're like, huh, well, I can't believe that he would get in arguments over his friend. What do you think divorces are, right? Like we humans think that we're somehow immune of like, no, I'm really cool with this guy. We're best friends.

30:52I don't think we're ever gonna get in an argument. Okay, well, consider this. People who sleep with each other for extended periods of time make life commitments to each other, half the time, end it. So if you think the most important relationship in your life where you're sharing everything with this person, you're committing to forever, half the time it ends, maybe, just maybe, write down a fucking contract. And the reason that I honestly had a lot of these lawsuits is because, and the thing is, is it takes years for these things to come do, right? Like you have a business thing that was six years ago, and then the thing finally really starts to make money, and then you have a conflict, Right.

31:27And so you have to deal with all the uncomfortable stuff up front. And I just so strongly encourage you to like those contracts. I avoided hard conversations and was like, I will figure it out when it gets to that. And we both didn't want to talk about those things. We didn't want to we didn't want to mess up the friendship. It's like, bro, if you think you can't have a hard conversation when there's no money on the line, just just assume that you will be in a lawsuit for many years. Just assume it. And if you're not willing to have that hard conversation up front and you willingly will go into having multiple years of lawsuits on the back end, then you deserve it.

32:02And it's so avoidable and it's likely that it's not going to work out because one or both of you can't have hard conversations, which is required for success. And so I unfortunately have the scars for this one. The contracts that I've done in the last couple of years are significantly better than the ones that I did six, seven years ago, but those are the ones that are coming due now. And so the time that you should have great agreements was 20 years ago. The second best time as today. So just start with the frame of like, hey, I want everything in writing just so we have no misunderstanding. So there's no unspoken expectations.

32:32Because the last thing in the world that I would want is that I would disappoint you because you expect me to do something that I was unwilling to do or that I didn't know you wanted me to do. And so you can approach from that perspective. And then you just have to say, hey, what happens if you don't want to be a partner with me anymore? What happens if I don't want to be a partner with you anymore? What happens if you die? What happens if I die? Right? What happens if we disagree on where we're going to put the money? What happens if we disagree if we're going to sell? These are all things you have to talk about.

32:55And so you either do it now when there's low stakes or you do it at the end when you both have high stakes. And I can promise you it's much better when there's low stakes. So it's a really cool concept. I think Sharon said this and I really like it. He said you can see what level of friend you have by the things that you talk about with them. So he had five levels of friends. I really love this. And I would use this as a litmus test for thinking through the quality of the friendships that you have in your life. The lowest level of friend is someone that you can only talk about the past with. Oh, the good times you used to have.

33:26Oh, remember high school? Past, right? The next level, friend, is somebody you just talk about other people with. Oh, how's so-and-so doing? Let's talk about that person. Let's talk about that person. AKA kind of gossiping. But that's what it is. Level two. Level three, friend, is someone that you can talk about ideas with. Oh, wouldn't it be cool if? Oh, isn't that amazing? You can dream, right? Ideas. Concepts. The fourth level of friend is somebody you can do stuff with. You can talk to those ideas and actually execute. You can take action. You can do things together, et cetera. Fourth. And then fifth is friends that you can make, lose, and spend money with.

34:00And I believe that because for whatever reason, money is just one of those subjects that I think it just shows how, I mean, it shows how someone behaves around a reinforcer and what someone values. It just kind of cuts through the crap of everything. And so like Sharon, for example, is our president. Sharon and I have done deals together for like five plus years. And we really started almost as, to use the Rockefeller quote, like we are a friendship founded on business. And it has worked out great compared to most of the businesses I founded on friendship. And so we've just done lots and lots of deals together.

34:32We've had ups, we've had downs, we've made big calls. And I just have seen him in all the ups and downs of those years. And he's seen me and we've been like, let's do more stuff together because it's so rare. And so at this point, could I have a handshake agreement with Sharon? Yes, totally. And we do have them on lots of different deals. On the really big stuff, we still write it out. Why? Just so we're on this literally the same page. And so I was just reminded of that this year. It would be, I'd be remiss to not say what I learned from the eight lawsuits that I got in this year. Those are my big takeaways is that know what level of friend you're with.

35:05Make sure that you put everything in writing and you want to front load the discomfort. Number seven, do more than what is required. So I said this was a legal year. And so part of this was looking into compliance and other things that are kind of risks for any businesses as you get over a certain size. Because the bigger you are, the bigger the target that's on your back. And so if you wish for success, you also wish for the pains that come with success. And as much as many people want to say like, ah, champagne problems or rich people problems, they are problems nonetheless. And I promise you they are still painful.

35:31And so I would say you want to go above and beyond. So what's interesting is you also want to become educated, right? Right. Ignorance is not defense. Real. If you don't know a law exists, it does not exclude you from the consequences of it. And so in realizing that you have to be proactive in learning the laws of everything that applies to you, which is there are a lot of them. And now with AI, they can summarize some of these things. But like I almost I got like a law degree this year on public, private. I just had a lot of law that I had to go through. And what I will say is that as much as people might, you know, poo poo it.

36:04I think by and large, most laws are written with one, good intent. And two, when you really follow the letter of the law, it kind of makes sense. And so I want to crush everyone and play by the rules. And so once you know the rules, then you can almost play with more freedom because you just know where to avoid, right? Or what to, basically you have to know what the rules are. I don't want to say so you can bend them or break them because obviously that's, we're talking about law, so So just leave it there. But you got to know the rules of the game that you're playing. And the law, as far as we're talking about business, those are the rules of the game.

36:39And so how can we get into the game and try and win? We don't even know the rules we're playing by. And so that would say, to me, it was like a big thing that happened this year that I would encourage you to just look at the laws that apply to your specific business or industry or partnerships and be very well acquainted with them. To the same degree, also, re-reading the contracts that you have in your employment agreements, your partnership agreements. it's just good to know like what what what tools do I have my disposal right now and what expectations are do I do other people have of me that I'm unaware of and that was hugely enlightening and also that has just allowed me to sleep so much better and knowing these things has allowed me to take what would otherwise be very stressful I mean imagine eight lawsuits a lot of lawsuits right something that would have otherwise been very stressful and say okay I understand the variables we will take these actions I don't need to have any more cycles on this next thing because that's where the lawyer stuff will eat up your bandwidth.

37:31It eats up your shower time. It eats up your dinner time. It eats up when you're staring out the window, when you're driving in the car. That's the cost of being in legal battles. But if you can minimize the cost of that by saying, I understand where the conflict is and I know what steps I'm going to take, and I have documentation to provide these things, you can actually circumvent the vast majority of the pain and suffering that goes along with it, which gives you a significant strategic advantage when you're in extended conflicts. All right, so next one. This one is probably a little bit more around my current stage of life, but this is, I mean, that's what this is about.

38:02Right now, I'm shifting the way that I'm doing work, which is pretty significant. And so I will first put the disclaimer out there that you wanna model the rise, not the peak part. So to use an example that people can understand, you're not like, oh, I wanna get rich, so I should fly private. Don't fly private to get rich. It's something that people do once they are rich, right? If you wanna get tall, don't play basketball. It's just that tall people play basketball. Very big difference, right? And so this is the first year in my life where I hit my financial goals. Acquisition.com crushed it.

38:34Portfolio companies crushed it. Launch crushed it. Like we did really well this year. This was the biggest financial year that I've had in my career, including the years I've had exits. And in light of that, I actually feel for the first time in my life that I have enough. And I know that sounds ridiculous to some people. How could this now be the enough number? But I would say that I have always had bigger goals than most people, but I also feel like I know when enough is enough for me. They just happen to be bigger than most people's goals. I do not have a permanently moving goal post. Like for example, I tend to be a little bit more muscular than most people are, but I got to a point where I was at 245 and I was like, this is a bit much.

39:12This is pretty big. I don't need to do more than this. Now, some people are like, I always got to get bigger. I always got to get bigger. I don't have that. I was like, there, this is enough. This is, I'm more muscular than most people even want to be, but I am muscular enough. And so to the same degree, I probably have bigger financial goals than most people have, but I have finally achieved the things that I wanted to. Now, what am I going to do with the business? It's not like I'm going to end them. It's just that the way that I'm playing the game is changing. And so I'm relaying this, so this may seem like flashing news, but I am now shifting to planning my personal life first and allowing business to fill in the cracks.

39:45And I have such strong reinforcement cycles of having worked for so long, so many hours that I just, I have to unlearn how to work all the hours of the day. I wish I could say it's discipline and all that stuff. It's like, I've been rewarded and reinforced for doing this for so long, but it really is less effort for me to work all day than it is to stop working. And so that's kind of the path that I'm in right now. And when I observe the people who are going from, you know, a billion to 10 billion or 10 billion and beyond, you get past a point where you will be compensated for the quality of your judgment, not the quantity of your work.

40:15And so I feel like for the first time in my life, I have crossed that threshold for me, is that there is significantly higher leverage in my ability to pick and make correct bets. And if that becomes the highest leverage work that I have, then I have to reorient my life in a way that maximizes the quality of my decision-making, which means that I probably will travel more. Why would traveling help the quality of my decision making? Well, I'll gain more perspectives, more filters, more positions to consider a decision through. I will probably see more people than I have seen in the past because their perspectives will also help color and shade in the edges, give more dimension to the decisions that I'm trying to make.

40:56Me, I'll probably try and I'm trying to prioritize sleep a little bit more. Now, I've never not prioritized sleep. I just like I sleep until I can't and then I work, right? But I will probably be more proactive in doing some of those sleep hygiene things that or a little bit of a pain in the ass that can get you that 10 % or 20 % more, I'm gonna be doing that now. I will probably have more time that I will unplug on the weekend so that I can let my mind wander so that I can think of kind of out of the box ideas. And this happened just recently, like two weeks ago. I had my EA team, they've changed my schedule a little bit so that there's even more free time than there was before, which there was already a lot of free time.

41:33But free time for me does not mean that nothing's happening, it just means there's nothing planned. And so because I had two days like back to back, I believe having an empty schedule allows me to do that which matters most. And I believe that the time of the CEO or the time of the founder is the most valuable asset or resource in the business. And so why would I not want the best allocator of the most expensive asset to be me? And so that's how they have blocked for me so that I maximize my free time. Now, in that free time, put together a deal that will make us more than we probably did entire revenue this year.

42:05And I did it in basically one day with six and a half hours on the phone, calling different people just because I had slept well. I had the highest, I had the lowest resting heart rate I'd ever had. And I had the best like sleep score I'd gotten in, it was a record in my entire life. It was the best, well, the score had only got to 100, but like my resting heart rate and my HRV were the highest and lowest respectively they'd ever been. And I was like, I feel like I can see color today. And that quality of decision making at this point is the best strategic decision for me. And so in some ways, maybe I still have the same objectives and I'm now just orienting my life to now do the next version of what success looks like or what I have to change in order to become the person who can lead this company to where I think it can be to help the most people.

42:48And so that is what you will see kind of going forward. And I have not, I have been in the stage that I was at from how I worked for the last 14 years. So this is a pretty significant change for me, but I'll be putting my, I'll be planning my life first and then business will fill in the cracks. So really powerful frame that I've been thinking about a lot has been, what do you want to have happen? And what increases the chances of that happening? So here's the next lesson, two frames for reconsidering the hard decisions and conversations that you have to have. So let's say someone does something that you don't want them to do.

43:23They say something bad, something happens, right? Something that I, you have an innate reaction, which is that typically it's something called, it's a countermeasure, right? So if someone punishes you in some way, you want to counter punch them back. You want to counter control. You want to punish them so that you want to punish them even more so that they dare not punish you, right? But when we think about these two questions, which is what I want to have happen, what do I want to have happen? And number two, what increases the odds of that happening? Oftentimes, your initial reaction to what you want to do is almost antithetical to what you want to occur and what increases the chances of that happening.

43:59And so for example, if someone says something bad to me online, I might have the immediate desire to go punish them publicly, right? What do I want to have happen? I would like this person to move on with their lives and forget that I exist. That would be what I would want to have happen, right? Realistically, what increases the odds of that happening? Does me interacting with them, reinforcing the fact that they said that increase those odds? No, I increase the likelihood that that person hates me even more and does even more to try and damage me. So that would make my problem worse, not better.

44:31And so that is just a two-step decision frame that I continue to use more and more and more, especially with interpersonal relationships. Hey, this employee is doing a bad job. I want to yell at them. What do I want to have happen? I want them to do a good job. Do I think yelling at them will increase the likelihood of that happening? No, I think they'll have more anxiety and they'll probably decrease their performance. Okay, so that's not going to work. What do I want to have happen? Okay, can I reward or publicly give them status for the one thing they've done well so that they can see some positive loop and then maybe they will do more of that thing.

45:02That probably does increase those odds. So I'll do that instead, even though I want to punish them for being a fuck ass, right? And so what's interesting is that when I ask myself those questions, the thing that increased the odds of me getting what I ultimately want rarely is what I want to do, or at least is rarely my initial gut reaction. And when I look at how most people live their lives, they live their lives from gut reaction to gut reaction to gut reaction and then counter reaction. And they're just responsive. All they're doing is just like, they're like seaweed in the ocean. They're just moving and they have no direction.

45:33They're just constantly going back and forth, right? And they're never getting what they want. And they think that life is chaotic. But when you actually ask yourself those questions, you typically can guess, no, I don't think that's actually going to increase the likelihood that happens. I think that person is going to hate me more if I do that. Right. Then why will you do it? Right. And so oftentimes when you have those, when you use those two razors, one of the most common things that comes up, and it's now become an inside joke for me and some of my friends, is doing nothing at all is often the most productive thing to do in those situations.

46:04And so it has now taken on this inside joke of the heavyweight champion of the world, which is that there's all these different potential actions, and the heavyweight champion of the world is do nothing. And that one almost always wins. Because what should I probably do? Keep doing what I'm doing, keep on my business, focus on my marriage, focus on doing good work, and ignore the rest. And what's interesting is that it is physically efficient, but emotionally painful. And so that is one of the, I'd say one of the, one of the artifacts that I've collected this year. So number 10, more, better, new.

46:34Now this isn't going to be a new concept for anyone who's listening to my stuff, but I will have a slightly different take on this. New is incredibly risky. And so this is the best analogy that I've, I've visualized this year that I'm probably going to take with me for the rest of my life, which is, I want you to imagine, here we go, actually, look at this. If I have these, these candies, all right, and I throw them all over the place. If I keep doing this, how likely is it that all of them are going to end up in the exact position, separated by color, and stacked together? Very unlikely. I would have to hit refresh and keep doing that many, many times until eventually all of these are lined up, stacked up on each other super nicely in a way that's organized, right?

47:18This would take a lot. Like, could it happen? Of course. It could. It is statistically possible. Is it likely? No. And so when you think about this, this is six pieces of candy, right? There are variables within your business that create the business that works, right? And so when you have your business and it is stacked, it is working, it is generating revenue, the likelihood that you changing one of these variables makes the building or makes the stack or the business better goes down. And the taller the stack is, the more evolved your business is, the more bricks in that building have been properly placed.

47:55And so the higher the likelihood, the next move is the wrong move if it's something different. So I'll give you a marketing version of this. If you have something called a control and you have a variant when you run a split test, AB split test. If you have a control that you've run 36 split tests on and it has won 36 of those, it is the number one control. The likelihood that you changing that resulting in an improvement is low. And so if you think about your business as it currently stands, there's many different ways to align these variables. Almost all of them are not profitable businesses.

48:27You happen to have one that actually works. And so if you have that, then the highest risk-adjusted move that you can make is that you do more of the thing that already works. I will keep doing more bricks in this order because that has worked before, right? You might try and do better, which is a tiny variation of of what you're currently doing. But something truly new rarely works. And it also usually takes the most resources. And so for us, if we're going to do something new, I give myself one new thing a year. One. So what was the one new thing this year? It was the book launch. That was this year.

49:05Next year, you'll find out what it is. But I get one. And it's because I know what the tremendous drain of resource, it is one big thing, one new thing. And so I would say that the bigger the companies that we have, the more resources we have, the fewer new things we're doing. Because when nothing works, you want to hit refresh as many times as you can. You want to do lots of new shit because nothing's working. But as soon as something works, then you start to have direction. You want to have less and less deviation from that unless you really believe there's an existential risk that would require you to change everything, which is significantly less likely than you really think it is.

49:39In fact, I would say many business owners will destroy their businesses in reality for problems that they have manufactured artificially. Problems that have not even yet occurred because they are afraid of them happening. When in reality, when that problem happens, it's not gonna happen overnight. And you're gonna have some heads up probably. And for those of you who are old enough to have businesses during COVID, so if you had business at least for five years, right? Or six years, you know that you'll survive. You'll adapt just like you always have. And so do not try and change the business to solve problems that do not exist because there's more than enough problems that absolutely do exist today that you should be solving.

50:18And so going back to more, and this has been something that's been just, I feel like I've got another layer of paint on the more better new, is that oftentimes the highest return question is, why can't I do more of the thing that's working? Now, there's usually a much deeper, harder problem that you have to solve once you do the easy mores, but there's always a way to do more than you currently are. And it's just that once you realize that the level of difficulty of what it takes to do the next more is harder than doing something better or new. So instead of you bucking up and saying, I'm going to focus on this very hard problem, you then distract yourself with reasonable problems that no one will blame you for solving.

50:55Because the biggest risk to the business is not like a stupid decision because those are unlikely to actually occur. The real risk to your business is the second, third, and fourth most profitable things that you could do rather than the most viable thing that you can do. This is a very important lesson for me this year. And so when you get clear on what the harder question is that you need to ask of why can't I do more and now it's getting hard for me to do it, then we have to remove every distraction that you have that makes you think about anything besides solving that problem. That's it. And sometimes the answer to that hard problem isn't a one week, a four week, or a four month solution.

51:36Sometimes you realize that your culture is fucked and you have to fix the culture and that's gonna take you 18 months. And when you're six months into it, things will feel worse than they did when you started, but it doesn't make it any less of the correct decision for the business. It just means that your reinforcing event or the reward for the work that you're going to have is far in the future. And it doesn't mean that six months in, you should now change course because it hasn't started working yet. Because you knew when you started and you realized that this was the true constraint of the business, that this was going to be a long and painful road ahead of you.

52:08And so you do not want to then solve, try and come up with the new solution when the first solution never had time to bear fruit. Because sometimes the most productive thing you can do in the business is give time time. Let the solution actually work. This has been a very hard lesson for me many times as an entrepreneur. And I just want to pass it to you because many of you guys have many half-built bridges. You had a way to get across, but you knew it would take four months. But one month in, you were still suffering. You thought, well, maybe I'll do this. But it's like you never let the first bridge get finished.

52:36And so in a real way for me, I realized that I needed to build a brand. I'll give you two examples of this. So one, early days of gym launch, Laila and I realized that we had an entire tier of directors that were not competent enough. And so over the next 12 months, we had to turn 11 out of 11 directors. Very painful. And when you turn directors, what do you think you also have to do? Sometimes you have to turn the teams underneath because they had a low bar. And so they brought in a lot of low bar people. There's obviously some good people they brought in too. But like very, very painful process.

53:07Kind of killed morale for that whole year. But we knew that we were going to be able to grow the business because the level of skill of that team was not sufficient. And our bar was too low. And unfortunately, we can't fire ourselves. And so we had to do the next natural thing. That was very painful. Six months into that, the culture is worse and we haven't turned the whole leadership team. Was it the wrong course of action? No. Should we change course? No. But it means that you have to learn to suffer because sometimes the correct course is the most painful path because the highest leverage move often is the hardest problem that you're not choosing to allocate attention towards solving.

53:40In a more recent one, I was at 30 to 40 million a year for three years for gym launch. And the big aha that I had was that I needed to build a brand. And that took years. And so when I went into it, I was like, I will have to keep doing this for many years before I'm going to bear any fruit from this. And my income, when I made that call, went down for the first two years by a lot. And so I think you have to be willing to stomach that period of time, or you will never be able to do the real solutions that are really going to move the needle. Because most business owners will do the second, third, fourth thing, the incremental improvements rather than the order of magnitude change that typically take order of magnitudes in terms of time and effort.

54:18So number 11, it's okay to just make money. So hear me out. There's something that I like to call the third marshmallow fallacy. And so it goes like this. So many of you guys probably heard about the research study of like, okay, they videotaped kids and they said, we'll put one marshmallow in front of you. And then if you wait, you know, whatever, 10 minutes, we'll give you a second marshmallow. And the kids that wait, you know, 10 minutes, they're more successful in life because it's a proxy for your ability to delay gratification. Okay, what's interesting about that is that people then assume that delaying gratification is always the best course of action.

54:49And this is why this is a very interesting lesson. If you delay gratification indefinitely, then you will work your entire life for nothing because you have delayed gratification and then you will die. Said differently, if you were the aunt that always saves up your money for the winter and you keep saving, keep saving, keep saving, and then you die, you have a big stack of crumbs that you will never have done anything with. And so the question is no no longer, like once you have learned to delay gratification, so this will be me talking a little bit more to the winners in the room. Once you have learned to delay gratification, you then have to learn the even harder task of the appropriate time to accept gratification.

55:25Real. So this is incredibly difficult, especially for winners, because in the earlier part of your career, you get reinforced, you get rewarded for delaying gratification. And oftentimes it is, there is a dose relationship, as in the longer you delay, the bigger the outcome. So you just continue to learn to delay more and more and more. But there is a time where it comes to reap because you cannot sow forever. And so I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who was like, hey, I don't want to do this thing because it's not going to add enterprise value. But the amount of money that we were talking about for this particular deal was like hundreds of millions of dollars.

56:00And I wasn't even that confident that the other thing was going to happen and it would be like 10 years in the future from now. And so we need to allow some risk adjustment for outcomes to make their way into the decision. If you can get paid today versus getting paid in five years, there is a value to that money because you have five more years of being able to use those resources to acquire more resources. And so I would say that something that has shifted in me particularly was that it's okay to make money. Like you can also just make money for the sake of making money. And I think that's fine.

56:38And I'll say this differently, which is like, In a business perspective, let's say that you have a service-based business or you have a software business, whatever, and you don't want to sell your own time one-on-one. Totally okay. And you don't want to do it because you do not want to get any revenue that doesn't have a high multiple. Okay, that's fine. Well, let me tell you the story. So when I started my first gym, I had one personal training client who paid me in cash every month. He paid me about$4 ,000 a month in cash for personal training. It was like 90 minutes a day, five days a week.

57:10So it was a lot of personal training. But that guy giving me that cash every single month, even though it was not scalable, it was not something that I could sell someday, that money paid for me to eat, right? And it allowed me to delay gratification on the rest of the business. But somebody who would be a purist of like, well, you should eat even more shit. You should suffer even more during that period of time would have said you shouldn't have taken that distraction. You should have just worked even more in the business. But I just, I don't think that's true. And so I say this only to the winners.

57:40If you're somebody who's never learned to delay gratification, you've never learned to save up for the winner, you still overspend your income, ignore this entirely. But for those of you who are the savers, who do always live underneath every means, who are willing to delay thing one year, five years, 10 years, you have to then also be able to make the decision, when do I ask? When do I reap? And I'll give you one more example and then I'll move to the next point, which is this is super common in content creators. and I think this is why I ended up writing this. I've seen a number of creators.

58:10I remember I had a conversation with a guy who said, hey, I have this Twitter following that I've built over the last however many years. And I said, okay. And he said, I would like to better monetize my following. And I said, all right. Well, how many times do you like, do you like what CTAs do you have? Do you, you know, what do you tell them to do? And he's like, oh, nothing. I never want to sacrifice the goodwill I have with my audience. And I was like, okay, why did you build this brand to begin with? He said, well, I wanted to make money. And I said, okay, how do you expect to make money if you never ask for it?

58:41Because he had been taught, I have to delay, I have to delay. And to be fair, of course you have to delay. But at some point, you have to make the decision, now is the time. And to be clear, it doesn't mean that like now he has to ask every single day. It just means we have to begin the process of reaping. And so for you forever sowers, and I put myself in that bucket of always wanting to underspend and always delay to the future, there is a line that you need to be able to draw for yourself for today's the day. I will begin reaping now. And I think that it is an entirely personal question because it's also fundamentally answering the question, how much do I invest versus how much do I consume?

59:17I think the answer to that question is entirely individual. But I think most of us can agree that invest forever, consume nothing is probably not the way. And consume everything, invest nothing is also probably not the way. And so it's somewhere in the middle where you will have to pick what's right for you, but it is in the middle somewhere which means you will have to consume at some point. You will have to reap and you need to know that it is okay. You might also die. And so, you know, there's that too. Lesson 12, this is a small tactical one. Just a great reminder for me from business which is the book launch, clear beats clever in all things, right?

59:50You will need to repeat yourself until you die. No one cares. No one is listening. And so I had so many people were like asking like, what was the secret behind the launch? It's like, I made 5 ,000 ads that pretty much said the same thing. Like that was it. and still most people didn't attend the one, right, of the book. And we still broke the records and did all the sales and donated all the book. We did all that stuff. And still the vast majority of the people that I admire is, one, didn't even find out about it. And two, even if they did find out about it, didn't come. Didn't even register.

1:00:18And the few that registered, still most of them didn't come. So you have to think about this in terms of percentages. If I have 100 people who register for something, less than half will show up. If I have 1 ,000 people who find out of something on an ad, less than 2 % of them will even click, right? So you're dealing with such small percentages that the idea that you want to be clever in any way is ridiculous. And I would say that the longer I've been in business, the more I emphasize clarity over cleverness. I emphasize simplicity over complexity. How do I make this as simple and as clear as humanly possible?

1:00:51And I think that is that effort of continuing to compress what you're saying and get it simpler and simpler. And that is where it becomes elegant. And that is where it becomes effective. And I would say like that, that is just a great, it was a lesson that I was reminded of. I had a friend of mine, we were jamming back and forth. He had a massive campaign for his company. He spent a day out here with me and we were going through everything. And his team had this really complex marketing structure. He's a phenomenal marketer. And he's like, you know, Alex, what do you think? And I was like, I think instead of having 10 things you're selling, I think you should have one thing and give 10 reasons for it.

1:01:23And he was like, yeah, I agree. And so he simplified everything down to one big benefit and 10 reasons for that thing and had the highest converting campaign he'd ever done in the history of his company. And he's a very successful company. It's been very big. He's done it for a very long time. And after the day, he came up to me and was like, he's like, listen, I wanted, I wanted to bring, he's like, my team has heard me say this so many times. They needed somebody from the outside to say it. He's like, and I didn't want, he's like, you got to be the bearer of bad news instead of me. And so, but like, just, just as a little moniker that you can remember for yourself in terms of writing copy, in terms of making sales pitches, in terms of writing emails, making content, whatever it is, one big idea with 10 reasons rather than 10 big idea with one reason each.

1:02:04I'll leave it at that. Which this segues naturally in to lesson 13, which is this year, the offer is still king, just like it was last year, just like it was the year before that. The offer still matters more than everything. And so we have begun the process of donating a lot of the books from the launch. And we basically made the offer pretty simple. One of the variations that we've tested, we're testing a bunch of different variations. But one of the variations was like, hey, just pay for the shipping of three books and you'll get all three books and just pay for the shipping of them. And so right now, I actually lose money, like literally lose money on that, even with the books being prepaid.

1:02:42And still, and what's crazy though, is that the metrics that I've seen from that offer, that funnel are better than any that I've ever seen in my entire career in marketing. And the reason I find that to be so interesting is that like, we whip that together so quickly and it's working because it's the offer, stupid. Like, how do you make an offer so good people feel stupid saying no? It's in the fucking subheadline, right? And so I'll give you a couple more tidbits that I've kind of like gathered together for myself. The reason we're able to break the record is because the bundle for donating 200 books were so strong and so compelling, which I spent two years building.

1:03:20The next thing is that whenever you have components of an offer or bonuses that you're going to include in any kind of offer, any service, any anything, right? Each bonus should be worth more than the entire value of the thing you sell. I believe that most buyers are single-issue buyers, like single-issue voters, is that they keep listening until they have that one light, that one key, that one unlock, that one reason why that say that was worth it. And so if you ever try and put an offer together where you think, oh, the aggregate of these things is worth more, you have already lost. And if the bonus itself is complex enough that you have to explain it, delete it.

1:04:00Because the most expensive part about you explaining different components of the offer is the mental real estate it takes up to actually explain it. And so if something is worth saying, make sure that it's worth saying. And when you also build offers in this way, it forces you to think even more about how can I make this more compelling? How can I make it simpler? How can I make it more compelling? and each one of them has to carry their weight. And by doing that, you'll create a more operationally efficient business, number one. And your offer, I like to use this as my kind of, my like razor for making a good offer, is that the offer should be textable.

1:04:37Can I text to someone? And then they'll say, yeah, I'm in. And that's just a great way, like you've got this much screen and that many words to say the essence of the entire offer. And if you can't fit it there, it needs to be better. or it's too long. And so that has just been really valuable for me. And I've had that, I've had that reinforced this year several times. Obviously, we had the offer at the launch, we're donating the books on the back end. But even within the portfolio companies, I mean, the reason I think that the offers book will always outsell the other books in general, I think Money Model is not selling now because it's new, but like, I think long, long term offers will outsell is because like, if you nail the offer, in a lot of ways, nothing else matters.

1:05:18It's just getting it right is so hard. But there's nothing that you can do that can make your business have a bigger step change in your business's revenue and profit than really making the offer better. And it's like, again, I think on some level, people have an understanding of like what things cost. And the reason I think that book bundle works so well was because they know it costs me. They know I'm losing money. Like people can, they know that three hardbacks cost more than$15. they like know that and so shipped right like even one$15 is crazy three is absurd right and so they know that and so it's like people assume that like I think Ogilvy said this he said people think they're you know the the prospect is an idiot but she's your wife and it's like we we talk to these amorphous masses but it's like they're real people who are intelligent who can make decisions and they know when something smells off and they know when something's a good deal and so like you can only do so much dressing up with the copy and the words and the persuasive elements because at the end of the day you should be able to make the pitch by just stating the offer and shutting the fuck up and pointing to how to pay and people should buy the rest of it is just is dressing right it's just tweaks it's just improvements but the biggest improvement overall is going to be what the thing you sell is so sometimes you need to be reminded more than we need to be taught and And this year was a wonderful reminder for me of like, can't like, it's the offer, stupid.

1:06:48Like, make it better. A nice little reminder for me for how to make ads work. So this is a little bit more tactical artifact. Right now, it's about volume of different creative. We did, you know, 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 ads, I think before we even started. I think it was 3 ,000 by the time the launch happened. I can't remember, it was in the thousands. And the way that advertising is moving in general, it's going to be about hyper-personalization. So with AI, you can create way more permutations much faster. And so I think we're going to have personalization at scale. And that's 2026. That's, I mean, right now it's the end of 2025, but like, I'm just calling this right now.

1:07:15I've already seen crazy returns that we're seeing in the portfolio with this across all the companies. Like, this is the future. Like, you need to be able to create lots of creative. And what's more important is you need to be able to create the machine that consistently self-proliferates the creative. So it's like, how do I get the customers to make creative? That gets us more customers that make more creative. That's the process you want to install in the business, rather than think, oh, I have to just keep building the team. I mean, there's elements of that for sure. But this is like, there's a great lesson for me this year and what I'm taking into next year is like, we have to build the self-licking ice cream cone and hyper-personalization is gonna be, I mean, I'm saying 2026, but I don't think it's gonna go back.

1:07:57So I think that's gonna be the future. So LS15, side quests can make the main quest. So what do I mean by that? So if you were a very like, I hate even using this term, but like visionary founder, if you're somebody who like has lots of big ideas, big dreams, you're always like thinking shiny objects, you have a little bit of ADD, a little touch of the ad, right? Sometimes you have to find things for yourself to keep distracted to not break your main business. And because sometimes, especially the bigger your business gets, when you're smaller, literally ignore this advice. But if you're bigger, it just takes like, it might take a year for a big initiative to happen because it's turning the Titanic versus turning a rowboat, right?

1:08:35And so I have found it useful for me, like the books for me are obviously I find a way to make them additive to my overall business at acquisition.com. But they take time from me. But that time, I think, gives me thinking space and also allows my team to just continue to get better without me blowing things up. And so I tend to prefer large change from an emotional level. From a logical level, I prefer incremental, et cetera. But it's like, how can I have these? How can I scratch my new itch? Well, I have to do things that don't drain, and this is the key, that cannot drain resources from the main thing.

1:09:11The side quest only helps if it allows the main quest to succeed even more, not if it distracts from the main quest or pulls any resources from it. And so for me, writing books is that thing. For you, it might be something else, but I think I've grown more and more okay with the idea that like some things will take time within the business and me having something to do in the meantime can actually increase the likelihood that those things succeed. And in some ways, it's a way of passing the time while things are painful and ungodly. So the next one, which was a great lesson for me this year was delegation is the price of scaling, loss of control, right?

1:09:41And so I believe that the spiritual path of entrepreneurship is a consistent relinquishing of control. And so we were employees at some time, likely for many people, and then you stop doing that, and then you decide to start a business. And you typically do that because you want to, quote, have freedom. And so then you say, I will have complete control. But in order to have true freedom, you actually can have no control. You have to accept that's true freedom, right? And so at every level, in the very beginning, you do everything. And then you say, I'm going to have somebody who helps you with this.

1:10:09So you give them a little control. And then the next level is like, okay, well, the doing I've delegated, but the management, no one can manage like I can manage. And then you give the management away. And you're like, okay, well, no one can direct or lead like I can lead. And then eventually give the leadership away. And then it's like, well, no one can think of the vision of the future like I can. And then eventually, maybe there is somebody, Steve Jobs was unable to be replaced. But many of us aren't Steve Jobs and are replaceable. And so delegation is the price of scaling, losing that control.

1:10:34And so hardworking people, and this is what's really interesting about this, hardworking people have a hard time coming up with non-hardworking solutions. And so this has been particularly difficult for me because I will get problems to say, oh, I wonder if I can outwork this problem. When Bill Gates talked about this saying, it's really good to have lazy executives because they will try and think of non-high energy ways to solve problems. And so the hard worker won't feel like delegating because they want to feel useful. and it's incredibly difficult. But if you draw the line, you have to say that you will not do anything in order for it to scale because otherwise you will absolutely be the limiter of your own growth.

1:11:14And I don't think we are as special as we think we are. And so you might kind of just have to give up some profit in the short term, but you'll make more in the long term. And so this has been kind of like a thingy process for me, which is at this point, the razor I have is if it requires me, it doesn't work. That's how I think about it now. And so I use the term internally from my head and Layla and I talked about this, scale zero. Like we have to scale me down to zero so we can scale it up to infinity. Otherwise, I will always be the limiter. And so this is kind of just like a great reminder or artifact that I've gotten from the year is scale zero.

1:11:49And I've been reminded this at this level now is that nothing can rely on me because the business is just too big. The other little tidbit I'll add in there as well is if you are at equilibrium within your business, that means that like your supply and your demand are fixed. Like I can't, I can't take in more customers because my supplies, like I, my team can't handle it, but I also don't have more demand. Right. So it's like, what do you do when you're at equilibrium? When I was in my earlier part of my career, I would have said increased demand and then forced the team to, you know, pull from the cracks.

1:12:19And then with the extra cashflow, you'll be able to afford, you know, the next person you need to hire. That was what I would have said probably the first 10 years of my career, 12 years of my career. And I would say that I have flipped that thinking probably this year, which is that I would say increase supply. And I'll explain why. When you're at equilibrium, whatever your next step is, you're going to have to bear a cost. And the cost will either be your reputation or your profit. And so if I increase demand, the cost of that increase will be my reputation, because my team will probably not be able to deliver at the same quality they otherwise would have because they are overextended.

1:12:49If I increase supply first, then the bandwidth of my team will improve. And in the short term, they will have to train this new person up, which will be a cost in the business. So I'm going to almost have a double cost, they've trained this person up, and I have to bear the cost of the person to begin as well. But once that's done, I will have dramatically increased the capacity of the business, which will then give bandwidth back, which then allow us to push to fill up the demand side. And so the reason that we were even able to do the book launch this year, we actually originally were going to do it in February, couldn't do it because we didn't have bandwidth.

1:13:22And then we're able to do it in August because 90 days prior, we hired four directors and leaders in the business, which expanded the capacity of the business so that we could do the launch. So that was just some of the lessons of this year from that. So next one was just real estate in general. So I, you know, Sharron and I have done a lot of real estate deals together for the last five years. I would say we will buy a few hundred million dollars in real estate this year. I can get the exact number probably in a future video because we have a couple of deals pending as the year ends. But what was very interesting is that I have a much better understanding of the tax laws around it.

1:13:56So this was a big W for us. I haven't talked about real estate in general, despite having done a lot of deals over the last five years with Sharon, because I didn't feel like I had the credibility. And so I will probably, and Sharon will probably as well, next year, we'll probably talk more about ACQ RE, so ACQ real estate, because we have now gathered a significant amount of resources there that I think you guys would probably like that. And I certainly have enjoyed it because it was something that I felt it was a deficiency in my skill set in terms of investing that I wanted to rectify. And so I've talked about it in many, you know, many years ago, I've talked about in some videos of like very tiny deals that I did$50 ,000 deals that, you know, didn't work out as well.

1:14:31And I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. And so that is when I basically enlisted help and I got people who are more experienced than I did what I always do and just try to learn from them. And it has been incredibly enlightening. And I very much understand the appeal of it now. And so it was a huge deal, huge W for us this year. And look, and I think will be a compounding vehicle for us in the future. I mean, this is a lessons video for the year for me. And so I'm grateful that we took all the steps that we did this year in order to do it. Next one, best ROI in business. All right, pay attention to this one.

1:15:00Best ROI is still talent. So the cost in return on talent. So let me get deep on this. You have, how much does it cost to you to get the talent? And then how much will that talent make you? And so I had a dentist who came and was like, hey, I have the specialty dentist. They're really hard to find, blah, blah, blah. And I said, okay, well, how much does a dentist make you in gross profit per year? And at his facility, he made$700 ,000 in gross profit per year per special dentist. And I was like, okay, that's gross profit. I said, okay, fine. And I said, so if you just had, and I think he was doing four or$5 million a year in profit, something like that.

1:15:31And I said, okay, so what's the problem? He said, well, I can't find any of these dentists. And I said, okay, well, how much money are you spending, you know, with on recruiting or marketing? And he was like, I don't know, like 2 ,500 bucks. And I was like, okay, so let's hear me out. I said, if I had an investment that I said would cash flow$700 ,000 a year, what would you be willing to pay one time to buy into that investment? He was like, I mean, if I knew it was 700 grand a year, I mean, 700. And I was like, right. So you should be more than happy to spend 50, right? On a headhunter or 150 on a headhunter to go get this level of talent.

1:16:08And if you, and he needed four to hit his next goal, which he had, which was like to double the business or something. And so I said, all right, let me ask you this. I think he had 4.6 million, I think was his profit. I said, this year, if instead of making 4.6 million in profit, you made 4 million. And then you got, you spent the 600 to get four guys at 150 each for Headhunter to go get that talent and maybe have relocation bonuses, whatever, would that be worth it? And he was like, well, when you say it like that, I'm like, right. And so I still to this day believe that especially in the age of AI, where every star employee who can use technology gets even more leverage, the return on talent is even better than it's ever been.

1:16:48And so when you see Meta paying these$100 million bonuses and stuff for these single individuals, you're like, they're crazy. Or they know something we don't know, which is that they might still get a billion or two billion or five billion in value from this one person if they can unlock it. And so I think about this from two angles, like a micro and a macro perspective. So on a micro level, when you bring someone in, you get time back. It's work that you don't have to do that you now get back. Phenomenal. On the macro level, the higher the level of talent, the more it's impossible for you to have their lifetime of experience.

1:17:22I can't live in AI coders last 20 years, right? Or last 10 years. I can't go do that. So all I can do is spend money to go buy that lifetime experience and then apply it into my business. And so fundamentally, the bigger the business gets, the more it's about assembling the talent that then builds the business than it is about building the business. And your rate of business growth will be limited by your ability to learn because no one will come work for you who is better than you. And let me put my caveat on this. No one will work for you who is better than you at everything. For sure. Many people work for me who are better than me at their specific functions, but they know that I have depth in some things that my depth is as good or better than their depth in their specific thing.

1:18:09And so excellence attracts excellence. And so if you want more A players, you need to become an even deeper A player because at the most simple level, if you had the five best teammates in the entire world, you would have one of the most valuable businesses in the entire world. That would be reality. Elon's superstar skill is that he's so good at engineering that he can attract the best engineers. And as a result, he can build the best engineering-based companies. That's his secret. And so he's not actually running six different companies. I mean, he obviously makes his key decisions in those areas, but a huge amount of decisions, I would argue the vast majority of the decisions, physically couldn't be made by one man because of the size of all six of the companies.

1:18:57And so the only way that's accomplished is by having such a strong brand, by being so good at what you do, that the best in the world want to work for you. The problem is that you're not the best in the world, and so they don't want to work for you, which means, as always, we are the problem. We are the limited of the business. Next set of lessons for me from this year. So A players will make you rich, but here's the downside or the hard part of a player culture. A players cost more per headcount, but not in actuality. So let me give you an example. If you had five eights and five sixes on a team, what really happens is that the sixes pull down the eights.

1:19:28So now you just have a bunch of six sevens. Anyways, the smart move is to fire all five sixes. And what happens is your eights become nines and you never needed the sixes to begin with. And that is something that I've seen over and over and over again. I had a team of 14 sales guys at one point, and we had a cancerous. There was one guy was stealing. Some of the other guys knew about it. It was bad. And so we ended up cutting, I think, from 14 to six. And those six guys closed more deals than the 14. Real. I've also had to do this on the media. I mean, I've had to do this in a lot of different teams over the years where I have to just massively take an ax because culture runs amok.

1:20:03There's a bad leader. They lower those standards. And then you got eights with sixes, and then the eights start acting like sixes too. But then when you get all the bad ones out, then all of a sudden these eights rise to the occasion and they're like, we just only want to play with eight players. Because eight players will self-manage, but everyone has to be an eight player. Otherwise, they'll say, oh, that's accepted. And either they'll lower the bar or they'll leave. And one of the difficulties of this is that your definition of an eight player will change as you get better. What I thought was an eight player when I was in, you know, when I owned a gym was somebody who was making$50 ,000 a year.

1:20:35And I was like, this is the shit. This guy is the man. This is a player. And then I had my first$75 ,000 year of playing, then my first$100 ,000 year, and then first$200 ,000, and my first$400 ,000, then my first million, then my first multi-million. And at each level, I'm like, I didn't even know they made people like this, right? And so your definition of what good looks like will always be better. And this is a quote from Sharani said, the best talent is always in the future. And so we always want to make room. We want to build a business that has a vision that's big enough that their big dreams can also fit inside of it.

1:21:04And I'll just say on a tactical level, this has almost become my razor. I have yet to find an A player that I don't immediately know is an A player within the first 14 days. It just hasn't happened. And so I think what's really happening for me now is that like my tolerance for not A players has just gone down. I just, I can just say like, I'm sure they're okay. And I'm sure we can give them time. And I'm sure they could become a seven. And so what? They're not going to be an A. Why bother? And that is a hard culture to enforce because people don't want to let other people go. Hey, this person just changed their jobs, etc.

1:21:38And some people might say, oh, you're not giving them a chance. I want to be clear. It depends on the level of who you're hiring. If you're hiring very low wage employees and the training is really fast, that can be different than maybe somebody who has to ramp up. There are elements of this. But you can still see leading indicators in terms of character and work ethic almost immediately. And those are the reasons that most people get fired, not because of kind of the day to day skill stuff, which leads us to the next one, which is money attracts talent. Culture keeps talent. And so hear me out.

1:22:06You need to be able to pay enough that A players will ride the ride, right? You must be this tall to ride this ride. But whether they'll want to keep riding the ride will depend on how good the ride is, right? And so financial incentives are absolutely important for attracting them. But in my opinion, not very important at all for getting the most out of them. The non-financial incentives will become significantly stronger than the financial ones because the financial ones are too infrequent. So if we think about how behavior works, behavior is reinforced in the moment. Latency beats intensity every day and twice on Sunday.

1:22:42The reason that one drug is more addictive than another is purely based on how quickly you feel good after you take it. That is how addiction works. Why are inhalants so addictive? Because it's immediately in your bloodstream. Why is Facebook or these social media things so addictive? Because the red light happens immediately. It's not because a red light is inherently this crazy thing. And to the same degree, nicotine is not a super strong drug, but it's immediate. That's why it's so addictive. And so if we think about addiction as a way of changing behavior, then we think, how can I get someone addicted to the right behaviors in my business?

1:23:16And the way that that addiction would happen is you have to have reinforcers within the way the business works that happen in real time. And are any of those financial? No. And so we have to be this high to ride this ride. You have to pay well enough that A-level people are there, but you still might not get true A-level performance unless you have an A culture. And so when you have a team of A's, they will self-manage and they will continue to reinforce each other for being A's. And if you've ever been on a winning team, it's more fun than being paid well and on a losing team. If you have to ask somebody when they're in the Super Bowl, how much do you have to pay to try hard to win this game?

1:23:54No one, they would do it for free. because winners want to win more than they want to make money. And that's what makes them winners. Money is what will get them in the door, but winning is what keeps them there. So next little tactical lesson, decentralization wins. So we are big advocates of decentralization. I would say that we've taken this as a Warren Buffett, you know, a feather out of his hat. I believe that people need to stay focused. Shared resources, split resources. And so our goal, especially in terms of how we're running the company, is that as fast as possible, we want to allow functions to be self-sustaining and ideally from day one, right?

1:24:29And if not, we need to look at that investment from Holdco, something that has to get paid back as fast as possible so they can become independent. And so this is a little bit more of an operational thing, but the way that I think about this is like kind of like revenue lines. So I do not like centralization. I want independent leaders who own their own P &Ls so that they can stay completely focused on making that thing win. And the times in my career where I have gotten distracted has actually been I distracted my own team from winning because I told I took resources from here and said, oh, we're going to also pursue this opportunity.

1:25:02But I didn't increase infrastructure. And so I think this is honestly like this. This is one of the big reasons why I finally feel like I figured out how do we go from a few hundred million to a billion a year in sales? Like this is like this is for the more advanced business owners. This is the big unlock is that you have to think of business of businesses. You have to think a team of teams, right? And so it's not like, oh, Amazon is this one business. Amazon has many revenue lines and they function as basically just many businesses under the brand of Amazon. They have the same culture. They have the same ideals.

1:25:37They strive for the same ultimate outcome and they're aligned in that way. But the actual doingness of AWS versus the logistics business versus the private label business of Amazon, all of those are very different. And so each of them has CEOs in their own right. And so acquisition.com now, we have two revenue lines outside or three revenue lines outside of the portfolio. And I guess that's not even true. There's more than that. Well, each of them, to that point, each of them has their own presidents and leadership team. And so that is the big mistake that I kept trying to make because I kept thinking I had to make this business bigger when in reality, like humans can only manage so many humans.

1:26:17right and so things eventually split off and become their own units of business and it's very difficult for a cfo of a holding company to know how much frontline customer service person needs to spend at this particular company they're too far away and so that's why i don't like centralization if you're building a very large business and i say that with with with the this the exception of software from a shared services perspective because basically the operations of that scale, you know, better than just about any other kind of business. But the way that revenue lines are imagined within the software world is basically feature sets.

1:26:53And so you have a team that's in charge of these features, and it's kind of like a director, a CEO of this feature, a CEO of this feature. So it still more or less works the same way, even if the revenue is consolidated with one membership or something like that. But if you have a service business, typically the revenue will not be consolidated in that way. You'll have different lines of services and different pricing associated with that, different sales teams, different marketing, but it's still, brand will still be the same, but the leaders and what they're selling and how they deliver will be different.

1:27:18And so that is a huge unlock for me. And it is, I feel like we're finally, I mean, we've been doing this now, but this is me distilling down that crystal so that future me can be like, what was I thinking right then? That's what I was thinking. And that I think was the big W. I'll give you a couple of tidbits on the leaders to do that. You need leaders who can drive the revenue lines and are incentivized on bottom line. and if they need you, they don't deserve the incentive. If they need you to drive the revenue, then they are not the driver. You are still the driver. If you really want to build something big, you have to be able to find people who are exceptional, compensate them well, and get out of their way.

1:27:55Now, you've heard people say that. I've heard people say that. And I want to say this in a way that somehow I can like make it real because it's real for me now. It's the thing that I was missing was a pattern recognition on what high quality talent looks like. That was what I was missing. if that person actually here's a different way of thinking about it here's a good one if you have a hundred million dollar business you might have one or two founders or three founders who have nine figure founder you know skill sets but the people who are going to run within that is the next tier of people are all call it eight figure or multi-eight figure entrepreneurs and so in order to create the hundred million dollar business you might have two 25 million dollar entrepreneurs and then and then five ten million dollar entrepreneurs who run the next tier and then underneath of them, you've got many seven figure entrepreneurs, right?

1:28:41And so it's almost like the aggregate of the, the aggregate revenue in the business is the added up potential of all the skill of all the players within it. And that was just a bit like, if you don't think that your head of sales could go do sales and like, if you're, if your person marketing could start a marketing agency, then they're probably not that good at marketing, right? And so that's, that's kind of thinking process is like if none of the people that you have could go do it on their own then you probably don't have good enough people and that's the thing because you have this fear of like oh what if i if i bring somebody in who can do it on their own they'll just steal my stuff it's like or if you don't bring them in you will literally do it for the rest of your life we have to create the vision and the opportunities that are big enough and this is where the design this is your job how to get the opportunities are such that it still makes more sense for the person to work here because they can have uncapped earnings so there's a difference between like Like somebody needs to own the whole business, which the biggest business in the world, no one owns the whole business.

1:29:38Well, I mean, to my knowledge, right? The biggest, I'm thinking like, okay, publicly traded, whatever. I'm sure there's some secret Arabian oil factory that I don't know about, right? That one guy owns. But like for the vast majority of businesses, many people own them, right? But what's more key is that someone has unlimited earning capacity. And I think that's the key. That's how you can get the A players. And if they are true A's, they'll fucking light up. Because the thing is, is it makes sense. because the return on effort is higher because of the aggregate infrastructure that has already been built from the brand recognition, from the reputation, from the delivery mechanisms that you might have in place.

1:30:11That person, it's like, they're like, I don't even want, like, let me just, let me cook. Let me crush what I'm really good at and be able to do that at a higher level than I could do if I did it on my own because I couldn't even use my whole superpower to the greatest degree that I can because I would get bottlenecked much lower along the line doing something else that I don't want to do. So huge unlock for me and for the bigger business owners, that part was probably the most valuable for you. Lesson 22. So I'm 0 for 12 on executive assistance, but I'm hoping to be 1 for 13. Maybe I should be lucky number 13.

1:30:38I had my first kind of like world-class EA. And so I will just do my very best to describe it. I'm early, so I'm almost hesitant to make this because I'm like, this is like, oh, I'm in love. And then you're like, how's that girlfriend of yours? It's like, oh, he broke up, you know, whatever. It's terrible. So take this with a gigantic grain of salt. But I do think that this one will work out and I'll tell you why. She's a psychopath. And I think I had normal people. And I'm not normal. And so I needed a psychopath. And I realized that the number thing that, I mean, we've said this in the interviews, but I still wasn't, I had never actually experienced on the other side.

1:31:11I knew it in theory, but I hadn't experienced it, which is speed over everything. I needed someone who will always respond to me within 60 seconds, no matter when I message. And I will go for hours and hours and hours with nothing. And then the moment I message you, I need full resources, full attention, because in that moment, you are my constraint. And I needed someone who had more competence, general horsepower. So I will say this for all of you guys who are founders, who have schedules and whatnot. One, I think you should be the one who manages your time. In terms of who's doing the blocking and tackling, that's separate.

1:31:50I think you can outsource that. But who makes decisions on your time? If your time is your most valuable resource, why would you want anyone but the person who's the best allocator of resources, a.k.a. you, to be the person who's choosing how that time gets spent? So thing number one. Two, I think speed above everything. Now, also above everything is general intelligence. And I think this is something that I did not appreciate. I did not screen for as much, and it was a mistake. And I found this by accident. My career is very intelligent. And so as a result, I trust her decision-making to a much higher degree.

1:32:25And I feel like my ability to actually give true tasks that I do that come up that require horsepower, I can actually give them and be like, just do a first draft and I can get 80 % of that done. And then I can tweak rather than having to just truly do everything de novo. So the next piece that I think has been really helpful is whether you are a maker or a manager, plan your time accordingly and live and die by that. I've had some of the most productive weeks of my life by finally for the first time in so long I actually feel like i'm ahead which I haven't I haven't felt that in such a long time where I'm actually proactively time blocking my time that's all the free time that I have but blocking it for what project is being worked on each of these time slots and she's keeping track of all my ongoing projects and knowing what loops of like hey when are you going to close the loop on this when are you gonna hey by the way this this followed up and so I'm sharing this so that for those of you who are like, man, I really need an executive assistant, pay more than you expect.

1:33:18Look for someone who's more intelligent and say speed is non-negotiable and have them watch the maker manager video because I think that will give a huge amount of context to how you work your life. And so for me, that was a huge learning for this year. Next one is if there's ever a problem in an organization or department or a line of revenue, look at the leader. And here's the rule. the leader is always the problem. Not sometimes, the leader is always the problem. So if a function is mediocre, it's because the leader is mediocre, period. Full stop, no questions. So it's either the leader and the team or just the leader, but it's never just the team.

1:34:00So if the leader is mediocre and then they brought in mediocre people, it's the leader and the team. If the leader is mediocre and you've got a great team, the leader will turn the great team into a mediocre team. And so I had a conversation with a business owner the other day, and he had four locations. Two of them were doing well, two of them were doing poorly. I asked a zillion questions to finally get to the fun fact, which is that he had somebody in the company who was running them, who was a longtime friend, and also, we'll just say, an addict. I'll just say that. And every day he was coming up to work, messed up, inebriated, whatever you want to say.

1:34:34And he was asking me for tactical business advice when I was like, there is no tactical business advice. There is nothing that will matter because every, no one will listen to somebody who they're like, well, why don't you show up to work sober? Why don't we start there? Right? No one will respect that. Imagine that guy coming in and be like, Hey guys, let's pick up the pace. What? Like, what are we talking about? And so it's like all these questions about like pricing and sales, like, dude, none of this matters until we fix the leader problem. Right? But the thing is, is that's obviously an extreme example, but it happens at every level.

1:35:04If your media team's not working well, the leader. If your sales team isn't good, the leader. The question is, after you pull the leader out, is the team also screwed? Got a 50-50 shot there. If they had a low bar and brought in low bar people, that sucks. Now, if you have, now it's like, well, what happens if you had a bad team and you put a good leader in place? Have you ever seen a good coach turn around a bad team? Pretty sure there's a ton of movies about it. Yes. If you have a great leader, they can turn a mediocre team into a great team. So I think I spent too much time early on in my career trying to pinpoint problems.

1:35:38Straight up, there's a problem with a function, leaders the issue. Just solves it. This is so much faster. So there's a razor for you. Lesson 24. In the world of AI, your brand is remote. All right, now this is not gonna be news to some of you. And for some of you, this hopefully is news to none of you. But if it is news, welcome to 2026. So if that's the case, because services and products can become increasingly commoditized and list of goals and content, things like that are easy to reproduce, how can you build a brand? So branding, the act of it is who and what you associate with. That is what will matter.

1:36:13And so in a world of AI, you have to be thinking about this. And so if you're a local business, for example, your brand will be mostly word of mouth and the reviews about you online. That's what the reality is. But just about every other business, it's that plus all of the content that are making publicly, right? And so this is just the most to the point version of this that I can give you, which is, as always, give away the secrets, sell the implementation. People do not want to do the work for whatever it is that you're showing. Whether you're showing them how to fix toilets, they'll just call you to do their plumbing.

1:36:46If you're telling them how to fix relationships, they're still going to call you to help them fix their relationship. If you're telling them how to fix their business, they'll call you to help them fix their business, right? People do not want to do the work or they don't want to do it alone. Key. Myself included, I will always pay to go faster and decrease risk so they don't have to do backtracks. Like I get the DIY, I will consume something and be like, this person clearly knows what they're talking about. I will pay to go faster. And I will pay to have you take this generic thing, make sure it's applied to my business so that it's right because I don't wanna pay the tax of ignorance.

1:37:17And so if you know this to be true, then the question is, if I wanna build a brand in 2026, I wanna think about what are the curated associations that I want to make that will reinforce the position that I want to have in my prospect's minds. What things do they like that I want them to think of me when they think of that? And so that's what we want to do. So what do you think we're going to do? I'm going to do a lot more business fixing next year. And I have to build a lot more infrastructure in order to do that. But it's going to be demonstration of skill, right? What's something that very few people can do in your market that you can demonstrate better than anyone else?

1:37:52Do that. Do as much of it as you possibly can't, do it until your eyes bleed because the market won't even know you exist by the time you're getting tired of it. So on the talk track of brand, brand has to be constantly reinforced. So you need to keep pushing the envelope to stay relevant. Something is only a big deal if you make it one. No one knew about the launch. No one. I have almost 20 million or 17, I don't even know what it is, between 16, 17, between 16 and 20, I haven't checked in a while. 16, 20 million followers or subscribers across all different channels or whatever. The vast majority of people did not know about the launch.

1:38:26Didn't even know about it. And I tried really, really hard. And in order to stay relevant, you still have to keep going bigger and bigger. Like, why would I do the launch? It's like, well, I gotta, like, it's like, just because, like, Chris Bumstead, when he won the first Olympia, it doesn't mean he's done. It's like, we gotta win the Olympia again. You gotta maintain the title. You gotta, it's like, that's why it's defending the title, right? So you have to continue to, And I think this is what's lost in some people. It's like, man, the climbing, the climb is so tough. It's like, no, man, holding the tops way harder than climbing it.

1:38:57Right. And there's always levels to the game. And so it's like, once you, once you get your title, whatever your title is for you, it's like, you have to keep taking on new title bouts to keep defending the belt. And maybe the stages keep getting bigger, right. And business that like the stages can only keep getting bigger. I'll tell you a failure that I had around the launch. I think on the PR front, I had planned for a big PR kind of blast off on the back end of that. And basically that fell flat. Basically the PR firm that I had, I didn't have really any attention to put towards it. And I saw it as, it was a miss.

1:39:29It was a miss. Like how many articles did you see about some internet person doubling the world record? Not that many. And that would totally have been fixable if I just had queued up a bunch of PR. And I just didn't. So that was a miss. That was a miss for me. We'll do better next time. Next one, the greatest risk to the business is that you don't feel like doing it anymore. This is super real. So the reason that people, like most businesses don't actually run out of money. The founder runs out of will. And so like you have to get, you have to have the frame shift to, it has to be worth suffering for.

1:40:05And I do think that making money is a component of it. Like I had somebody the other day who was like, hey, I'm thinking about switching the business. And that's how most businesses die, right? The entrepreneur just switches and says, It's not worth it for me anymore. I said, if this thing made 10 times the money, would you keep doing it? And they're like, hell yeah. I'm like, would you look at this other business? They're like, no. I'm like, well then dude, let's just fix the business, right? So making more money can help, but I will say kind of like the electroshock therapy. If it made 10 times the money, it will help in the short term, but not forever.

1:40:32Because plateaus are often the ones that stay in it the longest. So what do I mean by that? It's like the shrinking and the growing are the ones that are, I think, the most painful. that plateaus, people can just stay in them for years because it's just like not painful enough to quit, but still very painful. So the ones that grow fast are in lots of pain and eventually they don't need the money anymore at all. And so those are very, like if you've grown a lot and made a lot of money really quickly, you then stop wanting to be in all the pain that this tremendous growth provides you because you're like, I don't need to do this anymore.

1:41:09And so on the flip side, the ones who are shrinking or are very volatile deal with the most pain, obviously. So you have the same volatility and pain of the growth guy, except you also aren't making money. So that is the most pain that you will be in business. And so what we're solving for as entrepreneurs is something worth doing, right? Having something, and I think that the most powerful thing that has helped me is having something outside of yourself that the business acts as a vehicle that you drive towards. And so for some people, that's like some societal impact that you want to make. That's some problem that you want to solve.

1:41:47For me, it's the person that I want to become. But like that's very easy to say. And I've heard many people say it. Their actions don't align with that. So whatever that thing is for you, and it might not be that you want to become this person. But whatever that thing is for you, it's like it has to be real. And you have to fix the business to allow you to achieve that thing. because once you make all the money that you want to make, you have to have another reason to do it. And so that is why entrepreneurs not wanting to do it is the greatest risk to the business. And I think that like, I have to always keep that front of mind.

1:42:17Like the thing that, like I have to be willing at this point for acquisition.com to do some things that I just want to do, even if it's not in the business's best interest because it's in my best interest. And if it's in my best interest, I will keep doing the business.

1:42:35Thank you.