Embrace The Cringe | Ep 961

0:00This is the first piece of content I ever made. This is the first ad I ever made. Fast forward today, we make 450 pieces per week. I broke the Guinness World Record with the fastest selling nonfiction of all time with$106 million in sales in a weekend. We have a portfolio of companies that did north of$250 million in agri revenue last year. In this video, I want to show you just how far anyone can come and not to judge your first chapter by someone else's 25th or 1 ,000th chapter. Here's one promise I can make to you. You will be cringe. And so let's define these terms real quick. Shame is breaking someone else's rules.

0:29Guilts is breaking your own rules. Cringe is supposed secondhand embarrassment. Someone's saying, oh, that's cringe, saying I'm embarrassed for them. But in reality, it's a defensive status play, which means you should interpret it as, if someone says, oh, that's cringe, they said that to you, it means I'm beginning to change my status relative to other people or relative to them, and therefore I'm on the right path. And so we have to ask the question, like, whose rules are we breaking? Did we agree to their rules? If we set the rules, what outcome did those rules optimize for? A rule is an if-then statement.

1:00Is that true? How do we know that? And why does that matter? People seeing you try hard will say, why are you taking this so seriously? Why do you even care? But the truth is they've never cared about anything in their lives. Like, when's the last time they took anything seriously? Of course. Never. And it shows. And so I had a guy once come up to me and tell me that he saw how hard I was trying with content. And then he said he'd almost outsourced all of it down to two hours a week. And he was like, yeah, I like bragging about it. And I said, yeah, it shows. And he just like looked at me and I was like, yeah, it shows, right?

1:34He was trying to be cool about the fact that he didn't try hard, but all it looked like was that he was losing. But back to the point, is it cringe to care? Yes, of course it's cringe. You can make anything cringe by just caring about it. And the only people who think caring isn't cool are people in high school or people who got older but never grew up. So be real about this for a second. Just changing how I talk about something can make it sound cringe. So in the fittest world where I came from, right, bodybuilding, you could be obsessed over muscles oiling up and posing in tiny trunks on a stage for strangers, right?

2:11Maybe competitive chess, right? Staring at a board for hours in dead silence, obsessing over wooden pieces like your life depends on it. making YouTube videos, cringe, setting up light. You're gonna set up your little lights and talk to your little camera like an idiot. Like no one's listening, right? Editing for hours just for a couple views and comments. Ooh, writing a book, that's cringe. Locking yourself away for months or years, pouring your soul into words that most people will never read. Like you're just gonna sit away and type at your keyboard, right? Anyone can make anything cringe, right?

2:42Because anyone who cares about anything is cringe. But the worst, and I think Don Mazzetti said this, and I love this, the cringiest thing of all is to be scared about looking cringe. So why are you hating on someone else who actually has a passion or an interest or actually tries? Like, do we really want a world where people care less? Because when you make that claim, like, who do you really hate? Who does the person who says that's cringe really hate? Do you hate them for committing to something or yourself for lacking the guts to commit to anything? I want to show this in the realest form I possibly could.

3:13I went through the archives. I scrolled all the way back and I am I'm a weirdo about like I try to keep everything so I have like my lifelong text and videos and pictures and I'm very grateful for that. So I'll give you a tiny piece of advice to anybody who's on the journey right now. Document more like what I would say I don't have many regrets in life, but one of them is that I didn't document the struggle. I didn't document the journey because I was ashamed of it. I didn't want anyone to know. It's kind of like the people who like when they're overweight, they don't want to take pictures of themselves because they're ashamed.

3:39but it's like, one, you got to face reality. And two, if you believe that you're going to win, this will be part of the story you tell. And so, like Kanye was documenting in the very early days because he believed so hardcore that he was going to win, right? And I'm grateful because I knew the first, the moment that I actually started documenting purposefully was the day that I had$1 ,000 a mile left in my bank account after I lost everything. I was like, I will never let this happen again and this will be the beginning of my comeback story. Hey guys, real quick, many of you guys are getting started in business and don't know, but other entrepreneurs have already tried to help.

4:10And so 3.6 million copies were donated by other entrepreneurs in my book launch, and I'm donating these books as well. And so if you're starting in business and you would like the ultimate business backpack, all three books, this one shows you how to figure out what to sell. This shows you how to get people to find out about it. And this one shows you how to make money from it. When you have all three, you can actually get started. All right. On top of that, you have 30 days of school that you can get absolutely free. And all of this, including the books, including school, including shipping is 16 bucks.

4:35Yeah. Like we lose money on this. So go grab it. It's the ultimate thing I can give you, my gift. Enjoy. If you go there and it's shut down, it's because we ran out. But as long as the link still works, there's books. And so I want to show you some real stuff. That's tough. But I hope you enjoy it because I think everyone, you know, many people will compare their current chapter to like my chapter, somebody else's chapter, whoever your person is. But it's not real. It's made up. Like compare it to this. This is the first ad I ever made. Now compare that to my first professional ad that I ever made.

5:12It's super cringe. Okay, here's my cringey first post where I was trying to get people to give me money, right? I'm just like, hey, I started this thing. Please, please give me money, right? Here's my first content piece that I ever made. Sounds very dialed, right? There's a strong hook, strong meat, strong payoff. No, it's horrible, right? And this is the first YouTube video that I made when I started making YouTube content. And this is my first IG post. Now, 90 days after that first ad that I showed you, I lost everything for the second time. And that's when I made my first podcast. And so my goal was to document the lessons so that I had something to look back to as I moved up in my career.

5:55And I thought it'd be really cool if Buffett or Bezos or Musk had done some sort of like video diaries of the come up, not just the top, right? As something like an artifact for us to learn from that we could follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately, the world is too rational of a place to reward the undeserving. That's a Charlie Munger quote. In order to get what you want, you must deserve what you want, which really means that you've got to be good. And the only way to get good is to be willing to be bad for a very long time. And so this is my promise to you, is that you will be cringe. These videos, these pieces of content, your first product, they will be cringe, but you will also not be alone.

6:30And so the point is this, you'll figure it out as long as you start, take feedback to get better, and never stop. And if this motivated you to stop judging yourself, because hopefully these are super cringe, I made an entire video on the iterative process that I followed to get here, which you can watch. Let's see what this is. Hey guys, and in your next installment of the Mind Game series, I just want to talk about love versus discipline. And it's a topic that I feel like gets totally misconstrued within the fitness industry because Hey guys, welcome. Okay, so measuring yourself is a really important thing for tracking progress so that you can make adjustments to your meal plan.

7:07Makes sense. You want to track as many variables as you possibly can. The reason for that is not because you want to see... I don't know. A trainer? Like I have no idea. Hi guys, I'm Alex and I'm the owner of United Fitness. So welcome to our family. Thank you for the opportunity to earn your business. So I just want to tell you a little bit more about what we do. United Fitness, we strive to be the leading body in life transformation business out there. Are you tired of fitness places that don't make you have fun or give you the results you want? Well, United Fitness is ready to change them. And you know how?

7:41We're going to have you lifting weights.

8:15for encouraging