How To Raise Your Standards TODAY w/ Leila Hormozi | Ep 795

0:00What's going on everyone? Welcome back to The Game, where today I have a special co-host. Depending on where you look at the internet, my daughter, my sister, distant relative, or for those of you who know the truth, my wife, Leila Hormozy, is here with me. So for those of you who actually knew who didn't know that, we still get probably like one comment a day. It's like, wait, are you guys related? I have her here today because I'm recording this podcast on a Sunday. We've been working this morning since about six. I wanted to talk about something that I feel like will be a meaty subject for both of us with regards to business, but it probably does have some tendrils that extend to regular life.

0:41And that single prompt or word is standards. The reason I thought it'd be a really good topic is because as a business owner, I have a few themes of lessons that I have to continue to learn over and over again. Like I feel like the concept of the lesson stays the same, but my understanding of it deepens. You see the zillionaires on stage saying, hey, you just have to hire great people. And then, you know, the local barbershop guy is like, yeah, sure, you got to hire great people. But there's just so many levels to great people. For standards, it kind of works the same way, which is in a lot of ways, you get the business you tolerate.

1:19Layla made this tweet earlier today. And I think in seeing that tweet, I thought to myself, you know, I think it'd be fun if we did this together. So I will read you the tweet that you had, the reason your business is shit is because you are comfortable with a shit business. If a shit business made you uncomfortable, you wouldn't stop until it was fixed. Yeah, that was really on my mind because people tell me all the time how desperately they wish to have a great business. But the truth is, is that I know the way we are, which is like, I will not stop and you will not stop until we don't have a shit business.

1:54And I wouldn't say any of our businesses are shit, but I would say a decade ago, maybe. And so it's just a matter of like, are you willing to put in the work it takes and run your head against the wall a million times or, you know, fail 10, 15, 20 times to figure it out. And I think a lot of the times building a great business is just failing over and over and over again, just figuring out what works because learning how to lead people, learning how to build a culture, learning how to build a team. It's not like any of that is like one skill. People are like, tell me how to lead people. I'm like, yeah, let me give you 50 skills in one conversation.

2:27Like write a book on leadership. Okay. I could write you a fluffy bullshit book, but it actually is so many micro skills that bundle up into this one word. The concept of holding standards for ourselves. I think a lot of people in the beginning, it's really easy because you see, oh, I have nothing. These people have something. I need to raise my standards to get that something. And then when you're making a million dollars, you're making 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million. So you keep raising your standards. And then as you get further along, I think a lot of people tend to plateau. And I think a lot of the reason that they plateau is they don't know who to look for to set the new standard for what's required to grow.

3:04And the reality is, is that in a business, people always ask, well, why is it that, you know, you need to continue to set the standard higher and higher? It's because as your business grows, you at the top have to be the most potent source of those standards. Because as more people get on your team, as you have more people under you, those standards only dilute. They only get worse. And so if you don't continue to raise the bar and to raise the standards of who comes in and what the standards are, then they dilute even more. And so it's like fighting natural inertia of like, if we're not trying to make things better, things will get worse.

3:37Two things. So first off, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about motivation. Dr. K, who's my very close friend, basically brother at this point, we talk about this a lot because it's kind of one of these quintessential concepts. And you're like, how does motivation have to do with standards? Well, let me explain. If we define motivation as the equal opposite of deprivation, meaning if you are, you know, if you have not eaten in a while, you have great motivation to eat, you are hungry. If you haven't slept in a while, you have great motivation to sleep. And so you will, you know, be more likely to go to sleep.

4:03The issue with motivation is that you cannot measure an action until it is taken. So you don't know how motivated someone is until after they take action. And so I think the reason that standards are so important and so amorphous for entrepreneurship is that they are the thing, they are the line in the sand that separates you from where you want to go. And the further you are from your standard, the greater the deprivation. And the greater that deprivation, the higher the motivation to fix it. The reason I think standards are so important is because they actually are the seed, they're the catalyst for the actions that we have to take.

4:37And so I have this theory on business in general, which is that within any team, the person, the individual who has the highest standard should be the one who makes the decisions. And so if there's ever a day where there's someone at acquisition.com who has a higher standard of excellence for this business than Layla and I have, then that person should run it and not us. And so I think it's a wonderful litmus test to also identify like up and coming leaders in the business. You look at a department, you say, who here in this department has the highest standard? Who here raises the bar? And who here says we are deficient compared to this ideal?

5:10I think the reason that I have gotten more value in terms of changes in my life, like I can almost mark the huge material changes in, you know, Leila and I's income through interactions that we have oftentimes with people ahead of us or ahead of us within a function, right? And so, I mean, when Leila and I wanted to get on YouTube, we went to this little meetup with these, you know, YouTubers that I think the smallest person there had like 20 million, you know, subscribers. But the thing is, is that they reset our standards for how much more work we could be doing on the YouTube side. And I think we had a lot of takeaways from that.

5:50And I think our YouTube performance tremendously increased as a result of that. Not even from any of the tactics, but simply from an understanding of how much more work was required. And it's very difficult to translate that via a podcast or a blog article or something like that. But seeing it in person in the flesh, and I'll tell one little story, and I know Layla's going to jump on this. But we had a team that came to the building and we talked to some of the teammates in this particular company. And immediately afterwards, Layla and I both met and we're like, that is a higher standard than we have in this particular field.

6:25and it created tremendous change in terms of our thinking process around who, what, how, for how are we going to execute to now resolve this much larger discrepancy between where we were or even the discrepancy between our ideal and what supposedly or what at least looked like their ideal. And so they created more motivation by showing us what was possible. And I think that's actually the biggest gift of like being in the room with people who make significantly more than you, more than any tactic will ever give you. I agree. I also do think that like some people use it as an excuse, which is like, at least I hear this all the time.

7:00They're like, well, I can't get in a room with you. I can't get in a room. It's like, okay, well, look at the internet. You and I send each other snippets from Elon Musk, from, you know, Steve Jobs, from Jeff Bezos all the time. And we don't need to sit in a room with them. We can just say, you know what? I'm just going to take the fact that they're that much more ahead of me that I'm going to apply that as truth and I'm going to see how it goes. We don't have to necessarily, it is easier to be in the room with the person, but you can see something they say, you can read something in an interview, or you can watch a video on YouTube and you can raise your standards right then.

7:32You know what I actually think it is, is that people don't believe it until they see it often. When you have insurmountable proof, like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or somebody like that, then it makes it easier. And we also just know that there's just no effing way that they got there by having the same standards as other people. And so it's easier for us to do that. I actually want to read an email that we got from somebody who spent some time with Alex the other day. Because I think this demonstrates, you know, people hear us talk all the time about working hard and putting in the hours and this and that.

7:58And I think until you work in acquisition.com and you see that we are here before you every day and that we leave after pretty much most people every day, then you don't really know what it looks like. So this email, hey guys, as I'm heading home from the airport on my way home, I want to take a moment to express how much I personally appreciate the experience with acquisition.com team and everything you've been creating. Seeing Alex yesterday, delivering at the highest level nonstop for nine hours straight without literally leaving the room, has completely reset the bar for work ethic and dedication for me.

8:28I recall Layla's post on his birthday where she praised his work ethic and commitment, something few people get to witness. Now, witnessing myself and knowing that I only caught a brief glimpse, it really hit home on an entirely different level. I've attended quite a few business workshops and I know many are successful and many high-performing entrepreneurs as well, but nothing has even come close to Alex's delivery yesterday. I genuinely don't know if anyone else could sustain that level of focus and excellence. Thank you for all you do. And a special thanks for Alex for raising the standard and demonstrating what's truly possible, what one of zero looks like in real life.

9:01Man, I'll get all choked up hearing it. No, but it's one of these things where like, you know, there's, you know, a short last 30 seconds or some Instagram reel. And to be really clear, I'm not saying, because I think either of us is saying, hey, go sacrifice your life, you know, do something you don't want to do. I think that if you happen to be fortunate enough to have a big goal that propels you, then I think a lot of it is just basically ignoring everyone who tells you that there's something wrong with it. And I think that it's okay to behave differently than most people. Like I had my father called me today and he said, hey, don't forget to take some time off.

9:38And I was just like, why? And he said that right after of saying like, it's so cool what you've accomplish and all this stuff and blah, blah, blah. But it's like, they go together. And also, when I have a day off, and this isn't going to, I'm not going to go into work ethic stuff with this, but I'm just making this point is that like, we take rest when we need to rest. There's this idea that there's something wrong with not having a hobby, or there's something wrong with, you know, not taking vacations. And the thing is, if you want that, then do it. But you do not need to command other people to do it or say that there's something wrong with someone who doesn't.

10:12Actually, I would like to go in that direction for a moment because I actually think that the standard is low. And that's the issue is that the standard for what excellence looks like is low. And then people throw rocks at people like you and me who are actually trying to fucking make the world a better place and actually produce jobs and actually help people. And so I would like to ask everyone who's listening, the people that tell you that you're too obsessed, that you work too hard, that it's not normal, that it's not healthy. What have they produced for the world? Like for real, anybody that we know, we know people who really make this world a better place and they work their fucking ass off.

10:42And none of them have ever talked smack or been like, you guys are working too much. Like, don't forget to, like every single one of them's like, dude, keep crushing. Anyone who's below is the ones who have something to say. I made a tweet the other day, actually, that when I was thinking about this because it was really bugging me. What has become normal in the last few years is just unacceptable. Most people just try to distract themselves with useless activities until they die. Don't apologize for attempting to make something useful with your life. It's funny that you bring that up because I also had a tweet that I have written and rewritten multiple times and I haven't gotten it to hit the way I want.

11:17So maybe I'm gonna try and do this on this podcast live. If there were an immigrant who came here and was working three jobs, right? And basically put everything on the line in order to make his family successful and set them up. And he barely saw his kids. He barely saw anything just to help his family survive. everyone would be like man that's so great then if an entrepreneur who happens to let's play it out let's say that guy keeps working his three jobs then all of a sudden he does set his family up and he does you know his business does grow and he does make it work then what is that person supposed to now stop successful actions are they supposed to to do something entirely different as a result and then all of a sudden they go from being the underdog to the man and i always i always wondered about this.

12:00At what point do you become the man? And I say the man for those of you who are younger, it's a pejorative term for corporate, man in the sky, but that everyone's like, man, you're a big boss man now. When you become the man, where's that transition? And my opinion of that transition is when you do better than the person who's making the judgment. If we look at the behaviors, the immigrant who's trying to set their family up versus the entrepreneur who's trying to set the world up. The actions are the same. And so it's this whole fallacy of intention is that people want to somehow like say that there's something wrong with the intention behind something.

12:37And all you and I at least obsess over is we just, for those of you who don't know us that well, we completely disregard intention. It's irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. We only focus on behavior. Yeah. If you accidentally kill somebody, like, or you purposely kill them, as far as I'm concerned, you killed them. Now that has lots of tendrils attached to it. And I'm not going to get into that. But the reason on this is that we focus on behavior, we focus on the actions that people take and do these things propel us towards our goals. And I think that having standards to circle the wagon, having standards will create a larger deficit.

13:12And so the reason getting around people who are way ahead of you in a function or in general, resets the standard. And what's often happens is, and this is, I mean, this has happened multiple times in my life. When I see someone who's far ahead of me, and then I end up finally meeting them, I find out that they're not working twice as hard as me. I found out they're working 20 times as hard as I am. And that was like the example with the YouTube guys. When we met them, and they were like, oh, well, send me your brief. And I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, you know, all the pre-production for the videos that you make.

13:42And I was like, ah, you know, we kind of, you know, I have a couple bullets and he's like well yeah no i mean obviously like we spend an entire week like five guys in a room to figure out every single frame of what we're going to do and how it's going to transition and what first five seconds certainly in all the props and then we source it all and i was like wow well um it makes sense that your videos get 20 times more views than mine do it's funny you say that because it's like another one that i think about a lot because obviously i focus more on like the people culture stuff meetings people are like well i don't know why my meetings are so bad.

14:15I'm like, I spent today two and a half hours prepping one fucking meeting because I want to make sure that I have outlined everything so that if I pull 15 people into a room, it is worth the money. But does anybody else spend two and a half hours to prep one fucking meeting? Probably not. Same goes for planning for a company. People are like, how does the company grow so fast? I don't know. I've probably spent two months planning, two months planning what a year of growth is going to look like. Every weekend, every Saturday, every Sunday, every morning, going through every model, talking to every person on the team, talking to you, talking to all the executives, talking to the frontline, making sure that this plan is going to fucking work.

14:56And it's like when people are like, I don't know why my business isn't growing. I'm like, did you put two months into planning what the next year is going to look like? I doubt it. Well, I'm going to piggyback one that I'll shout you out on this. Layla is militant when it comes to, again, standards, but for people. So standards has lots of different functions that you can relate it to. but standards with regards to bringing people in. And so I'll give you a tactical example of this. You know, we were hired for a senior director of marketing at acquisition.com to take some stuff off my plate. When the candidate got on with Layla for her interview or for his interview with her, he said he was shocked that both you and I had watched the recordings of all the other interviews that he had had prior.

15:34And so at this point, I think he'd had three other interviews, full, you know, 30 or hour long interviews that had happened prior to that. You might be thinking, well, wow, what a waste of time. It's like, well, the thing is, is that if you listen to all of those, one, oftentimes you can just not have the interview that you were gonna have with them and just cancel it because you're like, no, I don't wanna deal with this guy or this gal. On the other hand, you can also create a significantly better experience for that candidate because they're not being re-asked the exact same questions yet again.

16:03Okay, so actually this morning I spent, again, two hours. I watched every interview of somebody who's coming into a very high level senior role in the company, who everyone said that they love, and I have the next interview with. And so my goal is I'm going to watch every interview, because guess who has higher standards than fucking anybody? Me. And so the reason really is actually it comes back to this video, which is there might be something that they say to someone else on my team. But if I have the highest standards, I'm going to catch that thing better than anybody else will. And so basically, what I come up with every candidate is what's the one thing that I'm not sure if it's up to standards.

16:37And so for this person, it's speed. I don't know if they're going to be fast enough. And so that's why I'm going to hammer home on the interview. I'm going to see. I'm going to test them on speed. But again, it's just like a matter of standards. And it's again, it's funny. People ask all the time. They're like, I don't understand why I hired the wrong person. Well, did you watch every interview? Did you listen to every single interview they had with your team? And did you take the time to distill five questions to review over an hour that you're going to deep dive into and like really understand who this person is?

17:03But that's how you uphold a strong team and the standards of it is you don't let the wrong people in. I think Layla and I right now, like there's a big theme, like internally, I mean, I'll say this, is that like right now we're definitely in a season of standards. We've just grown really fast. Yeah, which is great. The types of videos that Layla and I pass to each other, like the little reels are, I mean, she said the names earlier, like Jensen Huang from NVIDIA. We still look at lots of job stuff, some stuff from Altman, lots of stuff from Elon, Bezos. And more recently, I've had this like this this very short sentence in my mind that's kind of been like front and center which is fewer better people and the thing is is that like as as a company grows you inherently add headcount right but what I want to do is add IQ per capita I want the average IQ of the company to go up and if you know that you're hiring frontline roles it means that you have to really one the frontline roles in general have to get better and then the people who are coming at the top, even higher level than that.

18:03And companies dilute, I think Layla said it earlier, your culture dilutes, your standards dilute as it grows unless you are incredibly forceful and intentional about it. Partially because people hire people who are not as good as them because they feel safe in their roles. And that's a huge risk to a business. But fewer better people also require significantly less overhead in terms of management. And so if you think about the perfect company in terms of effectiveness as 100 % individual contributors that had zero management, that would be the perfect organization of human beings. Now, the difficulty would be aligning their actions and aligning goals and then aligning resources across departments.

18:42And that's why these lines of communication exist. But fundamentally, in a perfect world, and this is a hypothetical ideal that would never get achieved, you would have people who just work all the time and don't spend any of their time needing to communicate. Finding people who require less communication and less accountability and less repeating yourself and less having to explain down to a two-year-old what has to occur in order for their job to be successful or for them to be successful at their job makes such a big difference when you multiply by 100 or 200 or 500 across an organization. Yeah, and I would say this probably applies mostly to like knowledge workers in companies because there are some companies where I think that that's tough for somebody with a high level of intellect to want to keep doing.

19:22Well, look at Chick-fil-A's employees versus like McDonald's. A hundred percent. But they're not directors at average. No, for sure. I'm saying, but standard, relative standards. So we'll say shoulder to shoulder standards. Yeah. Have higher standards than your competitors. Yeah. Actually, easiest way to win. Yeah. If you have low standards for employees, then you have a lot of them. And if you have high standards for employees, then you don't need as many of them. Even further, what's the elephant in the room, at least when I think about this conversation, is that people rise to the standard that you set with your actions, not the standard that you request with your words.

19:54And the difficulty of everything that we talk about right now is that if somebody is listening to this podcast and then they go to their team and they say, I want you to be doing this on weekends. I want you to be mornings. I want you to be nights. I want you to be this. I want you to do this. Like, well, if you're not doing it, I can guarantee you that they're not going to do it either. Or they might do it once and then never again. Or they'll resent you. That doesn't create loyalty. You know, I talked about it with the team when I said, I said, our culture, competitive greatness, what does that mean when it comes to how we treat our office building?

20:22I said, listen, if I walk in and the coffee machine doesn't have water, that does not show competitive greatness. Refill it after you're done. If it's low on water and you walk away, I was like competitive greatness is being the type of person that you refill it before you walk away. And so if you don't do that, you're not upholding our standards here. It's a shopping cart test. It is. And it's funny because what happened was about five days after that, I was refilling the coffee machine and one of our teammates walked in and she was like, fuck. I was by myself. It was like, you know, six something here.

20:52It was like the end of an event, whatever. And that was when I was like, damn, she really means it. Another guy who's taping the event, he came over. Somebody had thrown a donut into the trash and it had like hit the trash sprinkles everywhere, right? I was there picking up little sprinkles. He walked in, he taped it. And he came to me, he was brand new. And he said, I just want you to know everything that you have said and everything I've ever heard you say just became validated in that moment. because I saw you picking up the fucking sprinkles from the floor around the trash. So it's like, if you guys are listening to this and you're thinking like, how do I raise the standards?

21:22Like, you must be the standard. It's like, you have to be almost an exaggeration of the standard. Everyone is going to be a dilution of that standard. If you want everyone to be a 10 on something, you have to be a hypothetical 21 out of 10. Like you, if you want everyone to behave a certain way, and I think one of the tough parts for entrepreneurs is that like, in order to embody that, yes, that means that your standard for yourself always has to be higher. No one has an issue with a boss who asks something of them that they clearly demonstrate in excess of the ask. Like just really think about it.

21:53Like, man, I can't get my team to show up on time. It's like, well, are you on time? Yeah. Hey, I can't get my team to follow up. Do you follow up? Hey, I can't get my team to be more logical. Are you logical? And how logical are you? So it's not just yes, no, are you? But to what extent? To what degree? Is it something? Is it wow worthy? Is they have their first week at the job, they tell their wife, they tell their, you know, they tell their spouse, they're like, dude, these guys are insane. Like these guys' work ethic is nuts. Like, man, their attention to detail is, I've never seen people with higher standards.

22:21The coolest thing about getting the office, the headquarters, has been seeing how people watching our, how we actually work in person has changed the work, the standards of the teams. I think that's the one advantage that we have of the in-person teammates that we have, because we're hybrid. We have some people who are fully remote. But I think that the people who really want to learn from us and that come into the office, get to see because they walk in at seven or eight or whatever. And they're like, they've been here at seven or eight. You know, and then they leave before we leave. You know, it's just like it's setting the standard for everybody else.