Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire

28:19I've seen it work out so many times that I have limited emotional affect when approaching them because I'm like, I know this is going to be better for you. Yes. I know this sucks right now, but you will not go homeless and you will not die. Right, right. You'll figure it out. You'll figure it out. You'll be okay. Yes. And we obviously, we do our best to try and make recommendations. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So the three big mindset shifts for you this year have been focus more on the main thing, not everything. Yeah. Find intelligent, hard-working people and really invest in that talent and be willing to risk losing or not working out also and the third thing is branding I'm betting big on brand really betting big more content higher quality content books things like that and all three of those things are aligned yeah what's the one big thing if I can continue to 10x the brand that's the focus what do I need for that I need the absolute best people and then how do I back that up with dollars and sense and time, the only resources I have.

29:14And so I'm putting all my resources into doubling down on that. That's cool, man. Um, if you could go back to yourself before you started making money, what would be the mindset shift that you would have needed to have to go from more lack or scarcity into abundance? Only think about the actions and not about anything else. What were you thinking about? Um, I mean, honestly, a lot of it was what other people would say. it's so weird because it's so foreign to me at this point but I remember that the most terrifying thing that I ever did was quit my job it was the most terrifying thing was the hardest thing I've ever done for sure bar none not even close the hardest thing I ever did was quit my job I belabored the decision for six months I called every friend I had I wasn't sure I would I remember just pacing in my in my tiny little condo back and forth just on these endless phone calls where I just loop in circles talk it'd be like I don't know but I mean but I really want to but I could fail but what if You know, like there's all this nonsense, right?

30:11And so the thing that ultimately allowed me to get over the hump was actually playing out the worst case scenario in exquisite detail. Like most of the reason that we're afraid to fail is because we're afraid of dying in an abstract reality. We think, oh, we catastrophize. Okay, I'll lose my job and then no one will like me and then I won't be able to get a job again and then I'll be homeless and then I'll die. Right? That's how we go, right? But when I thought through it, I was like, what would actually happen? So if I went there and I failed, what would I do? I was like, well, I'd apply to business school and I'd have this cool story.

30:45And they like entrepreneurs. They're people who try to do things. So this would be fine. This would be okay. And I have plenty of friends who would let me sleep on the couch if I had to. I could go back to mom and dad's house with my tail between my legs, which I felt that was honestly the most horrifying thing that I could imagine, going back home as a failure. yes um but the idea the one that got me out of it was i can always get the job back so like this is actually a significantly lower risk move than i'm perceiving it to be i just get it i can get the job back or i can get another job that's comparable right i have the experience and me doing all this stuff only makes me more valuable because i'll have a cooler story than somebody who just did four years of this job rather than two and then did you know two years of things on their own and so that was actually that was the one argument the secondary argument it was for me, I was young at the time.

31:33I was like, this is extremely hard to do. If you say, cause I used to always tell people like, yeah, and I'd like to own my own business someday. Like, it's almost like you like tag it on to like, what's your, what do you do now? And you're like, and I'd like to, and so I, I thought to myself, if it's this hard now, when I have no kids, I have no life, I have no stakes, it's going to be nearly impossible for me to do later. And so I was like, I have to do it now. And so I'm actually a very risk averse person, despite the fact that I am a quote entrepreneur now. I guess they're not quotes. I guess I am an entrepreneur.

32:04I think it's just because the influence of words. So like, everyone's like, ah, everyone's an entrepreneur. But those were the two strongest arguments that got me to take the plunge and make it that. What would you say then for those that don't have money right now is the frequency or the energy that money is attracted to? I don't know what that means. What would you think if money was trying to go somewhere? Money is out there. It's in the middle of the table. Sure, sure. What is money attracted to? What type of a person is money attracted to? I don't... So I define everything by actions because it's the only thing that's observable.

32:49So a person who takes action. Yeah. I mean, at the most basic level, yes. And then one level above that, I'd be like, money is exchanged for goods and services. and parties, when they make exchange, both parties are better off. The person who sells the goods and services believes they'll be better off if they had the money. And the person who buys the goods and services feels like they'd be better off if they buy the goods and services. And so it's a mutual exchange. Both people say thank you, which is why capitalism is wonderful. But the point is that you have to look at, and I like people starting out with service-based businesses because when you ask the question, does somebody need to have money?

33:24No, you shouldn't have time. If you don't have, you use the number, The first rule of entrepreneurship is you use what you have. First rule. If you don't have money, use your time. Yeah. And so that's because everyone focuses on resources rather than resourcefulness. And so every self-made billionaire and millionaire was in the exact same position as you because they were self-made. Which means that you have the same exact ingredients they had, which is nothing, but also nothing to lose. And that's what makes you the most dangerous player on the board. And that's the piece that I think anyone who starts out misses.

33:55you're the one if you lose it all you're still at zero you have unlimited shots on goal it's like life gives you a lottery ticket and you're like well what if i lose it's like well the lottery ticket's free and you can keep cashing it in until you win and so you might start a a car detailing business or you might start a lawn care business and the thing is is that everyone has this fallacy that the first thing they pick is going to be the last thing they pick they think that's going to be their business forever but i've had a lot of businesses over my career and you learn it each time. Like every business I've had, I've, I learned lessons from the ones before that, before I moved on.

34:26And it took me, it took me nine businesses before I actually had my like first real successful one, uh, with gym launch. Yeah. You were saying before we got started that your thoughts on manifestation, what are your thoughts on manifestation? I shy away from things that I can't define. And so I function 100 % in the observable reality. And when someone says, I have manifested this, I would say if you have a set of beliefs that you repeated on a regular basis that then changed your behavior, the behavior is what created this outcome, not what you repeat to yourself. And so as long as whatever you do translates into changing what you do in reality, then great.

35:14Whatever it takes for you to do there. But I just focus ruthlessly on that. Because how do you know someone's like, he's really motivated? You can't see if someone's motivated until after they've taken action. Which means, do I need to be motivated at all? I just need to do something. And that makes, for me, this has made business teaching people, training, learning so much easier. Because what happens is, if someone's good at something, a lot of times getting good at something and then teaching someone else to do that thing are two very different skills and so people who don't know how to teach or train then add a lot of energy and and mindset and all this stuff but it's like dude just do this just do this and so what happens is we have these terms so people like man i want to be more charismatic for example right well if i looked at someone and said be charismatic what do you do yeah you can't do anything with that.

36:06And so what happens is we have these, I call them bundled terms. And so it's these words that actually have a laundry list of behavior underneath of them. So be charismatic really might mean when you walk into a room, stand up straight. When you talk, talk louder. When you shake someone's hand, like grip them firmly, look in the eye, try and say their name as many times as possible. When someone's talking, you're doing it right now, nod your head. It shows that you're listening. And over time, if you do this laundry list and there's more, people will begin to describe you as charismatic. But if I said, be charismatic, it's useless.

36:38But if I said, do all of these things, then all of a sudden people would then say charisma has occurred. And so in training people to do things in the companies that we have, and also in trying to train myself to do stuff, because I try and learn all the time, I see the purpose of life as learning, as changing my behavior. How can, if someone has a skill that I want, I just, instead of looking at, and I don't even listen to what they say, because a lot of times they don't know why they're that way either. I just try to look at what did they do that was different than what I'm doing and try and compare their reality versus mine and say, oh, I need to do this.

37:11Ah, now it works. And all of a sudden people describe me in that way. And so trying to operationalize as many words as possible that are amorphous is how I've made sense of reality. How has your relationship with money changed then over the last few years since selling a company to then growing your companies? do you have a different relationship with it? Honestly, not really. I like to always know what I make per minute because that, so I'll say I'll rewind the clock in terms of the things that I have now, I think are a result of behaviors that I did in the past that I haven't changed. And it's just, I have more time under my belt.

37:49And so I think one of the big misconceptions of people who are starting out is that the amount of results you get in the beginning for correct behaviors are not indicative of how correct the behavior is. And so the first week you go to the gym, you're not really going to see anything. It doesn't mean that going to the gym is wrong. It just means that your results are going to come out of delay. And so for me, it's like I checked my bank account every single day for years until I had more money that didn't make sense anymore because the volatility of the things I was invested in made it irrelevant.

38:14But I call it having a pulse on the money. You need to know where it's going and where it's coming from. And when you have that pulse, all of a sudden you're like, I know what an expense that costs $500 means to my bank account. And I know what a thousand dollar check means to my bank account. And all of a sudden I started seeing my expenses as bundled time. So I remember the first time I had this realization. I used to work at a minimum wage job at a Smoothie King. I was a blender tender. So I made$6.75 an hour. And... Peanut butter mood. That's right. Let's go, man. And so what I remember, I remember my coworkers, it was like three or four people to a shift.

38:53they would go get lunch at Coasey which was next door was like a sandwich shop yeah and and I went with them one day and you know I bought a normal meal and I think it was you know 12 bucks something like that you know like dang that's two hours exactly and I was like wait I'm only working you know a five-hour shift and I'm using post-tax dollars and this is two and I was like if I do this every time I'm here I only get credit for three of the hours that I'm working and so immediately I was like, wait, I'm going to cut my work efficiency in half every time I go to eat lunch out while I'm here.

39:26And so I was like, oh, I have to change that. But then as soon as I realized that, you know, when I go to the mall on the weekend, because that's what you do when you're, you know, 15 or whatever. I would look at, you know, a new shirt from The Gap, which was cool back then. And I would look at it and it was like$30. And I was like, man, if someone, if my boss came to me at the beginning of the shift and said, hey, work a whole shift and I'll give you this T-shirt. I'd be like, no, I don't want to do that. And so in thinking about how much time it took me to pay for things, all of a sudden, a lot of stuff wasn't worth it.

39:55And so it shifted. So from my relationship with money is more like what did it change about how I spent and bought? Sorry, how I spent and how I acted to make more. And so I've always been a saver in terms of I always live below my means. I don't, like the first rule of money is spend less than you make. First rule of money. Like you don't need to listen to anything else. You don't need to do any investing. nothing else. The first rule of money is spend less than you make. The second rule of money is take what's left over and invest it in making more money. And I think the big piece, especially people who are starting out, miss out is that they expect that they're going to get rich as rich people get richer.

40:37And it's a different strategy. When you're starting out, you have to think about how you're going to make money while you're awake, not while you're asleep. The only reason that people who are really rich think about how to make money while they're asleep is because they've already maxed out their waking hours and they can't put more time into investments. And so they have to, by consequence, pick passive things to make money. But they already maxed out their active. Currently, you haven't maxed out your active. And the returns on active are significantly higher and lower risk than passive income opportunities.

41:10So for example, if I were in a, you know, it's about to be wintertime in most of the U.S., if there's snow in the area that you're at, you could probably buy a push snowblower for a couple, I don't know what the rate of snowblower is. Call it$1 ,000. And you could use a shovel in the beginning, and you might be able to do two, maybe three big driveways in a day. Okay. If you have a snowblower, you might be able to do 20. And if you have that, then you just 7X your earning capacity. And so it's a small, like what$1 ,000 stock is going to 7X your pay? Nothing. And so I think people wildly, wildly undervalue the active investments where you put a little bit of capital and a lot of time and how much that capital multiplies what you make with your time.

41:57And so that's obviously in the physical labor where you have a machine that helps you out. But even on knowledge-based work, one of the highest leverage things I did is I paid a guy who knew how to run Facebook ads. I didn't know how to run them. I had a gym. I knew okay because I'd like looked online and stuff, but I knew I was like I need to get better at this And so I went to I went to three different agency owners and they all pitched me their services and I said honestly I couldn't afford it And so I said what what would it take for you? And this is the question. What would it take? For you to teach me how to run ads and I was like, I'll pay you every hour He's like, I don't sell my time and I was like, it's america.

42:31Everybody sells Yeah, how much yeah exactly what would it take and he said seven hundred fifty dollars an hour Which to me was an unbelievable amount of money at the time And so I said, okay deal And I said, but the terms are, I have to have my hands on the computer, not you. Yeah. And you need to tell me what to do, and then I have to do it. And then if you change something, I need to understand the decision-making behind it. Why you did that. Exactly. And so it took me eight sessions with this guy. Ooh. Eight one-hour sessions. And it's cheaper than hiring him for two months. Totally. Oh, he asked for$5 ,000 a month.

43:03And I was like, oh my God, I can't afford that. But every time I would do it, and then I'd record it, and then I'd re-watch it a couple times. I would take notes and then I went on the next one I was like the best student ever right but by the by the sixth time I got it and by the eighth time I was like I don't need this guy anymore I get it and so that six thousand dollar investment made me millions of dollars in my life because I knew how to advertise and I didn't know how to advertise before I could get leads I could you know and I could I could call them close and bring in my gyms and then eventually I showed other gyms how to do the same thing that I did and so this is the let like leverage right how the biggest and best investment that you can make is in your own skill set because skills are the ultimate hedge against inflation.

43:46They're the hedge against currency changes. People are like, what's going to happen to the dollar? Doctors are going to get paid in seashells or Bitcoin or US dollars. It doesn't matter. If you have value to exchange, the world will exchange for it. Yes. And so that's the big thing that I think people who are starting out miss. What's the number one scale that people should be investing in to earn more? Promotion. You need to learn to advertise. So if you think about it in sequence, right? If you start a business, what are the contingencies? If no one knows you exist, no one can buy your stuff.

44:19And so you have to first let people know you exist. So it begins with advertising. Now, advertising doesn't mean you have to run paid ads. I say advertise. I define that as letting people know about your stuff. And so you can let people know one-on-one via outreach. You can DM. You can email. You can phone call. You can knock on doors. All that's one-on-one. You can make content. You can post on public platforms. You can stand on the sidewalk and shout. It's one to many, right? And then the third way you can do is you can run ads. The fourth and kind of like secret or more advanced ways that you can use those to then go get somebody who already has that audience that you want.

44:52So you get an affiliate to then prefer you business. And that's an amazing strategy. But in order to get in touch with those, you reach out one-on-one, you make content, or you run ads. So those are going to be the core things that you're going to be able to do. And so in the beginning, you have to do that to get the first interest. Now, I think where people make mistake is they then double down on that at that stage. Oh, this worked. I should do more, which is a logical thing to think. But long term, the product is going to be the thing that's going to allow you to scale really, really big. Now, don't get me wrong.

45:19You can make a few million dollars a year,$10 million a year, being a really good marketer, being a really good promoter. You get limited at a certain point because you burn through a marketplace because people understand the concept of word of mouth. They're like, yeah, you want to have word of mouth. But what they fail to realize is that negative word of mouth is significantly stronger and more viral. And so all of a sudden, when their advertising stops working or their cost to our customers doubles and triples, but the cost on the platform hasn't doubled or tripled, it means that you have an invisible hand that's suppressing your result, which is that somebody who would have bought heard that you're not good or heard that you're even mediocre and just decides not to.

45:56And we do this all the time. Yes. You're like, I was thinking about checking out that restaurant. It's like, I went. And that's it. It's done. Just like that. and you would have gone if that person hadn't said anything. I was going to go to that movie. How was it? I mean, it was okay. Done. Not going. That's it. And so people overest. Like, it's so hard to get positive word of mouth and it's so easy to get negative word of mouth. And that's what suppresses you long term. So in the beginning, you advertise. Then you maintain that level of advertising to continue to iterate the product because you need to get the people in.

46:22And this is the unfortunate part, but you bring people in knowing your product's not that good and you just do the best you can and you keep making it better and better and better until you get people to stick or get people to come back. And so if you have a membership business, it's obvious. You want people to not cancel. If you have a consumer business, like if you sell coffee, you sell Coca-Cola, whatever it is, it's how reoccurring is the revenue. How likely does that person who buys your coffee come back again to buy coffee? Whether it's a shop or it's a product, it doesn't matter. And so once you know that people are coming back, it means you fix the product sufficiently, that now you go back to the advertising and then you double down, you go crazy on it.

46:56If someone only has a few thousand dollars a year extra to spend on something, what's more important for them, to invest it in the stock market or real estate or to invest in themselves? You know where I'm going with this one. So my favorite ism that I like is don't invest in the S &P 500. It's invest in the S &ME 500 because you will get so much more on active income by investing the small amount you have into increasing your earning capacity than you ever would. Like, just think about the dollars here. So let's say that you had$1 ,000, all right, saved up. if you invest in Apple, whatever, or you'll have a 20 % gain this year, a 30 % gain this year.

47:37Okay, great. So now you have$1 ,300. But$1 ,000 can teach you a new lesson or a new skill that can take your earning capacity because if you only have$1 ,000 saved up, you either make very little money or you're not following the first rule, which is you got to spend way less than you make. And so if you're on the I don't make a lot of money part, by the way, you can still definitely save more. But if you're on the, I don't make a lot of money part, then doubling your earning capacity would, by the end of the year, you might have$30 ,000 saved up rather than one or$1 ,300 in the alternative scenario.

48:11It's not even close. It's an order of magnitude. It's not even close. But everyone's afraid of work and everyone wants to get rich quick, which is why lotteries continue to make money. And so if you can just get out of that basic fallacy that you're somehow going to get lucky, I would rather get rich for sure. and be willing to, like, that's for me. Like, success insurance is extending the time horizon and being willing to learn skills along the way. That's success insurance. Because play out the other scenario. If you actually do hit the lottery, you also lose it because you don't have the skills to keep it.

48:40It's true. So the other path is pure fallacious thinking. It's false. It's a false dream. It's never going to result in wealth. If you get rich quick, you get poor even faster. We've already seen it. Say that again. If you get rich quick, you get poor even faster. Why? because you don't, it's, so my favorite magic card, hold on, I'm going to bring it back. My favorite magic card was this card called Burning Wish in Magic the Gathering. And the sub, the flavor text on the card said, she wished for a weapon, but not the skill to wield it. And I always love that text because I thought about that as, as business, as money.

49:14It's like, we wish for money, but not the skill to wield it because money is just a potential for exchange. And so if you don't know how to make it, then everything you have is just a nut that's going to go down because you also don't know how to multiply it if you got lucky because anybody who wants to get rich quick only is relying on luck you're relying on chance you're gambling you're not investing and so if you want to play the game and the thing and unfortunately the the the tweets the the instagram posts the whatever we see someone screenshot when they get go from a ten thousand dollars to 1.5 million you just don't see the other hundred people or a thousand people who put ten thousand and it went to a dollar.

49:49And so the idea is I want to get rich for sure. And the surefire way to get rich. And the reason all these billionaires get up there and they say, hey, just invest in skills. And it's like, sure. It's because that's the only thing that protects you. And I come from a country, or my father comes from a country rather, where my family, everything we have is taken from us by the government and so it's very real that you may have to start over halfway through your life at zero and if you do lose it all the only thing you have is what you can do with your brains and your hands and so my grandfather who I was very very close with used to always say you have two hands and one brain use them and my father came here with a thousand dollars and he built the life that he has now he's a doctor um but that that was only possible because you had skills.

50:42And even though everything was taken, land, houses, everything was taken, you can't take no divorce, no tax, no government can confiscate who you are and what you can do. And I see that as the ultimate freedom and independence of excellence and representation of excellence. If someone has skills, but they have a bad relationship with money, or they have money wounds or they have money beliefs that they live in fear around or whenever they receive money are they able to earn and make a lot with those money wounds yeah and so i will i will first off i don't know what money wounds are but i will if i can define it the way i would define what you're saying yes is so it's like bad money beliefs money wounds money trauma bad energy all of that i'd bucket into bad behaviors under specific conditions which is that you don't know how to behave with money.

51:33That's all it is. How do people learn how to behave with money? Well, you follow very simple rules. The first rule is that you spend less than you make, period. No questions asked. That's it. What if people have never had money and then all of a sudden, oh, I got$1 ,000 and they get excited or they get scared or they get worried. How do you manage the energy that money brings to you? So I think it's thinking in ratios. So it's like, I will save this percent. I will spend this percent. This percent goes to my house or my lodging. This goes to food. And you just have to stick with it. Now, I think that that process is good to go through.

52:07But I agree that when you don't make a lot of money, what feels like a lot of sacrifice results in very low payoff. And that's why I'm bullish on put as much as you can in increasing your earning capacity. Skills. Yeah. And the thing is, is you don't have to, you don't have to bot. So you really only have to have one skill. And then you can get every other skill you need in your life. and so when I got into the business game, the only real skill I developed quickly was sales and I didn't even have that skill but I had to for the gym so I learned how to sell and I got pretty good at it and so I would go to these networking things, I would meet other business owners and I felt like I was a collector of fine skills.

52:47I would find people and I'd be like, hey, how do you get customers and somebody would be like, oh, I'm really good at Google PPC and I'd be like, oh, I don't know how to do that. That sounds interesting and so what I would do is I'd go and say, hey, what's your sales process look like? And they'd be like, oh, you know, it's okay. And I'd be like, hey, do you mind if I just like, I'm pretty good at it and I can walk you through what we do because I might help you out. And so then this is the key part. If they said yes, which plenty of people take free work, I would then treat it as though they had paid me for like a$10 ,000 like consulting gig.

53:17I would do tons of research. I would talk to their team. I would re-script what they had. And then I would train their team on it. I would tell them how to manage it. and this is when you know you did it right. I would present it to them as though I was like making a presentation and they'd be like, dude, this is too much, man. Like, whoa. And then the magic thing comes out. They say, what can I do for you? And I'd be like, it's funny you ask. Can you show me your PPC stuff? And the thing is, is that they would give me less than I gave them, but it was more than I had. And so it was a net positive game.

53:48And so you only need to develop one skill and then you can barter for everything else. Yeah. So like in the networking groups that I joined, I got voted the best, you know, the member of the year in the first year they ever had it. When I was in my fraternity back in the day, I became voted president. Like I always try, like when I was in high school, I was editor in chief of the literary magazine and vice editor of the newspaper. Like I always tried to like, what can I, how can I trade what I know? How can I just keep trading up? And that's fundamentally what I've done my whole life is just, just trade up.

54:19and the risk here is that let's say you do all this work and the guy says thanks and then just gets off the call. Well, there's two possible scenarios. One is you're not as good as you think you are or they don't function with reciprocity and that's okay because again, volatility only appears volatile with low volume. Yeah, you got to do it a lot of times. If you do it 100 people, you'll get what you want and if there's three guys who know PPC, You give to all three and maybe one of them helps you out. Absolutely. But you're still better off than you were before. And so this is how I leapfrogged in my earning capacity.

54:56Really? Oh, 100%. And then for the people I couldn't, I would do a favor and ask to pay them. You know what I mean? I would do whatever I could. And I would encourage people to, I spend so much money for one-on-one time. And I also think there's something very powerful about being in person. Not Zoom. Yeah. I think there's something, I think that you can observe far more behaviors in person. There's so many things that are lost on Zoom. What's the most you spent on one-on-one time? I spent$350 ,000 for an hour. An hour? Yeah. With who? Guy was worth$7 billion. What was the biggest lesson he taught you in that one hour?

55:34He said protect your reputation with your life. Did you need to spend$350 ,000 for that? I think that there's something powerful about knowing that someone who is much further ahead says it to you Mm-hmm, and it's not that that advice is something you haven't heard before but it's the advice that you needed to hear Mm-hmm and that was what I needed to hear Wow protect your reputation with your life What does that look like and how does one do that? When anyone can speak about them negatively online and say what they want and make stuff up or You can only control what you do. And so the Stoke approach to this is that you know the truth.

56:16And, you know, there's the whole like, you know, bad news, lies get out of, get around the world before, you know, the truth gets out of bed. But I see lies a lot. Like, so Warren Buffett says this about the stock market. He says in the short term, it's a popularity contest. In the long term, it's a weighing system. And I see reputation the same way, which is in the short term, somebody could make some viral thing about you or they make you they make some piece of content some hit piece whatever it is but if you do write by the values that you have on a long enough time horizon you touch enough people the surface area of your reputation compounds because it's not just that you do business with one person but as soon as because if you do grow in your reputation then more people will ask about you to the people who have met you and then they will give you they will give their opinion just kind of like the movie before or the or the the restaurant yeah exactly And so if every person who has done business with you is like, he's tough with air or like, he's very ethical or like, you know what?

57:10I would trust him with money. You know what I mean? If you have that core set of beliefs and you behave consistent with that, those bundled terms, I want people to think these things about me. What are the behaviors I have to do in order to get them to think that? I'll give you a story about this. So when I was in college, I had a bad reputation with women in my freshman year. I went from high school where it was small, you know, small pond and I kind of ruined my reputation there. And so I went to like a new area where like no one knew me. And I was like, oh, this is like it's like virgin land.

57:41Right. Not with the pun intended. But I went to college and I very quickly got the same reputation in weeks. Yeah. Wow. And so I went home depressed and I went to my dad and I was like, man, I was like, how do I get all these people to stop saying that I'm, you know, a man whore or whatever. and like that I'm just like this guy who just goes around and sleeps with girls uh because it's preventing me from sleeping with um and he said and I had all these ideas of like maybe I maybe I could do this or I could like I had all these like strategies and he said have you considered not acting like a whore not sleeping with women yeah and uh and I was like no no it can't be that and so but it's like as a kid like you you know for the parents they are listening right I dismissed it immediately but you know on the on the flight back and in thinking when i'm you know sitting there alone in my dorm i was like maybe i do need to just stop acting this way and so what ended up happening is i decided i was like i'm i'm i'm going to be something someone that i want to be proud of i want to be proud to associate me with me because i want a different caliber of girl and that caliber of girl is not going to go for this you know this guy who's always chatting up like I want a good quality girl um not just hop a good character right and it took basically two full semesters of me acting like a priest basically um and just like doing well in school studying hard just you know being a contributing member of society that all of a sudden like more like the the reputation started to change but like the new balanced reputation it took time it did yeah and so it's like there's this period of time that you have to go through and be willing because right now you are living through consequences of actions you took last year, five years ago.

59:27And so you have to be able to split it without getting the reward for it. And that's the hard part. And that's the part that no one's willing to go through. And the longer people know you for one set of characteristics, the longer it's going to take for them to unlearn that. This is a really good point. So the reason I think it's so hard for people back home, right? So for anybody who's ever left home and you go back and people treat you a certain way. They knew you for 20 years. Exactly. And what's interesting is imagine you went to high school with somebody in middle school. All right. So it's like they had eight years with you and they had every single day they had hours and hours of exposure.

1:00:00You go back and they have two days a year during the holidays. To see you. Well, it's like, okay, well, two days out of 10 ,000 were this way. Yeah, yeah. It's almost never going to outweigh it. I've given a lot of thought to this because I was like, why can't I change everyone's mind? Like it's like, I have changed so much. But the reality was that the exposure required to change their perception of me was greater than the time that I was willing to dedicate to it. You need to spend two or three years with them now to show up as you are. Not two days. Exactly. And then the trade-off is, is it worth it?

1:00:34No, it's not. I don't have many childhood friends anymore. Of course. And I'll make this point to anybody who's in that situation where you're like, man, I don't want to be like these people. I don't want to be like my friends that I have right now. is that you have to be willing to accept that you may lose those friends or you probably will lose those friends but you will gain many more with the caliber of person that you want to become and you'll get caliber of friends that match it but there is a transition period where you'll have neither it's tough man for about a decade i felt like i didn't have many friends i felt like all my childhood high school college friends they didn't want to hang out or when we hung out they didn't really understand me and they were kind of judging me and it felt like why are they always talking weird about me behind my back why am I not invited anymore to stuff it's kind of hurtful right totally but at the same time those I guess childhood friends that I maybe do have or I talked to once in a blue moon they've chosen to accept the person I've become and and appreciate who I still am not expect me to be who they once knew and I can respect them for that and not judge them on their journey and just accept them for being a friend yeah and I think well two parts.

1:01:41One is the people who hate it or the people who don't accept the new version of you, they downplay your success for being willing to take a risk that they were unwilling to take. Because your success makes them feel bad, whether they say it or not. It does, because humans are comparative creatures. We look at one another. I mean, we learn through modeling. We see what someone else does. And if they did something that we aren't willing to do and they have something that we don't have, we start not liking them because what does that mean about me? And so, the what does that mean about me it's much easier to say he's changed and he sucks now uh rather than saying i didn't and i suck so hard because the people who don't know how to say you've grown say you've changed and they say it like it's a bad thing and i think the eve the the simple response to that is and you have it and i think it's it's being willing to sit in that and be like, I'm okay with this.

1:02:34And I have lost almost every friend or rather I could say I have actively cut off every friend that I've had, you know, from the beginning. I have one friend that I still have from middle school, one friend, but basically no one else. And that one friend is because he is a, is a champion. Like he's a cheerleader. He has a different life, but he's just like, dude, go, he's not criticizing you. He's not judging you. He's like, you're amazing. Yeah. And you You keep him in his life, in your life. And he's also not a money guy. He's an F-Guy agent. And so he's exceptional at what he does. It's just not money related.

1:03:06So we have this perfect thing where neither of us, we have no competitive overlap. So I'm like, how many drug rings did you bust this month? He's like, dude, let me tell you, these Syrians, this whole gang I took down. And so I get to hear this whole thing. He's like, what deals have you done? Because we get to kind of live vicariously. But those relationships are rare. and if you find somebody who speaks well of you behind your back and talks to you to your face, those are the friends that are worth keeping. Amen. And if you can find somebody who can do both of those without flipping every conversation and making it about themselves, I think you have somebody who's worth keeping.

1:03:44But most people don't even meet one of those criteria, let alone all three. Yeah. Speaking of young men and ourselves when we were younger, What would you say are three brutal truths that young men need to hear in order to become more successful in life? You have to be willing to trade the things you love right now for the things you want. And you may not like the price of what you want, but you can't change the price. And so there's all this groveling that goes back and forth for younger men of like basically wishing it didn't cost this much time or cost as much failure or cost as much risk in order to get to where they want to go.

1:04:24And so they basically stomp their heels and then retreat inwards into their basement and video games and whatever else, rather than confronting their own inadequacy. Because the first thing you have to do is say, it's my fault. Everything that I have in my life is my fault. But if it's your fault, it's also under your control to change. Because you cannot change what you do not control. And so to me, it's taking full accountability. so that's number one um the the second thing is you if you want to change your behavior, change your conditions. and so one of the most powerful things that you can do is change who you surround yourself with and where you live and so if you have an environment of people around you who speak ill of you or like basically reinforce the wrong trains and the wrong actions there's a reason i left baltimore and there's a reason you left right yeah yeah as i went to where i thought i was like i want to get into fitness and so i was between miami and southern california those are i was like those are kind of the fitness capitals i'm going to go to one of those places because i want to do fitness and i want to be around the best and so baltimore is not the capital fitness and so me changing my environment allowed me basically a blank slate to to start behaving the way that i wanted without interference because a lot of people have interference in their surroundings and so i think it's a lot of times you have to well i think this leads to the third things.

1:05:56You change your environment. That's number two. The third is delete everything that is not getting you closer to your goals. And so I have used that. This razor has not changed in my life, which is my, probably the two most often asked questions that I have that I like mentally think. I probably think of 10 times, 20 times a day is number one, does this action, this person this decision increase or decrease the likelihood that I achieve my goals yes or no does it increase or decrease does this friend who always wants to go out does you playing fantasy football increase or decrease the likelihood that you hit your goals and that is just it's black and white it's pretty like you know it's pretty like you know now you can make the whole but shouldn't I have a I'm talking about winning if you want to talk about if you want to talk about you know fulfillment and all the joy and all that stuff.

1:06:53Like, I'm not the guy for that. Yeah, yeah. Because fulfillment is winning for you. For me. That's your hobby. Your hobby is winning. Where some people have hobbies for joy and fulfillment, you have hobbies which are to win. I like looking back and enjoy it because memories pay dividends in the future. And so suffering lasts only for a moment, but the memory of the achievement lasts forever. And for me, I love, like, looking back on what I've done only insofar as it excites me about what's to come. And so, um, the, so delete everything using that question. And the second question, which is my prop, it might be my favorite question in, it might be my favorite question in general, which is what would it take?

1:07:40And the reason I love that question is because it assumes success. So if you go up to some girl is way out of your league and you're like what would it take it assumes that she's going to go out with you or she's gonna say you need to be you need to make this much you need this you need this she's gonna give you the answers right and then do you want to pay that price exactly either you don't like the shoes or you don't like the price you gotta pay it if you want it yeah and and so what would it take and it's like hey if we have a deal that we're working on like what would it take now you can make the decision whether the price tag's worth it but at least you learn the price and what I have found in my life is that when I when I try to answer those questions like what would it take for me to be number one in this field?

1:08:18What would it take for us to lead this market? What would it take for me to be the best salesman in this company? The answers are not as crazy as you'd think. And so a lot of people spend most of their time answering questions not worth answering. It's playing games that aren't worth playing. It's like if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. And so no one asks the question before they play the game, is this game worth it? And so when you ask the question of like, what is the big goal and what would it take? Then you just get to solve for it. And to me, it's just great. If I know what it is, then either I have those resources or I have to use my resourcefulness to get them.

1:08:59But it's under my control. And these are how the big leaps in my life have occurred. When I wanted to get in the gym business, I was like, okay, what would make it the highest likelihood that I hit my goals? So what I did was I joined, I'd say$50 ,000, I was 23 years old. I lived on nothing. I saved$50 ,000, and I traveled to California because I was like, all the best fitness people are here. Then I joined a gym mastermind of all gym owners. I didn't own a gym. I joined a gym mastermind without owning a gym. And he was like, you sure? And I was like, yeah. He's like, why? I was like, well, I figure I'll learn from everyone else's mistakes before I start.

1:09:33Smart. Right. So the first thing I said, I was like, where do you guys open? One guy's like, oh, I have a terrible location. I wouldn't have done this. Another guy's like, oh, I might. And then the guys who had the best locations, like, what was it? Okay. well how many square feet should I have oh how should I organize the gym what equipment oh no should I buy or lease my company I thought I was gonna they're like oh don't buy those they're really expensive I thought I was using no one uses them oh yeah girls trip on those don't don't use them and so I was like uh-huh uh-huh I was just taking all these notes and so then I was like okay if I'm around the best gym owners and I'm learning from them then I can be at year 10 in my career on my first year because if I do what the best people did I will get what the best people got and so So I've always just focused on what did they do?

1:10:11Forget the energy. Forget the manifestation. Forget the vibrations and the frequency. Like, what did they do? I will do that. And not only will I do that, I'll do way more of it because I don't want to just pace them. I want to beat them. And so, like Kobe, it's like if he's working out, if the best guys are working out twice a day, he's like, well, I got to work out three times a day because they're already ahead of me. So if I'm working out twice a day and they're working out twice a day, then we're going to advance at the same pace. But I got to work out three times a day. If this guy's doing$100 an ad spend, I got to spend$500 a day.

1:10:41If this guy's doing, you know, one piece of content, I got to make 10 because he's better at it than I am. So I have to make 10 just to make up for my skill deficiency. And so, again, this volatility is a consequence of volume is that you're typically just not doing enough. And the people who outwork you, they out output you. And I'll give you a really simple example that will demonstrate this, that it's very real. So in a company, so I just took over operating one of the divisions on the media side. and the first you know day i came in i was like okay so you know what are we gonna do and so they're like this i was like okay what are we gonna get done by they're like you know next meeting which is like the next monday is a weekly meeting i was like okay how many hours does that take they were like i don't know probably like four hours to do this thing can we do it today exactly and then i was like okay well it's you know noon let's meet at four i'll give you an extra hour and show me what you did and then we met four hours later it was done and then i was okay, well, what can you do tonight so that we can do tomorrow morning?

1:11:36And he said this thing. So we just moved the buck along. And in three days, we did three months of work. Because if you think there was 12 actions that had happened, and you had a one week cadence, in a very real way, we moved forward at 20 times the pace. And so a lot of people think that like, it's not speed of activity, it's elimination of waste. There's all these other things that people are distracting, they're distracting themselves with. And so if you were, if you were that young man, it's you You have to recognize the trade-offs that you have to be willing to make. You have to change your environment so you can change your behavior.

1:12:05And you have to delete everything that's not the thing that you want most. And if you can't decide what you want most, then that's what you need to do first. But once you know what you want, then go get it. Yeah. Then what do you think are the most toxic traits that young men have today that are holding them back? So if we define traits as bundled terms, right, which means that there's just series of behaviors that bundle into one word. Convenient for communication, hard for training. is that, you know what, there's actually just a hundred small skills that you need. And I think demystifying this makes it easier.

1:12:40So it's like, I want to be confident. Well, confident is an approximation of how statistically likely something is to occur. So in statistics, you have a confidence metric. How likely is this thing to occur? And so if you want to be more confident, it means you need to do enough repetitions that you can make a statistical prediction that it's likely. If I go up on stage 100 times in a row, I do the same presentation, and I get up there like, how are you so confident? I'm like, because I've done this 100 times, and I know how this is going to go, because I've done it before. And so people want the confidence before the reps, but especially in confidence, the proof comes before the pudding.

1:13:17You have to do the reps before people are like, wow, because you can fake confidence, but not to yourself. You'll know. and as far as I'm concerned in life, I'm the only one I'm trying to impress. And so if I know I'm fake, I'm the one who in the middle of the night is looking up being like, I can't believe I'm so foolish. I would hate that. It's an empty life. It's also living for other people. And so if the toxic trait is people wanting the outcome without the repetition, right? Without the price. That's how I say that's number one. The, let me see, what are they saying? I'm trying to think of like a really specific thing.

1:13:55Well, the second one has everything to do, it's offshoot, but it's entitlement. It's fundamentally believing you deserve things and that the world must accommodate you. Why do so many people have that belief? I think parenting in the school system has made it so that you can have a safe room and you can have a cry corner. And if you think that one plus one is five, this is emotionally safe for you. I don't want you to feel it's like but you're gonna the thing is you can't change reality alright and so you can believe whatever you want but if your actions aren't aligned with how the world works you're not gonna get what you want and you're gonna be very upset for a long time until you figure out that the universe doesn't bend to your will like does it bend to your will though no but if you do a set sort of actions it starts to bend I play within I play within I play within the realm of reality but it bends to your will once you do the actions that it it wants you to create for you to get the results you want.

1:14:54I think that the universe is it. I don't anthropomorphize it. So I don't humanize it and say anything. Right. Um, but because of the actions you took over the last 20 years, you were able to create extraordinary results. Yes. Based on reality. And if I had done, if I had said, I want to become the best business guy and then sung songs every day, that's not going to be a line. Now I can manifest all I want, but that's not going to be the thing that makes me the best businessman. And so I don't get to set those rules, but I can play by them. And I think a lot of men specifically waste a tremendous amount of time stomping their feet, demanding that the world be different than it is.

1:15:28And so to me, that's a loser's mentality. And they then spend more time defending their excuses than defending their ambitions. And so if you put all of the effort into how do I make this thing into reality rather than how do I excuse my behavior up to this point? Like winners think about what they can make happen. And losers think about what happened to them. And it's one flip of a switch, which is I will judge myself on what I do and what I make happen, not on what occurred. And I think that divorcing those things is like, and this is a freeing thought for me. It's a little bit heady. So maybe your audience will like it.

1:16:09I'm in. the past doesn't exist except for in your mind it's like it's gone it's gone we only have this moment and then this will be gone right and it's only exists in our memory and so i have this this mental idea where what if i woke up one day i got hit with a shovel and i all these things i forgot about them what does it change and so a lot of people are like i need to process my trauma i'm gonna get into this because i think it's i think there's there's somebody who's listening to this so this could change their life. I define trauma as a permanent change in behavior from an aversive experience, from a bad thing that happened.

1:16:48Now, does that mean that trauma is inherently good or bad? To me, the answer is no. If I'm a child and I touch a stove and it burns me, that's traumatic. If I never touch a hot stove again, it permanently changed my behavior from a negative experience. Is me not touching hot stoves a bad thing? No. It's just a manner of learning. And so, if you have PTSD, you had a traumatic experience, which is fundamentally rapid learning. That's what trauma is. You learn, you have an accelerated rate of learning. Bombs go off, loud noises, your friend dies in front of you. And then a car honks really loud and you're in, basically you take the same condition and then you repeat the same behavior because you learned it, which might be ducked down or whatever it is.

1:17:25Right. And so the, this idea that people espouse that trauma is, is stored in our body. It's in our, it's in our banks. It's in our DNA now. I'm like, where, where is this, where is this compartment in our physical biology? No, you learned a different way to behave under circumstances. And so we just need to behave differently. I had a young guy who got on my, who was on my, uh, uh, team in one of a, one of the portfolio companies that I wanted to do sales manager. And he said, you know, I have, um, I have some demons that I need to like, you know slay and I was like what does that even mean he's like you know I just I tend to I tend to like self-sabotage sometimes and I just said you don't know how to behave period in certain conditions you don't know how to act great so we'll expose you to those conditions and then we'll teach you how to act the right way that's it that's all it is that's it exposure therapy yes and that's how you change behavior same condition your behavior that's learning And so I bring this up because I think so many people are chained by the idea of trauma rather than thinking, okay, this thing occurred.

1:18:31I learned a behavior that is aversive to my goals, makes it less likely to achieve my goals. So, and here's the key point. This is the thing that you ask yourself. What can I do instead? And so, for example, if you give feedback to someone, the reason no one can, or very few people are good at giving feedback is that oftentimes they insult rather than criticize. So if you say you suck at that or you're a dick, right, that's insulting, but it doesn't tell someone what to do instead. And so criticism is the difference between desired and actual. Now, that can be very non-emotional. You can say, hey, you said you were going to show up every day and you've been late.

1:19:05Great. Okay, so desired, actual. Now, if I said, and because of that, you're lazy, that's an insult. Me saying this is reality is just looking at what we can observe. And the reason I come back to this over and over again is like, what can I observe? Is because these are the only things that affect the world. is what you do. And so in trying to, quote, conquer trauma, like I could say, like I can create a narrative around whatever. So it's like if you were to say, hey, Alex, what do you think happened in your childhood that made you, you know, driven or whatever, right? I could make up something, but no one knows.

1:19:36I can't run a split test on my life. I know that I do these things and I've been rewarded in the past for doing so I repeat them. That's about the only thing I could probably say. But if I said I treated women that way because I had a broken relationship with my mother okay and all you need to change the actions it doesn't right it's like so it's all all we all it is is it acts as a defense for maintaining behavior that we know doesn't help us hit our goals and so every ounce of effort that goes in defending trauma or a negative a negative behavior from a negative experience is waste and so using that hit head in the shovel, like got hit, you have amnesia, you don't remember that that thing happened.

1:20:20Great. But you can do that today. And you can just say, okay, under the next time this happens, when my husband comes home drunk again, what can I change about my behavior? Now it might be leave. It might be telling him, hey, don't do this or I'll leave. That's a consequence, not a threat. It's a consequence. And so this, this has massively simplified my life. And I world more clearly than everyone else. Why? Because they've been able to predict what's going to happen better. And so my only goal is to be able to see more clearly how reality works. And I, my, my, I posit or my hypothesis is that the more clearly I understand how things work, the better I will be able to execute within that realm and predict what's going to happen.

1:21:10You make better decisions. Yeah. That's it. And then you get the results you want. More likely get those results you want. And that's what I would define as good decision making. A high likelihood of getting the thing that you want. Speaking about good decision making, you've talked about this a lot, the Solomon Paradise, where you have conversation with your 85-year-old self. Here's a question for you. We're getting close to the end here. How often do you have this conversation with your 85-year-old self? Whenever I have a big decision. Okay. And so it's not... How many times in the last year would you say?

1:21:40Five? Yeah, that's actually about it. Probably about five. That's probably what I said.

1:21:47let's say you're the next time you talk to your 85 year old self you ask him hey I want to make this decision and he gives you the advice that you need to hear subjectively outside of yourself and saying I'll just do this this this and boom it's done when you become 85 yeah and you win at everything everything that you do and you touch you win at you you know you accomplish way more then you fail all these things happen what do you think will be the biggest price you pay that you'll look back on and say i wish i would have told you to do something else we won a ton we wanted everything everything we wanted we won yeah but there was a price we paid somewhere that maybe at 85 yeah i wish you would have taken a different choice and and not looked at winning but looked at doing something differently is there anything that your 85 year old self would tell you what that could be?

1:22:41I think about this a lot and I think that most people have deathbed regrets because it's easy to make them on your deathbed. Yeah. And so basically we wish we could have lived six lives and so the concept of regret basically is like I wish I could have had it's I wish I could have had my cake and eaten it in Tim right I wish I could have lived the life as a musician and as the perfect husband and as the best businessman and as a professional health whatever. And I think it skews the idea of trade-offs, which is what life is more realistically about, which is that you make trades given the information you had.

1:23:25And for me to wish for a different outcome would mean that I would wish for a different decision-making algorithm, which would then massively change my life in general because saying oh I wish I had spent more time with my you know wife or whatever if that meant it would have caught that people say I wish I would have done this but they don't accept the cost of that would you actually because the thing is is that if you play all that all the way the other side they might say I wish I would have done this right so I see this as fundamentally we want to have everything and we can't and for me and that's okay what's the biggest um regret that most billionaires have that you've talked to um i don't talk about to them about regrets i talk about i talk about business with that to be like really real like like the real answer is if i have an hour with a billionaire i'm talking about money stuff sure um that's that's that's about it i mean when if i think about my younger self right um i'll play this out for you so let's say today i'm not 85 but i'm in a very different time in my life than i was when i was 23 when i started 22 when i started my first gym um i know what that young man was going through and i know how hard he worked and how hard he wanted it and if i were to look back at that young man and tell him what to do differently if i were to go back i would look at him and I would smile and I would say nothing.

1:24:56Why? Because I love the life I have and I wouldn't want to change anything. Right now you do. Yeah. You'd be like, whatever you're doing, whatever you're going to do, do it. I wouldn't want to mess with it. Yeah. Exactly. So like I've already played, if a time machine ever exists and an old version of me comes back and he says nothing and smiles, I'd be like, all right, all right, keep going. Right. Exactly. And so I think the regrets only happen if you, if you don't, if you dislike the present, like that is where regret comes from. there's some part of the present in this moment yeah right but I spend all of my time doing the thing that I enjoy most and I have to to them to the the criticism of the vast majority of people in my life past present and probably future like we were talking the very beginning like I worked the first hundred days of this year I didn't take a day off and I've probably taken 11 days off since you know since the halfway point or whatever of the year and I went on a vacation that was a two-day vacation and I left one day in.

1:25:47I got to this beautiful resort, very expensive, you know, crazy, you know, 22 villas. That's all it is, super high-end, whatever. There's like a three-to-one person who works there to you ratio. Like, it's crazy. And I remember we had this beautiful view of this mountain, you know, and there's this lawn chair. I'm sitting on, you know, fancy lawn chair, but I'm sitting there and I look out and I say to myself, this is beautiful and I don't give a I don't care. And the thing is that there's this expectation of myself that I should care. Like I should take a vacation. But I think about like how recent is the five-day work week?

1:26:28It's a 50, 60-year-old concept. It's not something that happened for hundreds of years, for thousands of years for humans. This is a new thing. People used to work every day. Yeah. It's just life. That's what they call it. You had to get up and work on the farm and take care of everything. Your name was literally what you did. Carpenter, butler, tailor. Like all of these were names. because what he's like, oh, John the Taylor, John the Butler, John, like, and then eventually they just became names that we have now. The Smith, like it's the same thing. And so I, I spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to remove every should from my life.

1:26:59Why should I go on vacation? Why should I go home for the holidays? Why should I call my mom once a week? Right now, if some people may disagree with me and that's fine, live your life differently. That's okay. Like do your thing. I guess if you're unhealthy or you're exhausted or you're drained, you'll take the time to sleep and recover. You're not going to burn yourself out every day. No. And so I think about output in terms of net output over a long period of time. So if I said, okay, you have to work as hard as you can for 24 hours. And of course you take every stim in the world and you don't sleep because you only have 24 hours.

1:27:28But if I say do the most work you can in a month, then it doesn't really make sense to do that. Right. Because you really just want to maximize your effective time. And so that also means that you're going to have periods of rest. And maybe it isn't working, you know, 18 hours every day. Maybe you're good on 14 hours a day or maybe you're good on 12. That's going to be dependent on you. but I also think that your ability to work itself improves. And so like in the fitness world, there's something called work capacity, which is basically your ability to recover. But I think there's work capacity and work as well.

1:27:52Like my ability to do work. So like I have, like, you know, if you speak on stage, right? And you do these, you know this. So people are, if I were to say, hey, I'm going to go do a hundred of these in a quarter, people might be like, that's insane. You did a hundred speaking events, right? But if I were to say, I'm a university professor and I do eight of those a day because I have lecture halls that I give presentations to, why is this different? It's the only difference for people to say that it should be different. You should be tired. You shouldn't travel that much. You should feel exhausted, whatever.

1:28:21And I'm like, why? And is there another alternative reality that I can ask, like the thousand years ago or the teacher, that would make the current struggle that I have just par for course? And if I can do that, then why don't I do it now? And so if my priorities change, I'll change my behavior. If tomorrow I wake up and I say, you know what? I have enough money and my achievement goals no longer matter to me, then fine. But I believe that we're a whisper in the wind anyways. And so I think we just, I think life is hard, then you die. And it's just what type of hard you want. This has already been, you know, talked to tears, but like in the business context, like growth is stressful.

1:29:04Stagnation is stressful. Decline is stressful. Disease is stressful. Yeah. Life is stressful. And so to wish that life weren't stressful is to wish to not be alive. Like stress is just an indication that you are alive. Yes. That you exist. Congratulations. So that would actually be a positive thing. Again, all of these are just shoulds that people tell us. And so I just, I really push back on that a lot and try and keep my space and say like, I'm going to do the things that I think increase the likelihood that I get what I'm going to do. Yeah. And if someone has a problem with that, then they can not be in my life.

1:29:39And that's okay because there's 8 billion other people. And I'm sure there's one that's fine with it. I'm glad you're in my life. I appreciate you. You've got two best-selling books that have sold over a million copies each, 100 million offers, 100 million leads. We'll link those both up. You've got another book that you have coming out here in the future. We'll announce that when you're allowed to announce it. you've got a free$100 million scaling course, which I think is pretty cool. Where can people go to get that? Just acquisition.com forward slash training. We just released it. I spent so many hours on this.

1:30:14Wow. I vetted it with three other billionaires and I walked through each of the stages and they were like, dude, I can't, like this is so accurate. Wow. And so basically break down every stage of business across all functions, going from zero to 100 million plus. So what does sales look like? What does marketing look like? What does customer service look like? What does product look like? What does IT look like? What does HR look like? What does recruiting look like? What does finance look like? Across zero, which would be you don't even have a business yet. Next stage is you graduate by making your first dollar.

1:30:50Next stage, you get your first employee. And then you basically scale all the way up from there. And so I got all the way to 500 employees, which for most businesses will be over 100 million a year. I scaled it by headcount because headcount is more similar in terms of structure of business rather than revenue. Like a software company can have 20 guys and do 100 million a year. And then a restaurant has 20 and does a million. But the structure of the organization is more similar by headcount. And so basically walk through each of these as functions. That's cool. What must occur to move to the next level.

1:31:18And so basically you can take the roadmap assessment. It'll tell you where to go. It's all free. and it will give you a personalized plan of like, this is what you need to do your sales at this point. This is what you need to do advertising at this point. And then there's videos that go with it if you're more of a video learner. Wow, so that's acquisition.com for that? Yeah, yeah, just training. I think roadmap, it's forward slash, backslash, whatever the slash is. Yeah, yeah. Roadmap, one word. I'm pretty sure that's what the URL is. Worst case, if you're going to acquisition.com, you'll find it.

1:31:47You'll be up there somewhere. Yeah, you'll find it. Or I will have failed as an advertiser if you get to the page. Exactly. how much how many pieces of content are you putting out a day on all social media now um 65 so if you want 65 pieces of content a day go follow you at alex hermosi on youtube instagram hermosi facebook twitter all the all the places um this has been powerful man i'm grateful for you for always sharing your heart i'm glad to see that like every year since two and a half years ago there's been this you know new insights that pop up for you as you keep expanding and growing and learning and failing and winning mostly uh you continue to learn more and share more here so we appreciate you here we're grateful for you we acknowledge you for uh constantly evolving you know it's like the last time i saw you you were 50 pounds heavier of just mass now you're leaning because you're focused on longevity which i think is really cool but either way man we're grateful for you here we appreciate you and we're excited to see what's next is there any final thing you want to share before we wrap up yeah never give up my man appreciate you appreciate you thanks for having me man it's great brother thank you so much for listening to this episode if you enjoyed this and if you found value make sure to share this with one friend just copy and paste the link and text a friend where you feel would be truly inspired by this episode as well.

1:33:10And also make sure to click the follow button on Apple or Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode, because we have a massive episode coming up next that I do not want you to miss. So make sure to follow this and be on the lookout for the next episode coming with some massive content and guests. Also, I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you are looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy.

1:33:55I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to the next episode on the School of Greatness. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

1:34:36Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.