The Cheat Code to WEALTH (Do THIS to Become a MILLIONAIRE in 2024!) | Alex Hormozi

22:12So you really hope to measure yourself on the outcome because you can get by on sometimes winning when you don't deserve it. And so 85 year old me never lets me win when I don't deserve it. Ooh, man, I would rather lose, but know I gave my all than win and be like, I just kind of just barely showed up today. Right. You wouldn't know. I won, but it's because I had an inferior opponent. It's not because I played my best. It sucks to lose. To know, man, I was freaking gave everything, every ounce of my energy and every trick and skill that I had to play this game and win it. I came short. It's going to sting.

22:49It's going to hurt. But at least I know I don't regret the effort that I put in. And I can be... Here's a great example. This still haunts me today. Yeah. 2002. it was October. So 21 years ago, is that right? October 2002. You're old. Yeah, almost 21 years ago. Is that what it was? Were you seven? 2002. We're playing, I'm playing football at Principia College, small school in Illinois. And we, it's my sophomore year there. My freshman year, I went to another school, so I transferred into this school. We're playing and it's a tight, tight game at home, back and forth. can't remember the final score but we lose by a touchdown i score three or four touchdowns i think i got an extra point i got a two-point conversion and i had 17 catches for 418 yards and we lost in the last couple plays we didn't score to to go and win and i remember being the last one out of the locker room i was in the shower i was so upset that we lost.

24:00And my coach comes in, it's kind of an awkward moment because I'm in the shower, you know, an exposed open shower, you know, I'm just like kind of pouting and like sad and depressed or whatever. And just like in there, everyone's gone. I'm sad we lost the game. And he kind of comes around the corner and says, Hey Louis, good game. Um, just to let you know, you broke a world record today. And I go, what? And I go, what do you mean? And he goes, yeah, you had 17 catches from 418 yards. No one's ever done that in the history of a football game. You're a new NCAA all record holder. And I go, I'm sad and depressed and angry because I didn't do more to help us win and we lost.

24:43And at the same time, I hear that I did something that no one in the history of the world had ever done in the football game. And it was tough because I felt like, man, we lost, but I gave it everything. But I was like, but could I still give it more? It's like, I don't know. But I feel like, you know, at least we didn't win and I played to a lower level and didn't create that result. At least I created something that for me, I can be proud of, even if we lost. It still haunts me that we lost. Interesting. But I know because we were behind, I had to give so much more than I was capable of. And if we were winning, I wouldn't have gotten that effort out of myself.

25:20Uh, so it's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. It is. Cause I would wonder if you had that same exact experience, but you didn't break the world record or no one ever told you whatever. Exactly. Right. If you would still, cause you said that you had the sting of the loss. And I wonder if Lewis today would feel that way because if you, cause you said like, I don't know if I could have given more, but I feel like on some levels, like at least for me, like sure we can get into the hypotheticals of like, you can always give more. Okay. course. Yeah. But there are certain times from like, I know I could sprint after the guy, even though I'm probably not going to get, you know.

25:55But I could give it the last 20 yards. Right. Exactly. And I think that this is where 85 year old me is the one that he is ruthless. And I love this David Goggins saying, I don't know if it's a saying of his, I heard it in one of his videos, but he said, there's no shortcuts for you, Goggins. And I just really love that. like he doesn't even look for them because he said you don't get those you don't get shortcuts there are no quarters to cut and that to me is like the embodiment of that of that 85 year old self because he knows if i could have spread it or not and so it's if i can appeal to that man's incredibly high standards which is why like commit to the journey is not the easier path i think it is the harder path because the standard is higher and when you really do that the winning does happen by default, but even saying that still makes winning the objective.

26:52Right? And you're just saying this is a different pathway of getting to winning, but winning still kind of matters. It does matter. I think it's a both. The journey matters and the outcomes matter. Because the outcomes also give credibility. They give more context, they give more experience, they give more wisdom to the teacher. Oh yeah. If you had no outcomes, but you said, look at all the efforts I put in though. But I put in 10 ,000 hours, but I haven't sold a company. I haven't built anything because it didn't work. You need a both end. Yeah. This is really interesting because on some, so I think from a, this is, I'm like really liking this.

27:29So from a, yeah, from a, from a fulfillment perspective, I believe that truly giving your all actually, not like try your best. That's just like, it's such a, it's repeated so many times that it's lost its meaning, but leaving everything on the field, having the tank on zero or empty when you walk off and truly knowing and looking at yourself and being like, I could not have done anything more. And it's tough to do that because we're naturally built to conserve effort. Right. And so you really have to push and overcome the internal mechanisms that you have that say, don't spread the last 20 yards.

28:04Could I put a little more? Yeah. Right. And that's why like when, when I walked on stage for the, for the presentation, I was like, I have done this before. I am prepared. I could not have prepared more for this in any way that would have been reasonable. And so to that degree, I can still define success that way. The outcomes will happen. And I think it's still that little thing where it's like, do this in order to, you have to cut off the in order to. I really genuinely believe that because I remember when I was in my retirement year, which is I still own the company, but we were in the process of selling.

28:36I had nothing to do. And it was an incredibly depressing year for me, which is why I've oriented my whole life around work because I really enjoy it. And I remember getting really angry about this and thinking like, it's not you work hard so that you can. It's like the hard work is the point. Like the point is how hard you learn to work. And that's the whole point where like, what has changed from last year to this year is like my understanding of my capacity to work continues to grow. And so I am able to work harder and therefore am more proud of the effort that I put into it because at least for me, I feel like I know in the mirror, did I give it my all?

29:18And I try to play out, this is a stoic frame, but if I had had a hurricane go through and we had not been able to launch because all the energy would have been gone, let's just say hypothetical. Fear virtual event. Yes. would i have been proud of the effort that i put in the answer would have been yes you simply let down and disappointed they didn't get to do the thing yes but i think that it would have been short-lived because i think that is like you you asked like early on what has been the biggest difference for you specifically and this has been whatever whatever you want to call it super secret secret whatever like this is what has been allowed me to keep my internal temperature separate from the external temperature to the greatest degree possible, is knowing that I'm using my internal thermometer to gauge my success, and I'm not perfect by any...

30:09Right, right, right. But the more I do that... To use your example, if I had worked my absolute hardest for 10 ,000 hours, and I knew that I gave it my all, and I had nothing to show for it, now I've actually had that instance, because five years ago I lost everything. Right, no external results to show for it. So I do know what that's like. I think at the end of your life, you'd still be more proud of the man that did his everything. Gave it his all. Left it all on the field, even if he didn't win. And I think that would be the man that I'd be more proud to be. I hear that. And I'm also like, if I reflect back, if we would have lost every football game, I think winning matters also.

30:50You've got to have some wins. You know what I mean? If I'd have lost every game for four years, I'd probably have been like, this is not fun. sure i'm becoming a better athlete and i'm competing against great people but just always losing i wonder be a challenge absolutely because you'd be like this is not fun it's fun to win it's not fun to lose consistently yeah i've you learn more in your losses probably you learn more from the bigger breakdowns and the challenges you face than always winning yeah the difficulties the challenges develop us having easy wins doesn't make us stronger and better.

31:24But I think having all losses may just say that, okay, maybe this is the wrong thing you're in. You should be in something else. Use this energy and effort and attitude towards a different thing and different purpose and different sport and different mission and different art after a period of time. It's always so much losing you. I mean, I could jam with this for a moment. I think the confidence comes in the effort and the journey, but it also, you've got to back with some external results, I think. Yeah. Or some type of credibility somewhere. Yeah. It depends if... So the credibility is if you're trying to be an expert and espouse and give advice.

32:03Mm-hmm. But credibility to yourself. If you have no external results, if you were broke today... Yeah. Yeah. No one would listen to me. That's okay. But how would you feel about you? After 10 years... Totally. 15 years, I'm busting it out. Dude, I did it for five years. I get it. Okay. But 10 years though. 50 years, right? I think, but that's where I'm saying like, what has changed about me that has made me better, stronger, faster is because I genuinely believe that the more I can divorce that win, even when you say like, you know, you got to win sometimes. It's like, even that small statement still makes it king.

32:40Yeah. Easy for you to say with a couple hundred million. All the wins. Yeah. Easy for you to say at this stage, like you said to others. But I think that the reason that I'm going to go from a hundred to a billion and 10 billion and beyond is because I do genuinely, like I am working harder now than I work to get here. And it's because I've learned a better way to work. And so this is me sharing that better way to work. Now, to be fair, maybe I have certain skills that if I don't work as hard, I can still win, but I would still know. And so I think that if you can, like, if the whole point of anyone who's listening to this is that you can open up another level of effort, I think that is the next level of effort because if I had thought the way I think about business now and work now, I would have been here faster.

33:28And that's me catering to the audience who wants to win. But I'm saying I would have become who I am faster. And I think that as a result, I would have evidence that would support that for the court of public opinion. But for the court of Alex, it's just, it's, I, I know what it's like to, for me to give it my all. And it's the absolute proudest I am of myself. And there's nothing anyone can do to take that from me. And that's when I feel bulletproof. And there's not many times I can do that. And so when I have realized how much work it takes to do something well, to gain the approval of my 85 year old self, I also realized hand in hand that there's only a few amount of things that I can do because I have to be dramatically more focused because the amount of work it takes to do something well is so much greater than I used to think that I can't do 20 things if I'm going to do it well.

34:17And so it goes back to like one of my favorite sayings, which is if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And the thing is, is that most people focus on the back half, but I think it's focusing on the first, like most things aren't worth doing. If it is worth doing, then it is worth doing well. Cut out the things that aren't worth doing. Right. So that you have all of the energy to actually give your all to something. And I would say this is that most things aren't that hard. If you really try, it's that most people don't know how to try hard. They just don't have, they don't have the skill to try hard.

34:49And so the, the number, I mean, you probably know the stat from the podcast world, right? Which is, it's 90 % of people only upload one podcast. Of the remaining 10%, 90 % of them don't make it past 20 uploads. So to be in the top 1 % of podcasters, you have to upload 20 podcasts. Right. It still may not be successful. Yeah. You still don't make it downloads, but you're doing a lot better than the other 90%, 99%. The price for excellence has never been so cheap. Yeah. It's showing up consistently. Everyone is so soft now that to win, you just have to not be made of glass and be willing to have someone tell you, I don't approve of your life.

35:40And you say, that's okay. Why do you think so many people are soft in our society today? Well, I think we've put a lot of guardrails up that prevent people from getting hurt. And I think that ends up resulting in people who don't know what getting hurt feels like and they feel like it's death, but it's not death. You know, I think that's just, I mean, at its absolute core, no one knows how to have hurt feelings. And I think people think their feelings matter a lot more now than they used to. Yeah. I don't think they matter that much. Why do you think people's feelings matter that much? Why should their feelings matter?

36:18why should my feelings matter? Like if I, if I hurt someone and I say, well, it makes me feel good. And why does that matter? It hurts somebody. So it's just looking at the actions. And that's, I mean, to be fair, I'm very extreme in that manner, but I think that if we can, for me, the more I can ignore my feelings and simply do the things that are required, the more I tend to see the results that I want. And one of my favorite internal sayings, like the things that you repeat yourself, I'm sure everybody has like a couple of things that like you say to you, um, whenever I have something that I'm like, God, I want it like the next rewrite of the book or, Hey man, we got to reshoot that whole thing because the mic was off or, you know, the worst man is, um, I have this, I have this refrain that's been trained faster and faster, which is, I will do what is required.

37:05It's not what I want. It's not what I feel like. It's, I will do what is required. I'm enjoyable. I'll do what is required. Yeah. And that's it. And so like, there's not, there's not a question. There's not a, if it's just, I will do what is required. And that has helped me a ton. Yeah. You try to learn from the pain or the challenge that occurred so it doesn't happen again, but you got to do what's required. I saw this, um, slip recently of this podcast called the all in podcast, which I saw the, I see these clips a lot online. I want to start actually listening to this whole show, but I think they go too long.

37:37Um, but they have a lot of great insights. It's like these four like venture capitalists and they're all billionaires and they all like are puppet masters in their own world. Right. And one of the clips was of a guy, I can't remember his name, but one of the guys who said he was spending a lot of time in Italy over the last month or a couple of months. And he was saying, you know, I really like spending time over here because my friends in Italy know how to relax. They know how to have great conversations. They know how to talk about life and art and magic and wonder and music and not just focus on more money.

38:14Cause this guy's a billionaire, multi-billionaire. And he was like, there's more to life than just making lots of more money when you already have a lot of money. What do you think about a point like that or a conversation like that where it's like, you know, live in Europe and take three months and relax and travel? And I think there's an overarching assumption, which is that life should be a certain way. And I think that I would, I would reject that notion. And so it's like, we should, cause implied in that statement, I think is we should be more like them. And whenever I see a should, I kind of don't really accept any should frames.

38:54It's like, why, why should we? Because you prefer that, which is fine. You could say, I prefer to live the same, which is go live that way. But to then say, everyone should live that way or you know then now you're casting your personal preference on everyone else and i reject that wholeheartedly so if you if you want to if you want to play video games all day and be the absolute best in the world at it and you are the best in the world at it and you get twitch sponsorships and you have all that stuff and you learn to eat because you're so good at it and you're so obsessed with it who am i to stop you from doing that you're gonna die and i'm gonna die and at the end of your life would you rather just go you know be a four minute factory that's not a disrespectful thing i'm saying more so that if you love doing what you were doing choose to not do what you love because you now are legitimate in the eyes of people who you don't care about.

39:40Like there was one rule for me is do you. Do you. Yeah. I want to ask you about this. Uh, this book launch just happened. And I know you did a vlog on this recently, which I want to dive in deeper, but can you give big context? Yeah. Why this book, why the launch style that you did, how many people showed up, how many people bought and upsells everything. And how did you get that result to happen? Not that we focus on results here, but the efforts, how did you get it all to come to fruition? So my first book,$100 million offers, was a book that answered one question, which is, what do I sell? And so now that has 17 ,000 five stars and - Incredible, man.

40:23It's a great book. Actually, it's still on Amazon charts, top 20 of all Amazon. And so is that one. So it's two of the 20. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Not that we're calculating results or success here. Yeah. Of course. Of course. And I didn't even sell it on Amazon. I sold it on Shopify. So all those sales didn't count. But anyways, this book, the purpose of this book was to, once someone knows what they're going to sell, they ask the next question, which is who do I sell it to? You need leads. Right. And so this book is about advertising. Now I split test the title four times to figure out what people like.

40:51I tried marketing versus advertising. I tried advertising versus leads. I tried leads versus promotion and leads won as the categorical leader for what to name the book. And so that's why I called it $100 million leads. But advertising in and of itself is the process of making known. If no one knows about your stuff, no one can buy it. And so - Set up more time. If no one knows about your stuff - Sorry, the first part, advertising what? Is the process of making known. Advertising is the process of making known, period. If no one knows about your stuff, no one buys it. And so what happens is most people have an offer and no one knows about it.

41:24And so you have to make it known. You have to advertise it. And so this book, so the first book all hinged on something called the value equation, which is people talk about, hey, provide value, provide value, but how do you mechanize that? How do you operationalize value? And so it was actually solving a problem that people want, increasing the likelihood that they think it's going to happen. In other words, decreasing the risk that when they buy, they're not going to get thing that they want, decreasing the time it takes them to get whatever the outcome is, and decreasing the effort and sacrifice that's associated with the work that they have to do in order to get the outcome.

41:53So there's the four variables. You decrease the last two, you increase the first two, and you have a more valuable thing, which we covered in a different video, so you can watch that one. With$100 million leads, I talk about the advertising cycle. And so there's eight pieces to this. So it has a little bit more pieces to it, but I think it's simpler to understand in some ways. So the first four is a core four. It's the only four ways any person can let other people know about their stuff, advertise. And so it's just a four box. There's one-on-one and one-to-many, and you've got people who know you, people who don't.

42:25So if you're letting people who know you one-on-one, you're doing warm outreach. You reach out to your friends and say, hey, come to my book event. If you're letting people know one-on-one who don't know you, that's cold outreach. That's reaching out to strangers. If you're letting people know one-to-many, two people who know you, that's posting content. And if you're letting people one of many know who don't know you, that's running ads. So there's the only four things that you can do to let other people know about your stuff. Now, the natural question is, are there other things that you can do?

42:51The answer is yes and no. No, in that you can't do anything else, but yes, there are other people who can let people know about your stuff. Referrals, yeah. Right. And so there's four, which I call the lead getters. So you've got customers who can send you referrals. Now, in order for them to send you referrals, they use the core four. They either reach out to friends, they post content, they do the same four things. So the only four ways a person could let other people know about stuff. The second is you've got employees, right? Like, so when I was making content for the book, I didn't actually make the content.

43:17My team made the content and then they posted it on my behalf. And so I got leverage on the amount of content I could put out because I had other people help me. From the paid ads, sorry, from the lead getter number three is agencies. So you can pay agencies to help you make content. You can pay agencies to help you run ads. And for me, for this book launch, I had agencies run the actual ads for the book because we're a holding company. We don't actually transact. So it made sense to contract that out. But my team made the ads, their team ran the ads, but it was still leverage. And then finally we had affiliates.

43:48So that's another business who refers you business. I'm just defining for the audience. Negative commission. Yeah. They get paid in money, free stuff or both. Right. And so we had 27 ,000 affiliates. 27 ,000? And we had 104 ,000 people attended from affiliates. We had 137 ,000 people. Holy cow. Wow. 137 ,000 people came in from paid ads. We had just probably just like 210 ,000 people came in from content. Organic. Yeah. And then the outreach, and then I would say that employees kind of factored into that piece, right? And so I used all eight methods in the book to advertise the book itself. So I could have just made a, I could have just emailed my list and just, you know, done a presentation or just released it.

44:29And I probably would have sold a lot of copies, but I wanted to use everything in the book to advertise the book, to demonstrate that everything proof that everything that I do here works and that they, it'll work for them too. If they just follow the steps in the book. And so I purposely followed the scripts that I have in the book for making ads. I followed the scripts that we had for making content throughout the whole thing so that people could look back at my ads. They could look back at the content that I made and be like, he followed this to a T and resulted in a world record breaking event.

44:57And so how much did spend on the ads to get the leads? 275. 275. Yeah. Which is not for anybody, that sounds like a lot of money, but for the context of how big of an event this is, it's nothing. Of course. And then how much did you pay out affiliates, which is another form of advertising? How much does that pay out, I guess? Zero. Zero. They got free stuff. How many people? 20 ,000? 27 ,000 affiliates. They didn't get any commissions? Correct. On nothing? Really? Why did they promote it then? What was the leverage or the value add for them? I think it was goodwill. And they also knew that the last book was good.

45:34And I'll give you the tactical piece of this is that most people require money to advertise to their audience because it's extracting goodwill to a degree. And so what I made, rather than saying, hey, the top 10 affiliates get Lamborghinis, which only benefits the affiliate, not their audience. I said, the top 10 affiliates, I'll do a live Q &A with your entire audience. and so it benefits the audience to have the person who's promoting it win and it doesn't extract any goodwill in fact it builds goodwill because he's like hey i've got this amazing event yeah this book i i know alex i've been following this stuff forever it'll help you out so go do this thing and if we're in the top 10 we'll also get you know time with alex and we can answer his you know answer questions and do this stuff so it can apply to us so like it's a win-win for everyone and so trying to find like in my opinion i talk about this in the book like the best way to use affiliates is to find a win-win-win, which is it wins for me, it wins for them, and it wins for their customers.

46:30And usually it's only two wins and one loss. And that's how most people do affiliates is why they have to pay an arm and a leg in order to get them. Now, a lot of times also they haven't built trust or goodwill with an audience before making an ask. So I'd spent two years doing hopefully nothing but providing value. And everyone expected the launch event itself to be probably a pitch of some sort. And I tried to sprinkle that in because I wanted to build up the anticipation and the tension for the event. But upon the event, so the official count was we had 542 ,000 people who registered for the event.

47:01We had 188 ,000 click to join live with us. And it was wild, right? How many book sales in that first day, do you know? We sold 100 ,000 in like 10 minutes or something. Yeah. That's insane, dude. It's incredible. And that was with no large bundles. Wow. So that wasn't like buy 100, get this. It was like one, two, or three, maybe. Three was the largest one that was incentivized. Wow. Yeah. So I just said, if you buy three, you get a hat. And the main reason that I did that was because the whole mission of acquisition.com is to make real business education accessible to everyone. And so I was like, if you share my book with two friends, you've earned this hat.

47:36And so this can't be bought, only earned. And so you earn it by giving it. And we had 50 % of people who chose to - Get three. That's incredible, man. And so - Was there an upsell after that or how's the - That was it. That was it. Wow. I mean, if I had wanted to make money - Right. You'd do coaching or something else. It would have been a very different, I would have structured things very differently. But the objective of the event was to demonstrate that the concepts of this book work. And the objective of my last book was to show that making an amazing offer can grow the sales on its own. So that one I did zero advertising for and it sold 500 ,000 copies.

48:11Wow. None, no paid ads, no event. I had 10 ,000 followers on Instagram when I posted that. It It was before Alex Ramose became Alex Ramose. It was literally an internal SOP that Layla encouraged me to post as a book. So I said, fine. And I added stories in it to make it interesting for my team. Cause I was like, if they don't read it, it's not gonna matter. So I added stories in it and I posted as a book and then it just continues to sell more month over month. And so that is the hope, you know, obviously with this book too, is that you make the product so exceptional that you get that lead getter bucket of customer telling other customers and affiliates telling other people.

48:42And I think that the goal was, if I, if I ask people to promote something and I say that it's going to be worth it, that I have to absolutely deliver on that. So that next year or two years from now, if I say, Hey, we promote my next book, they'll do it. Now, if I had gone and sold whatever, some, you know, coaching thing or something like that, right. That would have been the last time they would have promoted me because I would have been for free. Right. Yeah. I would have been siphoning their audience or whatever. Um, but I wanted to just install even more goodwill at scale by doing something that hopefully would be memorable that no one else would do.

49:16And so I made a huge pitching presentation to stack all the value that I gave with this book. And I price-ingered it at$12 ,000. Then I started - You started dropping - Price dropping down. And then I was like, it's free. And then everyone, it became a much more memorable event. And then - The book was free or what was free? The book's free too. The book's free too. So the course is free. The book's free on my podcast. so on the game I have I actually also made my offers book free as well just because people are like Alex makes his money on the$2 that the book costs so I just just to dispel the myths offers and $100 million leads are both on my podcast in sequence you can just listen to them straight through but if you want it all together in a physical book you gotta pay for it yeah if you want to pay for it yeah I mean if you physical books cost money to print and ship so it's like that but it was but otherwise people get it for free on your podcast and we have to just and the course is on my site with no opt-in you don't even have to opt-in for it you can just have it And so what I will say this, this, you might find this interesting is that it's always the scariest thing in terms of give, like giving is always scary, no matter how, how much you have, whatever it is.

50:23Like if you work really hard on something, there's a part of you that wants to monetize it, right? It's just, it's innate to us, right? You want to get something back. And so that's why it's so hard to delay gratification for such a long period of time, but it's also what will make you stand out in a marketplace of takers. and so um that was what i i have consistently i mean i've preached this message of just give give give and you will be able to grow faster than you can imagine and the event was probably the largest demonstration of that that i could do and what has now happened since then is you know we're number one in business on spotify we're you know we're 19 in all podcasts um from doing that We get 150 ,000 unique views a day on my site.

51:05Wow. Because the course is free. That's huge. And so people share it. And that's the thing. People share the podcast because they got value from it. And they know that it's a$20 book, I think, on Audible. Audible picks the prices for that. But because there's intrinsic value, people share it. And I think that's the thing is people give away free fluff that sucks because they spend no time on it. And then people consume it, realize it's junk, and then associate that junk with the person. and then say you have a junk brand because I've associated you with the one thing that I've consumed from you.

51:35And so despite the fact that your customer is only gonna be 1 % of the people that you ever advertise to or less, your reputation is made by the 99. Wow. And so if you wanna control the reputation that you have, then you need to give away more stuff. And in a world where trust is going to continually decrease and the amount of information and content is going to only increase with AI and things like that, I believe that personal brands and trust and authority are gonna be increasingly important. I think that more companies will have celebrity partners in order to gain trust because cost to acquire customers on paid ads has gone up 100 % in a very short period of time.

52:08When you have CAC, so cost to acquire customer increasing at that rate, you have to have something that is going to counteract that. And that's what brand is. And so brand has never been more important than it is today. And I think will only increase in importance. And so this was a brand play. That's incredible. And so, yeah, we still, you know, we sold 190 ,000 copies so far. Oh, the first, what, a week and a half, two weeks? Yeah. 10 days or 11 days. Whatever it's been. Wow, man. 39 ,000. That's crazy, man. Yeah. With no 1 ,000 pack bundles. It's amazing. Yeah. It's inspiring. What are the...

52:39How many pieces of content do you put out a day on all social media platforms right now? We put 300 a week out. 300 a week. Yeah. And if you could go back to two years ago when you only had 10 ,000 followers to now you have 5 million on all platforms in two years, what would you say to your younger self two years younger about the path to getting here the honest truth i wouldn't say anything because i wouldn't want to mess anything up it's like that's the the real real do you think you can get there by posting less uh no i think the volume the volume is you know quantity creates quality like you learn you learn how to do things better by doing more of it and so i've wholeheartedly embraced that that perspective when it comes to making content.

53:26Um, but I do believe that it's not just quite like, cause there are people who will post every single day and they get zero engagement, et cetera. You know, you're not learning from it, right? You need feedback. You still need feedback. You need to take the feedback from the market. And ideally you can also have feedback from people who know more than you. And so you use those two feedback mechanisms and the faster you can make that feedback loop, the faster you'll learn and change your behavior and get better. Um, and so you want to do tons of volume with tons of feedback because the like quality is better than quantity, but you only get quality through quantity.

53:57And the only thing better than that is quantity with quality. Right. Then you really start to grow up. Yeah. And then you, then you get, you get wild, um, in terms of all the different platform distribution. Yeah. It's been a, it's been a super fun ride. I'm very proud of the book. Yeah. It's great, man. I know that there's nothing else that I could have done to make the book better at my current level, maybe in two years. Right. Um, I might've been able to, I wrote it. I did 19 drafts. I had four, four rewrites. Um, I did six hours a day for two years. That's great. So I work from, I work from six to noon, uh, every day on the book, on the book.

54:30And then unless you were here doing an interview with me, of course. And then the afternoons, my afternoon is when I do my meetings and take calls and do the remainder of my actual job. Right. Uh, the only thing that I would add to this conversation right here, I'm sure there's a lot more, but the thing that's popping out for me is people could hear that and say, okay, you could keep working on this for another two more years until it's perfect. Because you said, I like what you said, is you put it out at the current level that you're at. You couldn't have done anything else than where you're at right now.

54:59Maybe in two to four years, you would have been, ah, I could have changed this a little bit. I think a lot of people are going to get hung up on that. They wait, wait, wait, wait. That's not ready yet. And this isn't ready for yourself 10 years from now, right? It's not as good as it could be in 10 years writing it. Yeah. But it is as good as where it is right now for your current self. And I think people need to learn how to also ship quality with what they can do it now and not just wait forever. I think a lot of people hide under the guise of perfectionism when it's really just laziness and fear.

55:32So the reality is they're like, it's not ready yet, but they're working on it three hours a week. they're not going all day and obsessing about it. So I mean, like, I think the whole, like, it's tension between two extremes, right? You've got the MVP, which means minimum viable product, ship it as fast as you can. If you are proud of your first product, it sucks, right? And on the other hand, you have, you know, Apple that ships a new product every like three years, or, you know, and they really only have four products that built a$3 trillion company. So where, you know, where on this continuum do you lie?

56:02And I think it's learning the rights, it's honestly probably matching your personality to the work that you do, but regardless, work has to be done. And so I can say this, it's like, if you work on something for six hours a day, every single day, and you truly work on it, when I say work, I mean, like you set a timer and when the time, when you step away or you look at your phone, you stop the timer, when you six hours of actual work on something every single day, you will know the things that you could do to make it better. And if you do all of those things, and the difference is, is being very clear on the problem definition.

56:35So that's, okay. So this might round out this whole conversation. If you're really clear about the problem that the product, if you're, if we're talking about making a product is supposed to solve. And so I could then of course, write a whole book on sales and I could write a whole book on, you know, monetization. I could like, so then, then the scope would then change. So you have to be ruthless with the problem definition of the scope of whatever thing that you're trying to solve is. But then within that very narrow line is this everything I can do in this tiny little sliver. If it's everything that I can do, then you can chip it.

57:07And so I think that's the, that like, you're not going to create the everything solution. You're not going to create HubSpot CRM when you're a coder in your basement, but you can probably create an autoresponder that works exceptionally well. And so do that. Just do that. Don't add the other dude. Just make that. One of my favorite stories about product iteration was Dragon Dictation. Do you know Dragon way back in the day? Like 90s right and so the you got it you got a headset and you would talk and it would type and this was like a cd yes i remember this now and they got uh lauded praised by like tech magazine or crunch or whatever it is um for dragon 2.0 and in dragon 2.0 they literally added zero new features they just made it work better and i think that is like the spirit of true product innovation is that a lot of people think they need more bells and whistles, but if you just fulfilled the first promise that you made and really did it and did it better, then you can make 10 times more money by doing something twice as well.

58:06Because it's just how much better, like if I said - More efficient, yeah. If I said, I can get you customers, I don't need to also hire your staff. If I can just do that, I fulfilled my promise. And this book specifically only sits between somebody who doesn't know you exist and someone says they're interested in what you have to sell. That's it. As soon as someone says, I would like to find out more, that book is done. Everything that 280 pages is to get you from I don't know who you are to I'm interested to find out more. I would like to consider buying your stuff, which is why the subheadline is how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff, not to get them to buy your stuff.

58:42To buy your stuff is sales. Yeah. And that's the third book. Stay tuned for that. They can get the book for free on your podcast. You got a course on your site, acquisition.com. They can follow you everywhere. Hormosey. If you love hard copies, you can go to shop.acquisition.com and grab a hard copy. I would get this. Get a few copies for sure. It's pretty, right? Where can they get the hard copy? It's on Amazon too. Yeah. I think paperbacks are in the hardback. If you like hardbacks, I have them shop.acquisition.com. Shop.acquisition.com. I'm sure if you just go to the site, you'll see all your$2.99 in books.

59:18Exactly. If people are business owners that are looking to be a part of your portfolio, I'm sure they can go to acquisition.com and they can learn more and apply and see what's going on there. And business owners, it's just for absolute clarity. It's really like if you're doing 2 million or more in profit. And we have actually narrowed our focus a little bit more to brick and mortar chains. So we've just flushed all the brick and mortar chains that we have invested in. And so we are - Smart. We are at least - That's the way you know best of. You did brick and mortar. Yeah. I mean, it was, you're speaking into it.

59:47We've done, you did gyms, you know, physical photography studios. We were teeth whitening. We've like, like if you have like a, if you have like a health or a beauty, uh, I call them like body services, anything. Tanny salon. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Tattoo removal, uh, laser skin, uh, hair removal, that kind of stuff. Like that is our, that is our jam. There you go. Yeah. That is our gym. They'll reach out to you. They can message you. They can go on acquisition.com. Get a few copies of the book. I think this is really inspiring. I love this stuff. Uh, you know, I've been doing a lot of this for the last 10, 15 years on myself.

1:00:22And I went through this and I was like, oh, there's actually some stuff that I can really start to start to apply even better, even though I've, you know, mastered to a certain level, there's so many different things that I was pulling out from. And I was like, okay, cool. I can steal like an artist here, here, here, here. So control X. Yeah. I was like, this is really smart. Yeah. So, um, it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or if you're, you know, got a big business, you're going to learn something from this and make sure to get a few copies. Give them to friends. I can't wait for the next one.

1:00:49I can't wait to have you back on in the future soon. Grateful for you, Alex. Thank you for being here. Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up? You guys are savages. I appreciate you all. And man, I was about to curse. Can I curse on this show? We bleep it out, but you can. Okay. Anyone who tells you otherwise, do you? I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey forward's greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me, as well as ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast.

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1:02:01And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

1:02:09Thank you.