Daily Motivations - IT'S ON YOU IN 2026

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

Speakers: Alex HormoziAlex Hormozi is a first-generation Iranian-American entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. In 2013, he started his first brick & mortar business. Within three years, he successfully scaled his business to six locations. He then sold his locations to transition to the turnaround business. From there he spent two years turning 32+ brick & mortar businesses around using the same model that made his privately owned locations successful. After that experience, he packaged his process into a licensing model which scaled to over 4000+ locations in 4 years. Over that same four-year period, he founded and scaled three other companies to $120M+ in cumulative sales across four different industries without taking on outside capital. He has scaled and exited 7 companies. His most notable exit was his majority sale of his licensing company for $46.2M in 2021.Instagram - @daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorg

I think once you've actually learned how to try, really try one thing for an extended period of time every single day and taking all of your discretionary effort and your money and your time and your resources and put it towards just doing that thing. Number one, you realize how few things you can really do well because of the amount of time that it takes. The second thing is you realize how easy it is to beat everyone else because of how few of them actually do that. And learning how to try becomes a generalizable skill across domains. So when you do learn how to play the saxophone, and if you want to pick up tennis, you think about how many sessions you did to fix your fingers and play a more advanced thing over and over again.

And then when you realize that the domains are similar in terms of skill achievement, you're like, oh, this is the same thing. And then when you go like, oh, I need to make content now, it's like, oh, it's the same as hitting 500 forehands and 500 backhands. And I make 500 tweets and 400 posts. And if I do it for an extended period of time and I take the feedback and I don't stop, I'll probably beat most people. Lazy people don't know how to start. Weak people don't know how to finish.

Successful people don't know how to stop. People demand success but refuse to work weekends. people want opportunity but won't talk to strangers. People claim ambition but sleep in every day. We are the result of our actions, not our aspirations. Everything worth doing is hard, and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is. The greater the payoff, the greater the hardship. If it's hard, good.

It means no one else will do it. More for you. I think a lot of personal growth is training yourself on how you respond. into hard. Because in the early days, hard was, ooh, stop, this isn't good. I should, I should, this is a warning sign. This is a red flag.

I should slow down or I should stop, you know, I should pivot. But the more I think about it as a competitive landscape, as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like. And these rocks and these dragons are things that I'm going to have to slay along the way to get the princess or get the treasure. I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow. And I think if you can if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do

this, then it's it flips from being this thing that you're like, oh, poor me to oh poor everyone else who's going to have to fucking try. If you see that you have an empty calendar, most people assume that if someone asks you for that time, it's therefore theirs. And it's only not theirs when someone else has claimed it, which means that your time only belongs to other people. And then you're surprised by the fact that your investment of time has yielded nothing for you when you've given the only and most valuable asset that you have to everyone else who often give a very poor return on it for you. And so in the beginning, if you don't have money, the only thing you have is time.

And so that is the only thing that you, it's the only currency you can spend to improve yourself or get closer to your goals. And so if that's the one currency you have, then why on earth would you give it away? The life that I'm living today is a result of the work that I did six and 12 months ago. And so if you're to look at my calendar six and 12 months ago, then you might extrapolate out to what I'm doing today. But just like people want the immediate reward, they also see their current condition as a result of the behavior they're doing today. when it's not at all. Like this is where I think the benefit of quote visualization comes into play. I don't see it as much as a benefit for like, oh, I have to imagine this thing to happen.

But I think it's more powerful to think, I'm doing this thing today and I'm imagining it happening. So it's an approximation of the feedback loop that you want to have. And so it helps you substitute and get through the period where nothing's actually happening. And so it's this continuous reinforcing cycle of the me and other me holding the whip behind me. to see how much I can take. But with each lash of the whip that I take, learning that I can take it and continue to trudge on. And so as long as you keep going,

you bear witness to yourself of what you are capable of. And I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery when you have to go through it. It means that you're not full of shit. I'm still here. It means that you're not full of shit. a requisite for success is a problem. And so reframing what I used to consider a problem as a point of evidence that I am on the path that I originally chose.

What's interesting is that when you start defining your own success that way, it actually starts to feel under your own control. It's not about what everyone else will think, because when I'm on stage making that presentation, the only person whose voice I'll hear is mine. And I will know if I have done everything in my control to be prepared. I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder. Like this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill. It's not that the things that the dragons are going to slay aren't going to get bigger, they are. But you become so much more equipped to slay them back.

And you have so many more allies. You have people in the stands cheering for it. You have the audience. You have all of these other things that are behind you. But in the beginning, it's just you with a stick against a bear. And arguably, that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you. And so it's not even like the size of the hardship. It's just also the resources and how few of them you have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have, which is time.

Because you have no leverage. You don't have the money to pay other people to help you. You don't have the resources to go, like, get someone to, no one can learn it for you. It's like there's a lot of the things that we care about a lot. Like, no one can work out for you. It doesn't matter how much money you have. No one can learn skills for you. And so in the early days, like, it feels so painful because you're like, you look around to see who can help you.

And then you're like, it's me again. I think it's just giving yourself permission to suck. It's giving yourself permission to be unhappy. It's giving yourself permission to not achieve while you do for a long period of time. It's giving yourself permission to lose friends. It's giving yourself permission to do things that's different than people in your social circle or your age group are doing, giving yourself permission to be an exception so that you can become exceptional. Going through the shit, which is honestly the boring stuff that no one wants to do for an extended period of time,

accepting that you suck and that it is okay because the first step is accepting that you suck so that you can do the second step, which is doing something about it. But if you are the goal, then the actions you take every day are reinforcing who you believe yourself to be. That's where the confidence comes from. The world belongs to optimists, because if you're going to do anything big, you have to believe that it can happen. Otherwise, it never will. I think that most of us can look back on our lives to 10 years ago and think about the problems that we were dealing with then. and think about how much of a pittance and how small those problems were compared to the problems that we deal with today.

And so I then think, okay, well, if I feel that way about the problems that I had 10 years ago, then 10 years from now, Alex will look back at the problems that I'm dealing with today and feel the same way. And so if he feels that way then about the problems that I have now, then the only difference is the perspective that he has that I don't have. And maybe these aren't problems at all. Maybe these are just facts of life. and I need to habituate to them. What's interesting about humans is that our ability to endure is very robust if we know that we'll make it out.

And so if I were to say, hey, I need you to hold your breath, but I don't tell you how long, 20 seconds in, you might be thinking, this is stupid? Is he going to stop? Is he going to wait for me to pass out? And all these stupid thoughts go into your mind. But if I say, I need you to hold your breath for three minutes, your lungs might burn, but you can see that there's this end that's coming. The difficulty with personal development and entrepreneurship is that you don't know when the end is coming, but you still need to fight like the second mouse who gets out, gets right off, and gets put back in. And the only certainty that I can give you is that it's the same thing that every other mouse, every other person who got through that period went through. and you won't die.

Best case you win, worst case, it won't matter. The vast majority of successful people have one thing in common, which is they're consistent. And consistency, you cannot see in a snapshot. You can't see consistency in a soundbite. You can't see consistency in a reel.

And so consistency is one of those things. I think you talked about unlearnable lessons. I think they are difficult to learn without large amounts of exposure. And I think those are the types of lessons that become unlearnable is that you need large amounts of exposure in order to encapsulate the lesson itself. I think most people have the potential to be exceptional, because most people are peculiar

in their own way. They just stifle that because they want to be accepted by most people, but in so doing, never accomplish what they want to do because they conform. And so there's probably a lot of things about the world, or even your world around you, that you're like, this never made sense to me. But then you do it anyways. And I think that a lot of innovation and a lot of what makes, people exceptional is feeling, you know, thinking that thought or seeing that thing and then being like, huh, I don't think I'm going to follow that rule anymore. I'm putting a huge amount of my discretionary effort into this because it's my belief that right now, what will, what will prevent

me from achieving my ultimate goals? Because that, that motherfucker's not gone, is running out of steam because I don't need to do this. Like, I don't need to work this hard. I have to, I'd prefer to, make the ride more enjoyable. Realize it never mattered to begin with. What's that? If you want it all, life will give you nothing. We're willing to sacrifice everything that we have for the thing that we want. And then once we get the thing that we want,

we want back the things that we sacrificed, which really just goes to the heart of the human condition, which is we want it all. And we're not willing to make trades. And so one of the reasons that I've actually, I would say largely tossed out the deathbed regret. of most people is that what they do typically is they will have the bias of wanting the other path they could have taken without considering the cost of that path. So they say, hey, I was really

successful and I did all these things. But, you know, I would give it all up today to have my family. It's like, well, yeah, but you didn't because you actually chose the path that you're on. And you weren't willing to do that. But what you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone. And so I've. had a few moments of clarity over the last, you know, a year or so. But we want everything without the cost and everything has a price. And you will never be able to get the sufficient price tag paid on everything to achieve a monocum of success in any domain unless you are willing to trade from another. And I think that that has significantly minimized my regret.

We give up our 20s for our 30s. We give up our 30s for our 40s. our 40s for our 50s and we trade everything we achieved in our 30s 40s and 50s to get back to our 20s we give up the thing we have most of for the thing that we have least of and we give up the thing that we want for the thing that's supposed to get it I will become happy when I'm sufficiently successful and I will sacrifice my happiness in pursuit of success so that I can become sufficiently successful so I can finally be happy we spend our 20s wanting to be richer and older and have a family then we start that in our 30s and we gain more work wealth and do the family thing and then we get back to get to our 40s and we've got more

responsibilities we've accumulated all of this stuff and then we think god if only i could go back to my 20s but you were fucking miserable in your 20s you hated it you had no idea whether you were going to be successful you were constantly concerned about money you were desperately needing validation from all of these people around you were permanently in dissatisfaction about this stuff we already know how the movie ends when we go back and say we want to relive it and you can't relive it into the same context because uncertainty is the largest part of the story Perhaps golden years can only happen in our memory. Nobody believes that we're living through in golden era right now.

We never think we're in the good old days. But the good old days are always now. I have spent a huge amount of mental resources accepting suffering and not saying that there's something wrong with something bad. Like a huge amount of mental resources gone to this because I've been better and faster at correcting the loop of like, oh, I am not not happy with this particular thing and therefore there's something wrong. Yeah. So it's fixed the story that I tell us off as opposed to fix the thing.

And that's been super helpful with the addition of everything that I remember will always be better than it was. And the nice thing is that there's tons of science that backs us up, which is that we learn through reward and punishment. Punishment fades with time, no matter how bad it was. Like, you get drunk, you get hungover. You say I'll never drink again. Seven days later, you're out drinking again. Why? The punishment of the hangover fades quickly. You are with somebody for a while. You're like, this is crazy or this guy is crazy. And then you break up. And then all of a sudden, what do you remember? The good times. Because reward sticks. And in some ways, there's a little bit of a hopeful message there, which is that

when you look back on your life, you will disproportionately remember the good times. But it only becomes a problem if you limit the present, which is the only thing you've ever actually lived in. when I think about a business and I want to grow it, for example, I would think, okay, what are all the things that can destroy this business? And this is Charlie Munger. This isn't me. But basically he says invert, always invert. And Einstein said that too. And it's because like you get to use this way stronger horsepower engine of like, how do I grow my business? That's, you could obviously think that way. But the alternative would be like, how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves? And then when you list out those moves, you're like, cool, now let's do the opposite of that. And that has been, honestly, a lot of the, some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us. Well, what if we did the even more obvious thing and did the opposite of what would destroy us? And it's worked better than I deserve. Figure out what you want. Ignore the opinions of others.

Do so much work. It would be unreasonable that you fail. Realize it never mattered to begin with. Help others once you get there. You've already achieved the things you said would make you success. Yeah, the first five steps there is my, it's basically my master life plan. I had a pretty terrible first out of college experience of work, but from that I learned some of the most important life lessons that I still take to this day.

And that boss particularly said one thing to me one day, she said, figuring out what you want is 99% of it. She said, once you know what you want, getting it's the easy part. and I kind of adopted that as a worldview because it's like once you're really clear like this is what I want that everything that's not that is what I'm willing to give up to get it now that thing can change and I think that's the part that people miss and I think we should all have permission to change what we want in any given moment and not having basically sunk life bias of like I put 10 years into this thing and that's okay and that's what I needed to do

at that time. And today, I'm willing to, I'm going to change everything. It's been super helpful for me to not think of my changes as permanent because it's been, it's allowed me to make such dramatic changes in my, in my life or my business much faster than I think most people have been willing to because there's this, this weight of forever on top of everything. Like, I can do this for today. And tomorrow, if it still works, I will do it for tomorrow. I will do it for tomorrow. And if five days from now or 25 days from now, if I work this way, I then say, you know what? I need a day. People are like, oh, he's burned out. It's like, I took a day. Because that's what I needed that day. And I think giving myself permission to have that freedom

has allowed me to take significantly faster action because who am I apologizing to? One of my themes this year has been focusing on moments and on both a positive and the negative. And so like when we think back on, if I think back on the last year, right, I don't remember probably 95% of the year. Like I, you know, I did the same things. And so it's like it just didn't get recorded. Like nothing notable happened. And so really like when we think about a year, we really just recall a handful of moments. And that's it. And those moments in time are usually very short. And so I've been trying to think about the bad, you know, seasons as, well, maybe it wasn't a bad season. Maybe I had five bad days or really five bad moments that I then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been five minutes times five into an entirely bad year. It's like, okay, well, if we can do that in

the negative, can we do the positive, which is obviously the thing to exercise? I thought about that. It's like if I were, if I were to boil everything down of all the skills that you can learn, if everything that we do eventually becomes irrelevant, then the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. Most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood. Like, I'm just in a bad mood. So it's like, well, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, it's like, you might as well be in a good mood for no reason, because that one at least serves you. And so I've been trying to exercise like, because there's on one degree, there's like, let's count things to be grateful for. On the other side, it's like, why do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood?

Like, why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood? Like, can I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood? Because I've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood. And so I've been trying to flex that, which is like, sure, we can find things to be grateful for. And when those things pop up, yes, and of course it's a practice, you get better at it. But like, what if I can just be in a good mood? And so I've just tried to break that relationship between the two because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find. To take this to the absolute extreme, why should I be grateful?

Why should I be happy? Why do I demand of my life that I must be happy during it? I think it comes down to, I use the word control before. Basically, if you can predict, it means you can control. But if you can predict what's going to happen, it means that you know what the variables are and you can influence those variables, which you can influence the outcome.

We have a set of behaviors or skills that will increase the likelihood of goal achievement, whatever that goal is, being spiritual, being a good husband, whatever it is. These behaviors will do that. To increase the likelihood of me doing these behaviors, then I have to have more good stuff, less bad stuff. I will down that hell.

Beyond that, what is anything that happened prior to this matter at all insofar as, It only works if I could use that same variable and then use it again to change my behavior yet again to be conducive to the goal. Expectation of life is that it's going to be until I make the billion dollars, until I get married to the love of my life, until I get these things. You're just holding your happiness hostage until something great happens. What if something small could be something great? People only root for others at two times.

First, when they're at the beginning of the race. Second, when they finish. neither is when you need it. So you have to master the middle. The boring, exhausting, soul-crushing middle, that's where the winning happens on your own. People will only cheer for you as long as you can't beat them at the game they value most.

Friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't. It's a bug, not a feature. You know, the very, very beginning people say, you know, I'm really excited for you that you're trying this thing out, right? And I noticed that everyone was very happy for me to try because I temporarily decreased my status.

I actually became worse than them during that period of time. And then as soon as I achieved a level of success, which I then realized that their happiness for me was proportional to where they were on the latter relative to me. And so as soon as I passed some people, then they stop being happy and then they start, you know, saying bad things, right? And the people who were still always ahead were still like, keep it up, keep it up.

And there's still people who have been that way my whole life. And I just wonder if and when I pass them, will they flip? I don't know. but also to the same degree it was the it was after you start the race when you're in the thick of it because you'll quickly pass the people who've done nothing but then you have this long period of time

where you don't catch up to the people who've been doing it for a long time and that's the part where it's very lonely because you don't have your initial posse you have to leave them at some point but then you don't get to the new group that's way ahead and actually has some proof behind them that you can actually like

sit at the table and so like today I have if I were to do something, I have tons of support. But I don't really need the support now. I needed it in the middle, right? In the many years that, like, no one knew who Alex Ramosey was. And that's the hard part. And I think it's the story that Morgan Hassel tells,

which is that you just don't know how it's going to finish. And that's what makes it hard. It's the uncertainty of like, what if I give up everything that I've done in my life for nothing? And then all of a sudden, if I knew that, then I wouldn't be willing to make this trade. But in retrospect, when you do have the thing, thing. You're like, of course I was, like, if I knew that this was going to happen, I would

happily, I would happily make the trade. But you don't know. And so you're just putting the money down and they're rolling it, but you get to find out if you hit black five fucking years from now. It's why dealing with uncertainty is such a matter skill. And it's one that I, to be honest, it's one that I really suck at. I'm very, very not good at dealing with uncertainty. my required line of assurance in order for me to commit to a decision is incredibly high, which is why I've basically never failed at anything that I've done. All of the stuff that I've done, a string of incredibly slow but very reliable successes is just because my required number of sort of justification points is very high.

And, you know, in retrospect, it might look like it was a risk. It's like, dude, I took so long to fucking make this decision. on the on the friend point it's a painful realization that the small number of good friends want you to win in case you take them with you and the large number of bad friends are scared of you're winning in case you leave them behind the best way to know who a real friend is is how they react when you win and when that happens you'll realize how few real friends you really have many people were like sure like good luck with that but i know knew that they just weren't really rooting for me. They were rooting for me to fail. They're rooting for the reason for me the wrong way. One of my rules is you should only take advice from people whose dreams for your life are bigger than yours are, which is a very small number of people. Sometimes it's your parents. Sometimes your parents really do have bigger dreams for you than you do. The people who are closest to you in the beginning, if they're like true, like actual friends,

then you recognize that because they actually want you to win. And that's amazing. A lot of people don't have that. And so what I have felt, at least for me, was that when you're a little ahead is where the friction is, when you blow them out of the water and there's no question, like it's, it's beyond reproach. They will do one of two things. They will either be really happy for you or they'll change the game that they're beating you at. That's great, but I'm in better shape. That's great, but my marriage is better, right? Like, or whatever, you know, whatever game that they choose to play, people who doubt you will be right. most of the time. And this further increases your uncertainty about the path that you're choosing to

take. But on a long enough time horizon, most people who don't bet are guaranteed to lose. And so they get to win at being right more times than you get to win at being right. But what that equation doesn't take into consideration is intensity, which is, can I be so right? one time that it makes all of the times that I was wrong irrelevant. And in the nature of life, the answer is yes, almost a resounding yes for just about every domain. Like everyone can say that every person you've ever dated has sucked and they could predict that you're going to break up until you find the person that you're going to marry. And in that moment, who fucking cares about the other 90 people that you went on dates with, that everybody said was a bad idea or that

you have a bad picker or you don't have a good taste? It's like, well, you're not marrying them. I date in a way that's different than you would prefer. Great. But I did end up finding this thing. The first thing that I ever did was an online, an online fitness thing, and it kind of worked. And then I did my first gym, and it kind of worked. And then I started all these other side projects. They got distracted, and I didn't know. And the downside risk is significantly smaller and more frequent.

It's both. You're more likely to lose, and it's more likely to have more times. It's just that upside is uncapped. And so, and I think about this one a lot. So there's the story of the guy. Do you know the guy who wrote Jingle Bells? No. So.

I didn't even know that that was, I thought it was like happy birth. I thought he was just gifted to humanity when we started. So there's this guy, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's never one song in Christmas time. maybe globally. And I think about that life where it's like, what if I failed everything, but then I have one thing that actually makes a permanent impact. I was like, would I trade that life for Aristotle's good life, where I amount to nothing, but the whole time was good? And this is just one of my eternal battles where I think with myself that I have no answer for, to be clear. But when I'm when I'm thinking through the periods where things suck, I'm like, well, maybe

I'll get a jingle bell's out of this. And maybe it'll just take 20 years longer than I thought. So not taking the shot is like saying life, I don't want to scratch off this lottery ticket, but the lottery ticket's free. Why would you not scratch it off and try it? Whatever reasons that we usually give ourselves in the beginning for why we can't achieve something, you can almost always find not only just someone, but someone who's achieved world-class levels of success with worse conditions than you currently have, which then means it's absolutely possible. And then the only thing that it takes to get there is work.

Sometimes progress is the W. Like maintaining in some seasons is winning. This has been my big focus right now. And I'm not the first person to say this, but just winning the day. And Bill Ackman had this hard season where he was getting divorced. He just lost $4 billion. And he was not him today. He was earlier on his career.

I mean, it was just the worst. And it was just a terrible slog. And he said one of the difficult parts about that period is that there was no one thing that was like, oh, I can tackle this today. Like you're not going to finish the divorce today. You're not going to undo the $4 billion loss today. And so it's like when you have these larger, more complex negative things that do scale, it's like, how do you navigate through that?

And for anyone who's listening right now, it's like maybe it's the bad breakup. Maybe it's that or maybe you're getting divorced, right? Or maybe it's like the business isn't working the way you want. It's like, and there's like 10 things that you have to fix. And so he had this very tactical advice, which I liked a lot, which is, He just tried to make progress. And that was it. And he said, you know, in a day, it's almost negligible, right?

But at 30 days, you're like, okay, I moved this. And at 90, you're like, wow, does this mean that our mood is still being dictated by circumstance? Yes, I'll be honest. Yes, it does. But I think many of us have this ideal. We'd love to be in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. But I had this one great podcast today. I'm going to make that thing, the thing that's making this a great day.

And then if I can make that great day, then maybe it could be a great week. And then trying to expand those, basically like let those good moments eat up the season in actively trying to minimize all the down things and super, super focus on those moments and be like, cool, I had that good moment. That's my day. Days made. And I'm trying to even say that more. Basically, I've had to recalibrate my entire scale to how little of a thing can happen that makes my day. How little of a thing can happen that makes my week. little thing can make my month. How crazy would it be if a year from now I say, that was a great year.