Daily Motivations - You Don’t Need Validation

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

This Episode brings together the most powerful ideas from Alex Hormozi, Chris Williamson, and Steven Bartlett in one long-form, transformative edit. It covers the truth about overnight success, the lonely chapter every ambitious person goes through, why consistency beats talent, why the work you do when no one is watching matters most, and why success becomes the only real revenge. You will hear about the valley of despair, the pottery-class lesson of volume over perfection, the 22-year-old advantage of energy and nothing to lose, why you cannot fit in and be exceptional at the same time, why the bar for winning is now lower than ever, and why hard seasons are a signal that you are on the right path. These ideas have become central topics in modern self-improvement because they cut through excuses and push you toward action, discipline, and long-term thinking.Instagram - @daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorg

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Jimmy Carr broke my brain with this one. Everyone is jealous of what you've got. No one is jealous of how you got it. I love that quote. My God. People see the trophies, but not the training ground.

Everybody wants the view, but no one wants the climb. I love it. A friendly reminder that in three generations, everyone who knew us will be dead, including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted all along. Imagine that someone you know achieves. every dream and hits every goal they have. Years later, they get old and die. Two years after that, how much do you care? About as much as everyone else will, if you accomplish your goals and dreams,

do it for you. When I wake up every day, there's only one voice I have to listen to. It doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I don't achieve all of the goals in three generations. I'll be forgotten. And the only people who were nacing against me will also be dead. And so then it's like, just do it for me. The reason the goal isn't coming at you fast enough is because every person you've seen accomplish the goal, you only see it the moment they accomplish it. And the reason that it hurts so much when people are like, must be nice, oh, that happened overnight is because every time you fail, no one cares and no one sees.

But when you finally win, people take nice. notice. Disgraded. But it's the only time they notice is when you actually win. And so to even further reinforce the point, the fact that everyone looks like an overnight success means that the 10 years where they sucked, no one saw. And so the fear that you have about people noticing the fact that you fail is ridiculous because they're barely going to notice when you succeed. And now people say, I must be nice for you. And you go, dude, you, you're, you. You know, dude, you. You You. Like, if you could have seen how much criticism and hard work and lonely nights and all of the stuff when nobody was watching and I was unsure of myself chronically miserable and I criticized

and all my friends took the piss up me and I did all of these things, I had to go through all of that for you to now say must be nice. I'd say one of the strongest mental frames that has got me through my hardest times is thinking this will be the story that I will one day tell. and that means the harder it is, the bigger the dragon, the more epic the story, and by consequence, the more epic the hero. And if you think about the difference between winners and losers, winners define themselves by what they made happen, and losers define themselves by what happened to them.

And the difficult part of the lonely chapter is that the rocky cut scene, last 90 seconds in the movie and last five years in reality. With no promise of it ever ending. No guarantee of glory. 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. And if you do die, you won't care because you'll be dead.

Best case you win, worst case it won't matter. And I promise you, every single person who wants to do something with their life and has done something with their life, has gone through the exact chapter that you're going through. And it's the lonely chapter. It's the chapter where you don't fit in with your own friends, but you don't have the outcomes yet to fit into a new group of friends. And you're doing this thing.

You're consuming content on the internet. You're doing these free tutorials online to try and figure out how to set up a podcast and where do I host this thing? And you're going through this and you're like, is this even worth it? Because you have no signs of success, right? But if there's anything that you can take away from what we're saying right now is that the sign of success is the hate that you get along the way.

And what you can't do is bend the knee to their hate and fit back into the conformity because it's comfortable and it's warm because like in the Matrix, when Trinity opens the door, when Neo's about to go take the red pill, and he wants to get out of the car, she says, Neo, you've been down that road and you know exactly where it leads. And I know that's not where you want to be. And then he closes the door. Like right now, this moment that you're going through is Trinity.

opening the door and being like, you could go back. But then you'd have to remember exactly what the reason was that you decided not to go out to begin with just because you listen to this podcast and you consume this constant, you're like, I can do more than this. Reminder that if you want to be exceptional, you're going to be different from everyone else.

That's what makes you exceptional. You can't fit in and also be exceptional. Both have discomfort. When you fit in, you have internal conflict because you're not being 100% you. When you're exceptional, you have external conflict because everyone sees you as difficult. different. Pick one. When your friends start to say you've changed, remember, it's because they don't

know how to say you've grown. I'm saying this because I used to think that there was something wrong with me when in reality I just didn't understand what the nature of being exceptional meant. And so I'm saying this purely from a definitional perspective. To be exceptional means that you are the exception. It means that you are not normal. And so it's normal for normal people. to find you abnormal if you do things that are not normal. Don't let people who have mediocre goals deter you from taking actions that make you great because it makes you different. Controversial take. You really can solve a lot of male problems by getting in shape and making money.

You still have problems. They're just smaller and you have more resources to handle them. We don't rise to the standards we have when others are watching. We fall to the standards we have when no one is watching. The only work that really matters is the work that no one sees. It shows you who you really are rather than who you say you are. The world is there for the taking for anyone who can learn from their mistakes, do what they say they were going to do, and stick with it.

What used to make a man acceptable now makes you extraordinary. The bar for winning has never been so low. If you think back to college when you were a freshman, you think, wow, this is so hard or whatever. And then by the time you're a senior, like, man, these kids are so soft. And so we remember things as harder than they were, but I also think that there is a threat of reality, which is that the younger generation is softer. And I think we are softer than the generation above us. When I think about the guys who were storming Normandy, and I think about the people would be attempting to do that now as a class, I think that we are softer. And so the thing is, is that if you can barely decide to take any action at all and peel your eyes away from your phone for just to be soft. a moment, it's so much easier to beat everyone else because most people are overweight, they're distracted, they're poor, they have so few skills because it has never been easier to start a business, to make money, to get in shape.

It's just also never been easier to do nothing. And so in a world where it's never been easier to do nothing, doing something becomes extraordinary. And I'm telling you from the bottom of my soul, it is so easy to beat people today. They are so soft. They have no work ethic. No one can stick with anything. Everyone's distracted. They're on social media. They're kind of notifications because they can't stick with they can't say no. If you talk about work life balance as a 22 year old man, you're hanging around with the wrong people. That annoying feeling when you realize you've outgrown your social circle isn't loneliness. It's your ambition, finally speaking louder than your need to belong.

If you're 22 years old, like the world does not hate you. You're just not good at anything yet. If you seek to be good at something, then you have a tremendous deficit in experience and repetitions that people who are ahead of you or who have achieved what you want to achieve have over you. And so the only thing that you have, now you do have an advantage. You have a couple. Number one is that you will have more energy than they do, period.

And so your ability to work long hours, sleep less, and maintain high levels of focus while maintaining peak fluid intelligence is that it's, peak, use it. The second thing is that you have nothing to lose. And so the thing is, people always fear being the new entrant. But when you have nothing to lose or you have nothing going for you, it also means you have nothing to lose. And that means that every position on the board always has an advantage. Because anybody who has achieved this big thing that you have was also once a 22-year-old who had nothing going for them. And you're at zero. Right. You can't get worse than this. You have unlimited shots on goal. And so not taking the shot is like saying, life, I don't want to

scratch off this lottery ticket, but the lottery ticket is free. And so 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. You don't have to feel good about it. You just have to keep going. The feeling will pass, but you will remain. You are greater. than your feelings. Going to bed late and waking up early to work for a few days won't kill you. You're not going to burn out. You're doing what it takes. If you're one of those people that push

work-life balance, just remember the people who like working a lot don't care. I've never regretted trying harder and anything ever. Hard times last long, but an epic story feels like a lifetime. It just takes work. Loads and loads of work. Every time I try and dress it up or cut a corner, get brutally reminded, the work just needs doing. The work doesn't care who you are. It just cares that it gets done. 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 you. You have the audience. You have all of these other things that are behind you. But at 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. Those early days, that little trench winning in the weeds, oftentimes gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else. And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it, remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons. And so expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is.

Success is the only revenge. As you expand, they shrink into irrelevance. As you get louder, no one can hear them. You don't beat them. You cast a shadow so big, no one can see them to begin with. When people copy, they copy the wrong stuff because they don't know why it worked to begin with. And when it breaks, they don't know how to fix it because they didn't build it. So don't sweat it.

Copycats will always be behind. So I was 15 years old. So this was really early in my life. I had this teacher, so I'm freshman in high school, and I might have been 14, whatever the ages. And I'm walking through the hallway. And this teacher is like an admin of some kind walks out of his office. And he's like, he's like, son. And I was like, I'm like, you're in trouble. What am I going to do? He's like, you work out? And I was like, no. He's like, why not? I was like, I don't know how he's like, I'll show you. He's like, you got the jeans.

And so that teacher, Mr. Givens, ended up working out with me, every day in high school and showed me how to work out. And you probably saw on some level that I was some angsty teenager that felt angry about whatever. And I, during our workout sessions, would be like, this guy said this to me, like, you know, oh, or like, keep this, blah, whatever. And I was like, man, I'm going to come back at our 10 year reunion. And I was like, I'm going to show him. I was like, he's going to be working for me, like, blah, blah, right? And he's like, no, he's not. And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, let me just have. my moment. He's like, no, he's not. He's like, and you're not going to do that. Not if I have

anything to say about it when you come back for that 10-year reunion. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, because if you come back at a 10-year reunion and say, hey, John, like everything I have, look at me now. He's like, the guy's going to laugh and be like, you did all of this to try and prove me wrong. Man, I feel sorry for you. And when he said that, when he actually played out what my like revenge fantasy was in real life, I realized it looked. It looks stupid. Petty. Yeah.

I looked like the beta in the situation, right? And so he was like, the only thing that you can do is win so big that all of them constantly compare themselves to you. And then you'll forget they exist. And that's when he said, he's like, success is the only revenge. He's like, it's not the best revenge. He's like, it's the only one. There's no other revenge because everything else is petty.

Everything else does show that you were thinking about these people all day long, which means they win by default. He's like, all you can do is think about your goal and winning. He's like, in when you win, that's when you become so big that they shrink into irrelevance. You cast a shadow that no one even can see them behind you. 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. Have you heard the story of the pottery class? Oh, I feel like... All right, wow. This feels like total modern. Is this where someone comes in behind and then holds the thing in front? So there's a teacher

and he's got two classes that he teaches. And one class, he says, the only assignment for this whole semester is that you come back with a perfect clay pot. That's it. That's the assignment. the other class he says your objective is to make the most total quantity of clay pots and you'll be measured by how many pots you make and at the end of the quarter the pots that came from the team that had to just make sheer volume not only did they make more pots but the quality of all of their pots was better compared to the teams that only had to make one

and it just underlines the the biggest lesson that i've learned in my life which is that volume negates luck is that you can try to be lucky and pick the one perfect thing and try and make it. But if you don't want to try and be lucky, you can just do so much work that you will, you will brute force your way to figuring it out. Like if you do a thousand podcasts, you'll be pretty good at podcasts. Right. But if you try to say, okay, you're brand new. And all you have to do is make one perfect podcast.

The problem is that you don't have the perspective in which to make a judgment to say, what is good? because you have zero data to base anything off of. And so you're basing your idea of a perfect podcast on something that you've literally never done before. And so doing the volume gives you the perspective to then have the best podcast at number 1,000 or 1001. There's a Tim Cook internal memo that he sent.

There's a saying that if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. At Apple, I learn that is a total crock. You will work harder than you've ever thought possible, but the tools will feel light in your hands. So good. Chef's kiss. Chef's kiss Tim Cook.

Almost every successful person that I have ever encountered has gone through not a month or a year, but many years of doing work without reward where they have to do things that other people find boring and they have to sacrifice things that everyone finds interesting that most people want to do during that entire season of their life. basically sacrifice a season of other things that they would prefer to do to do stuff that they would not prefer to do because of the one thing they want most.

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. 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 won't. That's Sean Puri thing. The cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. Yeah. Like, if you look at it from a percentage of success rate, I've been wrong more times than I've been right. I have failed more times than I've succeeded.

But you always succeed more and are right more in the big ways than the people who've been right all along and are wrong. Trevor says this. my editor. He says, 99% right and 100% wrong. So like, they're, they're right 99% of the time. But they're wrong 100% because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end. Like, your family and friends will say that every girl that you ever date is not good enough. Except for the one time you find the girl that you're actually going to marry. And then it doesn't matter. Or like, this won't last. Or like this business idea. It's not going to work. And you might have nine failures. I felt my first nine businesses didn't really amount to anything. Nine. Nine. As in the

first one, spent time failed. Second one. This one will be different. Failed. Third one. This one. This is the one. And then seven, six more after that. I'm just painting this picture because like it's painful. Because the whole time everyone is telling you, I told you so. And they're right today. but not forever. And so I'm at her parents' house in an extra bedroom. I haven't lost everything. And my one Hail Mary play of this launch,

the money did not come through. And I was like, I think you should leave me. I think I'm a sinking ship right now. And I would respect you. Like, we're cool if you want to walk away. Like, we're good. Like, I won't think. less of you like I would walk away from you right now because this could this has a very highlight bit

of not going right and um she pulled my chin towards her and she was like I would sleep with you under a bridge if it came to that how did she change you she has brought out the absolute best of her like in just about every way like didn't think we're going to go here um she just she believed And I think that's what most guys want. True. At least for me, that's what I want. Or need it. There's no perfect way to live your 20s.

You either live them up and become an underskilled 30-year-old, or you work them up and become an underlived 30-year-old. You just have to figure out which you'd rather be, accept the trade-offs, and know that there are no do-overs. There are more people that I have met in my life who are dissatisfied. by their live it up 20s, then dissatisfied by their work it up 20s. Because most of the time in your 20s, you have no idea what you want. But knowing what you need to do to work and move ahead is fairly straightforward.

And so you can take the known and make progress on the one that you have high confidence that you can make progress on. And then along the way, gain perspective on what are the things that are actually important to in your life. And you may find out often that they're far fewer of those things than you really originally thought, because what you thought live them up in your 20s was, was actually your mom and your two homies who are both mediocre and you don't care about their opinion now when you're 30 anyways. But what a waste of a life it would have been to, quote, live up your mom's dream or your

friend's dreams to then only get to your 30s and realize you didn't live it up and you also didn't work it up. And now you have neither. Stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in. the only way to become more successful than most people is to be willing to do something most people aren't willing to do. Charlie Munger in one of his seminal speeches, he talks about how to guarantee failure,

how to make sure that you were a failure. And he inverts the concept of success. It's like, what could you do to make sure that you were a failure? It's like, well, you would definitely get involved in drugs, drinking. He says, was it, leverage liquor in women? That's, you know, Charlie's big one, right? But one of the ones that he has, I think he has seven in his, in his speech is consistency.

He's like, you have to make sure that you're inconsistent. He's like, because if you are consistent and you have none of the other attributes, he's like, you still might be successful. He's like, it's very tough for people who are consistent to not be successful. And he makes an especially pointed point about consistency because in my opinion,

it's one of the most difficult of the virtues for humans to do because we're so attracted to novelty. And so, like, I mean, I used to do with this with, you know, people on their diets all the time. I remember I ran gyms. And so someone would come in and I would always ask the question. So have you been following the meal plan? And then they would say, yes.

And so then I started changing the way I asked the question. So I'd say, out of the 21 meals that you were supposed to eat, how many of the 21 did you have exactly the way it was on the meal plan? And then they would be like, oh, I mean, at least half. And they would say it as though that was a mark of success. And right now the meal plan could be your content plan. it could be your, it could be your showing up to work on time plan. It could be the time that you want to put towards your sidehouse. It doesn't really matter.

But if there's one muscle that you can flex, it's learning to do the same thing over and over again. Like one of the values that we had at gym launch is do the boring work. Because boring is what makes you rich. No one cheers you for not drinking for a day, not smoking on a long drive or not overeating for one night. No single workout or meal is ever impressive on its own. The reason so few people understand success is

consistency never looks impressive in the moment, only at the end. For me, my thoughts about what I thought I was were actually really negative. But when I tried to think, okay, well, I can be patient if I act patient, even if I don't feel patient. And then that allowed me to start giving myself a stack of undeniable proof that I am who I wanted to be. And I don't believe in binary traits, meaning like he's patient or he's impatient or he's loyal or he's disloyal. The question is, how loyal are you? How honest are you? How patient are you? And by switching the character traits that I wanted to have into progressions or continuums allowed me to make progress on them simply by giving myself more proof or one more penny on the scale

that says, I'm a little bit more patient than I was. I'm a little bit more patient. To the point where I have so many pennies on the scale that I can say, I think I am pretty patient. Even though every time I put a penny on the scale, I don't want to put a penny on the scale. I want to get the thing to happen today. I want it to happen yesterday. because why is it taking so long? It didn't take that long for this person. I feel like I work harder than them and I feel like I'm better than them.

Why am I not doing that? But I put the penny on the scale. Well, ultimately, what is patience? Is patients feeling patient? Or is patient doing the thing that is patience? So Sam Harrison, his first conversation with Jocca Willink, about 10 years ago, they talk about how courage is an unfakable emotion.

It's such a good frame. You're going to love this. So he said, if you do the thing, in spite of being fearful of doing the things, thing, that is courage. And if you don't do the thing, even though you felt like doing the thing, that is cowardice. And I think that motivation and patience are exactly the same. If you're patient, despite not feeling patient, that is patience. That is how it works. And that was that realization that you just said was the reason for that quote, because it was me realizing that I can't actually

have these traits, even if I don't feel like I live those traits. Judge yourself, by your actions, not by your thoughts. I became significantly less disappointed in myself when I started judging myself only on the actions I took, not the thoughts I had. Layless says this and I love it, but that fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. And so it looks like this ocean that you're going to step into and drown. But as soon as you step into it, you realize it was not that deep at all, and you can keep walking through it. And I just love that visual because a lot of times when it's like we have this anxiety around this big decision we have to make if you actually take the step and realize that it's not death.

You're not going to drown immediately. There's plenty of other steps you can take from there, even if you get a little wet. You're going to lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work. You'll stress to make ends meet. You won't finish your to-do list. You'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for yours. This is what hard feels like, and that's okay.

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. Because in the early days, hard was, ooh, stop, this isn't good. 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. It's a selection effect.

And I think if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this, then it flips from being this thing that you're like, oh, poor me, to, oh, poor everyone else who's going to have to try. And I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance. An easy productivity hack, instead of spending time, getting in the mood to work, just start working, confront the work.

People think they need perfect conditions to start when in reality, starting is the perfect condition. What have you got to lose? Exactly. And that was it. And it was like, I have nothing to lose. And that was when, I think in the last podcast we talked about this where it's like, if everybody who's like at the bottom and feels like they have nothing going for them, reframe that as I have nothing.

going for me, which also means that I have nothing to lose by taking action, it makes you a much more dangerous person. And I think that was the flip that I've had repeatedly shown to me in my life that allowed me to take the step that I was afraid to take. Have I told you about the region beta paradox? You've seen that one? Okay, so this is interesting. So imagine that you had to go a mile or less. And if you did... A mile? A mile. Okay. If you had to travel a mile or less, you would walk it. And if you had to go more than a mile, you would drive it. So paradoxically, you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile.

If you follow that rule, the important insight here is that if you only take action, when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things. You get absolutely better returns at the top ends of achievement, because oftentimes assets pool to the winners. The problem is, to achieve the highest levels, you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hoped the achievements would get you. There comes a time when the hard work you have to do is learning that you can't work any hard or any longer, and that you have to change what got you here to what will get you to where you want to go. You can work to get anything you want, but you have to sacrifice the other things you want to keep it, and that's sometimes harder than the work. This is the entrepreneur life cycle until you learn how to break free from it.

And so there are six stages. You have stage one, which is uninformed optimism. This is where you see your friend or you see something online and it looks like they're making money or it looks like there's some opportunity and you think, oh my God, that sounds amazing. And you have optimism because it looks great, but it's uninformed because you have no idea what it entails. So then you dive in and you say, okay, I'm going to pursue this thing, whatever is it, baking cupcakes or I'm going to do lawn mowing or I'm going to do crypto. whatever. Second step is you get into it and you're like, oh my God, I don't know. There's so many things involved in this and this is significantly more complicated than I expected. So then you become an informed pessimist. You now know that it's hard or significantly harder than you expect. The third stage is you have your crisis of meaning or the value of despair. So you're continuing to do this stuff. It's continuing to not work and you keep working and it keeps not working. And so this is the step and this is the, the point of truth. And this is the cycle where the paths of the entrepreneurs split. And the vast majority of people take this next step, which is they then say, you know what, there's that thing

over there that my other friend's doing. Maybe I should do that instead. And so then they hop back to uninformed optimism, and then they go, boom, to inform pessimism, and they just go around and around and around, and they live the same six months for 20 straight years. Now, the other path, of from the value of despair is sticking with it. And so then you become an informed optimist. Because now you understand, you still understood all the bad stuff, but you also understand the good stuff and how to avoid the bad and maximize the good.

And then once you're there, you stick on that path long enough and you end up achieving what you originally thought was really easy and fast. The biggest risk to your future isn't your competition. It's the distractions you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren't. People delay doing things they don't like for longer than it takes to do them. I don't deserve to be that man, but I can still do the things that can create it.

And it also means that I have to go through the circumstances that that would create that man, which means that if I have unbelievable big dreams and big goals, then I have to go through hard times. It's like hate, the hard times are a requisite for success. And so if you're going through hard times right now, it means that you're on the path to success. And it's not that you're on the wrong path. It's the feeling of being on the right path. The bar for excellence has never been so low.

Most of your competition quits after the first sign of difficulty because they've never known what hard feels like. If it's hard for you, it's hard for everyone. And most people avoid hard things, which is why you can beat most people by just trying. This will be really good. This will be nasty for the people who are listening at home. So learning means same condition, new behavior. So phone rings, answer the phone, you say ABC. I say, cool, read this script instead that says, D-E-F.

Phone rings, same condition. You say, D-E-F, you have learned. Same condition, new behavior. Intelligence is rate of learning. It's speed. It's a measurement of speed. And so it means how many times do you need to be exposed to the same condition in order to change your behavior? If I teach someone something, that script, and then on the first try, they say DEF.

And someone else, it takes five tries for them to say DEF. They are not as intelligent as the first person. Here's why this is interesting. Every person who's listening to this right now has listened to a thousand podcasts, and they're in the exact same condition. And yet they have not changed their behavior, which means, one, they have not learned. And two, they are dumb. Every time you watch or you consume a piece of concert, you read a book, if you think, what behavior am I going to change as a result of this?

If the answer is nothing, you wasted your time and you pretended to be learning, but you were really entertaining yourself. Not to piss off the positive pollies in the room. But if you haven't gotten what you want, then you're not worthy of it, period. And that's okay. Now you can admit that you suck and improve. Better to know you're bad for a season than pretend you're good for us. lifetime. You're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good as you

think you are. You're not struggling from imposter syndrome. You're a student and pretending to be a teacher. No students say they feel like frauds for trying to learn. You're a fraud when you get up to teach the class and you've never done it. For me, I was more miserable trying to make everyone else happy than I am now with everyone else unhappy with me. I would rather be hated by everyone to like myself. When you're on your way up, everyone roots for you because you remind them of their dreams. When you're at the top, everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on them. And you have one, which is, for anyone who needs a reminder, no one is going to hate on you for doing worse than them. Everybody when I was sleeping on the

gym floor, right? Like, you know, I was the underdog and everyone, you know, my clients were all like, oh, good for you. You know, you're going after your dream. They'd see my blanket and my pillow in the corner of the gym and they knew I was sleeping there. And it was evident. You know, I lived there. I didn't have a shower. It didn't have a shower. I didn't have a shower. YMCA, I think a shower. And that everybody was like pro me and the people would come in, they sign up like, I'm going to, I'm going to support you, right? And then within nine months, I had hired people and I had a manager and I pulled up. And I remember I walked in the lobby and all the same, the same people were like, ah, boss man's here. Oh, you're not too good for us now, right?

And I remember being so jarred by the experience. And I was, like, you guys rooted for me. And I was like, and now I did what you said you were rooting for me to do. And that was when I realized that people want you to do well, but not better than them. 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. People only root for people who don't need it. Like the amount of times when I was on my lonely path, where I was too different from the friends that I had, but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with, that's when you want people to root for you. That's when you want people to support you. Once you've already won, people are like, he's amazing.

He's so good. But like, that's the time when you need it the least. And so you always have to be the person who roots for you before everybody else does. And it's usually a single clap in the auditorium for a very long period of time. It is a slow clap that's just you rooting for you. And that visual, I think, is one that you can kind of. of take because it is people struggle to do things alone and the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception which means that you are not with other

people and rather than fighting that or bemoaning it see it as an indicator that you're on the right path because if everyone else were cheering you on then it means you're not in the right place because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you want to be whenever I get to a low point where I think, why do I even bother? I just remind myself, this is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win. And this relates to another one, which is a reminder for the gladiators in the arena who feel beat up and scarred with no hope in sight. Building your business is hard.

Hard feel sh**. This is what hard feels like. And this is why most people can't do it, but you can. 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 in Parishing Square, his investment firm. 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, how do you, 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 the, 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, 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, it's almost negligible, right? But at 30 days, you're like,

okay, I moved this. And at 90, you're like, wow. But now, does this mean that we're, 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 able to be in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. 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 can be a great week. And then trying to expand those, basically 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? How little of a thing can make my month? And like, how crazy would it be if a year from now, I say, that was a great year. The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a good mood in the absence of things. to be in a good mood about you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy