The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Man That Makes Millionaires: Turn $100 to $10k With This Step By Step Formula & Build An Audience From 0 Followers! Alex Hormozi

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Are these simple things keeping you broke? Alex Hormozi reveals the biggest business lies you’ve been told and the formula to turn $1,000 into $100 million   Alex Hormozi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist and founder of Acquisition.com. He is the author of books such as ‘$100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff’ and $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No’. In this conversation, Alex and Steven discuss topics such as, how to escape a 9 to 5 life, the exact formula to triple your net worth, how to build an audience from 0 followers, and how to REALLY succeed with your business model.  00:00 Intro 02:13 What Would You Say to the Millions of Entrepreneurs That Follow You? 03:18 What Entrepreneurs Really Need 12:03 Is There a Framework for Knowing When to Quit? 16:05 Fear vs. Logic: How to Think Rationally 19:08 Your Decisions Are Driven by Self-Awareness 23:35 What to Do When You Quit Your Job: The 4 P's 24:42 Pain as a Driver 27:29 Mercenaries and Missionaries in Business 32:30 Just One P Will Make You Succeed! 35:47 What's the Cheat Code to Win at the Game of Attention? 39:33 The Winning Strategy for 2025 49:08 How Important Are People in the Business Journey? 56:46 First-Time Founders Need to Know This About Recruiting 59:09 A-Players Hire A-Players 01:01:40 The Ability to Have Hard Conversations Sooner 01:09:31 Be Kind, Not Nice, as a Manager 01:15:42 How to Not F*ck Up in the Hiring Process 01:23:40 How Do You Know They're Not BSing You in the Interview? 01:24:42 How to Hire Great People If You Don't Have the Money 01:27:56 The Pros and Cons of Experienced vs. Less Experienced Employees 01:29:58 The 4 R's 01:33:08 How to Be Prepared for the Rollercoaster of Building a Business 01:55:35 What Successful Companies Do 01:57:58 How to Double Your Business Growth 02:10:45 How to Help a Founder Who's About to Quit—They Can't Take It Anymore 02:16:40 The Old Innovators' Dilemma and How to Adapt 02:25:46 Your Rate of Experimentation Has to Be Higher Than Your Competitors! 02:29:03 Do Mentors Matter in Our Journey? 02:37:18 Parrots vs. Practitioners: The Best Way to Learn 02:42:16 The Founder Mode 02:46:44 Founders and the Competitors Around Them 02:49:07 Work-Life Balance 02:56:28 The Mantra That Helped Me 03:03:36 How to Drive Meaning from Your Life 03:09:43 What Is the Meaning of Life? Follow Alex:  Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/EBxnhGYpNQb  Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/wucQ8x0pNQb  YouTube: You can purchase Alex’s book, ‘$100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff’, here: https://amzn.to/413cH2K  Spotify: You can purchase Alex’s book, ‘$100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/WcEZGF3pNQb  Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes  My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook  You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb  Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you want to make more money, you might want to consider doing this. So number one is hold that thought for just a second, because the thing that comes before the man is this graph of yours. Oh God, this is the entrepreneur life cycle. And there are six stages. Now the vast majority of people get stuck on stage three.

I've made some of the biggest career mistakes at this point. And you end up living the same six months for 20 straight years, suffering, until you learn how to break free from it. I want to go through the whole thing. This is going to be awesome. Alex H I wanna go through the whole thing. This is gonna be awesome. Alex Hormozi is the master of business strategy, an artist in scaling companies into the millions

and a leading voice in how to craft your way to success. He's an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Whether you're starting out or wanna go from one million to 10 million, there are certain behaviors and actions that will increase the likelihood of success that we're going to go through. But here's the really hard truth

that a lot of people don't like talking about. Entrepreneurs must be willing to make impossible choices, have the courage to be willing to be wrong, have shame by failing at things in front of people whose opinions they care about. And that fear keeps people stuck in a job and a life they don't want for years. And that was my path.

I had a white collar job, condo, overlooking the city. Everything was according to plan. And I remember thinking like, I didn't want to be alive because I was so afraid. But once you get over the city, everything's according to plan. And I remember thinking like, I didn't want to be alive because I was so afraid. But once you get over the fear, it unleashes this whole new realm of possibility of being able to do what you want. And that is when you can learn

the real game of entrepreneurship, such as knowing that business ideas typically come from one of three Ps, and you only need one of those three. And then there's the four Rs for customer success, how to learn new skills quickly, how to stand out in a competitive market, the winning strategy for 2025 2025 and so much more. So where shall I start?

I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this,

that would mean the world to me. That is the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode. Alex, if someone's just clicked on this conversation and they're considering listening for the next couple of hours, based on everything that you do for the millions of entrepreneurs that follow you, that read your books, can you tell me exactly why you believe they should stay and listen and who should stay and listen? At acquisition.com, we scale businesses. The content that I generate, that we put out, conversations like this, helps people who

are going from zero to one, just getting off the ground, to helping people go from one million to 10 million, to helping the entrepreneurs going from 10 to 100 either get there or exit along the way. And there are frameworks that cross all three of those that I consider both deep and wide that help any business navigate whatever strategic decision is in front of them to get the highest potential return for their time. And so if you're listening or watching, then if one of those frameworks applies immediately to your business and allows you to pull five years forward in your career, I would say

that's a pretty good return on time. For the people that are at zero, what is it that they're typically coming to you to help them with? So if you were one of them, what is it that they want from Alex or Mozi? I think it's, there's what they think they want and what they actually need, which are two different things. And so I think what they think they want is some tactic that's going to immediately help them start a business.

What they typically actually need is the courage to be willing to be wrong and to be willing to have shame by failing at things in front of people whose opinions they care about. And I think that's... If I rewind the clock for me, it was probably one of the hardest things that I had to get over. And so I think that's why maybe my message resonates with a lot of people is because it was so hard for me to get over. And what's interesting is basically anybody who's listening, the harder it is for you

to break free of whatever kind of mental prison you've made for yourself, whether that's real or just in your head, the more compelling your story will be when you break through it because it will resonate with even more people. For the people that it was easy that their story doesn't have a lot of like, I was immediately an entrepreneur. Like I wasn't like that. I had a job when I was in high school.

I had a job immediately out of college. Some people were like, I was selling lemonade out of the back of my thing when I was 13. I didn't do any of that. School failed me. I actually was pretty good at school. I didn't have any of those issues. You know what I mean? And so I had a pretty clear career path.

And so I had what many would consider like I had a real opportunity cost. So I had a white collar job and I had a GMAT score above Harvard's MIDS score. And so I had a really clear path of what my life could look like in the next 20, 30 years. And it was fairly well defined. Like I'll go to Harvard or Stanford or one of the top business schools, and then I will either go back into management consulting, I'll go into investment banking, and then eventually end up in private equity. And that would be the path, right?

And then all the flowers would be set at my feet. And everyone would say, we approve of you. You're an excellent person. But when I saw the people who were 20 years ahead of me, I really didn't want their life. And then it started making me look at my life and I was like, I don't even know if I really want my life. And so the big decisions that I've made in my life, unfortunately, have almost always come at the doorstep of apparent death.

And I think maybe in some ways that makes me a coward for having needed death to make decisions. And so operationalizing that has been something that has helped me move faster to make decisions that I know I need to make but don't. And so the first big kind of like what felt like a death decision was I was a consultant, 22-ish years old. I had a paid for condo that I bought overlooking the city. And I remember thinking, I really hope I don't wake up tomorrow.

And I don't mean that to be melodramatic. For a period of time, I just always just like, hooped every night. I was like, I just really hope I don't wake up tomorrow. I just don't want to do this. And what was difficult about that was that at that time was when my father was most proud of me because I was doing everything that was according to plan. He could talk about his son who graduated in three years from Vanderbilt, had the good job, everything was following the plan.

And it was upon realizing that my ultimate expression of living out his dream was me feeling like I didn't want to be alive. And so in, and it took me time to get to that point to even articulate that, because obviously you never want to kind of like admit failure of like, I have really messed something up here. But I was living my life to win someone else's game. And when I realized that, I realized that one of our dreams had to die, either his or mine.

And when I realized that his dream must die in order for mine to live was a statement that I kind of crystallized when I was at that point in my life. Like I had to keep repeating that, like his dream has to die in order for mine to live. And so to put this in perspective of like how afraid of my father's judgment I was, I left the state and drove across the country halfway through before calling him to tell him that I was gone. And so I bring this up because I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but I'm saying that if

you feel a lot of pressure, I get it. Like I tried to leave the job that I was at to pursue just literally anything that wasn't that. I wanted to start a business at some point. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I just knew that what I was doing was not the path I wanted to be on. And everybody around me wanted me to be on that path. And so I went to go be like, hey, I'm thinking about doing something else.

And it would always be that, ah, later, later, like everything's good, later. And I remember when I called my dad and I told him that. He said, understand, why don't you come home? Come home. Well, I didn't tell him that I was gone yet. I said, hey, I want to go pursue this fitness thing. He said, cool, come over for lunch. We'll talk about it.

And I was like, I'm already gone. And then obviously his tone changed a lot. And our relationship struggled for years after that. And I also bring that up because sometimes there's this illusion that you get on the Oscar stage or whatever it is and you're like, hey, I just want to thank my mom, my dad, my friends for always supporting me. And I can't say that. And I wish I could.

And you might not be able to say that either. And I also don't think that's a reason not to do it. And so we did struggle for years after that to kind of like, because I was basically living as what was once his prodigal son goes and takes a minimum wage job as a personal trainer at a gym, like cleaning floors and stuff to learn, just to learn the gym business. But that was ultimately like how I broke free, literally physically leaving the area and mentally. But I think that I had to accept that there was a timeline where my father would never

talk to me again, and I had to be okay with that to pursue what I wanted. And I think that when you asked the original question, what are the people from zero to one really looking for, I read tons of business books at that time. But I couldn't use any of them because I was so afraid. And what's crazy is that, like, I think about about it now in retrospect and it's like, it's crazy how large the perceived monsters can appear. And Leila has this quote that I love, but it's, fear is a mile wide and inch deep. And so you look at it, it looks like this ocean.

And then you take the first step and you realize you don't drown because it's like, oh, there's ground underneath of this, right? There's other people who are more on my path. And the friends you lose, you gain new friends. And so that fear was the hardest decision that I've had to overcome in my entrepreneurial career. And I think of all the split paths in my life, that was the one that if I had many timelines or many universes that existed, that was probably the one that is the most likely

that I would not have parted from. So I think in like 90% of universes that Alex Ramosy exists, I'm just a consultant somewhere. And so I would encourage you if you do feel that, you're not gonna die. Like, you won't die. And you might just live. It's so interesting because

I think everything you've said is just absolutely spot on, but you're right in the way you say that if you'd asked an audience member listening now why they haven't started yet, they wouldn't say fear. They would say, I haven't got the X, I haven't got the Y. But actually it is such an emotional thing, and we don't talk about that enough because uncertainty is, humans seem to be allergic to uncertainty and they'd rather the certain misery of their current situation typically than uncertainty. And I think, and I used what I consider a very non-palatable word of coward purposefully because no one wants to say they're afraid because if you say you're afraid then it means

you're a coward. And I think that it only means you're a coward if you allow that fear to change your behavior in an aversive way, as in not towards what you want. And so the inverse of that, many people have heard it, courage is not acting without fear, but despite fear. And I think that when you act, when you allow fear to change your behavior the wrong way, that is when you can give yourself that title of coward. And I think that that is a title that I have feared my whole life.

And that label is almost, I'm more afraid of that label than the label of failure. I'd rather be a failure than a coward. Is there a framework for knowing when to quit? So I think there's like the math behind it. And the math I think is pretty straightforward. So like, when do you quit your business? I like you've saved up three to six months of personal savings, number one. Number two is that you have started something because nowadays in the digital age, you can

begin a business on the side that can generate income. And that income in the small amount of time that you're not working replaces or at least matches the existing income you have from your current job. And you've been able to do that or demonstrate that income for like three to six months. If you do that, that's a very like math way of approaching it. That also is basically never the reason that people aren't quitting their job. That's a really set, like I have backlog,

I've matched my current income with my part-time work. And if I just put my full-time work, I would probably make more. Very reasonable, but never actually the reason that people don't do it. I was thinking about the two sort of reasons why someone might quit something or feel like they want to quit. And one of them is clearly because it's hard. And that's obviously not reason

enough to quit. And then there's another one which you were speaking to there, which is, it's not moving me towards a meaningful goal, irrespective of how hard it is. Like a marathon, you're raising money for a charity you care about. It's hard, but you don't quit. And then there's maybe if you're running a marathon for no apparent reason, you know, there was no charity, there was no one watching, there was no like fitness benefit, then that's a good, I guess, moment to consider quitting. My story mimics yours in a way that I didn't realize. I didn't realize you went through a similar thing in terms of the parents disownorship.

No real great option to flee to, but feeling like the current path that would have led me to be, I don't know, a business management student was significantly worse on balance than taking the risk. But I think maybe a point of distinction is it didn't, I was so naive that it didn't feel like a risk. Yeah. So what's really interesting about that is the guarantee. And so a lot of times we don't, we don't look at what I call the don't, which is like the alternate path. And so if I had played out my existing path, I had a guarantee of outcome I didn't want.

It was just at a delay. Whereas here, there's a chance that I can make it. And so one of the final kind of frameworks for making the decision was guarantee bad, chance at good. And I was like, well, I might as well take a chance. And I strongly encourage thinking about playing it out. And so what I mean by that is, like, I think fear exists in the vague, not in the specific. And so when you say, I'm going to quit my job, and then what if this doesn't work?

I'm going to failure, tons of fear. If I say, I'm going to quit my job, and then I'm going to try and start a business, and if the business doesn't work, I'll probably have a compelling story that I could tell for business school if I wanted to, to show that I had some entrepreneurial slant. In the meantime, I could use that experience plus my job experience to probably get another or maybe even better job in the meantime and match or supersede my existing income. And the actual loss would be maybe the savings that I had saved up. But if I'm younger or I haven't made as much money as I want, then that's never been the

amount of money that would be material anyways on the grand scheme of what I would like to make. And in terms of living situation, I will, worst case, go back to my parents' house with my tail between my legs or sleep at a friend's couch because I have enough people that would be willing to put me up in a garage if I had to. And so it's like, OK. So my actual worst case scenario is just like, I have a cool story and maybe some shame

that is self-inflicted, because it's not like no one else cares really. But it's self-inflicted shame and maybe a detour or a different story that I have to tell later on in my career. Not as much fear there, right? But like the first one, like I'll fail, everyone will hate me and I'll die. The first one sounded like it was written by your like amygdala But like the first one, like, I'll fail, everyone will hate me, and I'll die.

The first one sounded like it was written by your like amygdala. And the second one was pure like prefrontal cortex. It was all logic. And I'm wondering, you know, as you're going into that decision, obviously, fear is going to lead it. So of course, you're going to go for option one, where you just think about the downside. Maybe there's a practice that allows you to get into your prefrontal cortex into logic. I think that's actually so I think you nailed it and said it way better than I did. But I think that's, I think going from vague to specific basically disengages your amygdala because it can't reason the logic chain of causation and causality of what's going to

happen next in a chain of events. And so when you get into the specific of it, all of a sudden you're like, okay, I'm not going to be homeless and then shamed and die. I might live in inferior living conditions for a short period, which by the way, when you're later on in your life, you'll look back and think of as the good old days because I can't believe I was couch surfing. I was pursuing my dreams. It's only like in the moment that it feels bad. When you look back, like even I find this hilarious, like how long after you do something embarrassing

is it funny? Right, like at some point for almost all of us with enough time, the shameful experience becomes funny. And so if it is going to become funny eventually, it might as well become funny now. And so it's just like pulling the time horizon up. But all of that's prefrontal cortex decision making. And so no, but I think that nailed it because when I thought about this decision, obviously

I had my very emotional statement around like his dream has to die for mine to live. Yes. Also, logic downside risk here. I'll have a story and I can always get my job back. Okay. And if I can't get that job back, I'll have other ones that will be available. Fine. And if I have a downgrading and some people think that I'm not as successful, then OK.

I'll not stop, though. And so I think that that demystifies a lot of the fears. I think that applies not just for entrepreneurial fears. I think it applies for any fear. Like, I can't tell this person this bad news. All right. Let's play it out. I say something and then they're going to kill me?

Probably not. So what's going to happen? I'll say these words and then they'll flip the table, they'll flick me off, they'll maybe just feel hurt and maybe they'll cry, maybe they'll shout. Okay, okay. If they shouted at me, what would I do? And you just kind of play it out and you're like, okay, I think I have like most of these conditions prepared for. And then all of a sudden you can like have those things. What you also said is that in the face of guaranteed misery, any option is better. Yeah, it's real. You get to live once.

Yeah. So like, why would guaranteed misery be better than any available option? It's delay discounting. What's crazy is delay discounting happens both ways. So like you set your alarm for 5 a.m. at night and you're like, I'm going to wake up at 5. But that's because you're delaying the pain of waking up. And when it's immediate, when I have to quit the job, like I'll quit my job tomorrow for 20 years.

And so it's just like we delay the fact that we're going to be miserable into the present to it like, like we massively discount what a whole lifetime of misery would be. Amen. When you're thinking about what to pursue, so say you've left the job, you've quit the thing, when you're thinking about what to pursue, how much of that is a decision derived from self-awareness? Because, you know, someone will look at you now and be like, oh, no, Alex did this, so I'm going to start a acquisition.com, you know, or they'll say, I saw Steve Jobs did that thing with the computers, I'm going to start Apple. Or Elon, I'm going to do the spaceships. How much do you have to know thyself to know what to pursue?

I mean, that's a really good question. So there's a tweet that I love by Andrew Wilkinson, which is, every entrepreneur ever, colon, here's the winning number for my lottery ticket. And so it's like every entrepreneur will say, here's the winning lottery ticket, but it's like that game already, that drawing already happened. OK, yeah. Right. And so like you can't cash that ticket in, it's already done.

And so people say the word first principles, no one really knows what it means. I mean, some people do, but I think far more people say it than know what it means. And so basically, there are foundational truths of business that exist, and the conditions of the environment will change. And so you have to apply those truths to whatever the current condition is. And so that's what I try and tease out with the books and the stuff that I put out in content. But at the end of the day, you have an input of time, like zooming all the way out.

Assuming that your goal is to make money, and this is just a purely economic business goal, then you have time, which is the primary currency that you trade it, and you make dollars over a period of time. And so I tend to reject the idea of like never trade time for dollars or anything like that because everyone trades time for dollars. It's just some of us are more efficient at it than others. But even exchanges that occur that just are not denominated in time still occur over time. And so you have this foundational unit of time which you're going to give in.

What we're seeking is the highest return on that time. And so, within a business context, there's kind of three levels of things that have to occur in a business. You have to attract attention, you have to convert attention, and then you have to deliver something for that attention. And in each of those things, you want as much leverage as possible. So you want as little time as possible required to get the most output. And so I have built acquisition.com on basically two primary theses, which are in the logo,

which is this is a fulcrum for leverage. For people that can't see it's like a triangle. Yeah. So it's like a triangle or the Illuminati because that always gets brought up. So we've got the fulcrum for leverage and then inside of it, you have supply and demand. And I see those are the two foundational principles of business. Yeah, right. So we've got the fulcrum for leverage, and then inside of it, you have supply and demand. And I see those are the two foundational principles of business, which is you need supply and demand to have a business and then leverage to get as much out of it as you possibly can. And so when you're looking at the assets that you have, assets can also be skills, resources,

what you have available to you. Now, if you have nothing, then all you have is your brain, your hands, and the time that you have that you can put towards learning something, which is why I'm a big fan of skill acquisition as one of the primary things that you can do is educating yourself. And not formally educating, but informally or alternatively educating yourself on super tactical things. Once you get over the fear, then you start asking, okay, how do I let people know about my stuff? And what do I let people know about my stuff?

And what do I let them know? And so you have to have something to sell, which is the offer. And ideally, you want the offer to have as much leverage as possible. So if you sold software or you sold media, those are things that you can cut once, sell a thousand times. If you have a conversion mechanism, it's like you can have it be automated like a checkout page or some sort of video Sales letter or something like that where people just buy without a phone salesperson if you add a phone salesperson

There's less leverage not say this wrong, but you want to you want to have the highest leverage opportunity and then from a from the deliverability expect perspective I kind of talked about deliverability first but from the advertising perspective, if you reach out to people one on one, that's lower leverage than being able to make one piece of content that a million people see. And so over time, you go from low leverage to high leverage, where you have the same inputs, but you just get significantly more for your output.

And that fundamentally is like, if we're reasoning out from first principles, how do I get the said differently, the question someone I think is really asking is how do I get the most for what I put in? And you have to reason within your current context of your skills and your resources and your assets in order to derive that solution for you. So if someone walks up to you in the street and they say, Alex, what idea should I pursue? Just quit my job. Yeah, right. So I would say business ideas typically come from one of three P's. So it comes from a pain that you're currently experiencing, a past profession, so the thing

that you just quit or some of the jobs that you just quit, or passion. So something that you're inherently interested in that you would spend your time doing anyways, some skill that you learned while you were in the workforce, which by the way is one of the most proven ways of making money because the economy has already showed you that people are willing to exchange money for that specific job. And so in the world of gig economies and solopreneurs, every business can be dismantled into just jobs being done. And all of those jobs can be fractionalized.

So anybody like we look at any business, you've got sales, you've got marketing, you've got customer success, you've got customer support if you want to differentiate that. You've got product, you've got marketing, you've got customer success, you've got customer support if you want to differentiate that. You've got product, you've got design, you've got web pages. There's so many different components to a business. You just need to learn one of them. And then it's like, boom, you have a skill that you can trade for money that you don't have anybody else to report to. And then pain is usually, I think, in some ways, sometimes one of the biggest drivers is like, you had an eating allergy,

and you couldn't find pancakes that dealt with your specific eating allergy. And you bet that there's a decent amount of other people with that allergy that also like pancakes. And so then you make pancakes that are delicious and amazing, that also cater to people with that food allergy, and then all of a sudden, like, you have a business based on pain. And why does that matter? What pain pop? What leverage and advantage does it give you for the next five years? I think that deep knowledge of the prospect is

Paramount are very important for creating exceptional products and you can either do that by doing a ton and ton of research or by being the prospect and there's a certain amount of like visceral feel that you'll know. Like if someone wants to make a nose product for breathing, I have tried every product since I was in eighth grade. So it's been 20 plus years, 30, whatever, a lot of years, that since then, and I've tried everything. And so I know the pros and cons of every product that exists on the market.

And I can tell, because it's not like, oh, I tried it for a day. It's like pros and cons of every product that exists in the market. And it's not like, oh, I tried it for a day. It's like, I'll try things for a month at a time. And so I have so much time exposure to this problem that I have a lot of nuance in my opinion on what's wrong with the solutions. So I can formulate a way better hypothesis on how to fix it. And that hypothesis will be, for an investor, so much more compelling because you lead with a story as opposed to logic.

I met the guy who invested in Regal Cinemas, which is probably the biggest chain in the US. And it was when there was a guy who had just won theater. And it became an obvious COVID has disrupted that business. But for 20 years or whatever, they crushed. And he said, it was so weird to say that, oh, cinemas are going to make a comeback because they've kind of been on a downturn or something like that during the time that he was making the investment.

And he said, the reason I decided to invest in it was because this guy knew everything about the business down to how much the cost of kernel popcorn was. And he just knew it so like the back of his hand that he was like, this guy can't fail. He just knows too much about this business to not have it work. And so he invested in, making gazillion dollars and so but I think that that Deep understanding and if you look at all of these the passion things You'll have deep understanding because you're spending all of your discretionary time pursuing this passion The pain you have a deep understanding of the of the problem and the prospects going through it because you've experienced it probably for years

Now the professional one I would say is a bit of a shortcut Because if you're quitting the job because you've experienced it probably for years. Now, the professional one, I would say, is a bit of a shortcut. Because if you're quitting the job because you don't like it, and then you say, I'm now going to do this for myself, well, you're OK. I mean, well, the one proven point about that is that that one is proven to work from an economic perspective. You will be able to make money doing that because you already have made money doing it. These other two are less proven, but sometimes have a significantly more upside.

When you were talking about the breathing example with your nose, it's funny because if you had sat down and said to me, Steve, I've made these like breathing nose strips, they are better, they're 20% more durable, they expand your nostrils by 20%. It is multiples less compelling than you telling me that story you just said about being a kid, having breathing problems, trying to solve this problem for yourself. And it's funny because that story you told versus the sort of rational logical approach or the benefits approach is your marketing campaign for the next five years on TikTok and Instagram.

It's I had a problem, I solved it, I tried everything and solved it for myself. There's almost like nothing more compelling and believable. We see that in Dragon's Den. It will be sat there listening to these pictures all day. Then someone will come in and say, I had ADHD. I tried energy products. They all made me crash. So I went out and solved this problem for myself.

And we're on edge because we almost can't argue with it at that point. So Bezos has this great framework where he talks about missionaries and mercenaries And so it's kind of like you have the guy who says okay I looked at market trends and this is a growing category and you know I surveyed people and this was the you know, the the result that came back And so I believe that if we time this product, right at this point in the market will achieve huge you know a mass adoption blah blah blah and It's like lodging your way through.

And to be fair, some people do make it work. But the missionaries are the ones that end up making the most money because they do it for sure for the money because the business has to have some economic engine behind it, but really because they viscerally experience this problem and don't want anyone else to deal with that problem either. And so if I were to tell that story, like you were saying, when I was in eighth grade was the first year that I started really noticing I couldn't breathe at night. And so I learned how to fall asleep with my hand on my face like this so that my nostril

would, so I could fall asleep and my hand would stay. There's no actually other, because you can't hold it because you fall asleep, right? And so if I fall asleep with my hand like this, like I'm on the cap, and I fall asleep like that, it keeps my nostril open. And I can fall asleep and it doesn't move. And so that's how I learned how to sleep for years before founding like just like simple nasal strips and things like that. But there's tons of problems with those solutions that exist right now that I won't get into.

But maybe someday I'll make a nasal product. I think, I mean, he literally just delivered. Yeah, I can tell you, if you put every product in front of me that exists right now, I can tell you what's wrong with it. Because I've tried literally all of them. I'm pretty obsessive. And so I've tried all of them. You're missing an opportunity here.

I've tried the ones from Europe. I've tried the ones, not just US. I've tried every product that exists on Amazon. I've tried all the ones from foreign countries. Every fan or follower who sends me a product that is a nasal company that's new, I will try the product. I still do. And there has yet to be one that has truly solved it.

I mean, you should. I mean, no. I think in some ways, so this is actually a really good meta concept here, which is that if you want to be compelling, a demonstration or a model is always more compelling than anything else. And so me even going through that entire narrative, right, is taking everyone else who's been listening to this on some journey, it's like if you want to make a compelling pitch for a business, it's like, we pretty

much just kind of went through one. And so that's really what it comes down to. It's like, well, what do I do with my business? It's like, create your narrative of why you're even doing this. And if you can explain to somebody why they should care about this problem, or more specifically, why you care about this problem, I'll tell you this. More investors will like, I might be like, I don't care about kitchen utensils, but this girl certainly does.

And I'm sure there's other women who do too. And what everyone wants to see is obsession. And unfortunately, in like some of the world, I know more in the UK than the US now, like that kind of perspective of like just being all in obsessed with stuff has almost been like bastard or like, you know been chastised and I but the people who are obsessed with the ones who change the world at least change their world and And I think that So a very close friend of mine did all the Olympic teams

nutrition and supplementation stuff for a country overseas and He said, you know the difference between champions and everyone else? And I was like, what? And he said, everyone always looks at them and says, what do champions have that I don't have? And he said, they have it backwards. He said, it's what do champions not have that I have? It's what do they lack?

And it's an off button. They just don't stop. And so in dealing with the gold medals, he's what do they lack? And it's an off button. They just don't stop. And so in dealing with the gold medal, he's like, they just never stop. They just can't stop. Everything in their life is geared towards one goal. And so finding that thing, and they approach everything in their life that way. And I think that that level of obsession around like everything that you touch on a daily basis is required for really getting to where you want to go.

So interesting because as we spoke there about the reason why the story was so much more compelling, it was back to the amygdala. It was back to emotion. Right. And it's funny because we said a second ago that when someone's thinking about quitting a job, they're like so in their amygdala humans run mostly on their amygdala So when we think about pitching we should really be aiming at the same part of the brain Which is what you did when you showed me that you were sleeping as a kid with your hand stretching across your face

I immediately felt sorry for you. It was empathy and I immediately believed that if anyone's gonna solve this problem It is this fucking guy who's been through that pain. I've had two surgeries both of them didn't really work Like I mean like I've got the story. My girlfriend's the same. What? Oh, really? Yeah. Two surgeries, but she's coming up to her third one now. We've tried all the nose strips. I saw you wearing one. I bought that one for her.

And so there's a lot of people watching right now. And there's something going on with these bloody fucking noses. We're doing something. I feel like I may have popularized some of the national stuff. Yeah Making it cool Pain profession passion. Yeah, ideally you have all three If you have all three then you're I mean my god You're set like if you if basically pain created an obsession and for some reason you also were doing something like that in your work

Like I feel like the likelihood that you don't succeed is almost nothing You only need one of those three. Just pick one. If you just had one pain that you had that you wanted to overcome, or one passion that you were just inherently interested in. Because sometimes passion is nothing. You might be really into model cars.

It's OK. Well, there's a lot of businesses that you can build around model cars. It's like you can manufacture model cars. You can have services around model cars, making them faster, because some people race model cars. You can be a collector and start flipping model cars. You can just make media around how to build them

and then have a media company around it. There's so many different components of any obsession or interest that you can make. I was talking to, on one of the future episodes of Mosey Tank that's coming out, we have a guy who's he loves Dungeons and Dragons. So he's an IT guy and just loves Dungeons and Dragons. And he was like, I just want this to make enough money that I don't have to do IT anymore.

But it was so pure. You know what I mean? And so I was like, we're going to help you do this. And so we kind of walked through the business plan for it. Is he going to be a billionaire? No. But I also don't think that's his goal. And so I think being really clear on what you want is important.

So if you're like, I want to be the richest person in the world, I think it's a terrible goal, but if you want that, great. Well, you have to have a multi-trillion dollar idea because by the time that occurs, there's already multi-trillion dollar companies now. So you've got to be looking at like a trillion dollar opportunity. And so believe it or not, basically, the bigger the goal, the narrower the scope of the paths to get there. If you're like, I want to make $10 million, I'm like, you can literally do that in almost

any business. You want to make $100 million, probably still almost any business you can do it. On a long enough time horizon, you can do it. A trillion or deca trillion, it's going to be some sort of tech, it's probably going to have some sort of AI. And so you get basically the bigger the goal is is the narrower the scope of how to get there. But the vast majority of people are like, I want to be the richest man in the world just because they don't know how to really think through it and be like, all right, well,

after like 100, there's really nothing you can't do, except buy more big things. But like in terms of your actual consumption, maybe even 20 is like, you can only eat at restaurants that go so expensive, you can only stay at the best hotels, you can only drive the nicest cars, you can only eat at restaurants that go so expensive. You can only stay at the best hotels. You can only drive the nicest cars. You can do that with about 25 million. What do you think the cheat code is then? So I've got my idea. What do you think the cheat code is in 2025 to win at the game of attention?

Like there's got to be some new rules here because we've got AI, we've got new platforms, we've got new media. You know, I'm, I'll give you a hypothetical business idea. I'm going to be a personal trainer. OK. And I picked that because everyone can do it. And it's a saturated industry. If I'm a personal trainer in the 2025,

how should I be thinking about building attention? So I'll tell you what I wouldn't do first, which is I don't think I try and outscience the science people. Because unless you have some PhD, there is a PhD guy who's already jacked, who's making content. And so he's more knowledgeable and more jacked than you. So you're not going to win there. And so I think in the game of attention, it's trying to find what is unique.

And so how do you, quote, stand out when everyone's loud? And this is going to sound trite, but your fingerprint is unique, literally from a biological perspective. But so is your life and your experiences. And so there's real alpha or benefit to be had above normal level of effort by leaning into you. And so what makes every person unique is what makes their content unique. And so trying to be like, oh, I want to make content like Alex is probably not the best

way to do it, because you're not going to beat me at being me. But you'll beat me at being you. And so it's basically your flavor of media. So like for me, it's like, you know, what is my brand to model this? It's like, well, I have elements of philosophy that are in my brand. Well, do I need that? No, but that's like kind of me. I obviously talk a ton about business, marketing, and sales promotion, conversion.

Those are all things that I spend a lot of time thinking about, and so a lot of my content is about that. Fitness is a component of my life. And so there's light sprinkling of fitness in my content. Also I come from a background of fitness with the gym launch and the companies that I owned before that. And so that would make sense that, and my wife, Leila, said that sprinkled in.

And so those are basically the components of my life. And so that's what kind of shines through in my content. I consume a ton of comedy, and so sometimes you'll see some dry humor and dark humor that shines through, but that's me. Now you have all of those little buckets of you, and not only are those buckets unique, but also the proportions of those buckets

will be different. And so maybe your philosophy is way bigger, or maybe fitness part is way bigger. But I think what makes the truly unique personal trainer fitness brand is leaning into people being interested in you for being you. And then being like, by the way, I have fitness stuff if you want to buy it from me. And I think the key part is the vast majority of products and services are commoditized. You're probably not gonna be significantly better

than other trainers, just being real. You probably aren't. But you will be different than them. And we wanna lean on, I wanna buy from somebody, and so I might as well buy from her, or I might as well buy it from him. So you're taking basically the audience that would buy from anyone, but your brand premium gets them to want to buy it from you. We think about Prime, for example, with the drink company.

It's a drink that there's other products that already exist in the marketplace that satisfy the same thing as Prime. But if you are agnostic to that brand and you have brand affinity with that creator, then you're like, well, then if I have two things that are basically equal and I just like this guy better, I'm just going to, as long as the prices are comparable, I'll just vote with my dollars here. And so I think that if you're a personal trainer in 2025, it's going to be long term, it's going to be building the content. Short term, it's going to be outreach to people that you know, and making a compelling offer to get people

to try to work with you. This overarching point you said there about being yourself, as I was thinking about it, I was thinking, gosh, do you know what? The thing that all of my favorite creators and the really successful creators have in common is they all have, I and I use these words intentionally, the courage to be themselves.

Because I'll tell you what, when I was starting out as a content creator, and I look back, I was showing one of my team members the other day the things I used to post, it was like everything happens for a reason. It was cringe, cliche fluff. And it took me several years to almost relax into just realizing that the game here was to get to the point where I could be myself on the internet. And actually, that was the most high value because of what you said, it's the unique

as part of me. But the courage to be yourself. And it's the winning strategy for 2025. And it's I think, it's leaning into it. And the thing is, is that everything in you wants to not do that. I'm not really sure why. But I was having a conversation with Leila, I want to say two nights ago or three nights ago.

I got a bunch of flack for some X-posts that I made. And she just looked at me and she was like, never dilute yourself. Because I was like, maybe I shouldn't talk about this stuff. Maybe I should just like, I'll just lean off. And she was like, never dilute yourself. There are so many more people who need that message than people who are hating that message. And she was like, and if you're actually going to make a difference in a lot of people's lives, there's going to be an equal and opposing force of people who want to reject that.

And she's like, this just comes with the territory of like how big of an impact you want to have. And it was just such a great, you know, wife talking to husband, you know, conversation that I guess for me at the end of the day, I'm like, as long as she thinks I'm cool, like, you know, I'll keep doing it. But yeah, it was just because the diluted down version all of a sudden becomes everyone else's stuff. Well, you said a second ago, you're not sure why that is. But by very definition of it being unique, that means that there is no blueprint. There is no person that's come

before you and proven that it works. So the courage of being yourself, there's only one Stephen Bartlett. So if I'm truly yourself, there's only one Stephen Bartlett. So if I'm truly myself, it's never been done before. That means that the risks are unknown. The upsides also unknown. But so again, going back to our hate of uncertainty, it makes much more sense for me to try and copy you, because I can see a blueprint there,

than to run the risk of being yourself. And you are someone, I have to say, who is running the risk of being yourself. And actually, as someone who's observing you, now I know who you are someone, I have to say, who is running the risk of being yourself. And actually as someone who's observing you, now I know who you are and I now know who you're not. And it's important for me as someone that follows your work that actually I see consistency because I've established Alex and Moses values. And anything that diverts from that is actually less valuable because as you say, it's more

like everyone else and the things I've had before. But it's also, it else and the things I've had before but it's also it Wouldn't feel true anymore. Yeah, and And this is something that even as a creator myself I have to fall back on is my audience know who I am now For better or for worse. Yeah You know, it's really interesting is navigating the gray and so there are Contradictory ideals and this is what I kind of come back to when I'm when I'm like worried about these types of things navigating the gray. And so there are contradictory ideals. And this is what I kind of come back to when I'm like worried about these types of things,

which is like, you've got mercy and you've got justice. They're somehow opposed and they are both ideals. So how can we believe in justice and also believe in mercy at the same time? And so, and I mean, there's I mean, you can have variety and consistency. There's tons of examples of this, right? And so we have these diametrically opposed ideals, which means that if you ever say, by the way, I'm a little bit more of a justice guy. I understand they had a hard time, but at some point you got to take your own personal

accountability. So no, you're not going to get out of the speeding ticket. You're going to get, that's what's just. On the other hand, it's like, hey, single mom gets pulled over for driving too fast. You know what? Maybe we let her off today. Both of those stories, fair. But you're going to get attacked by the other side that has an ideal that all humans try to strive for. And it will feel terrible because they are right.

And so what? And so I think that understanding that that conflict will always exist between two apparent ideals that, and this is foundationally what politics is, right? Is that there are two apparent ideals that all of us, I would say, 99% of people would say, justice is good, mercy is good, variety is good, consistency is good, right? Respecting justice is good, mercy is good. Variety is good, consistency is good.

Respecting values is good, so is innovating and doing new things. How can we have both of these contradictory ideas and at the same time, like navigate that without conflict? You can't because how much becomes the question. And so I think that your thumbprint as a creator is that when someone presents a scenario and says, does Alex choose mercy or justice in this scenario, that your audience says, gets it right. And so I think about branding in general as basically a mosaic that you get to create.

And so like each piece of content is a little tile that has a single color on it. And if you just see one piece of short content of Stephen Bartlett, you don't really have an idea who Stephen Bartlett is. But if you see a thousand of them, all of a sudden you zoom out and you get to see the whole picture. And I think that the colors that are in those mosaics and the proportion of how many yellows,

how many reds, how many greens, and where are they is what ultimately creates the brand. And so because people want to try and turn this into, OK, so I make one post about family, I make one post about finances, I make one post about whatever, right? It's like, I don't think that's how it works. I think you just be you, and then those proportions will naturally shake out. And also, over time, you will change. And so it also makes sense that your brand will change. And that was also another thing that I had to reconcile, which is like, wait, I don't

know if I agree as much with some of the things that I said 10 years ago. Because the thing is in the digital world, like my first podcast was 2017, July of 2017. Episode 8 is called Stop Branding. I have changed my views on branding, to be clear. But that first podcast is 90 days from when I lost everything. And so the entire Hermosy journey, if you want to call that, from zero to billion, is actually documented 90 days from zero. It's all there.

And so you can see how my views on business have changed and what I was thinking about at every portion of my life. And so I had to just be okay with the idea that I will change my mind because I will get new information. Because let's take the alternative stance. If I get new information, do I just keep parroting what you did before? This is also an issue with politics. But I just said, he's flippy floppy.

It's like, so they're not allowed to learn? Yeah. You've been in politics 20 years. You haven't learned anything? Like no stances change? Like I feel like we should be able to do that. And obviously brands don't work that way. So it has to be gradual over time, which I think if you were always you at all times,

it will be gradual over time. Yeah. I don't know. I think a lot of the time we end up over focusing on unreasonable people, which is a war we can never win anyway. Yeah. Because you say that to me, I think... I think it was like I had this guy, the therapist in my podcast,

who I then spoke to after the podcast, and he basically broke it down to me. He was like, there's 20% of people that just absolutely love everything you will ever do. Like, you could say anything, you change them, they're fucking... They're just super fans. There's 80% of people that are actually like... He said there's 60% of people that are really reasonable.

They don't speak. They just watch, they're like reasonable. The silent majority. And then there's 20% of people with no matter what the fuck you do, they're gonna be... This is like, don't spend your life focusing on the 20%. The quiet majority, the 60%, they don't tweet, they just chill. And then the 20%, they're your evangelists. But I find myself falling into the trap of... So what's interesting about the 20% is that like, I was thinking about this today, that you were... So no matter who you are, you're going to be disliked, period.

Because no one's liked by everyone. So we just have to like, listen, if we can accept that as a premise, right? No one's gonna be liked by everyone. You might as well be disliked for being you than being somebody else. Amen. Right? At the most basic level. The being disliked is a fixed cost.

And I think to take the opposite perspective, I think it is far better to be disliked for being who you are than loved for someone you're not. And one of the great entrepreneurs I interviewed on the podcast said to me when it comes to marketing and branding and this sort of attention conversation we're having, she said to me when it comes to marketing and branding and this sort of attention conversation we're having, she said to me that in order to reach your 80%, you have to piss off your 20% or at least be willing to piss off your 20%. It was Jane Warung, who's the founder of Demologica, global beauty brand, I think hundreds of thousands of people.

And she sat and said, to get to your 80%, you have to be willing to piss off. No, actually, fuck. She said, to get to your 20%, you have to be willing to piss off. No, actually, fuck. She said to get to your 20% you have to be willing to piss off the 80%. And from a branding perspective, it makes so much sense because when you stand for something clearly, which you do, you inadvertently stand against a ton.

You have to. If you draw a line, there's a side on either side and you have to say, like, I'm on this side. Did you see that Nike ad? Dude, I was just going to say that. I was just going to say that. Yeah. The Willem Dafoe ad.

Yeah. Like what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine. Yeah. Just like, it was actually the first time that I'd seen something from Nike in a long time that I was like, this is what built this brand. And I think they have, they had lost their way for a while, uh, with like the wokeism and all that stuff. And I think it's like, Nike means victory, which means people have to lose.

Yeah. And they were willing to say that for the first time ever. I posted it on my LinkedIn and it was 50-50. I'd say it was actually more like 80% of people were either neutral or pissed off. Really? Yeah. And 20% of people were like, that is me. I am a Nike person. And for me, when I saw that, I thought I want to buy some Nike shorts. Yeah, it was, I mean, it was the first time I actually felt like I had positive brand affinity towards the brand in a long time.

How important in this game of building and starting is people? Oh, very? A hiring question. I'll tell you why I asked this question, because when I look at my portfolio, early stage first founders never seemed to understand the importance of hiring in people. Yeah. And I bang my head against the wall trying to convince them that actually the game they're playing is in the word company, group of people. Yeah.

So I'll start with one thing and then I'll answer the question. So I was talking to a mentor of mine and he said when I was in my 20s, it was all about the destination. He said when I got to my 30s, I realized it was all about the journey. He said, when I was in my 40s, I realized it was about the company. And I was like, I can't wait till you're in your 50s. The next one, right? But I thought that was such a profound shift in terms of how he thought about his business

success because he was like, I don't need to be a decade billionaire. He's like, I'm cool where I'm at. And now I just want to do it with people that I like. And so to the question about people overall, I believe that the potential of an organization is directly correlated with the aggregate intellectual horsepower of everyone contained within it. And so if you are the smartest person in the business, and you can do everyone's job better than everyone in your company, then it means that the limit of the business is purely based on one person's horsepower and one person's life experiences.

And that will be the cap. And basically, it doesn't matter how smart you are, you can't live 100 lifetimes. You can learn quickly. Sure, there's some people who can learn faster than others, but you're not going to be able to live 1,000 lifetimes. And so as a business grows, more expertise is required. And I think the easiest litmus test for this is if you look at the richest people in the world, almost none of them own 100% of their business.

So number one, most of them don't even own 50. Most of them are small percentages. Jensen Wang is at 4% for Nvidia. Bezos is at 7 or 9% for Amazon. I think Elon is at 20 for Tesla. Small percentages. And it's because it takes a lot of horses to take a chariot to the moon, right? And so basically, as you put in more intellectual horsepower, the potential peak of the business goes so much higher, so much faster.

Keith Rabois from, he was one of the original PayPal mafia guys, has a really good analogy for this. And he talks about it in terms of barrels and ammunition. And he says, so as soon as you get some product market fit, the business starts to grow. And you say, OK, we need to start shipping things faster. And this works the same with the services business, a physical products business, software business, the concepts the same. And so what happens is you then hire a lot of people, and you assume that your throughput

is going to increase proportionally. So we have 10 people. We hire 50. We should 5x our output. And then you quickly realize that that is not the case And so what happens is there are people who are rate limiters for an organization and those are the barrels So think about like a Civil War barrel, you know old cannon and you've got these cannonballs next to it He said most people are ammunition and so you bring more ammunition But you're still gonna be limited by the one barrel capacity of how many shots can get taken by the barrel

And so you need to find more barrels. So you have to go from one barrel to two barrels, two barrels to three barrels. And that becomes an increase in capacity or throughput for the organization. And there are very few of those in a different, I can't remember the law, but it's some organizational law, but the square root of the number of people in a company generate 50% of the work. So you've got 100 people in an organization, 10 people are responsible for 50% of the value that's created. Thanks.

Right. Anybody who's been in a, like, you're like, preach. And so the thing is, I think the real game of entrepreneurship is that your standards rise over time. And it's unfortunate because we hear things that other entrepreneurs tell us. It's all about the people, stupid. And then you're like, sure, but look at my... And it's like, you're not hearing it.

And I don't know, there are some... I think Williamson talks about this, how there's like some lessons that for some reason it's like we have to learn for ourselves. I still believe that it's like we can operationalize this at a lower level so that we don't have to learn for ourselves. I'm convinced. I haven't figured it out yet. So every entrepreneur can resonate with this, which is every business that I've started,

I've gotten to the success of the business prior way faster. And I kind of liken it to a video game where it's like you beat level one, and then you get to level two, and it's like you spend months trying to beat this boss, and you finally figure out how to beat the boss. And it's like you beat level one and then you get to level two and it's like you spend months trying to beat this boss and you finally figure out how to beat the boss and it's like great and you spend another three months getting, beating boss three and let's say you start the game over with a new character. It's like you just zoom through level one, two and three and then you get to level four and you're like, shoot, now I got to spend time. It's like virgin land, like I don't know how to beat this yet.

And so I think that that happens for archetype finding for skill and talent within an organization. And so... Say that again. So if you have functions across an organization, there are people who are going to drive results within that function. And the first time you hire a salesperson, for example, you don't know what you're looking for. And so you just hire a human who says they can sell.

And maybe they can, maybe they can't. And then you cycle through, you try to train them, it doesn't work, does work, whatever. And then finally, let's say you cycle through three sales guys, and finally you find a killer. And then you have this pattern recognition, you're like, OK, that's what I'm looking for. And then all of a sudden, you try and approximate that person or that archetype as much as you can. And so when you start your second company, you're like, oh, I can quickly staff up sales because I know what I'm looking for.

But then you're like, shoot, I've never really nailed sales manager yet. And so then you cycle through, you start whacking away at the boss and then you have to end up firing the boss at a level because you're like, oh God, this didn't work. And then six months are gone because you had to find them, recruit them, hire them, train them and then find out they sucked

and then start over again. And maybe it takes 18 months to really find the right sales manager. And then you're like, okay, I know what that looks like, but I still don't have a director of marketing. What does that look like? And so it's basically developing this pattern recognition across all functions of the business

so that you know what exceptional looks like. And then over time, what happens is as a business grows, your ability to attract talent increases. And so then your standards also grow. And then you find out that there's even more nuance to this, which is that there's a director of sales at a $1 to $10 million level, which is a different looking person from $10 to $100 million level. And it continues to go all the way up. And so it's basically building this repertoire of identifying patterns.

And if you talk to, I would say, more experienced entrepreneurs now, they don't talk about building businesses. It's like assembling them. You just assemble the pieces, and you just know that this is how it's all going to flow together. And that fundamentally is basically what I try and decode within the content that I have so that it's like, here's a pattern for how you can recognize this. Here's a pattern for how you recognize this so that you can just move faster through the

levels to get to where you want to go. And so to loop back to the original question, which is how important are people in an organization, people are the organization. And so if you ever want to build enterprise value, it's building the collective consciousness of the organization, the skills, and how they collaborate together towards a specific outcome.

And so knowing how to staff that up is the job. I think the reason why first time founders feel like they have to learn this lesson themselves is because everything you've just said is an unknown unknown. Like they don't even know that they don't know it. So they hire the sales guy because they were their friend from high school and then fucking, and then they go through the pain.

And I say this because I'm so unbelievably passionate about it, I went through the same BS. I hired my friend who worked at Prada to be our account. I hired a guy I met at a rap battle to be my marketing director who was literally playing video games for a living at 30 years old. And I went through this whole thing and then maybe three or four years into my first business, I accidentally hired someone great. Like through no intention of myself, accidentally.

And I saw the net impact they had and I thought, oh my God, over the coming years, I learned that the game, the fundamental game here was, as you said, assembling the best group of people. How if I'm a first time founder, can I put a system in place to make sure that even though I don't know what a good salesperson looks like, even though I don't know what an ex good person looks like, I still attract them to my company. The simplest way of doing it, so the simplest way of attracting somebody to your business when you don't know how to do the job or know who to look for is to unfortunately do the job yourself. And then once you can break down the job, we follow three Ds, which is document, demonstrate,

duplicate. That's how we train anybody. So first you have to document everything that you do to successfully do the job. And that's step by step into a checklist. Then you demonstrate. So you do this checklist in front of the person that you're trying to bring on. Then they duplicate. They do the checklist in front of the person that you're trying to bring on. Then they duplicate, they do the checklist in front of you. What's interesting about that three-step process is that you'll often find when you try to

demonstrate following the checklist, you don't follow your checklist. And so then you have to adjust the checklist until you actually follow the checklist. And then when you can consistently follow that checklist and get the output, then you can have them do that checklist. And so I think this is why bootstrap founders, I think, oftentimes will find they tend to know more about more things because they had to learn them in order to teach them. Now what's really interesting about what you said about accidentally finding that star at three or four years in is that I think that happens to almost everyone.

Well, hopefully, the people who end up making it, it happens to almost everyone. Because then you realize, oh my God, like if I had four of these people, like we could change the world. Can I say something as well? The other epiphany revelation I had was the star hired stars. And so I think her name is Katie Leeson. Of the 10 people she then hired, nine of them became the best people in my company. And also, I'm not going to say his name, but someone else in my business, a C player of the 10 people he hired, he and everyone he hired was fired. So, as you go up in the organization with hires, the risk and reward goes up.

And so that's something that a lot of people don't like talking about, but I will, which is if you hire somebody and let's say that they're not a cultural fit, maybe they have the skills, or they are a cultural fit, they don't have the skill fit, and they're a leader, what you find often, and it sucks, is that everyone, it's almost like it's like a tree that has an entirely rotten branch. It's like you end up having to scoop out three quarters of what was underneath because you realize that they were ineffective, or they just were against the actual mission of the business. And it's harrowing and it's horrible.

But I try to give this analogy to my team because we've had to do it in every business. Like, it happens. It's just part of business is if somebody goes to the bar and you're at the club and somebody racks up, you know, just ordering shots for everybody, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, and then that guy dips, that guy leaves. We all have to pay the bill. In the moment when we pay the bill, when we scoop out the deadwood, when we scoop out the rot from the organization, it feels horrible. But that pain isn't because the scooping out the rot is bad.

It's because we planted it on bad ground or because that guy ordered all these shots but couldn't afford it. And I have a different analogy because I really want to drive this home because I think it's important is that in the relationship world, if one spouse tells the other spouse, hey, I cheated on you, I had an affair. That moment is incredibly painful for both parties. And so what it makes you think is, oh, this was wrong to tell the truth. But it's not wrong to tell the truth. What's wrong was cheating.

When you tell the truth is when you make it right. And so the pain that you often have to encounter in the organization feels wrong, but is right, because you're writing a wrong and that's where the pain occurs. And that's why so many businesses stay stuck is because they have this affair, they have this person, and they're unwilling to have that hard conversation or multiple in order to make it right and they stay stuck for years. This is another quality of really successful founders that I've noticed, which is what you just said, is the ability to have the hard conversation sooner.

And in my first, in my portfolio where there's first time founders, they're coming to me and in our like monthly meeting saying, God, there's this guy who's running the Ecom division and he's so bad and I'm having to do the job for him. What do I do about it? But then they come back to me two weeks later and they're like, he's still there. Yeah, right. A year later and you're like, it's still John. And you're like, what are we talking about here?

I remember asking him when it's such a meeting, does John know that you're unhappy with him? Oh yeah. No. So there's this quiet dissatisfaction, which I think is a virus, right? Right. And what no one wants to discuss is the fact that everyone else knows John sucks. Amen. And that that becomes the minimum standard for what is acceptable for excellence in the organization. And so I think like, so if brand is what your reputation is externally, I think culture

is kind of what reputation is internally. And so I define culture operationalized, because I think culture is a very fluffy word. What does that mean? Right? It's the rules that govern reinforcement within an organization. What do we reward? What do we punish? And so the thing is that there's realistically, there's like, people have values because they're

bundled terms that ladder up many behaviors. If I said Rolls Royce probably would have some value that's quality over speed, probably. Right? And so they would have that. but somebody would have to say like Well, what does that mean? Right? Well, we hope that we use this as a decision-making filter for how it affects behaviors on every situation so that when you're in the should I go faster? Should I make it right you make it right and there are other organizations kind of like the speed Justice and mercy speed and quality.

Both of them are important. And sometimes they sit diametrically opposed. And so we have to say, where do we sit in the gray so that we can duplicate decision making across the organization so that we can maintain the culture? And so culture, you know, Leilis says this a lot, but culture, I think this is a Drucker quote actually, culture trumps strategy, like twice a week and every day on Sunday. If you have a mediocre strategy but an unbelievable culture, you will crush somebody who has a great strategy and a terrible culture.

Because culture ladders up to performance and execution. And almost every business is limited by execution, not strategy. Most business strategies isn't that complicated. Let's do a really good job, so good that people tell their friends about us, and as long as we have enough gross margin, we'll make money. It's not that hard. It's just that the doing it is the hard part. And so when we have these, they are the spoken and unspoken rules, mostly unspoken.

If someone shows up three minutes late to a meeting and there's 10 people in the meeting and it's supposed to be a marketing meeting and I'm there, if I don't say anything, I have now said, we have an unspoken rule that if someone shows up three minutes late to a meeting, it's okay. I've reinforced that rule. Now I've reinforced it by not punishing the behavior or at least calling it out. On the flip side, if someone comes in and I berate them, that's also a way of changing behavior, maybe not the right way to do it.

But I could then, like, what do you do in that situation? Someone shows up three minutes late. First off, you would probably sideline with that person and be like, hey, I don't know if you realized that you were three minutes late. What happened? And they're like, I was on a client call. It went late. I'm really sorry.

Or I was on a sales call. For me and my organization, clients and sales, like, will take priority. So if you have a meeting and you're on a sale and you're about to close it, close the sale. But if you were just doing nothing and we have this meeting, then this is the priority. And so the next time we hop on, I'd be like, hey guys, I just want to address something. John was late. He was late because of a sales call. Or when I DMed him right as he got on late, I would say, hey, make sure you say that. And they'd be like, hey guys, sorry I was late. I was on a sales call or when I DMed him right as he got on late, I would say, hey, make sure you say that. And then be like, hey, guys, sorry, I was late.

I was on a sales call. And then I would say, that's fine. You're good to go. Always go make money. And then I'm reinforcing the right thing. And so I think we're very big on rapid feedback in the moment because that's how you train behavior. So if you look at, so there's tons of studies on this, but basically if you want to train

a dog and you want it to sit, if you have it sit and then immediately give a biscuit, it learns really quickly. If you have it sit and then wait 10 seconds before you give a biscuit, it takes like three times as many repetitions for it to learn that the sitting gets the biscuit. If you wait more than a minute, it never learns. Really? You can see the learning curve, the amount of repetitions just skyrockets

until eventually there is no amount. But here's where it gets crazy. That biscuit is still reinforcing something, just not sitting. It's reinforcing the thing that just came before it. So if we want people to do something, we have to change it in the moment. And so when we train,

and I think that we're a training organization, we're very good at training, whatever skills, is engineering ways to give many feedback loops in a short period of time around specific skills. So I use sales because it's one that everyone understands. If you're training a script with someone, if you let someone read through a script, and then at the end you say, hey, here's the things you could have done better. This is how 95% of people train.

It also doesn't work. We set the premise with, you're going to read through the script, and in the first 30 minutes, we might get through a third of it. And I'm going to probably stop you like 30 times. And if that happens, it means we're doing it right. So we set the premise that I'm going to interrupt you a bunch of times. And as soon as you see the first line, I'm going to be like, stop, say it again, say it like this, go again.

And then they're like, okay, and they say it. And I'm like, awesome job. Do it again. Awesome job. Do it again. So I reinforce it as many times I can. Okay, go to the second sentence. Right?

Now do first and second, right? Do second and third, right? And you keep working your way through until eventually they just say it like a whistle. They can sing it because they've also had so many repetitions and so many feedback loops that they're like, this is what it sounds like when it's right. And I think that the vast, vast majority of organizations have no idea how to train and their entire training, their way of getting talent is just, let's hire 10 and we'll just see who works out rather than being able to take someone and level them up.

And I think that the ability to train is one of the largest alphas that exist in organizations. Because if you can buy talent at B skill and get them to A plus, then you net the delta in profit between what you had to attract and pay the person to come and what they perform at. If you have to use a picking strategy, then you have to pay for current market rate of the skill. And so you actually eat into margin because you don't know how to train.

There are advantages to speed and sometimes it still makes sense to bring in the talent because maybe the training requires so much time that it's not worth it. And so from a hiring perspective, because we were just talking, this is the theme, we always wanna hire for the smallest skilled efficiency. And so in low skilled labor, for example,

if we have a cupcake bakery and I need somebody to work the counter, that is pretty low skilled labor. And so if there's a number of skills that are required, being able to be on time, smile, be nice, those things are bundled terms that have many skills underneath of them, right? Whereas teaching someone how to use the register might take like 30 minutes. And so it makes sense to hire for attitude and then train aptitude when you have low skilled labor. When you have really high skilled labor, I can't teach someone 10 years of being a CFO

for M&A. This is an extreme example, right? And so in that instance, we still hire for the smallest skill deficiency, but I can probably teach someone to be nice under these circumstances faster than I can teach them to be a CFO. If they have everything that I want here, obviously you would want both, but the world is imperfect. And so we just try to hire for the smallest skill gap, and attitude is a series of skills. And so instead of thinking of things as an attitude and aptitude, just think of everything as

skills and then we hire always for the smallest efficiency. The thing that's easiest to train up. Yeah. Okay. One of the things that's so central to that is we were saying about giving people feedback and I wrote down most companies and most entrepreneurs and founders are scared to give petty feedback. Oh. Because if like I might notice you making a slight error, but it feels petty to point that out.

It feels like I'm some kind of rude dictator. Why is that so important? How do you create an environment? I'm totally good with that. Yeah, I know, but a lot of people aren't. I have lots of managers on my teams and they don't want to offend people. Their central focus is too much on being nice and it's... Dude, kind, not nice.

It's one of our cultural, you know, I wouldn't say it's not the one on the site, but things that are repeated internally all the time, kind, not nice is one of the big ones, which is that you're actually being unkind to someone by not maximizing the likelihood that they succeed in their role. And people don't lose jobs because typically because of one thing, it's usually a hundred small things. And so if we can immediately fix those hundred small things, most people want to do a good job and most people want to succeed and most people want to move up.

And we can maximize the likelihood that those things occur if we help them. And this is where the culture is there. If on that first day, like I said, we say we're going to work through the script and we're only going to get through a third of it, I'm going to stop you 30 times to correct you. We've already kind of set the expectations of how things go here. We will fix things and we will fix them fast. And it's understanding the difference, and we teach our teams this, is what is the difference

between an insult and criticism? So criticism is a discrepancy between actual and desired. So you're supposed to be on time, and this week you were late twice, and so that is discrepancy. And you're lazy is the insult. And so the judgment that's associated with the discrepancy is insulting someone.

Pointing out the discrepancy is purely criticism, and that's objective. And so if you want to improve the team, remove insults, focus on criticism, and tell them what to do instead. And so the easiest way to think through this, I think, is stop, start, keep. So I'll tell you a real story. So we had a director level, so a relatively high person in the organization who was having

behavior issues. Said differently, everyone thinks you're a dick. And so he ended up making his rounds of the executive team and having a sit down with all of them because he was really proficient at the skill. He was high performer, like good at what he does, just no one liked him. And so he talked to four different executives and the behavior didn't change. And so he finally came to my office, and he was a little bit worried. And he was like, am I going to get fired?

And I was like, no, HR will fire you if you're going to get fired. You're not going to be with me. What are we talking about? But when we sat down, I said, OK, I want to be clear. I want to decrease the likelihood that people call you a dick in the future. I said, does that sound like an agreeable goal? And he said, yeah, I want that. I was like, OK, good.

I also don't care if you are a dick. I just care that everyone else thinks you are. And so I just want to minimize the likelihood that I get drawn into this ever again. So the reasons that they are calling you a dick, we need to dive into that. Because every other conversation you had with some of the leaders was just like, hey, man, stop being a dick. And the thing is, what do you do with that? Nothing. You just get insulted and then you have nothing to do.

And so instead it's like, OK, when you cut people off when they talk, stop, start, keep doing. Do this instead. Shut up. So when someone else is talking, wait until they finish. And if you're not sure, ask if they're done. He's like, OK. When you give unsolicited advice on how they should run their department, don't.

Or ask if they want it. If they say no, don't say anything. And so we identified three or four behaviors that he was doing. And I said, just do this instead. And literally the next week, people were like, what happened to him? He's like a new man. And the thing is, is that he wasn't a dick. He just didn't know how to behave.

And so if you want to teach, teaching has to come from conditions and a behavior. And so if you're trying to get someone to be different, you have to give them the conditions under which they need to change So when someone says this if this occurs There's a condition and then this is what you need to do And so the vast majority of training that exists does none of that It's just people shouting at each other insulting them and saying hey, you need to level up You need to you need to get you know, you need to increase your performance. What does that mean?

And so I think one of the easiest ways to identify the actual behavior, because that's actually the tough part, is like, why do I think he's a dick? Why do I think she's lazy? Because I want to insult them, but that's not... So how do I help her? It's like, okay, why am I describing her this way? Okay, so when I slack, she tends to be slow in her response. So sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes it takes three hours.

I'm like, okay, so I'm going to gather that data and be like, OK. So when I talk to her, I'm like, I'm going to have this branch of data. The next thing is when I get stuff, projects from her, they are incomplete. I feel like they're not all the way fleshed out. I'm like, OK, that's a second bucket. The next one is that when she shows up on Zoom,

she looks disheveled. I'm like, OK. So now when I talk to Sandy, I'm not gonna say, hey, Sandy, you look lazy, need you to level up a little bit here, otherwise we're gonna have issues and have to put you on a PIP, performance improvement plan. Instead of saying that, just put her on the

performance improvement plan without saying it's performance improvement plan and just say, when you show up on calls, change your background to the standard company setting so we don't see your bedroom, and make sure that from the waist up, you look professional. And what do I mean by look professional? Have a collared shirt and put your hair back. OK? Now, some people are like, how does that work in woke politics?

No idea. Deal with it in your country. But you should have a culture where you can say stuff like that. The second thing is that right now, I need you to turn on Slack notifications and I need you to respond within 10 minutes, okay? During work hours. After work hours, fine. But, you know, nine to five, you have to respond within 10 minutes.

Do you think you can do that? Yes. And so the end goal here is like, I will get everyone to stop calling you lazy. It's interesting because it goes back to something you were saying earlier where you were saying specifics versus vague. Prefrontal cortex versus amygdala. An insult is amygdala. Totally.

Can't do anything with that. But if you make it specific, then action is more likely to occur and useful action is more likely to occur. On this point of a person who's listening now, who's an entrepreneur, they've got a business and they're thinking about making those first highs, I want you to throw a proposition at you to see what you thought of this. One of the things that I think can help you not fuck up in the hiring process, especially early,

is if you just live it with the permanent assumption that you are bad at hiring. So I live with the permanent assumption that I'm bad at hiring because I've got biases, there's things I don't know about, certain things, et cetera. And when you start with that assumption that you are really, really bad at hiring, you try and decentralize the decision making.

So one thing I say a lot to startup founders is, if you're hiring a salesperson, create an interview process where there's five people and one of them might be you and the other four are the best salespeople you've ever encountered in your life. Like who sold you your house? And ask them to be part of the interview process.

How does that sit with you? I think it sits great. And I think that the amount of references that you go for is proportional to the importance of the role. Okay. So Sam, the co-founder of Skool, so he was a non-technical founder. What is Skool? Oh, so Skool.com is a platform for building communities. Right now it's online, but we have an in-person component so that people can meet online, then meet in person. It's awesome.

And so that's the only investment that I've publicly associated myself with outside of acquisition.com. So it was a very big deal. It's something that I believe in a lot because it's education. So education and media meet. Sam is the founder of school school and he is not technical. And so he knew that to build an exceptional software product, you need world-class talent. And so he interviewed 600 developers to find Daniel, who had become the CTO of school.

And he asked everybody to know who the best coders were. And then he talked to all those people and then he asked them who the best coder they knew was. And he talked to those people and then he asked them who they thought the best coder they knew was. And eventually like Daniel's name came up as like God tier. He's like, if you can ever get this guy, he'd be amazing. And so he ended up finding a way in to find Daniel and then he ended up becoming co-founder of

school as well. And what's interesting about that process is that it actually ladders into rapid learning. And so when I was a consultant, I was 22 years old, and I would go and have to give presentations to four-star generals about weapon systems that I knew nothing about because I was chugging beers 12 months earlier. And so how do you sound intelligent in front of somebody who has 30 years more experience than you do? And so this is the consulting process for rapid learning.

First is you find five experts. So you ask the one person, you're like, hey, tell me the five people you know who are the best at this thing. And then you ask them who are the five people you know who also know a ton about this thing. And for each of the interviews, you take all of their information down of like, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? What do you think about this?

And what happens is you start mapping kind of like the information ecosystem. And the reason you talk to experts first is that there's no lack of information. Like you can Google whatever you want. The problem is there's too much. And so the filter becomes where the highest point of leverage is. And so experts have spent years filtering out for what's important. And so then you basically rapidly consume the most filtered information, and then you reorganize the information.

And so this is what a typical analyst will do as a consultant is like, I would say for the Space and Cyber project that I did, we had 600 pages of notes from all the interviews that we did. First step is you recategorize all the news by category. So it goes from raw notes to categorized notes. Then from there, you distill and consolidate notes into what are the truths or the most distilled beliefs that we have about these particular, in this case, weapon systems, but it could be whatever. And then from there, you're able to generate your inferences for what it looks like when

it's right, what the problems are, what potential solutions might be. And then that's fundamentally how you say this is what we need to do next. That's if you're trying to learn something. But in talking to all those people, it actually works the same way because the interview process, the higher up the talent is, the more I would encourage entrepreneurs to use it as a learning process as a consultant. And so I present somebody who wants to come in for this role, the actual problems of the business for which they would have control over and say, how would you solve these?

And so then they tell me all the things that they would be considering and what they're thinking about. And then I'll ask the next guy what he thinks and what he thinks and what he thinks or she thinks. And then all of a sudden, one, I get free consulting, which is amazing. But secondly, you can tell by how the quality and quantity of metrics that someone tracks how good they are at a particular skill. And so this is fundamentally what separates beginners from experts.

And so beginners typically have binary thinking in terms of outcomes, either it worked or it didn't work. An expert, for example, for a marketing campaign, isn't going to say, oh, marketing doesn't work or ads don't work. They're going to say, this particular campaign didn't work because our click-through rate was too low or because it was sending traffic that wasn't qualified and we weren't converting enough on the page, or we didn't have enough people who were taking the second step in our four steps.

And they can break down any part of that continuum. If I'm interviewing a salesperson and the person says, and I say, okay, how are you going to affect these metrics? What behaviors are you going to do? So to the same degree about vague versus specific, if they give me vague things back, I'm going to dial in and say, no, what are you going to do that's going to change that? And by the way, this is a wonderful way to teach in the organization how what they do makes a business money.

And so if you have like a customer support rep, for example, and you say, hey, how do you make our company money? If they can't explain it to you, they probably aren't doing it. And it sounds as simple as it is. But if someone says, well, you know, I answer customers' questions, and it's like, how does that make us money? Now, if they're able to say, when I answer customers' questions, I increase the likelihood

that they refer us to other customers, and I increase the likelihood that they stay and continue to pay for us, so I help us get new customers by delivering an amazing experience, and I get the customers that we have to continue to pay us. And if it makes sense, I recommend other products and services that we have that I can introduce them to sales guys who can explain that so we can generate even more

revenue from them. I'd be like, one, if you can articulate that, you're probably not just a front line customer service, you're probably a director, right? And so that level of nuance, the specificity is what shows expertise. And so when I look for and I'm interviewing for candidates, I first, I want to gather as much information as I can. I want to drain as much knowledge as possible. But I'm also really looking for the quality and quantity of metrics they track and behaviors that they do to influence those metrics.

So in the hypothetical problem that let's say we're trying to solve, we have low click through rates, I'd be like, OK, this is the problem we have. How would you approach changing it? And then that actually gets me to understand what they would do in the organization. Because it's very easy to say, I'm going to come in and let's say a sales director, I'm going to come in and I'm going

to improve the sales team. I'm like, OK, cool. What are you going to do? I'm going to coach the guys up. I'm like, OK, what does that mean? And so just continuing to ask, what does that mean? How do you do that? Until they're like, OK, well, I'm

going to meet with the guys every single morning and we're going to do role play. All right that mean? How do you do that? Until they're like, okay, well, I'm gonna meet with the guys every single morning and we're gonna do role play. All right, well, how do you role play? Well, we're gonna start with the script. And we're like, the more detailed they get, the more I believe they can do it because they've actually explained what actions they will take.

If someone can't dial it into actions, then it's very unlikely that they're going to take them. And so what I just outlined is basically three core things. So one is the quality and quantity of metrics that they track. The second is the behaviors that they're going to take them. And so what I just outlined is basically three core things. So one is the quality and quantity of metrics that they track. The second is the behaviors that they're going to do to influence those metrics. And then laddering up to third, how do those metrics and these behaviors influence the revenue in the business? If they can explain that clearly, you have a winner.

All of that is requires them to know if the person's not bullshitting. Yeah. And also to know like what metrics matter, right? Because someone could sit in an interview for my first time founder, say a bunch of big complicated words. It sounds good. I hire them. And that's really what I'm trying to mitigate here is how do I not let a bullshitter pass

me? I think having them explain it as though you were a fifth grader. And so I always I make the same joke because you know you do this enough times you make the same joke It's like hey, I need you to explain this to me like I'm a golden retriever Which is a brand type of dog that has Down syndrome Alright, so and I always get a laugh and I'm like so assume I know nothing. Let's start there what do you think customer service means and so thing. Let's start there. What do you think customer service means? And so if someone really has expertise, so Richard Feynman was famous for the physicist,

which is if you can't explain it to a child, then you don't understand it well enough. And so if they do confuse you, then it means that they don't understand it or they're doing it purposefully, neither of which are good scenarios. You said something during that explanation. You said you were talking about your founding partner at school, and you said that he was pursuing a CTO. And he said, if we can get this guy, he'd be amazing. So many entrepreneurs that are starting in business have that thought sometimes.

They think, if I could just get that guy from that amazing company to come join our garage where we're building this new startup, it would change our fortunes. But how? How do I get a truly exceptional person who is being paid shit tons of money, who has a comfortable job, who has security to come join me in my bedroom? Well, I think there's the soft and the hard side. The hard side is that is compensation, maybe you don't have as much cash. So it's like you're going to have a few levers at your disposal.

So you have what do you pay them in cash? What's their upside if there's equity or shares that you're going to give them? This is obviously if it's a software business. And it's probably worth segmenting this. So if you're not in a software company, which is probably the vast majority of people listening to this, there are four elements within equity that exist. You have control, so who gets to call the shots. You have risk, what happens if everything goes wrong, who's liable.

You have profits, which is the cash flow of the business, who gets distributions. And then basically, sale or enterprise value, when we sell or if we sell, who gets to participate in that upside. Those are kind of the four elements of equity. Now, the thing is that you can obviously grant shares or you can give stock in a company. That's one way of doing it. But you can also basically contract around any of these things. Now, most of the times, they don't want the risk.

And they probably won't get the control if it's your company. So you really just have profit and you have upside in terms of a sale. And so you can contract these things, and there's lots of structures, so I'm not going to get into the legal around this. But asking somebody, what do you want? Sometimes it's just a very powerful way of beginning this. And my favorite question for these types of scenarios is asking, what would it take? So when you have this guy, it's like, man, it would be amazing. Like, how do I sell this guy?

I just ask him what would sell you? So I say, what would it take? Because I don't know. He'll tell me. And I love that frame because it assumes yes. It assumes you're going to come. So what would it take? So many of the books that you write and so much of the content you make centers on this

idea of sales. Yeah. And it is a sale, isn't it? Totally. And I always think about the Steve Jobs quote where he met with, was it John Scully who was working at Pepsi and he said, you want to continue selling sugar water for the rest of your life, would you want to come change the world? How does that sort of emotional psychological element of the self factor into persuading

someone exceptional to come and join your mission? I think it's the amygdala story that we started with, with the nasal strip thing, which now has actually reared its nose multiple times, poked its nose in a few times here. But I think that pitch that you're giving to a potential co-founder or potential early hire who's going to be a leader is the same more or less that you'd give to an investor. It's almost the same pitch, except instead of investing capital, they're investing time, they're investing their life, they're investing their expertise. But fundamentally, you're asking for investment.

I'm just asking you. There's also this weird question, which I've actually never asked anybody. But founders often struggle with, do I hire naivety? Because that's going to probably create new solutions to old problems, like the young scrappy kid that gets TikTok. Or do I hire experience, which is going to be more expensive, more conventional and safe? And I see some companies lean too far either way. I have actually fairly strong opinions on this.

So I actually think it's, I was talking to the CEO of ButcherBox about this particular thing last week. I think it's a barbell strategy where you have people on either ends and very little in the middle. Interesting. So I love lots of young, hungry people who are here for growth and want to learn and are ready to work long hours and just go all in and The people at the call at the late vote the back half of their career that are here that they've made enough money

They know they can get a job wherever they feel like it You're not doing them a favor by giving them a job and they're not what I term I hate which is careerists They're not obsessed with their title. They're not obsessed with their title. They're not obsessed with their career path, what their promotion plan is going to be. They basically have a litmus test, which is like, I have to have make about this to get to come in and do this with you,

but they actually just really love the work. And so these people are learning, so the young people are learning and overcompensating with tons of hours and reps. And these people are bringing their experience to the game and creating significantly more leverage with strategy. The people in the middle are the ones that tend to be the pain in the ass for everybody. And I don't think, and be clear here, I don't think this is actually an age thing.

I think it's a perspective thing. So it's just, are you here for growth or are you here to share what you know? And I think that it's the people in the middle that are like well, I'm bringing something but I need something It's like this kind of tit-for-tat relationship that I would say the vast majority of people that don't work out are in that bucket and What role does naivety play in innovation here because the kids that don't know the rules? Yeah, I'm more likely to stumble across nuances, right? I think yes. Fundamentally you can disrupt any industry if you don't know how it's supposed to go.

But I think that really teases out something we said at the very beginning, which is starting from first principles, which is what are the few things I know to be true? And then basically forgetting everything else. And when you build from those assumptions up, you end up building lots of different paths up the mountain that may or may not have been trodden before. I think one of the most corroborating things that can happen sometimes is that you re-derive a solution that already works. And you're like, OK, well, now I know why this works.

But I think that's actually, then you have more confidence in the path. And you're like, OK, well, now I know why this works. But I think that's actually, then you have more confidence in the path. And you're like, OK, that's fine. But now I know why we're doing this, not just because other people did it, but because I understand why it works. And so I think it just comes down to, what are the few truths that I know to be true?

And going all in on those things. I know that if customers love my product, they are more likely to tell other people about it than if they hate it. That I feel very confident. So then we say, OK, what are the things that must occur in order to get someone to quote love my product, aka increase the likelihood that they tell their friends

about it or post about us. And so now there's, and you can break this, and again, this is where quality and quantity of metrics matter. So it's like, how much more nuance can I break and break this up into small pieces? So it's like, okay, at what time do we deliver or? Around what experiences that have high likelihood of them posting can we decrease the friction around them sending friends? How can we make it both easy and how can we incentivize it and so all of these components whether it's a service business a physical

Products business a software business. It still works the same way is You know and for each each customer for example as we're taking someone through this I have four milestones that I look for, which are the four Rs. So how do I get them to review my product? How do I, well, in order, it'd be how do I retain them immediately? How do I get them to review my product?

How do I get them to refer somebody? And then how do I resell them? And so they're basically, those four Rs is what I try and take every customer through. It's a very simple framework. When you think, oh, man, customer success, what does it mean? It's just like, well, these are the four things that I want to occur. And so all I'm trying to do is reverse engineer what activities increase the likelihood that each of these four Rs happen.

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Search Adobe Express or download it for free in the app store right now. Well, I want to go through the four hours, but I also, I think that what comes before the four hours is knowing how to get customers in the first place, which was a tricky one. And actually maybe even the thing that comes before that is being psychologically prepared for the toll

and the roller coaster that business is. I found this graph of yours. Oh, god. Yeah. And I think for any founder starting a business, it's important for them to understand this cycle. I think you call it the crash-burn cycle or something.

Because if you're not aware of the cycle, when you hit certain parts of it, you're probably going to think that there's something wrong with you. Yeah. But there's a certain inevitability to this crash cycle. certain parts of it, you're probably going to think that there's something wrong with you. Yeah. But there's a certain inevitability to this crash cycle. I'll put it on the screen for anyone to see. Yeah.

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 gonna pursue this this thing Whatever is it baking cupcakes or I'm gonna I'm gonna do lawn mowing or I'm gonna to pursue this thing, whatever. Is it baking cupcakes, or I'm going to do lawn mowing, or I'm going to do crypto trading?

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 expected.

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 point of truth. And this is the cycle where the paths of the entrepreneur 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 informed 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 from the valley 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. And so that cycle, this is more or less the Alex Formosy life story, which is why I can

so intimately describe each of the steps, is that I call that loop and that the person on the other side, the woman in the red dress, which is probably my favorite part of the Matrix movie, which is Neo, who's the main character, is in a program to teach him one thing. And so he's walking through the crowded streets of what looks like a New York City with Morpheus leading him. And he's drawing on about something

that he's supposed to learn. And he says, Neo, were you listening to me or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? And Neo was looking at the woman in the red dress as Morpheus is talking. And then he says, look again. And he looks back at the woman in the red dress and it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his head. And in that moment, he's like, freeze.

And he explains that you're either one of us or one of them. And they are the people who are sent to destroy us. And so what appears to be the woman in the red dress is actually an agent from the system meant to destroy the opportunity that you're in right now. And so I love the woman in the red dress so much because it's so real. Because you're in this thing,

you're in this relationship with your business. And you're like, this girl seems great. And then you get to know her and you find out she snores when she sleeps. And all of a sudden it's like, you know, you see the sweatpants and no makeup in the morning and you realize that sometimes she's moody, whatever. But you start to get to know, you're like,

I don't know if we're gonna get married, but like, you know, this is kind of where we're at. And then you see a woman in the red dress. And you're like, you know what? I think that's the girl. And so you quit this relationship with your business and you get into that relationship. But then you realize that that girl has crabs, she has a crazy ex-boyfriend, and you're like, oh my God, I didn't want to deal with any of this stuff.

And so my CFO, so it was one of the first people that were like, oh my God, I hired that person and changed everything. So my CFO and Jim Launch had taken four companies from zero to 100 million. She had done over 40 M&A transactions. Her largest one was 5 billion. Super experienced. She was at the very end of her career. And she was like, I'll take this one last ride with you guys.

And so, mind you, Layla and I, I'm 26 or 27 at the time. Layla is 23, 24. And we're sitting across the table from a very experienced businessperson being like, please help us. And so one of the things that she taught me that I'll never forget is she said, the grass is always greener on the other side. You just don't know that it's fertilized with shit. And she's southern, so she had this deep southern accent.

She's like, there's always shit. Shit everywhere. And so she's like, I've been in's like, there's always shit. Shit everywhere. And so she's like, I've been in enough businesses to know that all businesses have shit. And so you just have the shit you don't know about and the shit you do know about. And you're in this business. And so this is the shit you know. And that has been so profoundly impactful in my life because it was so hard for me to break the cycle, really hard for me.

I mean, I gave you my life story of the many businesses that I've been involved in. And so like the entrepreneurial ADD has been so real for me. I mean, I gave you my life story of the many businesses that I've been involved in, and so the entrepreneurial ADD has been so real for me, and I've made some of the biggest career mistakes by just pursuing and splitting my attention between multiple endeavors. And I can say truthfully that this 2024 was the first year, and this is now 2025, the first time in my life where I haven't experienced FOMO, so fear of missing out. And it was one of those things that I just always had.

I would see somebody doing it, I was like, oh man, I should be getting into that. I shouldn't be doing this, I'm just doing that. And it was one of those things, kind of like being happy, where you don't realize you're happy, you just look back and you're like, you know what, that was a really good year. You kind of see it in retrospect. What I realized was that now when I hear someone say like, oh my God, I crushed it with this thing, I think that's amazing for them.

I'm sure there's tons of problems that I don't know about and that's amazing, but I'm gonna keep doing this thing because this is the only thing I know how to do pretty well and I'm just gonna keep compounding my information advantage against everybody else who thinks this is easy and wants to get into it. And so I think that that, any massive company that you know of has existed for multiple

decades. And in order for something to exist for multiple decades, the founder has to stay focused on that thing for the whole time. And I measure focus by the quantity and quality of things that you say no to. And I measure commitment, or I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. And so if you think of marriage as the ultimate commitment, then it is the ultimate commitment because you've limited literally every alternative besides this person. And so I think that many business problems and many entrepreneurs would 5X, 10X their

business if they simply gave themselves no way out. This is what I'm doing. And I'm, I mean, burning the boats, but I'm eliminating all alternatives and structuring my life such that I make it very difficult to pursue the alternatives. And I think by doing that, you can actually conquer this cycle and make it past the split where you go crash and burn and then restart the doom loop or make it to informed optimism and then eventually to the achievement that you want. There's so much there.

There's so much there, but it's such an important point. So where shall I start? So at that moment here, this crisis of meaning moment, what I see so much of is entrepreneurs not necessarily quitting the old thing, but just taking on something else. And I get entrepreneurs will come up to me in the gym, and they'll say, Hey, Steve, just want to let you know what I do and see if you can offer me any advice. And then they'll list three things. They'll say, I'm starting this crypto thing with my friend Dave, I've got this hair business

where we're selling on ecom, and I've got this other thing. And they almost assume that the more things they're doing, the higher the probability that they'll be successful in something. My mom was that. My mom has started 30 businesses and I watched for my whole childhood how she would start a hairdressing salon and then the person down the street running an estate agents would come in and say, we're making loads of money as an estate agent. She'd start that, that business would suck.

She'd hit this moment of crisis of meaning. She'd then start a furniture business. And she jumped between 20 to 30 businesses, and it's kind of still happening now. But they last six months, they eventually go bust. She sort of like, you know, like the monkeys that swing to the next month, swings to the next thing. And there's never been the escape velocity

that comes from this informed optimism part. So yeah, this it really rang true for me in every sense of the word, this idea of like, a focus going against all of your instincts and your emotions, but being pivotal to achievement. I think entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. Like, we can understand what we should do, we just don't do it. I think entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. We can understand what we should do, we just don't do it. And I think that's why we're so much better at giving advice than we are at following it.

So most people, if they just followed their own advice, they'd be successful. And so with this kind of valley of despair, I call it niche slapping. It's like, don't make me niche slap you. Which is like when you have three things going on, it's like, let me slap you into just picking one. Because the thing is, is that any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick only one. Because it's actually, in my opinion, an exercise in arrogance to assume that you doing three things is somehow going to beat somebody who's doing one. And I can promise you the competitor who is going to beat you is only doing that one thing.

And you think a third of your time is going to be theirs? No, it's not going to happen. I think it's arrogant. And so there's actually like an underpinning of ego underneath of this. And I say this as somebody who did this. So like when I had the launch business, I also had my six gyms. I also had a chiropractor agency and I also had a dental agency. And so I would introduce myself like, oh, I own lots of companies.

But I think one of the biggest misconceptions when you're an entrepreneur is not understanding the difference between being an owner and being the CEO. And so they might hear that you have a portfolio. They might hear that I have a portfolio and be like, OK, well, they have a portfolio. So I must model that. That guy's tall, I should play basketball. Doesn't work that way. Right?

So if I want to be rich, I should fly private. Doesn't work that way. Right? It's conflating order. And so we must do these things in order to get the outcome. We have to concentrate on only one thing in order to get the outsized return. And that spreading of attention, especially when you're newer in the entrepreneurial career, it's like you already don't know so many things.

How do you now want to have three sets of unknowns that you want to try and conquer at the same time? And the fallacy of thinking is that I'm going to try all of them and see which one works, but none of them will work because you're them and see which one works, but none of them will work because you're waiting to see which one will work. Because you can force, in my opinion, you can force one thing to work, provided, like, I'm going to just assume basics like you're not selling $5 bills for $4. Like, you know, the normal economics of a business, like, if a real estate business

exists, there are other people making money. There are hair salon businesses where people are making money. There are business exists, there are other people making money. There are hair salon businesses where people are making money. There are lawn mowing businesses where people are making money. You can make money in all of them. You just can't make money in all of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you walked in today and you sat down on the chair, I said, like, what's going on

with you professionally? I remember what you said. You said more of the same and better, which clearly comes from your wisdom. My infinite wisdom, right. Well, it's just from suffering. The woes of this. Like, the biggest entrepreneurial mistakes I've made in my career have all come from splitting my attention. Every one of them. Like, every single one of them.

Like, I talked about how I had the e-commerce business that I bolted onto my licensing company. I should not have done that. As soon as I did that, my revenue started slowing down in its growth. Why did you? Because I was ADD. I was like, oh my, I don't wanna leave money on the table. And I wanna be so violent about this.

You are always going to leave money on the table. That is the result of focus. But you're leaving a small amount of money on the table to pursue the much larger money that's on another table of just sticking with the thing that you're on right now. Because compounding, if I were to show a chart here, it's like if you're at year three of your thing and you want to think about moving to year zero of a new thing, you have to compare maybe year zero of a new thing, you have to compare maybe year zero of a new thing grows faster, but it has to grow faster than year three to four of the thing that

you're on right now. And I think that's the people compare year zero to year zero, but not year four to year zero. And the thing is, is you actually we have a linear life. And so that is it's an unfair but true comparison of the opportunity cost. And every exceptionally successful entrepreneur that I know has just stuck with one thing for such an inordinate amount of time. And I think there's a quote by, I want to say Shane Parrish, he said, success is doing

the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without believing that you're smarter than you are. And it's just like, we know what we need to do. So we don't need to make our lives more complex. Complexity will come with scale, I promise. And so just simply trying to do more of what you're already doing well is already hard enough. Don't add anything else. And so if you need to write some sort of commitment of like, I'm just going to stick with this,

then do that. But what happens is, when we were talking about the levels earlier about beating the bosses, so what happens is you know how to beat boss one through three of the game. And so then you just say, okay, well, I'm just gonna start the game over and beat boss. I mean, this time it's gonna be different. But then you just get to level three again, and then you're stuck again.

And so people just keep getting up to level three and new endeavors over and over again because they never learned how to get past that boss. And so you just have to confront the uncertainty of knowing that you don't know how to do it, but that you will figure it out if you keep doing enough repetitions. And that's where you talk to as many people as you can. You see what they said, you consolidate it all and you say, I think this is the highest likely path.

It might not work. But I do believe fundamentally that if we cut people's hair well, and we do it for a long period of time, we will have a thriving business. And if we have a really good model from that thing, we might be able to open up another location. And if we keep our costs down, we might be able to have an actual model that we could either invest our own capital or bring somebody else and take it national. All of these, I have yet to find a business that can't get to $100 million a year, that

has a permutation of it that exists. You're a dry cleaner. Fine. Well, cool. We'll build the model. And either we can license the model, we can franchise the model out, we can get outside investors, we can scale it nationally, we can do it. But the crazy goals are only crazy because people have crazy timelines.

They're actually very sane goals if you extend the timeline out. If you have a true 10-year goal or a true 20-year goal, almost anything is accomplishable. I mean, almost every multi-billion dollar company is about, you know, they get, it's usually between like year six and 10 when companies get to kind of like those big numbers. And most people who are listening to this are five years into entrepreneurship, but you're six months into the thing that you've been working on right now. And you keep restarting the clock for getting to year 10 every time you start over. And I think that's the part that it took me a very long time to figure out,

and I think it takes a lot of entrepreneurs. Everyone messes around with a lot of stuff in the meeting because you just don't know what you're doing. And so, in my experience, it takes about five years for most entrepreneurs that I know to just find something that works. It takes about five years to figure out which way is north. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then it takes like another five years. And a lot of people, that's it. Like they restart, they go off crash and burn. And it takes another five years to build something that can create generational wealth. So it's about a 10 year slug. And here's the really hard truth about it. If you have a job right now,

for almost all of that five years, you quit your job because you don't want to work as hard as you are and you want to make more money. And as soon as you quit, you will realize that you are now going to work way harder than you were and you're going to make less money for an extended period of time. The one benefit is that you get to claim all responsibility for how little you make and how much you work because you're like, my boss is an idiot and it's me. But it's the truth. And I think that in some ways having that optimistic ignorance is actually one of the

really redeeming traits of entrepreneurs. And one of the really hard parts is that the biggest jump you have to make gets so immediately reinforced from the freedom you have from being able to chart your own path. But that big success of quitting one thing and starting another, you need to immediately forget. And I think that fundamentally that is why so many entrepreneurs keep doing it is because the first time you do it It's the biggest rush ever you quit your job You do the business and you get some some first traction and that for that first dollar that you make when the new business

It's like the best dollar ever right? But it's such a strong reinforcer that what does it reinforce it reinforces stopping what you're doing and starting something else. And so I think one of the fundamental errors of entrepreneurship is that sometimes the jumping ship to start this thing is the lesson that you need to immediately unlearn because after that, you have to just stick with it for a very long period of time. There's also something in that entrepreneurs don't go into starting a company with the belief that their hypothesis is wrong. So in year one or seven months in when they realize that their initial hypothesis was

wrong, they think that means abandon ship because my hypothesis is wrong. Whereas successful entrepreneurs that I've met, especially second time founders realize that their hypothesis is almost certainly wrong from the jump. And that the process of starting is to correct and to find a new hypothesis. I think about like Mark Zuckerberg in his room with like face swap or whatever was rating people's attractiveness, and now matter is there's like virtual reality AI company. But understanding that your hypothesis is wrong from the jump, and that this is a process of finding a new hypothesis, I think will give you a little bit more patience as well

through these cycles of The crisis of meaning and so on so two things so one is I had this tweet that went like super viral But it was like first time founder. Hey, I need you to sign an NDA before I tell you my business idea I know you've gotten I know you I know you have Third time founder Here's everything I have. Here's all the documents. Here's all the projections. It's probably all wrong and this probably won't work.

But I have a couple of smart people and I think we'll be able to figure it out. It'll probably cost longer and take longer, cost more and take longer than we think. But we think it's worth a shot. Because everyone who's been on both sides of that understands. The entrepreneurs got it because they're like, oh my god, I was that guy. And all the investors get it because they're like, oh my god, I deal with this guy all the time. But actually what you just said with the many, many iterations from your original idea until

what actually happens is yet again one of those demonstrations of the difference between a beginner and expert. A beginner has binary thinking. So they think this worked or didn't work. And if it didn't work, then I need a new idea. Rather than having the nuanced thinking of a master or an expert or advanced person who says, what about this if I click into it, break it into its component parts? What about this didn't work?

OK, it's not that meta ads don't work or advertising doesn't work. It's that we didn't nail the hook in our ad or that we didn't make our offer clear enough on the landing page or it was not congruent with the advertisement or the offer itself wasn't very compelling or it didn't have, it didn't like, it was just this, everyone's coming in and saying, yeah, I kind of want that, but this is actually my issue. We're not solving the core problem. So it's always in the details. It's always in the sifting through the many small things

that you find the kernel that ends up fixing the business. I mean, I know that Facebook was trying to fix their virality issue. And they were locked in a room for days trying to figure out how they could get more users to retain on the platform. People would sign up, but then they wouldn't do anything and then they drop out. And so finally, Zuck just said, okay, we have some belief that if people have more friends,

that they will engage. And so they didn't, and here's the thing, like with the uncertainty, they couldn't prove it. He just was like, I feel like that's better than them not having friends. And so he said, all right, the new goal is 10 friends in 14 days. That's the goal. So we have to create the experience so that we can get it to introduce them to 10 people or connect them with 10 people that they already know on the platform within 14 days.

And as soon as that happened, then obviously Facebook took off or continued to grow. And so he wasn't like, oh, Facebook doesn't work anymore or social networks aren't gonna be a thing. It's usually way smaller and way, the adjustment you need to make is much more nuanced than what you originally expect. If the foundational principle of like cutting hair, mowing lawns, whatever, it's like this problem exists and I can charge a certain amount and make a profit on it,

then there's nothing wrong with the business. It's just what is the constraint that's holding us back and then usually zooming into the constraint and realizing there's 20 things that are contributing to the outcome, not one. And that's where expertise and that you develop that expertise by trying and failing. And that's just the name of the game. And so I think you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for failure without internalizing it and feeling like you yourself are a failure as a result of failure. Well, this is it.

When I started my first business at 18 years old called Wall Park, social network, whatever, I thought the game was to be right. I came to learn from businesses that came after that actually the game of entrepreneurship is to be successful. And they're two very different things. To win. Because when you want to be right, you not only want to be CEO and you want your hypothesis that you put in that first pitch deck to come true.

And even when customers are telling you that you were wrong, you try and force the fucking hypothesis. No, you don't know. Yeah. But when your game is to be successful, there's a couple of really interesting things that I observe happen. One of them is you, I watch founders say, actually, maybe I'm not the best person to be CEO.

Even though I founded this thing, maybe I should be Chief Brand Officer. When I think about some of the top companies in the UK represent just valued at 100 million. Jim Sharp, Ben's business valued at 1.5 billion. Julian's business probably valued at 100 million. Jim Sharp, Ben's business, valued at 1.5 billion. Julian's business probably valued at a billion. I'm involved in some of these businesses in different ways. But the thing they all have in common is that some early point, the founder put their ego secondary to the success of the business. They said, actually, I'm not the best CEO. I should be head of brand or marketing. A product, right.

A product or whatever it is. And that's that mind-shut shift from being, I need to be right and I need to be at the helm of being right versus this thing needs to be successful. And this goes back to the who, which is if you at some point, if you want to have a really ridiculously successful company, it will require more lifetimes of expertise than you can live. And so then it becomes a recruiting game. Like very quickly, almost all business becomes recruiting, which is how do I... I mean, if you listen to Zuck talk about it, you listen to Elon talk about it, you listen to Steve Jobs talk about it, Steve would talk about how the best players that he had in

the company, he would set aside like a year to 18 months to bring them in. Amen. And he said, every time I knew who I wanted, and then he's like, I would take some calls with other people and I would just be like, but they're not John. They're not John. And so he would just keep working on them and working on them and working them.

And so eventually they're like, you know what, fine. They like give up. They're like, if this guy is this persistent, like, he probably will be a successful entrepreneur and he will take us there. And I think that like, people are the highest leverage thing that you can bring into the company outside of, you know, crazy technology. I am one of my favorite videos of all time is where Steve Jobs, who you just mentioned, talks about hiring truly exceptional people. And he says words to the effect, I'll play it on screen, he says,

people think the success of Apple is a consequence of me and my talent and my skills. But what I've actually done is I've built my career, quote, on hiring truly exceptional people, doing the extremely hard work of finding them and hiring them. And this crazy thing happens when you do that is it propagates. IA players then want to work with A players. They also hire a players and it spreads. I think it was this video I've built a lot of my success Finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players

But really going for the a players and found something. I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find, you know, five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they've never had a chance to do that before. And they don't want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so it becomes self-policing. And they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates. The thing is that it's just like money won't make you happy.

It's one of those things that every founder has to figure out for themselves. But the thing is, and I've had obviously a bunch of conversations around this, but like what you think is an A player today is not what you will think an A player is in five years. And so I think one of the hardest mental hacks around this is trying to project yourself into the future, into the size business that you want to have and say who would be an A

player at that size and scale. And then coming back to the present and saying how do I get them to work for me today? Amen. And it's really and so as a mental process for anybody who does have a business right now and has some employees, if you like everybody right now you probably have some version of your a player because every business has at least one hopefully right besides you. Imagine your business had five of those people.

Like picture in your head, you've got that one person, now you have five of them. How much more would you make? Would you double? Would you 10x? Would you 50x? And sometimes you realize, you're like, no, I think I would actually 10x. And so if that were the case, one, not only would you 10x the company, number two, the value of the company would more than 10x because it would be significantly less reliant on you

and it'd be more reliant on the team that you've built. Number three, it would happen faster because you would have more barrels that were firing concurrently, moving things forward. And those pieces, when put together, you have to then ask yourself from an opportunity cost perspective, what other activity could I be doing that would have the possibility of tenacing my company, doing it faster, and increasing the enterprise value multiple? That's not that. And if you can't find one, then it means you're working on the wrong stuff.

And I think that is one of those great litmus tests of like, if I can find something, and I'll give you a really simple one that's not human, the talent based here, something as simple as calling your leads. So there's tons of research that suggests that you can 4 or 5X your conversion of leads by calling them within 60 seconds of them opting in for any product you have. If you have all of these priorities they have across the company, does any of them have the high likelihood of four or five X in your business immediately with very low cost of doing so, less so than just calling the leads within 60 seconds?

If the answer is no, then by God, why are you not calling all your leads within 60 seconds? The FOB question would be like, well, I don't have enough people to call our leads within 60 seconds. So then we'd say, okay, what is Forex, the revenue of your company worth? Okay. What does it cost to hire one person whose only job is to just call the leads? Now I recently talked to a restoration company, they did water damage for homes when they got hit by storms. And he told me he said he was converting 55% of his leads, not calls, leads.

And I was like, how on earth are you doing this? And I was like, well, how many leads a day do you get? He said two or three. I was like, okay. So what's the process? He's like, oh, how many leads a day do you get? And he said, two or three. And I was like, okay. So what's the process? He's like, oh, it's really simple. My aunt, I pay her $60,000 a year, and she has only one job.

She has no responsibility in the company besides the moment a lead comes in, you stop having sex with your husband, you stop cooking, you stop loving your child, and you immediately call the lead. That's the only responsibility. She just has to make three calls a day at the moment the leads come in.

And he pays her $60,000, and that brings in millions of dollars of revenue. And so you're not going to pay for it out of the dollars you have now. You're going to pay for it out of the dollars that you're going to make that you're not making yet because you haven't done it yet. And so pinning that back to the people. I think the hardest time, we call this the swamp at acquisition.com, but it's usually between like one and three million is the swamp. And I think there's a numbers reason for why it's such a painful period for entrepreneurs.

Let's say one million for simple math. If you have a million dollar business, let's say that you have 20% margins. So that means you're making $200,000 a year in profit. For you to get an A player, it's probably going to cost you 100% of your profit to get that A player. And so you'll have what appears to be an impossible choice. You'll have, do I sacrifice basically 100% of my profit to bring this person in? Or do I work another six hours a day to do the job that this person is doing?

Both paths work. Both are painful and risky because the overworking yourself thing, you can get yourself through that hump and then now you're at maybe three or four million and that 20% is 800. You can spend 200. You still have cash flow. You can still live. The downside for the picking the person path is that what if you pick wrong? And this, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is why entrepreneurs get outsized returns

is because we take on outside risk. And so this is the job, is that we have to be willing to make impossible choices. And the vast majority of choices for entrepreneurs in the business are impossible choices between two relatively bad scenarios. Because the rest of the choices don't even feel like choices because they're obvious. Of course we should correlate faster. Of course we should follow up more. Of course we should try and onboard faster.

OK, all these things are the obvious ones. But when you have, man, I'm trying to think of the ones I'm not sure. Almost all the decisions that you get stuck with, and Elon says this really beautifully, he says running a business is like staring out to the abyss and chewing glass. So because the staring out to the abyss component of it is just the fact that this may never work and you're almost facing existential risk at all times to the business. And the eating glass component is that you will, by nature of your role, get funneled the worst problems in the business and the problems that no one else can solve. So it's one, problems that people can't solve, two, the worst ones.

Or that they don't want. Two, the worst ones. Or that they don't want to solve and they suck. And so you basically become a filter for the worst things. And that's why it feels like a fire every single day in the business because you're the only one who can make the tough call because no one else wants to choose between these two impossible choices. And you're like, why is it so hard?

And the thing is that it literally never stops being hard. It's that the currency that you pay for and the hardness changes. And so a lot of people have this envisionment of the Rocky cut scene of it must be hard for business. But I don't think that's where the hardship comes. I think the hardship is that at every level of business, there's new sacrifices that you didn't know

you were going to have to make. Because if it was just, oh, I have to work long hours, there's tons of people who work long hours in their business and don't grow. And it's usually because they're unwilling to have a hard conversation. It's a different currency. They have to take on risk. It's a different currency. They have to make some sort of bet that they otherwise wouldn't have had to make.

They have some sort of legal issue that they encounter. They have an employee who tries to sue them for some sort of mal whatever. All of a sudden you're like, wait, all of these things are happening and they happen on a regular basis. And at each level, you unlock new levels of glass that you get to chew through. And so this is why most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, don't actually quit. They fizzle. So it's not a big bang.

Usually it's they just stop seeking. So either they get content at the level that they're at and they just don't strive for more. And sometimes they say it just wasn't worth the trade. And I respect that. If you're like, you know what, I'm at a million dollars a year and I don't want any more, fine, you won. Congratulations.

Like you won at life. But most of the times they don't really quit. They just stop trying. And then they just either coast or it just fizzles into nothingness. And that's just my experience of having, and I'm sure you've seen this, having gone through like cycles of entrepreneurs, like seasons. It's like, oh yeah, I came in through, even like in the media and influencer space, whatever. It's like, there's a bunch of guys that 10 years ago, it's a different landscape now

than it was 10 years ago. Some people adapted. Some of them were like, I don't like the, they just, they just, they weren't willing to chew the new glass, which is how do I learn TikTok? How do I learn? But man, blogs were so good. It's like, yeah, and they're not anymore. I talked to an entrepreneur really massively, many hundreds of millions a year in sales.

And he was like, dude, we were killing it on infomercials, so TV. And he's like, we really just have to crack YouTube. And I'm thinking to myself, like, dude, it's 2024. You needed to crack YouTube 10 years ago. And he had the resources to do it. But it was just a different kind of hard. And so most of the hard is, one, a level of uncertainty that goes into it, and almost certain immediate failure, because the first thing you're going to do will probably not work.

And again, it's the iterations of when you get into the new domain, you have to transfer your generalized knowledge, which is that as an entrepreneur, I will know that this doesn't work, probably, because I only know four things about it, and I need to know like 400. And so I will get my first shot, and I need to get directionally correct, and then just keep doing more of that. And so I gave the consulting way of learning kind of like a new space. But if you want to learn a new skill, the fastest way that I do it that's outside of

courses or anything is tremendous volume of activity. So whether that's like I want to take a lot of sales calls, I want to do a lot of outreach, I want to make a lot of content, I want to do a lot of customer success calls, whatever it is, you do a hundred of those. And then you see what are the top 10% of these? Okay, what did these top 10% have different than the other 90? And then I say, okay, well, these ones had these three things that were different. Let's try and do those three things on the next 100. And then because of the variety of life, there's going to be some new variables that exist

that you look at the top 10% of the next 100. And you're like, OK, we did those three. But there's also two more things that happened in this 10 versus the other 90. Now let's do all five of those things. And over time, this is how you develop a checklist for making banger content and banger videos. And I'm sure like there's this clip, David Perel talks about Chris Rock's creative process. And he says, how is it that you see Chris Rock at Madison Square Gardens, and it's just like 60 minutes of just fire. You're like, how is this guy so funny?

It's because what you don't see is the many small clubs and the first club that he goes to and does a whole hour long set and has like three moments that people laugh a lot about. And he's got like five minutes that are good and the other 55 minutes basically suck. And so the next time he goes to a club, he takes those five minutes, puts them at the front, and then he tries all new material for the next 55 minutes. And he gets another five minutes. And he continues to repeat this process and put the new stuff at the front

until eventually he has 60 minutes of uninterrupted laughing. And then people are like, oh my God, he's so talented. I can't believe that he can just stand up there and talk into a microphone and make everyone laugh. Cross age boundaries, cross cultural boundaries, cross all of the boundaries that you might imagine. How can he be so funny to everyone? That's how.

How can that guy be so good at writing? Well, he looked at the stuff that he wrote, he found the best stuff, made it into the few things that he always does, and then kept writing. And that fundamentally is the process of learning anything. And it's usually not one thing. It's many small things that when added together in aggregate, create the outsized returns. Sorry, that was a little pop at there.

I just get violent about skill acquisition. Because that's what it takes. No, it's so interesting. But so interesting to see your journey through that and how you ended up at skill acquisition. Because as you went through, there was three things that I was thinking about and I managed to write them down. The first at the top of it was you detailed three reasons why hiring the exceptional person when you're faced with that paradox of what do I do with my profits? It makes so much sense.

One of the big things I hear from founders that they don't appreciate is to go for a long period of time, you have to have some kind of emotional regulation. And as you were talking about the different levels of business and every level you have more problems, what I often see is a young founder hasn't hired those levels in between to deal with those different types of problems. And they are like burning out and thinking of quitting. I had someone in my office last week and she's on route to build about a $50 million business this year. And the first question I said to her was, what's your executive team? And she just like rolls her eyes and she's like,

I don't have an executive team. She'd done a post on social media basically in tears saying that she was gonna quit. She's got a 30 to $50 million business. It's growing like wildfire, but she's about to almost quit it because she's dealing with every single problem. And often founders say to me,

they think because they're experiencing so much hardship in that like one to three million phase that forever it's going to be just huge pain and I talked to them about this thing I call the promised land. I love this. Because in the first two, three years of my business, I thought that forever I'm going to have to deal with every fucking problem. Jenny in the office is pissed off at Dave and on Saturday night when they were drunk, they did something which they shouldn't have have enough. And I realized the problem was I hadn't solved for hiring these levels,

so everything was coming to me. And the emotional toll on my nervous system of dealing with every problem was not sustainable. And then I accidentally hired someone good. Yeah. Katie, who I mentioned. And then she dealt with all this shit. And then I could think again as a founder.

So I wanted to just give a moment to that and your thoughts on that. I want to do my best shot at operationalizing what you just said for somebody who's listening. When we encounter this issue, we have a specific process that we go through. And so we tell the founder, I want you to make a Google Sheet, really simple.

And I want you to have the time slots from 5 a.m. to midnight, however long you work, in 15-minute increments. And I want you to set a timer, easy timer, kitchen timer, like for cooking, for every 15 minutes. And every 15 minutes, I want you to, when it dings, I want you to write down what you did. One or two words, doesn't take a lot.

Now, as soon as I say that, people are like, oh my God, I don't have time for this. I will promise you, it will be the most productive week of your life because you will be aware of how you're spending your time. Every time I do this, I immediately think I should do this all the time and I don't. So just do it.

Just do it for the one week, okay? And so what happens is you'll do it for a whole week and then what the second step of this is you'll look at that and you'll say, okay, wow, I didn't know that 40% of my time is dealing with this thing. And I can hire a role to handle 40% of my time for this amount of money. If I had 40% of my time back, I could double this business. And that would be worth significantly more than what I pay this person.

And then you look at the next 15% of your time, you're like, okay, is this something that I can give to somebody else? Can I push this down? Can I create some process around this that can correct it? Or do I need to keep eating it for a little bit until it's enough that it's a full-time role? And so fundamentally, I see the entrepreneur as the many-hatted fractionalist that you continue to pull things onto your plate until you have enough that you can ship it out to somebody else full time.

And being aware of, again, the one resource that we have, which is time, how we're allocating it so we get the highest return. And so if you look at the stack of time as an entrepreneur, we are always getting paid for our time. Kind of the premise of the whole talk here is that we trade our time for dollars. And so we always, the whole process of entrepreneurship is continuing to trade up what you're trading your time for. And that's like at the most foundational level, that is all we're doing. And so to take this as a hypothetical, your

business doesn't need you. Right now, you spend whatever hours you do working and you do these things. Imagine a world where you could hire somebody who could spend the same amount of time doing all of that stuff. Now you own the business and whatever you have to pay them you take out of the profit and everything else is now distributions that you own as an owner. That's it. Now the entrepreneur who's mission driven then stacks their plate with even more things that they need to do and then just continues that process over and over again. Now this is the part where the pushback comes, which is no one can do what I can do. And I want to say you're right and if I wanted to, let's say you're a unicorn, so we can

imagine this mythical unicorn, got this white horse, got the horn, tail, everything, and the little pixie flies for the magic that's around it. Okay. You probably won't find a unicorn, but you can find a white horse. And you can find a rhinoceros to get the horn. And you can find some fireflies to give you the twinkles. And so you may not hire one person who has all of these things, but you can hire three. And then those three together can potentially do everything that you're doing better because it's all they're doing with all of their time. And breaking it up into basically understanding that you're not going to find that unicorn,

but you just break it into pieces and then you can partition it out to people who can just do those parts makes it a lot more manageable from an emotional level to think like, I'm never going to find this. Of course you're not. And that's okay, because we can find, we can solve for parts of our calendar. And fundamentally, when you buy back the time, you can then do what you're like, basically take the next step in the business. The other really interesting thing is you were talking about your friend who was doing blogs and missed YouTube, was the idea that our success traps, being an old innovators

dilemma, that success traps us in the past. So your friend probably missed YouTube because he didn't want to reallocate headcount to something that was working and paying the bills. And this, I guess, ties into your point about failure being so unbelievably important because what me and you both do right now is gonna get old. Like, you know what I mean? And we probably both watched the people that came before us fade into irrelevance.

Look at these dinosaurs. Yeah, right. And we're part of some kind of new school of content creation, but we're gonna become part of the old school if we don't. Yeah. What's in that gap? Adapt.

And I think that it's a port. So Google has their, I think Sergey solved this mathematically, but I think they call it 70-20-10. So 70% of resources get allocated to the core business. Do more of what we're currently doing. 20% goes to adjacent businesses. So things that are high likelihood success that are one step removed from the existing core business. And then 10% goes to moonshots, totally off the path, like, let's just see, maybe we'll

get 100 extra turn, we probably will lose on most of these. And he proved it with math, he's smarter than I am. But fundamentally, that is the concept of more better new. And so that's one of the chapters in the leads book, which is, okay, now that you have the core four, these are the four things that you can do. You can post content, you can run ads, you can do outreach to strangers, you can do outreach to people you know. Those are the four things any person can do to advertise.

The first thing you do is you do more. And for most small businesses, they're doing so little and think they're doing so much, and it's a huge gap in understanding. And so I'll tell this story that's probably the easiest way to explain it, which is when I had my first gym, I called up a mentor, he had 20 locations, I said, how do you advertise? He said, I use flyers.

I said, okay. So I put 300 flyers out. It didn't work. I called him back, I was upset. I said, WTF? He said, slow down. What was your test size? And I said, what do you mean?

He's like, well, your test size. So like, I mean, the 300 wasn't the only amount that he put out. I was like, well, yeah. He's like, well, our test size is 5,000 flyers. And then once we have a winner, then we do 5,000 every day, in terms of flyers that they put on cars to get people in. And so over a 30-day period, he would be putting out 150,000 flyers, and over a 30-day period, I put out 300.

And so he was, in a very real way, doing whatever the math is there, but like 300 times or whatever, a lot more, 500 times the math, sorry, 500 times the math, sorry, 500 times the flyers that I was. And of course, he was getting a better result. And so one of the fundamental misconceptions of small businesses is that they mistake low volume for volatility.

Meaning if you're not sure where your sales come from, and you get one sale here, and then two weeks later, you get another sale sale and it feels sporadic. It feels volatile well, there is a certain amount of advertising activity that is occurring over that period of time and We know that a month passes and you get one to two sales And so the companies that are in your space that are doing one to two sales a day Take what you're doing in a month and they do that every day. And I know that you can get this and I want to put this in context here. I hear I would like to build a personal brand and I say cool and then I ask how much content

you're putting out and they say, you know, I put out, you know, one or two pieces a week and I'm like, that's amazing. For context, for anyone who's listening to this, we put out 450 pieces a week. And so the brand that we have is way larger because we do so much more than you do. And that's, it's, people can't fathom the idea that someone works two times, five times, 10 times, a thousand times more output than they are doing, but it is usually the reality of why they are getting a thousand times more than than they are doing, but it is usually the reality of why they're getting a thousand times more than you're getting.

And fundamentally, this is the concept of leverage, which is that you get more for what you put in. In the beginning, you're the one doing the flyers. Then you get leverage because then you make enough from those flyers that you can look at your time setting and be like, okay, I can pay two guys to do these flyers and I can get eight hours back. That would be amazing. But now you've got two guys doing flyers, which is still double of what you were doing.

Now you have double the revenue that's coming in. You're like, okay, should I hire more guys? That's more. Or should I do something better? Should I change my flyer up? Should I change the offer on the flyer? That would be better. Or should I start Facebook ads?

Well, the new, which would be Facebook ads, is the 10% thing. Now, when you're looking at allocation of resources, let's say we're now fast forwarding a little bit into a company that has profit that they can do stuff with, part of the reinvestment is insurance for the future. And so every business has three strategic buckets that it has to allocate its resources into. Number one is how do we get more customers?

Like if we get more customers, the company grows, period. Number two, how do we increase lifetime gross profit per customer? So if we got the same amount of customers, but we made all the customers worth more, we would also grow. Bucket three is how do we decrease risk? AKA, how do we increase the likelihood

that the first two things don't stop happening? And so those are the three buckets. And so when you look at that 70-20-10, the 70 for the most part is usually gonna be directed towards get more customers, make them worth more. And the better also ladders up to that. The risk factor is usually going to be the new thing that you're going to do to ensure your future is going to be there by the time you get there.

And so if you notice, if we noticed, for example, that YouTube becomes like legacy television and viewership starts dropping and it becomes this new VR, whatever. At some point, we're going to have to look and be like, we need to take 10%, 20% of our profit every year and start building out this new team. We're going to continue to do what we're currently doing. And here's the mistake that you need to avoid. Don't take the stars that are making the one thing work and then push them on the other thing.

You have to find the people who can build this, otherwise you're going to sacrifice the core. Because all of a sudden it's like, oh God, well now we're totally screwed because now we're not getting customers from our existing thing and we haven't figured out the new thing yet. Right? And so this is fundamentally where I see the CEO role. You want to eventually become the flex player, which is that you can parachute in to a specific

division or department that's solving a complex issue and then you have the benefit that you have a CEO or founder is that you have decision making power and you have the ability to allocate resources and immediately say yes to things. And that's why and to be fair, it's unfair to your team to say, why can't they do things as fast as me? Well, because you can write the checks and because you can say yes, you don't need to check with the committee. You don't need to run it up the flagpole. It's just you saying do this, do that, don't worry about that. I'm telling you, you can stay late for check with the committee. You don't need to run it up the flagpole. It's just you saying, do this, do that,

don't worry about that. I'm telling you, you can stay late for this meeting. This is more important. And so strategy is just a fancy word that people say when they mean prioritization. That's all it means. We have unlimited opportunities that we can allocate things towards,

but we have limited resources. And so how do we prioritize those unlimited opportunities against those limited resources? That is fundamentally what strategy is. And that's another way of just saying we prioritize those unlimited opportunities against those limited resources? That is fundamentally what strategy is. And that's another way of just saying we prioritize. My gut and my gut is the home of our digestion and it's also a gateway to better health, but it can be hard to know what's going on in there.

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Bartlett. That's shopify.com slash Bartlett or find the link in the description below. On the car example you're talking about with the flyers, what I was thinking is so many businesses try and win on the game of creativity. So we'll create something more creative and appealing as an advert. And I see this in my portfolio because they'll send me something and they'll go, Steve, one particular business I'm thinking about, a major national supermarket has given us a display slot in 400 supermarkets. Which display should we use?

And they'll say to me, this one or this one. And I remember replying to them and saying, I don't know. And you don't know. But here's the system to find out. We're going to create 100 displays. And we're going to run them as ads on Facebook. Or we're going to create some kind of environment where we're not going to try and win on being the best

creative guesses, we're going to win on our rate of experimentation. We're going to conduct more experiments. I think this is a real shift in so many regards because especially if we've gone through university and we've been trained as a copywriter, we have the old problem of wanting to be right, not successful. Being able to, as a creative, even as a podcaster, say, I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm going to create a system where our rate of experimentation is going to be so much higher than our competitors that we're going to stumble across the right

answer more than they do, is a shift in thinking. So there are two types of questions that you shouldn't ask. Questions that can be solved with a spreadsheet and questions that can be solved with testing. And so fundamentally, the outside advice that you get on something that can be solved with math, just solve with math. And I would say like 30% of the questions that I get are like, should I sell this one or this one?

And I'm like, OK, well, what's the lifetime value of this product and what's the lifetime value of that product? OK, what's the cost to acquire for this customer? What's the cost to acquire for that customer? OK, this is a math problem. You have a way higher LTV to CAC ratio here, allocate resources here, but that's a math problem. Anyone can just do that math.

For the testing one, I love this, because it's like the Leeds book. I didn't know what to name it. So it's about advertising. So I ran story tests for like a week or two, just saying $100 million promotions, $100 million advertising, and then advertising won. It was like $100 million advertising, $100 million marketing. Okay, and then advertising wins.

I'm like, okay, $100 million advertising, $100 million leads. Leads wins. $100 million leads versus two other things, leads keeps winning. Okay, that's the title. And then I did the same thing for the cover. I did the same thing for the subheadline.

And so I tested every component of it to get the thing that people seem to want, which is like the book is advertising, but ironically, people want leads. So it's kind of like, do I want to have a book on drills or do I want to have a book on holes? Right. People want the hole in the wall, not the drill. That's just the vehicle. And so the book is just the vehicle to getting leads.

But as a quick hack for anybody who has a brick and mortar business, this is just a quick hack for anybody. If you're like, what market should I expand into? Here's five markets we're looking at. Take $1,000, run your best promotion that you win in your current market in all five of those markets. See what your lead cost is in all five markets. The one that has the lowest lead cost, then open in that market.

Don't spend $250,000 doing all these studies and then building out this location only to find out that the lead cost in that area sucks. Just test it first. It's the best $5,000 or $10,000 that you're ever gonna spend to just ensure this is a risk bucket, ensure that when you're there, it's gonna work. I mean, amen.

It's our whole philosophy. So it's so wonderful to hear that. And I didn't realize that you'd done that with the book. Oh, yeah. I have it in the chapter where I'm like, you have to wrap everything. And I show all the tests that I ran. And you can see all the percentages

of people saying that's the book title. When people look at you, Alex, you're a guy that knows a lot about a lot. And one of the questions that I often get as well is, I need a mentor. People, kids will come up to you and say, I'm sure they say it to you all the time, will you be my mentor?

Yeah. Do mentors matter? So I'll explain what I'm thinking through. So to answer that question, I think it asks, what is required to win? And is a mentor required? No. But there are certain behaviors and actions that will increase the likelihood of success.

If you can do those actions faster, then you will have a higher likelihood of winning and higher likelihood of winning faster. All of humanity has been built on us standing on our forefathers' shoulders and taking what they learned. We don't have to figure out how light bulbs work. I have no idea how the internet works, but I know that it works. And there's somebody who can figure it out. And so we just start where they kind of lay off the baton, and then we pick it up from

there and we run the next tower of many, and then we pick it up from there and we and we run the next however many and then we die and we hit the next guy and I think You don't need mentors, but you need to learn from people ahead of you And so I think in models not mentors What can I model about their behavior so that it can change my behavior to increase the likelihood that I win faster? And so everything that I do and I I feel like this is a pretty strong statement, everything

that I do ladders up or down to behavior. And so you've probably noticed it when I talk about training and employees, when I talk about advertising, I just want to increase the likelihood that a stranger takes a desired action. That's all I'm trying to do. And when we get into behavior change, it removes a lot of the surface level fluff that I think confuses the vast majority of people. And so I'm always afraid to go on podcasts where somebody is like really heavy in like manifestation and like energy and frequencies and like whatever the hell and

They'll say things like I manifested this meeting and I'll be like you didn't your You have content that did well because you produce content on a regular basis and then your EA reached out to my EA That reach out is what initiated this Not whatever vibes you were setting out into the universe now some people people might say, yeah, it was also the vibes. But I would bet that if they made the content and did the reach out, I would still do it. Which means that those are the core things. Because if we've removed those, if we just did the manifestation and didn't make the content and reach out, I would not be here.

And so one of these works, one of these doesn't. And so that is what has allowed me to try and extract the essence from the mentors or heroes ahead of me. I consume a tremendous amount of Elon, Bezos, Zuck, anything that I can find that they put out or that they're interviewed on, I try and consume it. And the whole goal is I want to think about their decision-making process as it relates to what they did and try and apply that to my context in terms of behavior.

And so that has been just like the big, big, big zoom out for do I need a mentor? No, but you need to learn stuff. And so whatever way is the fastest way for you to learn things, do that. And so I'll tell this story because I think it's like, do you need one? No, no one needs one. You can literally just do all of these things through trial and error on your own and you will figure it out. Time is obviously the one thing that is the big question mark.

I think part of that is a question of how valuable is your time to you? Not in a micro example, but would I pay in time or money to move forward five years and not make five years of mistakes? When I started my first gym, I didn't actually start the gym because I quit my job and I drove across the country and I showed up at a guy's house that I Googled on the internet who said he was good at running gyms. His name was Seven Figures Sam. All right.

And so he was a gym guru. And so I showed up at his actual gym unannounced and I was like, hey, I'm here to be mentored and learn. And he was like, I'm working. I really don't know who you are. And maybe we'll talk tomorrow or something. And I was like, OK. And he's like, where are you staying?

And I said, I don't know. I haven't decided yet. He's like, what do you mean? I was like, that's my car. I just drove here. And all my stuff's in there. And he's like, you have nowhere to learn. I was like, I figured it out.

I just figured it out when I got here. And so he offered me to stay at his house that night, which is unbelievably generous, and maybe my salesmanship got him. You know, who knows? But within a few weeks, he had a meetup of all the gyms that were kind of like following his little system for how he ran his personal training studio and boot camp. And I got to go as a 22-year-old, and I paid to have access to this community of gym owners.

And they were all going around talking about what was going good and what was going wrong in the business. And when it got to me, I was like, well, okay, so I want to open a location, and this is kind of what I was thinking about my model, and this is what I was thinking about price points. And they were like, wrong, wrong, here's why that's not going to work, here's why that's not going to work. And I was like, oh, okay, well, this is where I was going to buy equipment.

They're like, don't buy there. That's retail. You can get it from secondhand over here, and it's literally a tenth of the price. And I was like, oh, okay, well, this is where I was gonna buy equipment. They're like, don't buy there, that's retail. You can get it from secondhand over here and it's literally a tenth of the price. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. Okay, great. I was like, well, I was thinking about getting this type of thing. They're like, no, girls will eat shit on that and they'll fall. Like I've had two girls do it, don't worry about it, like you're not gonna use it. But you can get sandbags, you can use them all the time and they're super cheap and if

you have to replace them you can, but you can use them for like hundreds of exercises. And I was like, great great I'll do that. And then I was like okay so I was thinking about this kind of square footage for my facility they're like dude you don't need all that you can cut that in half and I was like okay well cut that in half and I was like I'm willing to pay two bucks a foot and they were like no never go over 150 and I was like okay never go over 150. And so like in a matter of a day I got to take like all of the knowledge of all of these guys of the

mistakes that they'd all made with their gyms, and I started my first gym just on their backs. And so how much was that worth to me? Years. And so for me, I have always been willing to pay in whatever currency was required to get knowledge that I don't know. Can you get that now for free? Yes. It didn't exist then.

YouTube wasn't even a thing. Instagram had just come out. Like for context, for everybody who's listening to this. I think about this equation a lot. And I actually had some video of somebody shitting on me for this. But I'm going to say it anyways, because there's the 20% that I'm going to say it. That's right. I'm not going to dilute myself.

So I saw a salesman say this at a conference, and he wrote a million dollars on a whiteboard. And he called up a lady in the audience, and he said, how much do you make? And she said, $50,000 a year. So he wrote $50,000 underneath a million, and he subtracted it. And it said $950,000. He said, it costs you $950,000 every single year. You don't know how to make a million dollars a year. And so the question is, what is the value of that skill?

And the answer is the difference. And so the troll who responded to this originally was like, well, you can keep going. What about $100 million a year or a billion dollars a year? And I was like, yes. Yes. If you had the skill of making a billion dollars a year, then the difference between 50,000 and a billion is the delta of the value of that skill. And it's really not one skill.

It's many skills that ladder up to one combined together to create that kind of value. But I remember that being like seared into my memory, which is like, whatever I want to have, the delta between where I'm at and where that thing is, is what basically what I'm willing to sacrifice in order to learn what I need to learn to get there. And I think that if people appraised that delta, not by the money in their wallet or the time that they currently have, but how much they would be making or how much time they would have and how much that's worth to them, then I think far more people would be willing to invest in their

education. And it's such a taboo word because people hate the word education. It's like, oh, it's like work. But like, you want to be an entrepreneur, like, you got to learn. There's so much stuff to learn. Parents versus practitioners. This is an idea that I've thought about a lot of the years because I look at someone like you and I can tell based on everything you say today

that you are a practitioner. In this analogy, what I call a parrot is someone who hears what Alex said and then starts saying it. But your lessons and wisdom have come from going through that shit and being able to distill the essence like Richard Freiman and then share it.

There is a group of people that just spend their whole life reading books, posting about it, etc. They never take the jump. Parrots versus practitioners. Is the best way to learn being a practitioner? This is widely known in the education space, but not as much in the content world. But there are two types of education. There is procedural and there is declarative. So declarative knowledge is knowing about something. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. So a simple example would be, okay,

I understand how private equity works. Right, like you could talk about it, you can explain how, okay, they take some debt and then they have this arbitrage and they get this enterprise value multiple, whatever. But you've never done a deal. And until you've done a deal, you will not have procedural knowledge

of knowing how to actually do a deal. And until you've done a deal, you will not have procedural knowledge of knowing how to actually do a deal. And so you can read 100 books on sales, but you will learn more about actually selling from your first 100 sales calls. And business is the same. Yes. And so the idea, in my opinion, for most people is that if you want to rapidly learn, you want to rapidly do those 100 repetitions as fast as you can so that you can suck 100 times

in a row and find the 10 that sucked the least and then say, how do I suck least on the next hundred? And you keep doing that so many times until eventually you suck so little that you're actually good. Hard work. Yes, and I think, you know,

this is actually really interesting because it ladders up to, because there's two types of creators. You've got entertainers and then you have educators. At least that's how I separate it. The point of entertainment is to maintain the attention of the audience. That is it.

So the point of an entertainer is to literally just keep people watching. The point of an educator is to change someone's behavior. And so if you want content to do well in either of these buckets, fundamentally, at least in the education space, you are selling time. So education is I spend all this time doing this thing to learn these four things that I can give to you so that you don't have to spend this time learning it. And so education is actually,

if said differently, what you do is you buy time. So when you buy, it's the only thing, it's the only way to actually buy time today. So if you want to basically time warp into your future, you have to buy education so that you can buy all of the life experiences from all these people and then not pay for it in your life. You pay for it with less time by consuming what they have or some money or some combination of those things. And fundamentally, we usually pay with the currency that we value least.

And so interestingly, a rich person values their time more than their money. And so they're willing to pay with money to get time back. A poor person will also pay for their time and drive around to 10 different gas stations to find the one thing that's 10 cents cheaper or drive to 10 different grocery stores to use whatever coupons. They're valuing their time over their money in that instance. And so back to the the educator. If you want to be certain or have confidence in any endeavor, you have to do so much volume

of activity that it would be unreasonable that you would suck. And if you were to write out the equation of like, OK, how many public speeches would I need to give for it to be unreasonable that I would suck. And if you were to write out the equation of like, okay, how many public speeches would I need to give for it to be unreasonable that I would suck? Is it 10? Is it 100? Is it 1,000? Write the number that you're like, there's no way that I would suck after this money. And then all of your effort gets really narrowed, commitment, elimination of alternatives,

focus, turn down quality and quantity of other things, to just doing that. And then, and the key part of this is not just to do the thousand, but after every 10 or every 20, looking at the top 10 or 20% and saying, what did I do well there? And that, because you have to have the feedback loop. Otherwise, it's not just doing 100 reach outs. You have to do 100 reach outs and then look at what worked

and then do more of what worked. And so for the parent versus the practitioner component of this, even if you're starting out, you can have confidence in what you're doing because you derived the solution. And you can actually answer why you do something. So if you cannot explain why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief, it's someone else's. And so most people, I would say, parrot the vast majority of the things that they say

because—and to be fair, that's how humans learn. You're five years old, you say, what's that? They say, bull, and you say, bull, you parrot it back, and there we go, right? But when it comes to skills, you can describe what other people have said before, but if something goes wrong or what about this condition, you won't know what to do. But if you derived it from the ground up, and there's a great portion of this in the Y Combinator community that you, or the Silicon Valley community,

that you probably heard of. Maybe like three or four months ago, it was like founder mode. Did that get to the UK? Yeah. It was from Brian Chesky. I actually messaged him about it after. Oh, yeah. It was awesome, right?

And so basically, the tenet is that the founder always has special powers in the company because you know what built it. And so that is basically at its core the practitioner versus parrot. The people who came later are parroting why you do what you do. But you know what conditions you were in when you made this rule.

And also you know how to break it and when to bend those rules. And so if you build something when you built it from those repetitions to distill out the few truths that exist, you'll know why those are the truths. Like I'll give you a really simple example. So if we, you know, we've tried to learn YouTube and we've gotten better over time. But in the beginning, I did this massive review and I figured out that the videos that we had that had three things at the beginning, proof promise plan, was the videos that did the best. And so then all of a sudden we said, okay, all videos have to have proof promise plan

right at the beginning, the first 30 seconds. Great. So we started doing that for a while. And then we looked at the outliers among those and we're like, oh, well, we also, and some of the ones that did really well, also had some sort of visual picture of this plan. All right. So it became proof, promise, plan, picture. Then we kept looking and we found out over more repetitions

that if we also include some sort of pain or problem that's being solved, that also helps. So proof, promise, plan, picture, pain. And so you're like, wait, if you keep adding to this thing, it's gonna get really long. No, sometimes you can check multiple boxes with one thing. And this becomes the elegance of creation. Like how can I check off three of these boxes with one sentence?

And so that is, by the way, if you're thinking about this, you're like, do they really think about this when they're making videos? Yes. And that is the difference between a 10,000 view video and a million view video. And it's understanding that level of nuance across the entire thing that creates expertise. And also, when you're like, oh, this video flopped when you're a beginner, you're like, these videos in general don't work or content doesn't work,

rather than saying this video didn't work. And here's why, because we did three of the five. And so it's like all of the, I mean, the devil is in the details and you only, you meet the devil himself by doing the unreasonable amount of work. And then it becomes, it goes from uninformed lack of knowledge to informed optimism. Because first you're like, I can make videos and get rich. Then you realize that it's really hard to make videos that people watch.

And then finally you start to develop a framework of this is how I make videos that people watch. And when they don't watch it, it's because I didn't follow it. It's so timely because it's weaves into something you said earlier, because my girlfriend came to the recording yesterday. And as I went into the green room and I sat down, she went, babe, look, I found this new app. And I said, what is it? She goes, it's an app that summarizes books.

And she is called like head something. And she showed me it. And I go, look at my book. Because I know the laws, I know the chapters, I know all of the principles that lead up to the point. So show me my book. And law two of my book's called 33 Laws. And law two is about the Richard Freiman technique you talked about. And I

explained why that process of learning something, simplifying it to assess its essence for a 10 year old, teaching it to someone else, if they understand it, move on if they don't go back to the top and learn again. And it summarized a lot of my book, like writing is the best way to learn. And I said, babe, if you just read that summary, the top of the pyramid, and you don't have the story and all these agreeable foundations, which I then explained to her, would you be able to then translate that

and truly understand the nature of the problem so that you could apply it to lots of different settings and so on? And then I told her what that second law in my book actually meant and she deleted the app. Because there's no point knowing the conclusion. The aphorism?

Yeah, like the punchline when you don't know the story. And without the story, you can't, I guess, get to the first principles of the thing. So this is really interesting because with that Feynman example, it proves that the distillation of knowledge is not bidirectional. So you, Richard Feynman, can break it down to a child, but a child cannot then re-derive what Feynman has done. Interesting, yeah. And so it's convenient for the transmission of communication

and for teaching someone who's, let's say, coming new to an organization, here are the things, and these give you the decision-making frameworks around which, and it can give you directional guidance. But that is the whole founder mode. That is basically a different way of getting to the founder mode idea. That person derived this thing. And so when a problem arises,

we can re-derive the next solution rather than trying to apply the aphorism to a new setting. Another point for founders who are getting their work copied. Because everything you've just said actually should give a founder who's having their work copied, their t-shirt designs, their content copied, a huge amount of peace. Because if I need to know steps one, two, three, four, five up the staircase to success to be able to predict step six, then if someone's just copying your step five, you should be at total peace because they don't know the foundations that would lead

to the next step. And that's what we see as podcasters. Podcasters copy you, they'll copy your thumbnail, your title, your whatever. I'm sure you see it everywhere. The piece that I have is, honestly, I say to the team all the time, if that's the thing that makes us special, we're fucked anyway. Like if it's the thumbnail or the this or the how all the time, if that's the thing that makes us special, we're fucked anyway. Like, if it's the thumbnail or the this or the how we do this, if it's the trailer that made us special, we're fucked anyway. But also, there's a set of principles, we call it the iceberg,

the 99% of what we do, you can't see. It's the culture, as you said. It's like... I have so much on this. So, one is, right when I sat down, you were telling me about the episode that we ran that was like akin to a shark tank, but new version that we had on our channel. And you saw me like kind of like grow and be like,

it was 56 minutes on video, but it was so much work to produce that one thing, but no one sees all the work behind it. That's the 99%. So that's thing one. The next thing is, think about the, if you're a founder who's plagued with competition and being upset about it, I was one too,

and I wanna tell you how I got over it. So number one is think about the alternative, which is that no one copies you, because no one cares about what you're doing. Well, then it would be a requisite for success that people copy you. So as long as you are successful, this is just a part of business.

The second piece is by definition, if someone copies you, they are second, period. And so if you wanna lead, you can't look at anyone else. You have to consistently be deriving the next step, the step six that's unseen from your first five steps to innovate, rather than I'm just going to parrot the next thing. And as soon as you find yourself copying, you have admitted defeat.

You've admitted that you were no longer the leader and that you were just following in someone else's footsteps and you're giving them the baton and saying, you be the champion. I'm happy with second, third, fifth place. And in a winner take all world, like attention is, all the fruits go to the first place anyways. Amen. Amen. I have nothing more to add. Let's talk about it. The last thing I want to talk to you about is, it's really like a three-part thing. It's hard work, love, and happiness.

Okay. And I put them together intentionally. One could say work-life balance, love, happiness. I think these things are kind of fundamentally intertwined. But how do you think about it? You're someone that's known as being very obsessive, very into your work, to say the least. You have a wonderful partner who seems to be aligned. I know. Oh, super.

Okay, good. She's hardcore. So let's go through it. Work-life balance slash hard work, love and happiness. Okay. We start with work-life balance. Is that a shit question. Beliefs on it?

Yeah. So, I will answer with how I derived my kind of life thesis, which was after we... So when we went to... So we had taken about $40 million in distributions from Jim Launch personally throughout the years that we ran the company. And then in the year of the sale, for those of you who have never sold a company before, you typically don't want to change a lot of things. You kind of want the company to just be like, be stable, keep working, everything's fine.

And so it's one of the most harrowing experiences to go through because you can't really change anything. And if you're the founder, you're always trying to innovate. So you can't do what you're normally doing. And you also can't start the next. So you can't change current and you can't start new. Because if the deal doesn't go through, then you don't want to start two businesses, remember, because we're, you know, cardinal rule number one, we're not chasing women in the red dress.

And so you basically have to sit idly by and just like let things operate. And so in that year, it was one of the most miserable years of my life because I basically had nothing to do. And when I looked back on my life, this sounds like I looked back on my life as though it's been so long, I looked at the days that I enjoyed the most. And on those days, I had worked out and I had produced something and I had done both of those with people I liked. Almost all of those days, I'd worked many, many hours.

When I realized that the idea of working hard so that I can insert blank, the so that actually makes it still destination driven. So that was when I derived what I called, hard work is the goal. It's just to work hard. That is my goal. And then die? On things worth doing. And those are the days that I love.

And I get a tremendous amount of pushback for saying this. And it bothers a lot of people. And to them I say, live your life whatever you want. This is, again, my life is not a sermon. It's a documentary. This is just how I do it. You can do whatever you want. And for the people who are dissatisfied, try it.

And if not, no worries. I really enjoy working. The best days are when I write those books, it's the happiest I am. And it's not happy in the moment because it's really hard. But the amount of challenge is about proportional to my level of skill. And every book I think is better than the last. And the third book that's coming out is gonna be fucking awesome. I'm very excited about it.

But there's nothing that I enjoy more. But in the moment I'm like, how do I break this down? And I'm just rubbing my forehead, and I'm like, and then I create two, three different frameworks, I'm like, nope, that doesn't work here, and that doesn't work here, which means some kid in Afghanistan is gonna get stuck on this step because it doesn't work. I have to figure out how to get it so that it works everywhere.

And I keep deriving it. But the moment it clicks, I'm like, that's it. Fight me. That's the framework. That is what I strive for. And for me, the love, the happiness, and work have all, because of the nature of my life, been one. Now, some people have lived their lives where their love life and their happiness

and their work are all separate. For me, it has just been life. And I like it that way. And for the people who are upset by that, I'm not upset about how you live your life. I just choose to live it this way. And if in the future I change my mind, I'll change my life. If I get to a point where I'm like, this is no longer a priority for me, something else is, then I will. But when I look at the centenarians and I look at the people who, I look at Warren Buffett as somebody and Charlie Munger as two of my heroes, Charlie worked until the day he died. And to be clear, I don't work on a seven day calendar.

I don't work a certain hour. I work as much as I can until I feel like my rate of output drops precipitously because of fatigue and then I sleep. And then if I feel like on a longer time horizon of like I've worked nine days, I've worked 20 days, I've worked 30 days in a row and I'm like, all right, I feel like I don't have any gas today, then I'll take the whole day off. And whether that's a Tuesday or a Sunday or a Saturday, I take the day off and that just is what it is.

And I've just, I have learned to work that way and I'm okay with it. The goal clearly for you then is the hard work itself and not a certain place you're trying to get to necessarily. Because that always moves. Yeah. And so Jesse Itzler has this and maybe, maybe I'll be able to steal it from him someday. But he told it, I saw him show a picture of his kid finishing a race and putting a zero up.

And what that signified was nothing left in the tank, that he'd spent everything he had on the field. And I would, and it's like I have this visual of the 300 movie where the Queen says to the King as he goes off to battle, she says, come back with your shield or on it. And I kind of see like my work that way. Like I can't imagine a better way to go out than like doing the thing I love. And it bothers a lot of people that I love something

different than they love. And it's like, it really bothers me that it bothers them to be honest, because I make no projections. Do whatever you want. And I feel like if I ever had one thing that people took from me, it was absolute freedom. And because of that absolute freedom, we are 100% responsible for our own lives. And so where we place the finger of blame is also where power flows. So if you blame your parents for your life, your parents have power over your life.

If you blame your boss for your bad life, your boss has power over your life. If you blame you for your bad life, at least you can change you, and you can do something about it. And so I think absolute responsibility has been my core tenet. And if you have a life where you're like, I don't want to care about work that much, and I just want to spend all my time with my family, I'm like, congratulations, you fucking won. That's amazing.

Just don't assume that everyone's you and that winning for me is the same as winning for you. And I think the times that I talk about this, I know that my message won't resonate with everyone and that's okay. But it's for the few people who were like me and felt like everyone told them there was something wrong with them, and I still get people to tell me there's something wrong with me. And if wrong means not normal, then yeah, you bet.

But it's more so that you are different, and that's okay. And I think that if you're okay with that, then it unleashes this whole new realm of possibility of being able to do what you want. And kind of like I had the, you know, you do 100 of these and you look at the top 10%, do 100 of these, look at the top 10%. That was my way of trying to operationalize happiness. Because it was this ephemeral thing that when I was 18,

19, 20, 21, 22, I struggled a ton with. I was very depressed. I looked at religion. I looked at a lot of different things. And this is common for people at that age. And I came up with a mantra for me at that time, which was fuck happiness. Now, people will then hear this, and I'm sure this will get taken out of context, but that was basically like this release moment for me, where by continually chasing happiness, it always existed outside of me. And so it was always this carrot that was in front of me that I could never really get to.

And so by saying, fuck happiness, I was like, it's unattainable. I'm just going to work. And I'm just going to do the stuff I want to do. And when I started doing the stuff that I wanted to do, I looked up years later and I was like, I actually kind of like my life. And I was like, is this what happiness is? And I was like, I don't know. But I think one of the major plights of humanity, myself included, is the expectation that life

should be different than it is. And so we create this idea that whatever we have right now is not what it should be. And I think should is the root of all pain, is that all the things that we think should happen but aren't is basically the measurement of our pain. And so I've tried to eradicate should from my life. Should for other people, she should do this, they should do that. And just lean into is. It just is this way. I work period.

Not I should work more, I should work less, I should work differently, I should see my mom more, I should call my dad more. I do this. And if something changes, I will change. And so unconditional shoulds. Now if there is a condition of like, if you want to make more money, then this is a higher likelihood you might want to consider doing this. Those are things that I don't consider in that category.

But just the generalized shoulds of, he shouldn't do that. He should build a family. He should have kids. He should have gotten married earlier. He should have gotten later. He should have married someone different. He shouldn't have the life that he has, he shouldn't work this way according to what? And so for me that is my theory on life, on happiness, work, and love has been very unified

because I love my work so much that I got out of a relationship and when I started dating Leila, I said, I am not willing to change this. And so you have to be willing to deal with me working this way or this won't work because my relationship with my work is the most satisfying relationship I have. Now people will hear that and be like, well, that's because he's never experienced true love or whatever narrative they'll say. But it's like, you haven't lived my life and I haven't lived yours and I don't project anything onto you.

But I love what I do. And I get attacked for liking what I do so much. And I like working a lot. And it's because they have negative associations with the word. and that's their own history of their experience with the word. But I see my goals and my relationship with my goals as one of the most sacred things that I have because I see them as a relationship with myself. And so those proxy when someone comes in and says, hey, sweetie, you've been working too much according to

what? Why should I stop? Now let's do this other thing. And people will probably see this as a, they'll put whatever labels they want on it. But like I just said, this is what I would like to do with my life. And if you can incorporate yourself into that, that would be amazing. And so my second date with Layla, after we talked about business for four hours on our first date, was I said

I'm gonna be working all day. It'd be cool if you worked with me and she just worked next to me she had her own thing, but she just worked beside me and I was like this is nice and Over time eventually was like hey, maybe you want to work on my thing with me and she was like, yeah That sounds good. It was a little bit more than that But like fundamentally I got her to switch switch to working on it with me. And at that point, what we got to talk about was what we were creating together. And to me, that's been the journey of my life. And it's been amazing.

And I'm not saying it works for everyone. I'm saying it probably doesn't work for most people. But it has worked really well for me. And it would make sense for me that my path would be different than most people's because I don't behave like most people and so I would have to have a different formula for how I derive You know meaning or joy from my own life and since I don't believe in inherent meaning Just the meaning that we choose to ascribe to things

Then it's up to me to create that meaning within the work that I do And so the reason acquisition.com was all based on, and it was during that year where I just basically had nothing to do, where I was like, what do I want to do with my life? Because I don't need to work anymore. And that was, you know, we'd taken 40 out before the sale, and then we obviously got the sale. So like, I don't need to work. I like to work.

And I try to spend, I look at, you know, I had this boss that told me this, and was one of the catalysts for looking at life this way. She said, I had just had a good weekend or something and I came in like chipper. And she said, well, you must have had a good weekend. And I was like, yeah, it was good. And she said, this was like an authentic comment. She said, I'm pretty sure the key to happiness is living as many days in a row like that

as you can. And it was actually like really operational. Like I could, I was like, I can use this. Like what are the good days? How do I live as many of those days in a row as I can? And so I've, you know, I've been attacked for like saying that I don't really enjoy going on vacation very much. It's because like, I just want to get, I just want to get back to doing the thing that I

really enjoy doing. And I remember we, Leila and I went to Mexico this year for a week. And it's always during the week of Christmas because no one works and it drives me nuts. And I've just like, I've just given up trying to get, you know, get everyone to work. Cause even if my team will work, cause my team will because they're crazy too. Other teams won't and vendors won't, it's just pain anyway. And so while we were there, all I came out with was like, this is for other

people and not me. Comma and that's okay. Early on when we were talking about... Sorry, that was a long rant. No, it was beautiful. Because it, so a couple of takeaways from it, but earlier on we were talking about being a great content creator is a byproduct

of having the courage to be yourself. And from that, everything you just said. I still look like me. Yeah, I also gleaned something similar, which is being happy requires the same thing, which is the courage to be yourself. And in both in the previous analogy, you said everybody is unique and that is their value as it relates to showing up in marketing or with whatever product they have.

But also when I think about Alex's story, your story, and all you went through with your father and the early experiences and that consultancy firm, the gym, the fur place you worked. Logically, from first principles, the thing that's going to make you happy, because you are completely unique, is going to be completely different from everybody else. Like, to varying degrees, depending on how you're sort of defining your early experiences are, but I actually think we talked about the courage of being yourself. There's also the courage of being happy. And with the courage of being happy,

you have to withstand public pressure. The shoulds you said from your parents, whatever from social media, especially as you become a bigger creator, to actually just listen to how you feel every day. Can I throw something out that I think might like, so this blew my mind. So I throw something out that I think might like... So this blew my mind. So I was in around that same period of time, because I talked to everybody I could to try

and get context on this. And so I called a friend of mine up, or not a friend, I would say acquaintance that I got connected with, who'd sold his company for hundreds of millions of dollars. Really bright guy. And one of the questions I asked him, I said, so how do you drive meaning from your life? And he said, an answer that really, really shook me, which doesn't happen that much given my worldview. He said, why do you think that life needs to be meaningful?

And it was just this really interesting question, which is basically that I had an unspoken demand of the universe. Life should be meaningful. I should be happy. And so it's the shoulds that we don't even know that we think and say that are the ones that chain us the most, like, hardcore. And so my favorite quote of all time, which is probably at the front of a few of the books that I have and will probably be the one that will be on my tombstone, is a permutation

of an Orson Scott card quote, which is, we question all of our beliefs, except for those that we truly believe and those we never think to question. And so I would say that a lot of my entrepreneurial career, even as human journey, has been, what are the beliefs that I so inherently believe that I don't even see them? I don't even think about the should. And so when he said that to me, I was like, whoa, I have had this inherent demand of the universe that my life be meaningful.

And now people would hear this and be like, they have their shoulds and they're going to say, well, it should be meaningful. And I'm like, why? According to what? And if we look at history, history pretty much sweeps everyone under the bed, like within 100 years. And within 1,000 years, basically everyone and the people that we remember, we remember some of their works.

And we go 100,000 years in the future or 10,000 years in the future, probably unlikely that we will be remembered in general. And that is solving for the idea that we need to be remembered. Again, we have to. Why? And so my solving has been for degrees of freedom and responsibility. So what are the things that I can control? And I will do the very best of my ability to try and do the things within my control to ideally make other people's lives better and my own in the process.

Now that is a choice rather than I demand that of the universe. And this gets really abstract and heady really fast. And so I will try and bring us back down to earth. But by demanding that life be meaningful, by demanding that I be happy, when I understood that I was demanding these things and pursuing them, that they were outside of me, by saying I need to do this, that I created inherent space that I could never gap or I could never close. And so by trying to forget or eliminate the demand is where it was the first time that

I experienced those things. And so I try to keep them out of my head to the greatest degree possible so that I can be inside of them. That sounds weird. rather than in pursuit. And so the times where I derive the most joy from my life, if I'm optimizing for that, which is I wouldn't necessarily say that I am optimizing for joy, I think Williamson was like, you definitely optimize for purpose or meaning or something like that. I kind of reject a lot of it, mostly because I do what I have been rewarded for doing in

the past. Because I have a behaviorist view of the world, which is that everything boils down to behaviors, why do I do these things? I do these things because when I have done them in the past, I have enjoyed the result. So I continue to do things that I've enjoyed the result of. And if other people have done things that they enjoy the result of, then I encourage you to keep doing them. And I also encourage you to not project that other people need to also do those things

and that they will experience the same result as you because they might not. Alex, thank you. Oh, that was such a beautiful way to end. And it's so interesting because if people attack you for that, I just wanted to give my own perspective. When I hear you say these things about not enjoying holidays and things about your relationship with Leila and how that happens, for me, I feel even if I don't agree with 100%, I probably get to 95% to be honest with you, the fact that you're telling me that you're different makes my difference, whatever it

might be, feel acceptable. Do you know what I'm saying? I 100% know what you're saying. Because when I heard you say these things and I go, oh my God, Alex feels like he's different from the normal two. We might not be, me and Alex aren't the same, but we both feel inherently like we're not playing by the rules and therefore in some way getting life wrong based on this like public narrative of the way we should live our lives.

I thought, amazing. I remember watching the video where you talked about not liking going on holidays and being like absolutely obsessed. And me thinking, oh my God, I'm so fucking glad he said that. Because deep in my heart somewhere, I felt a guilt. Yeah. Oh, I, you know, I guilt and I'm like, where did the guilt come from? Right.

I'm doing it something that I love every single day, but I feel guilty. Well, I feel guilty because of other people's shits, right? So please, Alex, despite the, despite any critics that might be out there, please continue to have the courage to be yourself. Cause you have no idea how it's making a group of weirdos that feel like they don't fit in, feel heard and understood for their variance. Well, that is my, yeah, I mean, I make it for them.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast, as you know, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. Oh, God. I'm laughing because it's so ironic. Okay. What is the meaning of life? Well, the short answer is obviously 42.

I actually do think it's learning. I actually do think it's learning because if we think about what learning is, it's that you're exposed to new conditions that over time change your behavior. And so you are different now than you were 10 years ago because you've learned more things. And so if we think about the meaning of life as what is the output of life? So I Actually do really like this. So People talk I can relate this to business, of course I can relate with the meeting of life to business But what is the meaning of a business? The purpose of the business is is whatever the output of that business is

That's the meaning it's it's what the output of that business is. That's the meaning. It's what the output of that business is. And so if the mission, like with Elon, is like to get to Mars, then the output of the mission is that people get to Mars. And so that's the meaning of that business. And so the meaning of life in general for me, I think for all humans, is that the output of experience is

learning. And so we will learn regardless, whether we want to or not, we learn. Learning happens whether you want, whether you like it or not, you will learn. And I think that that's where I would just leave it. And the question is, are you learning the things that you want? Amen. I highly recommend people go and check out the new format you launched on your YouTube channel.

It's titled, Building a $1 million Business for a Stranger in 56 Minutes. It's kind of like a new take on Shark Tank, but it's more actionable, more practical. It's what you referenced earlier. And I know it took you many, many, many, many hours to perfect it. But it's a really interesting format that I think YouTube is seeking because it's so actionable and practical. And I highly recommend, I'll link that below, but I would also highly recommend people go and check out these books. I mean, they've been, to say they've been smash hits is a massive understatement.

Thank you. I mean, I just see it everywhere. I feel like it's a prerequisite of any entrepreneurs toolkit when they're starting and they're trying to figure out frameworks for scaling a business, making sales, generating leads. And I know there's another one on the way, which you won't tell me about,

but I know it's coming this year, which is volume three of this format. And I'm exceptionally excited to see it. And for any entrepreneurs out there that are looking to get in business with you, I highly recommend they go check out acquisition.com. Because there's so much there, regardless of where you are in the cycle,

whether you're starting out, whether you're scaling up, whether you're looking for advice, acquisition.com is the place to be. Thank you, Alex, for your generosity. I appreciate it. And thank you for all that you do. Thank you for being weird and different. Because like that's, again, that's the value. That's all the value in the world. We don't need more of the same.

We need people that have the courage to be themselves and the courage to be happy. And that's exactly who you are. And I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO into these conversation cards

that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com. They've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really really recommend acting quickly.