The Game with Alex Hormozi - 0 Tolerance entrepreneurialism and my definition of help...and why "focus" is a lie. | Ep 76

Episode Date: September 6, 2018

"You shouldn't want people to need you. Cause if they need you, you must always be a slave to your business." Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the importance of removing distractions to focus and be more productive as an entrepreneur. He also talks about his definition of help and how to identify and handle people who are not helping you.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:21) - Help = attention, know who helps/hurts(6:33) - Small changes aggregate attention, tackle big tasks(7:35) - Do less, focus on one thing, be efficient(10:11) - Acquire skills, lack of attention hinders growth(12:35) - Optimize schedule, prioritize, delegate non-essentials(14:35) - Embrace self-sufficiency, avoid dependence, promote growthFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Everyone, happy Tuesday. Hope you guys having an awesome week so far. I kicked it off strong with a nice Monday. I have a short video that I wanted to make for you today or podcast, depending on how you are consuming this content. So there are three topics that I jotted down in my notes that I wanted to cover today. One is the concept of the zero tolerance entrepreneur. The second topic is my definition of help. And the third is why focus is a lie.

and I'm going to try and tie all these three things together, and I think it will hopefully be able for you. So one of the reasons I wanted to make this is because I'm hoping that some of you guys will tag your managers or some of your employees in this video so that they can better understand you and how you work. The number of one video I've ever made now of all time was the video on attention and the new entrepreneurial role, and so I kind of wanted to have this work as a little bit of a sequel to that, but within the context of other people and how they play a role.

And so the first one, I'll do this in reverse, like, middle order, so it's two and then the third thing and then the first thing. But my definition of help, one of the hardest things for people to understand who aren't entrepreneurs is that most of the time they're not helping you. They're usually hurting you. And what I mean by that is that the definition of help, as I understand it, you can Google it or whatever, but as I understand help, help is giving someone attention back. So someone becomes more potent, more able, more powerful as a human. human being because they have more marbles in their marble bowl if you've watched the first videos like everyone has X amount of attention that they have at their disposal and so if you can put marbles if you can collect marbles for someone and put them back into that bowl they are now more able

they can do more things they can be a better husband they can be a better wife they can be a better business owner etc now for us as gym owners right we help people by giving them the attention that was taken by their insecurities or their lack of confidence or their lack of energy right And we give that back to them in the means of fitness, right? So when you get in better shape, all of a sudden you're not consumed by these thoughts about, am I not good enough? Do I look a certain way you walk into a warm? It's this fitting weird, whatever, all those things are attention that are being drained

from you from the task at hand, right? And so if we can give them back that attention, we're providing value, right? Now, where this ties into the people who play in your sphere is that a lot of people have what we would call inverted help, which is they think they're helping, but they're actually hurting you by taking their drains. An example of that would be someone who's an employee who constantly comes in and blows stuff up. And what I mean by that doesn't mean they have to be angry or they have to be whatever. They just have huge emotional swings. They're very emotionally reactive, right? And because they're very emotionally reactive, that spreads onto you. So they walk

in the door and then you just get sprayed. And what I mean by that is they just take a whole bunch of attention from you because they have things going on in their life that they have not handled yet. And you should know who those people are because you feel it. Like in as entrepreneurs, you feel it. You're like, ah, it's noisy, it's loud, right? That's because they're taking attention from you. They're not helping you, okay?

Another example of that would be like, if you have an executive assistant or an admin who continually pings you all day long to make decisions for them, are they helping you or are they hurting you? They're probably distracting you a lot of the time. And if that person is distracting you, ultimately they're actually making things worse, not better.

Right? And so you have like and how do you practice this? How do you figure out if someone's actually helping you versus not helping you? Really? It's just it's just the general noise level you have in your world. If things get quiet, you can think more clearly. If things get quiet, you become the person that you like you, you, you don't become the person. Your circumstances allow you to exhibit the characters, characteristics of yourself that you always want to have out there. When you're stressed, when you're spread thin, you don't have a lot of attention, you don't have a lot of bandwidth. You become more reactive and then you become more emotional. And so when you have lots of people who have explosions around you, then little things become explosions for you too, and then you get totally off task. So I'm going to lead this into why focus is a lot. One of the number one things, like, there's this whole mantra around like the grind and whatnot, and that's cool. I get that. You have to hustle. But focus is a lie as a concept because I don't think that people apply it the way it's intended to be applied. You don't focus by thinking about something harder. You don't focus by like doing this and being like, I'm just going to ignore everything else and go. The only way you focus is by

removing other things. That's how you focus. You have only X amount, like your vision is just your vision. It's in front of you, right? But if you have other things there, then that's how it gets split, right? And so you don't focus by doing less. Sorry, you don't focus by doing more things or just foot like pushing yourself harder to do this one thing and trying to ignore surroundings, you have to handle those surrounding things so that there's really nothing left. And then that's when like the whole thing about boring makes you money, like boring but rich. I want that to be our hashtag. I was thinking about that this morning. Boring but rich is that like you shouldn't have explosions in your life. And if you have people who create those explosions in your life, you should

either have conversations with them about what you expect from communication. Here's an example. I really don't like getting voice messages. It bothers me because I hate having to listen to someone for 30 seconds when I could have read that in about three seconds. And I also think that people when they do voice messages tend to ramble, right? They don't know what they were going to say. They just start talking, right? It bothers me. And so when someone texts, it takes more time to text, right?

Because you have to think about what you're going to say and you usually try and make it as short as possible because you don't want to move your thumbs as much. which works great for me as a receiver because then I can read it in a split second, right? And I can also read it at my own leisure, right? And for me, I don't like to have the, like literally the noise of, like, I like keeping this area quiet. It's carpeted for a reason. I don't like the echo. I like it's quiet. I used to put headphones when I was in college, like gunshot headphones with the ear plugs in, so I kind of absolute silence.

Like I had, I just, for me, it stresses me out. Maybe you're the same way. Maybe you're not. but um anyways uh that's just an example like you know you better than i do right but if you if you if you have these little pings these little twigs of like kind of annoys me communicate it and either fix that communication cycle or end it that's it because it's not helping you it's hurting you and every little thing so like the reason that our closet i wish i could pull my computer with me to show you i had everything labeled. So it's like daily t-shirts, workout t-shirts, workout shorts. And I have

them on hangers now instead of in drawers because drawers, because then I have to look for stuff. Now, this might sound like ridiculous to you. And I get that. I'm not neat. I'm not that organized of a person. I really am not. But I had to do those things because they bothered me. And I realized that they bothered me. And so it was taking attention. I was like, why I need to handle this, right? And so it took me a morning. And then, then from that point on, I feel good when I walk into my closet. Why is it when you clean out your garage, you feel better? Because you have attention that's sitting in your garage and still is sitting in your garage

right now because it's just wrapped up and stuff that you know you should do. And so doing these little things allows you to aggregate this stuff, bring those marbles back into your bowl so that you can handle even bigger and bigger things. Right. So, focus is a lot because it's not about focusing harder or ignoring things. It's about handling those things that are taking from you no matter how small they are. Because each one of those things can get added back to the bowl and make you better, right? I'm telling you, how many times have you fixed something?

And then the next day you look at a problem that you thought was insurmountable. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's really obvious. It's because you have more attention. Literally, you become better. I talk about this stuff because I'm telling you, when I talk to guys who were doing eight figures and they're like, dude, I'm stalker. They're like, how are you growing at such a crazy rate? and they ask us all these questions,

I can usually tell within a couple seconds that they're super split. And so like the advice that I give most people is I'm like, do less. Like there's no way you can handle all that stuff. Do less. Boren but rich. Do less. And all of a sudden they're like, dude,

I went from three businesses to one and now we're making three times as much money. I'm like, awesome. It's amazing what happens when you only have one thing you have to do, right? It becomes really easy. Real quick guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this.

and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words so we can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review

and share this podcast. So the single thing that I has to do is you can just leave a review. It'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. Okay. And so zero tolerance entrepreneurial.

So I covered my definition of help. So hopefully, if you have people around you and you're like you're not helping me you're actually distracting you're taking my attention you're stealing attention from me and if people communicate to you in ways like they text you all the time whenever things happen they face with message all the time or they send your voice messages and that bothers you whatever then handle that so that stop pulling from you and making you weaker right so that's the help thing and that should be for your staff or anybody who has to communicate you with on a regular basis you can even do that with your spouse layla and i have defined

communication cycles. We really do because it makes our life easier. That way we know exactly what our expectations are and what we're going to be bringing to the table. I'm not kidding. This stuff sounds crazy, but like the higher people, the louder everything will get, the bigger your organization will get. The more of an impact, like, I can't tell you how many Jim owners I've had who are like, my vision for my life is I want to help 10 million people. I'm like, awesome. The habits that it will take in order to create the infrastructure to actually impact 10 million people is that you're going to need to morph 10 times over and to become someone much bigger and much clearer than you are right now. If you feel like you are stuck right now,

it's because you have not enough attention to acquire the next skill set that you need to acquire in order to move up the ladder. That's it. Straight up. That's it. If you're like, man, I'm so busy. I'm so tired. Whatever. The marketplace does not matter. Like, does not care. Your business does not care. Your clients don't care. Honestly, most people don't care. Right. And so you have all this noise that you're giving yourself. So there's only one solution that you have, which is to gather your attention back, count out all of the things that bother you, and then go focus now because you can focus because there's nothing else distracting you. And then things that used to be complicated get really easy. How it works. All right. And so my ask for you is just to become a zero tolerance entrepreneur,

right don't tolerate stuff like all of the little little little net bites they add up the the messy sink that you you walk past right and it doesn't need to be you you can have other people handle that stuff for you like it doesn't if you're like man i hate cleaning that would be something that is loud for you then pay someone get that attention back and then you can apply it in other areas like right now we built the home like you're like well this isn't like i can't do that that's okay because this is just like I'm just showing you where this path goes I'm not saying that you have to do all of this now I'm just giving you examples and hopefully you find a valuable so we have a home gym because I don't like the I don't like traffic I don't like leaving in morning I don't like having to wait for layla or coordinate or having her wait for me

because then I feel guilty and I get this little twang of guilt as she's sitting by the door like I don't like that right and so we have a home gym we have a home gym so that we can go on our own schedules and do it whenever it's convenient for us and I save the time right that that's like a little thing that we do. I don't like grocery shopping. So we have Instacart, which by the way is 150 bucks a year and you get groceries delivered to your door in an hour. $150 a year. So you're talking 12 bucks a month for me to every single week be able to go grocery shopping two times a week, which is probably a two hour round trip like by the time you figure out what you want to get, get in the car, go there, find it all in the stores, waiting in line, have some kid going nuts next to you, right? Then you check out, get back in the car, come all the way back home.

If I could avoid all of that for 150 bucks a year? Are you kidding me? Yes, right? We buy everything on Amazon so it comes the next day. There's like, so what does my life look like? Calendar-wise, I have my daily huddle in the morning and then I have my huddle with my team, the R&D team, and then that's it. That's my whole day, right? And then I have some things that I want to get done, and that's all. And so look at your schedule, look at the things that. that are on there, look at how necessary they are necessary for you to actually be the one doing it, right? And then see all of the things in your personal life,

because it's still draining from the same bowl, which is why when someone comes to work or that you have an employee who has a parent who's sick or they're having trouble at home, right? They don't do as well with work, because you have one bowl of attention. And so if you think that the issue with your parents or your child or whatever doesn't affect your work,

of course it does. So you have to handle those things. You have to handle everything. And people might be like, like wow that's really hard and it's like yes it is hard and that's why most people don't do it that's why most people don't succeed or at least to the extent that they want to so anyways sorry this felt like it's a little bit more ranty than I anticipate but anyways guys um if you can throw a like for all the for all the homies poor little poor little fun tap out for all the homies

and if you have any staff who you're like man like I want you to understand that if you communicate with me it has to be deliberate it has to be with intention and we can't just do it it haphazardly because you hurt like you doing that pools for me which hurts the entire business right like if i can't do what i can do then we can't grow this thing and so i need you guys to be organized and not splatter on me whenever you don't know what to do and a lot of times what happens is that if you can cut those things out most people figure those things out on their own and then they actually learn and grow themselves because they don't need you as much anymore and you shouldn't want people to need you because if they need you it means you always have to be a slave to your business something to consider

Anyways, guys, shoot a like, drop a comment, text somebody. Hope you guys have an amazing week. And I'll see you guys on the flip side. You like my new shirt? They've got it from it. She got one of my little lemons all blazing. I thought it was pretty cool. Anyways.

Bye.