The Game with Alex Hormozi - 4 Strategies That Help Me Not Want To Quit | Ep 303

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Be in this for the long haul. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how longevity is a key factor to creating success, the state in which you can manage your thoughts, and some insightful strategies for you to continue playing the game.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:(1:17) - Imagine bad situation multiplied by a thousand, desensitize feelings.(3:59) - Prepare mental state, expect worst scenario possible.(6:09) - Soak in idea, imagine worst scenario, change perspective.(8:20) - Many things we do lose meaning, no inherent meaning.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. Hope you enjoy and subscribe. In March of 2019, my wife and I were walking together after just having finished a $4.4 million month. And she turned to me and she said, Alex, let's just shut it all down. She's like, I'm so tired of this. I'm so burnt out. I just don't want to do this anymore. And it was at that moment that I realized that in order to progress in the,

entrepreneurial game we had to change the way we operated the way we thought and so if you're an entrepreneur and you're a business owner the number one thing that I've seen that creates success is longevity meaning that you can continue to play the game because at the end of the day none of us is going to quit business or hopefully not quit business and so in order to decrease the likelihood that we quit which is the only way to fail we have to think through our problems with a defined framework and so rather than focus on the actual framework of the decision making, what I want to do is focus around the state in which you can manage your

own thoughts. All right. And so I've had to do with plenty of stressors, as you can imagine. So if you're stressed in your own business right now, like, you know, add a zero to whatever your revenue is and you'll have 10 times the potential for stress if you were 10 times bigger or 100 times the stress. If you were 100 times bigger, which that depends on who's listening, we may be that for you. And so I can tell you truthfully that the way that I've been able to eliminate pressure,

which has created longevity in the game for me, has been through four strategies that actually work in the real world for me. So the first that I do, whenever I have any kind of negative situation, is I go 1,000x negative, all right? And then I reevaluate. So let me explain what that means.

So if, for example, there's something that's bad that happens. We get a bad review or we get, you know, a client's upset, or I have an employee who says something bad to another employer, or a employee that's key leaves, or someone tries to, you know, a competitor steal stuff and then starts back, whatever it is, right? There's a million problems in go business. Or you have cash flow issues or you can't make payroll,

whatever it is, right? I like to think of this one is my first, this is my first line of defense. The first thing I think about is, if this were to happen a thousand times more, right? And this works really well with what I would consider like minor to medium-sized grievances. So things that happen that are kind of everyday business

that can, you know, bother you for a day or two days or a week, right? Well, if you can just shorten that loop of that cycle of you being disturbed, because the thing is, lots of those things are going to happen every single week. A lot of times you just don't know about them, right, depending on the size of your business. And so I just happen to know about it now. And so first off, I like to think about that. But second is I'll do this, right, which is I'll imagine that every day in my life this happens, whatever that thing is, right?

Customers upset. Now, obviously if it's a core issue, you have to resolve it. But in terms of like it happening in my affective or my emotional reaction to it, then I think to myself, well, if this happened every single day and this happened every hour of every day, at some point I would become desensitized to it, right? Because I had so much stimulus of this, I would not be able to have an emotional response. And so when I think and I imagine myself experiencing this negative thing over and over and over and over again, it's called a negative visualization.

Then what ends up happening is I become immune to it. And so I think to myself, well, if I can become immune to it after a thousand tries, I can become immune to it on the first try. Because it means nothing has actually changed only my perspective on the occurrence. And in so doing, you can short wire yourself to that end to outcome and then fast forward it to the present so you can live the rest of your day or less of your week without being emotionally disturbed. And when you do that, at least for me, I feel like I make better decisions. And so I think for most of us as entrepreneurs and business owners, we are judged by the marketplace by the quality of our decisions. That's ultimately what it is, right?

It's just how good are the quality of the decisions that we make? And so if I can decrease the likelihood that I make bad decisions and I can do that on regular basis then this is something that protects my mind and candidly it's what makes life worth living the second thing that I'll do is that when I'm preparing for something that that I need to start doing right because there might be habits or things that you need to start doing you know this is a this is a slightly different example but it's I'm giving you the four different strategies that have worked really well for me the second one is let's say you wanted to start working out because you're like you know what I've been neglecting my health or you know you know start eating healthy

whatever it is right those are fitness examples but just go with me. What I will do is I will expect the worst circumstance. So rather than saying, okay, I'm going to go work out and feel excited, right, to go work out, I'm super pumped. What I want to do is I want to plan and prepare my mental state for when it times to work out, when it comes time to work out, I'm going to be exhausted. I'm not going to have slept well. I'm going have a lot of business stress. And so I have to expect that going into every workout. Now, if I don't have that happen, then it's a bonus. rather than expecting nothing to be my mental state.

And then when something bad does happen, then I have this reason, right? And so it literally does go into truly expecting the worst case scenario and making the preformed decision to act anyways despite that because you have plan for it. So most people, most humans have really good psychological resilience if we brace for it. So if you're about to give someone bad news, for example, you actually have to let them, hey, this is bad news. Hey, you might want to sit down for this. Because people actually are very resilient if you give them a moment to emotionally brace themselves.

And so what we're doing here is using this bracing technique on ourselves in advance of a situation that is likely to occur at sometime between now and when we die, especially if it's a habit that has to be ongoing. Right. And so what I do is I emotionally brace for the worst scenario. All right. That's number two. 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 ask you 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 with someone else. The third thing that I do, and this is probably the one that I use the most, it's really the one that I use the most.

Actually, I'll say that one for last. A different version of this, the emotional brace, is an extreme version. So kind of, this is, imagine the thing that you just had happened that bothered you for a thousand times, then it stops affecting you. The second one is you emotionally brace yourself. The third one is you imagine worst case. Now, the point here is kind of like a pain anchor, okay? And so what I mean by a pain anchor is it gives you perspective on your current issues, right? So for example, whenever you've had a family member die or someone close to you die or

some of you even have a pet die, it depends on where you're at in your life, right? If you have something that was painful for you, right, all of us benefit. We get the gift of perspective from those who die. That's like one of the final gifts that any death occurs that's in your proximity will give you, right? And so for me, I think about that negative situation. I really like try and soak myself in it, right? Really try and like put it on and walk around and what that painful state would be. Whatever, whatever worst case scenario I can imagine, might be death of a spouse, might be death of a parent, whatever, right?

Or child, something horrific, right? But if I can truly allow myself to go there, then what happens is I get so much context and perspective on the little thing, like somebody bashing a piece of content or someone saying that they hate your ad or whatever, it might be. be the thing that is deriding you. And all of a sudden that problem becomes massively minimized, right? It becomes almost inconsequential. And what I found is that over my life in the business, there's an infinite amount of problems. Truly, like there's an unlimited amount of problems. I could think of so many things we should be doing or we could be doing better or should not have happened, right? But it's only because we put the word should in front of it that we have an expectation

that is different than reality, which creates the friction in our minds. It creates the dissonance. It creates the unhappiness that we have. And so if I can imagine the worst case scenario and then actively minimize my current situation, then I usually can get right through it. And most times what I found is that most problems shrink into irrelevance within broader context. They actually never get solved. We just realize that we just don't care and that they are no longer meaningful to us. And so that has been something that's been very useful for me as we've grown

because, frankly, the bigger your company gets, the more ability and potential you have to become stressed. And I think most of us are here for freedom. And so if you want freedom, then you have to, or at least for me, I have found that I have to manage my mental state in order to continue to make high quality decisions. And so that leads me to the last one,

which is probably my favorite and most used one that I use on anything. And this may bother some of you, and that's okay. This is an N, sorry, universe. Is that this is a worldview that I have. So if you are, if you are, you know, don't be trigger, You know, don't take offense to this. But I'm telling you what has worked for me.

And so I believe that the universe will continue to expand until eventually everything becomes a fine mist over a long enough time horizon. The sun will give out, all stars will extinguish, and then everything will just become a fine mist. And as silly as that may sound, it means that anything that we do, this video, anything that I accomplish in this world,

will eventually disappear and be meaningless. And so some people, find that incredibly depressing. I don't. I find that to be incredibly meaningful because it means to me that I'm allowed to I am the only person that ascribes meaning to anything because it means that nothing has inherent meaning and so that means that when I have any stressors in my life I'm saying that I'm choosing my brain is choosing to make meaning out of this when there was no meaning to be made to begin with and so by doing that I can play the notes of

the piano of meaning that happen across the across the occurrences and circumstances in my life. And so when I think about it in this context, everything shrinks into a relevance. And so a lot of the concepts around like, I want to build a legacy, I want to make an impact, I want to leave a dent in the universe. You're not.

You're probably not going to leave a dent in the universe. And even if you made some big advancement within 500 years, like it'll probably be forgotten. And that would be like if you're the top 0.00001%, right? It's unlikely. But it is 100% likely that over long enough time horizon everything will disappear right and by doing that for me it decreases the pressure that I put on myself for having to I must I should I have to

like I can't live without those thoughts that strangle me right those are the things that destroy my ability to make decisions because I come way more emotional as a result of them and so whenever I have any kind of negative occurrence or a stressors that come up in my life which are inevitable I use this as my ultimate frame of reference. This is my ultimate trump card that I use to keep my my emotions at bay and ultimately say, I am the master of my own universe. I get to decide what has meaning. And for me, I'll tell you what I have found most meaningful for me is that my purpose in life, to my knowledge at this point, is to learn. I love learning. And so that is why I make these

videos because I feel like I am able to better learn how to think. I'm better learned how to run businesses. I'm better learn all of the aspects of everything by teaching it, right? And I'm sure if you ever did a book report when you were in high school you learned the one chapter you had to do your book report on or give a presentation on way better than any of the other chapters because when you have to teach something, you have to learn it better. You have to learn the nuances of what makes something work. And so for me, even cataloging these things has been useful for me because I think these are all the things that I

do, huh, but now I have a process that I can continue to use rather than use haphazardly just because I've just trained myself over time doing this. And so I don't know where you're at in your business career. If you're, you know, you're at seven figures, you're at eight figures, or multi figures, you have multiple companies, whatever it is, right? This has been so personally impactful for me that it has helped me be in this for the long haul. Because if nothing has meaning, except for what I choose to give meaning, then it means I can choose to only play games

that I find meaningful. And by extension, I will not fall out of the game or quit because the thing that I am doing is the thing that I derive the most meaning from. And so I will be able to outlast longer players in that pursuit. And what happened is, for me, my life becomes a glorification to an ideal that I create. And so for me, like the content, I will do everything I can to continue to improve on this.

I'm paying coaches. I'm going through courses to try and make the lessons that I have more engaging, more entertaining, more educational, have more stories woven into them so that hopefully I can transfer these things to someone else. Because that is what I find meaningful, not because it is eternally meaningful, but just because that ideal to me has meaning. And so that is something that I believe is eternal. Values are eternal. And values will exist even when everything did. disappears in the universe. And so for me, I choose to dedicate my content to those ideals.