The Game with Alex Hormozi - A Million Dollars Is Not Enough | Ep 937

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

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 and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Wanna scale your business? ⁠⁠Click here.⁠⁠Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:⁠⁠LinkedIn ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠YouTube ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Acquisition ⁠

your money goals are too small, and I will prove it to you. So in this video, I'm going to explain how you need to rethink your income, your investments, and savings goals, and timelines. And so here's the problem. A lot of financial gurus, even people on this platform, right, and I have no shade, right? We'll tell you to save $100 a month, and they'll tell you that if you do that from the time you're 18

until the time you retire at 67, you're retire with a million bucks at a 9% compounding rate. And that all sounds great until you realize that when you're 67, that $1 million is going to only be worth $170,000. So why is that? Just $1.95, right, 50 years ago, has today's equivalent purchasing power of $6.2. That's a six-x difference in 50 years. The main reason, inflation, the dollar. They don't make them like they used to, right? Or rather, they make too many of them. And if you push back on that, then I'd like to ask you to think and study late-stage capitalism. So, like, look if in late-stage capitalism and countries that are in it, which I would say America is in late-stage capitalism, look if inflation goes up or down, and I'll give you a hint. It goes up. So this measurement is conservative. This is based on the last 50 years, not necessarily the next 50. And so if that's the problem, how do we solve it? So this is kind of the new way I think about your goal. Let's say

that you had the goal to have a million dollars. Obviously, add or remove zeros as it suits you, right? Some of you might be 10 or 100 or a billion or whatever you want. Let your heart, you know, go wild. But let's say that you wanted a million dollars when you retire, so you could live passively on 50,000 bucks a year from investing it in a bonds or something that's relatively low risk. Well, you have to realize that in 50 years, that million dollars will only buy you $170,000 of stuff. And that $50,000 of passive income, oh yeah, that's only going to get you about $8,000 worth of stuff. Tough to live on that per year. So let's say that you were a little more ambitious and you said you wanted $4 million.

Well, just to be clear, that was my lifetime goal when I was in high school because I figured if I could do that, I could live passively on like $160,000 to $200,000 a year, which is 4 to 5% of that, which means that I could live indefinitely. I could keep the principal and a kind of live on that 4 or 5% interest. And if that was your goal, like it was for me, you might want to adjust it and take into account the inflationary reality. So if you want that $4 million when you retire, you probably need $24 million. If you want $200,000 in dividends that you could live passively on from interest, you probably need closer to like $1.2 million per year in distributions. I know. That's a big difference. Again, that's just because you're

thinking in today's dollars, not future dollars. Now, before you lose your mind and just throw in the towel and say that you'll never make it, I want to give you some good news. Compounding is still a thing, and it still matters. You probably just need to do more of it and do four important things. So think of this as your strategy to mitigate that so that you can actually get where you want in terms of your savings, your investment, and ultimately the freedom that you're looking for. So consider this the new strategy.

So I'll give you the quick and obvious ones that you've probably heard, but in a new way, and then I'll wrap up with what I've actually done to achieve it. Okay. So number one is you have to increase your income. So a lot of people think about this in terms of savings. I think it's much more powerful to think about in terms of income. Because, like, if you're not making a lot right now, there's not a lot of room between zero and you. There's an infinite amount above that.

Right. And so, like, you can only get your spending down to zero, right? So that delta is not going to be that big, but you can totally increase the upside. So let me put this in real world terms. Even if you don't think that extra $1,000 a month from flipping stuff online or making content and just getting some AdSense revenue, or, you know, promoting school and online platform to help people start communities and getting commissions from that. It won't matter, right? If you don't do anything with it, right? But if you take that extra thousand bucks a month, which might not seem like a lot, that work might not seem worth, you'd be like,

oh, that's a lot of hustle. I got an Uber more. I got a door dash or whatever, right? If you invest that extra $1,000 a month in that same equation, you get $10 million by the time you retire. So a thousand dollars a day, hold, like you're ready for this? This is me, this is me juicy. A thousand dollars today, if you're 18 years old, is $80,000 in 50 years. So the money that you make and spend now counts 80x. Why? Because 9% compounding, right? It's bigger than inflation compounding. Over 50 years, 9%, over 50 years is 80x. But we can't be one-sided. We also need to realize that 80K and 50 years is only worth $13,000 today. So in reality, every $1 you save today is worth $13 when you retire. So for me, this makes making that extra $200 for a gig where you do a DJ thing, right, or helping your buddy move

or whatever, is actually a $2,600 investment. And it makes it far more worth it for me, or at least when I was thinking through my saving stuff when I was starting out, that made saving $100, $500,000, when it was $13,000, way more worth it. So number one, we got to increase income. Number two, and a kind of natural leads to it is that you got to stop spending so much money. Now, on the other hand, If you think, you know, the $500 belt that you wanted to splurge on doesn't matter, just remember that it's $40,000 in 50 years, right? That $500 belt with compounding, verse back to the present, is $6,500. That makes it hurt a lot more, right?

And so here's something that's even worse. A $500 month car payment, that's a lease. That three-year lease is $18,000. That $18,000 in today's dollars when you retire, is $234,000. dollars. And if you want to say it in future dollars, it's $1.4 million in future dollars. Wild. 50 years, obviously. And that's just one lease. So even if you make less, it doesn't, it doesn't mean less when you're young. And this is the point that I think really discourages a lot of younger people, is they're like, I'm not making as much money as I want. You know, I wish I could make more.

They want to like, they want to flex the small amount of money that they've got because they, like, first off, never flex when you're young because everybody who's older has way more money. You just have more time to you accumulate. You just do, number one. More time you accumulate it. Number two, you earn more when you're older because you have more skills.

So don't like, don't get weird about this. But the thing that really matters that people who are older don't have is you have time. And so the value of the money that you make, even if it's half as much, the difference of that last 10 years of compounding when you start at 18 versus starting at 28

is the difference between a 30x, 33x, and an 80x. think about that for a second, a 33x and an 80x in terms of that 10 year difference. And so just because you make half as much or third as much as you want to make right now, it doesn't mean that those dollars aren't worth more to you. And so I just, I say this to encourage you to like make the extra few bucks here and there, spend, like don't spend as much. You know, you go out to the club, just get the, like, just pregame a little harder and, and gets a, get a soda with lime, all right? Like, you don't have to go crazy with it. And anyways, any girl that's,

going to just like you because of the money you're spending. It's not the girl you want to be with anyways. All right. So number one, increase income. Number two, stop spending as much. And then putting it in future dollars relative to today's dollars hopefully should soften that blow for you. The third is try and make it and save it faster, right? Because the money you make now versus the money you make when you're 10 years older hits harder. So there's obviously a time value to money. So three quick strategies. One, set a watermark. Invest the rest. So it's like, I know, I know, need to have $5,000 in my bank count, everything about $5,000, I invest, period. Or an alternative way of doing it is saying, I have to invest $2,000 every month no matter what,

and I got to make it happen, and then I'll live on the rest. I will tell you that the richest people I know think in terms of the second way more than the first way, all right, which is like, I'm going to go make that money to get that thing or to make that investment rather than I'm going to take it out what I got. Just something that I've noticed. Now, either way, just pick a strategy. And the thing is, is you can always change it. So don't have this idea that it has to be perfect. You can change the strategy over time. as long as you're still always investing more than you're spending, you're on the right path. We're talking about $1,000 a month in the example.

You can always make that number go up. Like, you can always start investing $2,000 when you're 30 and $4,000 when you're 40, whatever. Now, the next one is that my examples assumed $1,000 per month didn't go up by 3% a year to adjust for inflation and didn't increase in earning power. So you can absolutely run a separate model for that with your own Excel sheet or your own, you know, whatever AI you use to run a model on that. So if you're like, $1,000 a month, if I do that from 18 until I am 67, I'll have 10 million bucks. It's like, yeah, but if you actually increased it by 3%, it'd be a significantly larger number at the end. And so you could probably hit your goal or beyond that with just that tiny piece. Now, I said I had four strategies.

So I just gave you three, right? Invest the rest, invest first and spend the rest, or invest the same amount every single month and then increase it over time. All three of those are fine. Totally fine. And honestly, I see entrepreneurs. I see people all the time. Like, people want to know if they're going to be successful. Watching these videos and actually taking action,

99% of the time, like, that's all that actually met. Like, the fact that you care enough to actually change your behavior is the big green flag indicator. You're going to tweak over time. You're going to learn other stuff. But actually doing something about it is what will separate you from everyone else. Let me give you the fourth strategy, all right, which is what I actually did. All right. So I'm obviously not 67, and I have more than $10 million.

I made my living expenses as small as humanly possible. All right. So, protein shakes, Chipotle, I split a bedroom. All right. So I lived in a house, and I had six roommates. And then within one of the rooms, I split the room, like college style, like dorm style, with another guy, like we're staring at each other at night across beds, like that. All right?

Because it was cheaper, right? And I was never there anyways. I was working all the time. I owned a used car that I paid for outright. So the only thing I had was my car insurance. that was it. I haven't had car payments in a very long time. Like, buy a used car that's 10 years old that's in good condition, pay 10 grand for it, and then just like never have a car payment again. And then I invested my money, pause, in learning to make more money. So I said the first thing was

that the very, very, very, very first point I made today was that you want to increase your income, right? But how do you really do that? Because when you factor in that it's one of the only thing strong enough to break the cycle is that you just have to make more. So think about it. Like, if you spend $2,000 having someone help you learn how to sell, ideally a place with some sort of, you know, placement assistance. And if you can't find one, you're never going to make it anyways. Just look on the internet. All right. I remember for me, I spent $750 per hour, which was like all the money to me at the time for eight hours to have a guy who really knew how to do ads at a higher level. Because remember, this is a guy who was going to charge $750, not your buddy. Right,

you might be able to just buy him to pull and he'll do it for you, right? But to have somebody who actually taught me how to run ads at a high level, that those eight hours, that tutoring, that skill that I was able to learn from that 101 tutoring made me hundreds of millions, not just hundreds of millions, literally. And so these are where you can get absurd returns that counteract the leak of that three percent compounding inflation. And so part of the reason for that, there's twofold. The first is that skills will always trade in today's nominations. So whether we're trading, you know, dollars or Bitcoins or, you know, seashells, it doesn't matter because if you have something valuable to exchange, you will be able to exchange it at the present value in whatever denomination

exists. And so that's why skills are always the ultimate hedge against inflation. Now, let's take the other example I had a little further. Let's say you invest that $2,000 in learning that skill. and that $2,000 takes you from a $30,000 year income to a $90,000 year income, which is probably about what an average-ish salesperson makes, not at like a supreme one, just like an average-est salesperson. And post-taxes, at least in the U.S., that's about $75,000 a year, assuming you live on, let's say, $2,500 a month because you're living lien, that's $35,000 per year after taxes, after expenses,

that you can invest on for the rest of your life. So that $2,000, one time, gave you a permanent $3,000, $25,000 per year increase in investable income. That is how you get the absurd returns that can get you out of the cycle. And so put this in perspective, that alone would, like just that one change alone, if you did nothing else and you invested the $3,000 a month, roughly, that alone would get you to $31 million in 50 years. And that's with zero races, zero new skills, and zero increase in opportunity.

You literally just doing the exact same thing for 50 years. So the idea here is like you want to use compounding to your advantage, but the biggest thing is how much you can invest over time. And the way to increase how much you can invest is to make more, spend less. And in the short term, where you will get the highest returns, actually over the long term, where you get the highest returns and the short term, is in skills. But people are so afraid of investing money in skills, and I really want to dive into this because I truly want to help. So yes, you can absolutely achieve financial freedom if you live under your means. You invest the difference into increasing your income.

And then once you have the amount that you need to compound to your number, you can just let the compounding work. And if you're a maniac, my preference, my people, you'll realize quickly that you get higher return on learning skills than anything else. So then you put as much as you possibly can into it. And so for many of you haven't had that reinforcing cycle that one time where you spent money and he made more money back. I was very fortunate that the first thing I ever spent money on, I made more back. And the next thing I spent money on, I made more back. And so I got very addicted to buying money, basically trading money for skills that I would immediately be able to make more money and increase my income. Right. And so as much as alternative education has its share of scummy people, because it does, don't get me wrong.

I mean, in a lot of places, it's successful. It's still a cheaper alternative to learning realistic real world skills than like higher education. So if you were to spend $100,000 on courses in coaching, for example, or tutoring, which is how I prefer to do it, by the way, After doing some research, as in like, look online, like make sure people have good reputations, make sure they have testimonials, they're people like you, and they have many, many of them. They don't promise too much, right? I'm convinced that your life would change far more than $100,000 of higher education. And I do think you can learn a lot of stuff your own, to be very clear. YouTube didn't, like, really exist the way it does now when I was coming up. But the thing is, like, this is me trying to provide whatever value I can in terms of, like, my path, is that I was just always willing to pay for speed, right?

speed and the time value of money is something that I think people just wildly underestimate. Right. Like if you can increase your income for, like you get your five year increase in income in one year, the difference is the value of that learning. And I just, I don't know why people don't get this. I mean, I'm like, I think Charlie Munger, you know, and Warren Buffett had a little moment where he was like, you know, it's really not that complicated. And I think Munger was like, if people weren't wrong so much, we wouldn't be so,

rich. And I think, so I'm trying to, like, I've never really understood it. And so maybe you guys can help me understand it. I think the big reason is that people are afraid of spending money and not getting anything back. I think that's the big fear. But I think another part of it is ego saying, I don't need anyone's help. I can figure out on my own. And here's the reality. It's like, you can figure it out on your own. The question is whether you want to figure it out in the amount of time it would take to figure out. Like, I don't need to try and derive calculus. Newton. I'd rather just have somebody who already derived or deriven, devoted, or deroded, deroded, deroted, derided, who knows, right? Who had already derived a calculus to just teach me how to do it, right? And the thing is,

is that with good feedback, you can get your goal significantly faster, right? We already know tutoring. This is just in education research in general. Tutoring speeds up the assimilation of any subject significantly faster, like huge differences. Like, we're talking like 8x differences in speeds, monster differences. And so it's not even like saying, oh, I can't do this on my own. Of course you can do it on your own. It's just like you can just do it faster and do you value the difference in speed. For me, I always pay for speed. And so pay for tutors. Join free and paid communities on school to learn stuff. Right. Some people won't be good teachers. Just like you had bad teachers when you were in high school, middle school, and lower school. It doesn't mean that

teachers are bad or that the subject is bad. It just means that you had a bad shake. It happens. Move on. Right. Like, you will always lose until you learn, then you win. That's how winning works. But you have to be willing to lose in order to win. And so I have a relatively extreme stance on this, which is that I will spend when I was coming up, I lived on basically nothing. And I spent all of my money. And it essentially meant like almost had no savings for like years and years and years because all my excess cash, I just gave to people. And for sure, I had people who were like, that wasn't worth it, that wasn't worth it. But I tend to always come from the perspective of like, how can this make me better? How can I, like, how can I get an ROI on this? And so some of the best lessons I learned were from bad teachers of like do the opposite of that. And so this is like, I really like want to drive this. Now, I want to be clear, like, you will make mistakes and you will buy things that don't immediately work. But I, I want to be clear. Like, you will make mistakes. And you will buy things that don't immediately work. But I, I think of skill acquisition like a bridge.

So let's say that you're on this side and you're sad because that's how bridges work. You're always sad on one side. And then on this side, you have dollar signs fries, which means you're happy because money brings happiness, obviously. All right? And so here you're sad. Maybe we'll cross your arms because you're super sad, right? Most people will look at this bridge and say, well, I bought this one and I know how to do this one already. and this one, why can't I get across? It's because you got missing links. And so let's say you buy

something else and you get some tutoring and then it adds this brick. Was it a waste of money? Well, you still can't get across. It's a waste of money. No. Just like your arithmetic teacher wasn't a waste of time before you learned calculus or before you learned algebra, you need one in order to get there. They are prerequisites. There's a reason prerequisites exist. You need their stepping stones. And so what happens is, is that you get this other one from the sixth thing you buy, and then the seventh, and then the eighth, and then the ninth. And then what happens is you say, oh, this guy who taught me this ninth thing, that guy is the truth.

But the reality is that the reason that some people get outcomes and some people don't by going through the same thing is that the skill gaps that exist in someone's skill set are what create different outcomes with the same education. And so the problem with an inexperienced teacher, and this is very common in the alternative education world, is that they will accept money no matter what. But if I were to teach you Spanish six, and I'm very good at Spanish, but you've never taken Spanish 1 through 5, am I a bad Spanish teacher? Are you just not good at Spanish 1 through 5? What should have happened is I should have said to buy Spanish 6, you've got to go through Spanish 1 through 5. But the thing is, as many of these

alternative education businesses only know Spanish 6. They don't even know how to teach Spanish. one through five or they never had before, never thought about it, because they get one out of five people get a result, so they say, this is good enough, everyone else didn't try. And to be clear, there's definitely people who don't try. I don't want to say that's not true, for sure. But there are also people who do try, but just didn't have the missing links. And so part of the process of going through the alternative education world is having the perspective of a collector of skills. All right? And so I don't know if I'm going to be able to use this today, but I know I will be able to use this eventually. And as long as I see myself as the asset, I'm always going up.

And once I have all the pieces together, guess what follows? The dollars start walking across the bridge and they keep going into your pocket. And so to me, this is what I mean when I say like invest your money into income earning skills. If you can trade the skill for money and you can learn it, can you imagine something that's more valuable. We just did the math on like getting $3,000 a month extra from one skill. Imagine adding 10 skills. Imagine that sales guy says, you know what, that $3,000 a month extra, instead of saying I'm going to invest that three, I'm going to spend six my next two months of it, and I'm going to spend it on learning how to run ads. And you know what? I learned how to run ads, but I don't know how to make offers or make landing pages

and stuff. And so I'm going to spend another two months on learning how to do that. Like, I just always saw the money that was left over every month is like, what skills at the store do I need to go buy? and then I would just go buy them. And so I think that in the early days, now I went through the brass tax, the very simple version of this that you can use if you just have fixed income or you have a job

and you choose not to make more than that. That's up to you. But one of the big unlocks that I had in my career was that I went to an event and there was a guy who was there. The event was for everybody who was doing over eight figures is what it was for. So everybody was 10 million and up.

And at the time, Leland and I had just started making money. I'm talking like within the last 12, weeks and everything just started taking off right i finally got the last piece of connect and so we were doing three or four hundred thousand dollars a month i can't remember but it was almost all taken because it was just me leila and i had one assistant over a kitchen table like that was the business um so i was like and we just got married i was like live in large i and when i said living large i'd like i spent no money but i just felt not poor anymore which was great um so as i go to this thing i was like i don't even know if i should be here i'm definitely not making that they're like oh no you're gonna

you're going to be way past that. And I was like, I'm glad one of us believes that. I was just, you know, trying to ride this rocket with both hands. And so anyways, everyone goes, you know, goes through their presentation. And the first guy who got up, because I remember he was like busy. And so he like, I can't, he either want to go first or last. Doesn't matter. And he gets up there and he, and he starts by saying like, so we did $35 million in revenue last year. And I was like, what? 35 million dollars? Like, I was like, one is I mean like I was three months into making you know pacing higher than that but I never actually like really had to happen at least from an income perspective and so anyways he gets up there and after he gives

this whole presentation he was in the e-commerce world someone asked him so where you're at now like what are you doing to invest in your education like what are you doing to invest in learning and he said I made a decision a long time ago that I would have a learning budget and so every month uh whatever percentage you're comfortable with he's you know maybe it's 1% maybe it's 5% maybe 10% of my income he said, I force myself to spend it. And I spend it in a way that's testing something that I think is cool. And so that might mean, like, he's like, I'll test a new ad strategy, knowing that it probably won't work, but I'm willing to lose that money to continue to experiment

and stay ahead. And what's crazy is that I went to that thing, I heard him. And then for me, I was like, okay, well, I'm going to go experiment with my income. And so remember, I wasn't spending much money, and I had a lot of income. And so I took, like, you know, 10%, so I think it was like 300,000 a month, so 10% would be 30,000. And so I was like, I'm going to increase our ad spend by $1,000 a day. And we were spending like 400 at the time. So I went from like 400 to like 1,400 a day in ad spend. And that is when Jim launch went from

300 to 480 to 780 to a million to 1.2 to 1.5 to 1.7 something to 2 million, 2.2. That was months. Because as soon as I saw that happen, it was like, oh my gosh. And so part of me, literally just being willing to lose the money, unlocked my ability to spend more money, which scaled the company. And so once I had that, obviously, a very reinforcing event for me, I was like, where else can I spend money like this? Like, where can I, can I, can I, can I, can I pay for somebody's time 101? Can I, can I go to the event? Like, I did everything. Because every time I went, I made more.

And that's what I want for you. That's really it. is that like you're going to need to make more money than you think it's going to take longer than you think but you can make it happen significantly faster if you learn skills that pay today and i'm willing to pull cash from my future forward and even though i know that thousand dollars is worth 13 000 in 50 years i know that that 2 000 if it can make me an extra 2 000 a month will be worth something like well just let's just say a lot a lot of zeros a lot more than 13 x in 50 years and so that is my final Take weight, be fruitful and multiply.