The Game with Alex Hormozi - All Great Things Take Great Effort | Ep 552

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

"The amount of work required to build something amazing and huge just takes time." Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) reflects on his experience at a YouTube meetup and how it reminded him of the importance of putting in great effort to create exceptional work. He shares examples and lessons learned to inspire listeners to rethink their approach to work and strive for excellence.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:(2:22) - Level of detail & the challenge of hard work(7:27) - 3500 hours spent on creating a book(11:47) - Underestimating what can be done in a decade(17:41) - The level of effort in recruiting good employees(20:53) - Being aware of areas for improvement(23:33) - The work is done when it can't be improved further.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

And building an exceptional product takes a level of work that most people are not accustomed to do it. And this has probably been a continuous learning experience of my entrepreneurial career is how much work it takes to be good. Or rather, how much work it takes to be the best. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wished Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy.

So every year I always like to look back and think about my lessons and failures from the year or any kind of big frame shifts that's happened. And this year I had two. And I'm just going to talk about one of them, which was level of effort. And the big reminder on this was I went to this little YouTube meetup of guys who had, you know, from five million to several hundred million subscribers on YouTube. So very, very big creators. And for whatever reason, They thought that little old me would be cool to have in the room. And what was amazing to me was how much work they were putting into every video. And so I'm going to give you some context here for everyone who asks, because I get on podcast and I get asked on stage and they're like, how do you make great YouTube videos? And I want to be clear, after having been to this thing, I think we make horrible YouTube videos. But the amount of effort that went in is that they would, for every video, they have a 20 to 30 page brief where they're talking about the scenes, the transitions, the cuts. And the first five seconds, they're confirming the thumbnail, opening another

loop, presupposing multiple ideas so that people have open visual cues that they want to confirm later. The introduction is completely mapping to the very clickbaity headline and image, but they don't, it's clickbait if you don't fulfill it. It's just accurate if you have an insane thing and the video is also insane. They're like make an insane thumbnail that'll get all the clicks and then make sure the video delivers on how crazy that thing was. And the level of detail, like one guy pulled up a video and it had 10 million views on it. He's like, I was so pissed because these guys copied my exact video and they got 40 million views. And the guy who had the most subscribers in the group said, all right, let's play it. And so he sat down, we pressed play. And in the first two seconds,

he was like, stop the video. He's like, you didn't confirm the thumb. He was like, that's it. He's like, I don't need to see anymore. He walked away. And I was minding. And I was minding. blown because of the level of detail that was being ascribed to each of these videos and the concepts. And multiple of them would have previsis, which is like they spend $20,000 or $30,000 just to have a full mock-up of the video they're going to make before they spend $500,000 fully producing the video. And so if you're like, wow, that's a lot of work. That's what it takes to be the top 0.000-0-0-1%. And so to me, it was a great reminder. of lessons that I've had earlier in my life.

And so I'm going to go Quentin Taratino on you. And the first time that I had this big reframe was actually when I was pledging a fraternity. Big disclaimer here. The school I went to, like, 50% of people were Greek. So it was really like, you were social or you weren't social. And the only parties were at Greek houses, so you kind of had to be.

So it's a little different everywhere. But for where I went to school, that's what it was. And I remember this occurrence. So every year, a pledge cast a pledge, right? And like Clockwork, two weeks into the pledging process, there would always be a revolt. It happened my year. It happened every year after that. People, they'd all get together, all the pledges feel it lock arms and they're like,

this isn't what we thought it was going to be. We thought it was going to be fun. This sucks, right? We don't want to do this. And so I got the opportunity to be on the other side of the table as president my junior year. And so they asked me to come over the freshman side of the campus because they didn't want to come to like home territory. So I walked into some kids dorm room. There's 20 guys in there.

And they're all like amped up because they're like, fuck you guys, whatever. And so I just sat down. I was like, I understand you guys are upset. I was like, okay, just a quick question. Who here thought that pledging was going to be easy? And no one raised their hand. I was like, who thought it was going to be hard? Guys raised their hand.

I was like, want you to look around? What do you think about what you're feeling right now? I was like, this is what hard feels like. and it's such a frame shift because a lot of times we're accustomed to what a certain level of hard is and we've defined this level of struggle as hard but every once in a while you get something that comes on top of that and then it feels very hard but how you reframe that reality after I had that conversation with those guys they all accepted okay this is what hard feels like and then the rest of the time they were fine and they finished the process like everyone else does and so it had

we had to break reality for them in order for them to reframe what hard felt like. And so when I went to this YouTube meetup, it did the same thing for me yet again in a sphere that I wasn't familiar with. But it reminded me of a lesson that I've known over and over and over again that all great things take great effort. And the difference between a good thing and a great thing is often 20 times, a hundred times the work. And so when you see a video that has 50 million views on, you're like, man, that guy is so lucky, right? The amount of thought and work and prep and re-recording and editing and post like these guys are making like one video a month and they're spending every hour of every day with a 25 person team to make one video and so when you

think about that versus like i made a video on how to get facebook leads right like of course you're not going to get the same out because it's a talking head in front of a camera and so it discounts the amount of work that is truly acquired to win the next time after this pledging occasion that i had was i actually went to a law firm in france you might not know this but i went and spent a whole summer in France as a legal intern. And so French is my first language, fun fact. Well, haven't spoken a long time, but my, anyways, all good. I was good enough to go there. And so I remember I got, I talked to one of the partners of the law firm. And it was this older lady and I was like, yeah, I have to do this whole, I have to translate this purchase agreement from,

they wanted me to translate from French to English in legal language. And I was like, Jesus. And so I'm working on this thing. And I was like, man, this. is so much work. And this lady laughed at me. And she was like, she's like, you're so young, you don't even know what work is. She's like, you've never even, you haven't learned to work yet. And she said it in like a very loving manner, but she was just like, you haven't learned what the word work means. And as somebody who now has a little bit more experience in the law world, or at least from what I witnessed there, people worked around the clock. Well, as France, so not as much. but like here in the U.S.,

like people work around the clock at law firms. And just the level of work, level of output is so much higher that she was right. I had no idea. I think my entire, like one of the months I was supposed to translate a contract. I think nowadays I'd probably be like three days work or two days work, right?

And with AI, who knows? But the point is that she reframed what level of effort was required to win. And so, for example, my book that's coming out, $100 million leads, I spent to this point two years and two thousand hours working on the book. My editor spent 1,500 hours working on the book. So together,

two people spent 3,500 hours working on one piece of content that we're basically going to give away for free, not basically, we are giving it away for free in multiple ways. Digital formats, the hardbacks you've got to pay for. But the main thing was the difference between my first draft and my ninth draft and my 19th draft, 19th draft of getting. this book is what I think is the difference between a good book and a great book. And for me, the standard that I wanted to set for this book was that I wanted this book to become canon. Meaning when people talk about the great books of advertising and marketing and business, they bring up this book. Like in every one of those listicles, they're like, oh, this is one of the

10 books you have to read. Like, I want it to be in that list. And I want it to be in that list, not now, but 20 years from now. And so leaving that as the standard was a very high, bar to meet, not just like, can I write 200 pages worth of words and put a face and a cover on it? Because I've had a lot of people who saw the success of $100 million offers and said, oh, I'm going to go write a book. And they wrote it in like four weeks. And they're, you know, they're surprised when like they do their launch and then it doesn't sell anymore after that. And they have to spend the rest of their time trying to promote the book because the book, the quality of the book doesn't promote itself. And so the thought process that I had was,

if I spend two years making an exceptional book, then I won't ever have to market it again for the rest of my life because it will market itself. The same thing with the offers book. It continues to sell more copies every month after month. And that comes from the product. It's a higher leverage activity to make something exceptional. Even though you frontload the work,

if you spend 10 hours on a video versus one hour, you might actually get 100 times the views because of the incremental level of effort. And if you go from spending 10 hours to 100 hours on the video, you might get another 100 times the views. Because the level, so there's the law of diminishing returns, meaning your incremental unit of effort only gets you an incremental return. So less and less return every time.

But here's the counterlaw of that, which is that you get exponential returns, the better you are. And so what's the difference between the best Olympic runner in the world and the second best, 10th of a second. And think about all of the diminishing returns they had to do for all the practices and all the things. But what's the difference between being gold and silver in terms of life?

Everything. And so even though they both had diminishing returns, that little bit, that extra bit of quality that might have taken the number one guy another year of training to get this much out, the real world difference is everything. And so one of the mindsets that I've had and continued to be reinforced

is how much work there really is. And it's difficult when you're younger to appreciate how much work can go into a single project simply because you haven't had that many years to work yet. So a 15-year-old cannot have worked on any project for five years. It's impossible. And so when you're 30, you can have spent a decade building one thing, but you can't really have done that when you're 20. And so that is where I think people who are older have a real advantage over the young. I'm not saying forever because obviously younger people get older too, but they have that advantage because they know what it looks like when it's hard, when you have to keep putting in more hours every day to make the 16th version, the 17th version, the 18th.

And you think, why didn't you just publish the 18th? Because I didn't think it was as good as the 19th was. And the 19th version of it, as it currently stands, I can't think of anything else that I can do to it. And I wanted to leave all of my heart on the field and say, like, there's nothing else I can do. Like, this book is as good as I have the ability to make. Now, whether the market agrees is a separate question. But in terms of where I feel like my output of like what my best work is, the work is done. And I think, and part of my fear is that as my quality standards continue to grow as I, as my tolerance for mediocrity continues to go down, how much work I have to put in for it to be

my best for there to be nothing left to do or to work on continues to expand, which is why I think some of the biggest projects are the ones that take the longest. The reason why some of the biggest business tycoons talk about people underestimating what you can do in a year and overestimating how some of the biggest business tycoons talk about people overestimate what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in a decade. And so switching my perspective to the amount of work that I can do in a decade to accomplish something big actually makes the big things more accomplishable because everybody tries to make a best selling book in 90 days. What bestselling book was written in 90 days? Not many. 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 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 for someone else.

And so looking at the achievements and then reversing, what was the price tag of that achievement in terms of hours of effort and work and repetition? To me has made these very distant things achievable because it's like, oh, I can now count because at least my mindset has shifted enough that I can count in five-year increments. I remember when I brought on my first YouTube editor. He was a vendor in the very beginning because I wanted to just get somebody to hold me accountable to making the videos. I said, you know, my goal is to make three videos a week. And I hope that within a decade, I'll have a million subscribers. And I was like, it won't really matter if I hit a million. I was like, but I feel like if in a decade I don't have a million, then the marketplace will have told me that the videos aren't that valuable. And six months later, we ended up bringing a lot of the team in house. And, And I got on the call with him, and he said, I just want you to know that the perspective shift that you had on that first conversation with me, he said, I have never once had a client in my entire life say that. He's like, they're always asking, like, how do I get to 100,000 subscribers in 90 days? Like, how do I get my videos that go viral?

And you were like, yeah, I'm just going to keep making videos for a decade and hope that it works. And the reason for that, that exact goal was because I heard a podcast of a guy who said he was getting 3,000 applications a month for his service business. And I was like, man, 3,000 applications at month. I was like, that's a lot of applications, all off organic content off of YouTube videos. So I looked at his channel. And I think at the time, you had like 300,000 subscribers. And I was like, man, that's pretty wild. And then I clicked View First Video.

And it had been eight years earlier. And so I was like, okay, well, if I do what this guy did and I do the same level of effort for eight years, then maybe I can get something that does 3,000 applications a month. Because my thought was, if I have a business, that service business that has 3,000 applications is inbound for free, I'll probably be able to build a $100 million, you know, a revenue company might be valued a half a billion to a billion. That was kind of my reasoning. But one of the things that's been the gift of working with people who are significantly wealthier than me now, who have the B next to their name, is that all of them talk about

significantly longer time horizons. And they talk about it that way, not because they think that it has to take that long, but because the amount of work required to build something amazing and huge just takes time. And one of the, my favorite quotes from Warren Buffett is, you can't sleep with nine women in a month and expect to have a baby. Like, it takes nine months to make a baby, no matter how many women you impregnate. And I love that because sometimes the work just needs doing. And the level of effort reminder that I had from that meetup was a reminder of how much room we have to improve in everything that we do in the market on the media side. And so that was very inspiring for me rather than it being something that made me feel insufficient.

I mean, sure, like, it made me feel insufficient in that, like, I know we can do better. But in a lot of ways, I'm like, I saw all the different ways we could improve. And that gave me this huge time horizon of how much better we can be. And the work that I know, other people won't be willing to do to keep up. And so in a lot of ways, you can see the work that you're willing to do to make something great as the competitive mode that other people won't be willing to cross. And so I'm going to give you, I'm going to wrap this up with a real world example. Good friend of mine wanted to get into a sales recruiting company, right, just like everybody under the fucking son. And so he's like, yeah, I want to recruit sales guys for companies. And I was like,

okay, well, how are you going to be different than everyone else? And before he had time to answer, I was like, let me tell you, actually have exceptional salespeople. Because if you think about what the fundamental truths are, right, if you had a sales recruiting business and every salesperson that you had was an exceptional salesperson, do you think that you'd have trouble finding business? No. Okay. Well, then if only one thing had to be true, And then if that one thing were true, everything else worked, why would you not focus all of your effort on that? I'll tell you why.

Because people are in a rush. So their first few sales guys would probably be pretty good. And they'd give them to companies. And those companies would be happy and ask for more. But because they hadn't built the infrastructure yet, they then go find a few more people, don't do quite as good of a job, and they give it to those people.

Now, those people might not be dissatisfied, but they're like they might not look for more salespeople from them. Now, use the testimony from that guy to get a couple more customers. Now, that demand comes up, and the next people that you bring in, you put a little bit less effort. They're just not quite as good as the second round of people. And you see where this is going. Eventually, you sell too many people too quickly.

Your quality drops precipitously, and then eventually you're the exact same as everyone else. And so the amount of work that it took to train and recruit those first people, the ones that you absolutely wanted to make sure had to be good, is the level of effort. That is the hard work that has to be confronted. that is the problem to be solved. That's the one that has the 10 or $100 million price tag on it because I like to think of problems as puzzles with a price tag, which is, okay, I'll talk to our portfolio company and say,

hey, I think this is what we need to do to get our enterprise value from like $20 million to $100 million. And they're like, dude, that's going to be tough. And I'm like, well, good thing we're going to get paid $80 million to solve the problem. I was like, makes you feel a little better, right? And they're like, well, yeah, when you say it like that. And so I encourage you to think, like, what's the price tag? what's the treasure at the end of this thing for doing it right?

Because you know what the cost of doing it wrong is. You're going to be like everyone else and you're going to struggle and you have a rat race. You're going to price compete and it's going to be vicious and you have thin margins and it's going to blow. And that's what most people's businesses are. But if you were that first guy and you had that amazing sales guy and you give them and you know, you sell the recruiting services, right? And let's say it takes you another two months to get another three good guys. So what?

Do you think you're going to have trouble selling those three guys? No, of course not. And what's going to happen is you will be able to constrain supply and demand will increase. What happens then? Your price can go up because if you only have so much quality, people will always pay for quality. And what happens there? You have more profit per recruit than other people. That is how you become a premium brand. Everyone wants to position themselves as premium, but doesn't want to do the work of being premium. Because at the end of the day, you can position all you want, the product is ultimately going to be the thing that creates their reputation. Ford, like Elon Musk talked about this, he's like, Ford can go talk about how they're the highest quality and they're reliable. He's like, but ask the marketplace. No one describes Ford as high quality and reliable. The marketplace tells you what your brand is based on the quality of the product. And building an exceptional product takes a level of work that most people are not accustomed to do it. And this has probably been a continuous learning experience of my entrepreneurial career is how much work it takes to be good, or rather how much work it takes to be the best. And the difference in the guys who we have,

have 20 million subs and one million was an ocean, me being at one million and some of the guys being at 20 or 50 or 100, the level of effort that they put in every video, I honestly think is probably 100 times the effort that we put into these videos. And to be fair, I think the effort we put into these videos is 100 times more than a lot of the guys who have 10,000 subs on their channels. And here's the tough part, is that the work precedes the outcome. And so if we start, let's say tomorrow, We snap our fingers. I triple my media team so that we can actually start making these Hollywood-level production videos. Well, we're going to start putting those videos out.

And it still make take time for us to reap the fruit of what we've sowed during that period of work. And all the recruiting and all the training and all the hiring and all the onboarding that we're going to have to do for each of these teammates to get them up to speed. And then actually start increasing our output. It's going to take time and effort. But a lot of people want to shortcut that. And I'm telling you, it is the character trait of being able to, to confront and push through the work that will ultimately unlock the level of success that other people only wish they had.

And a final thought I'll leave with is as you get better, you become more aware of how much work there is yet to be done. It's only a beginner who asks beginner-type questions. When I get questions like, how do I get to a million dollars in 90 days? I already know that the person's never going to get there because of the constraints that they put on the question itself. And so the better you are, the more areas of opportunity you see where you can improve. And so the more deficiencies you realize you have. And so this is the classic Dunning Kruger effect, which is the more expert somebody is, the more they realize they don't know.

And so if right now you're like, this is all I have to do, then it probably means you don't know enough. Because the more aware you become of the deficiencies you have, the endless amounts of improvement that you know that you can squeeze out. And in my experience, big products, amazing media, Exceptional work doesn't have silver bullets. It has hundreds of golden BBs. It has many tiny incremental 1% 2% returns that when added together become exceptional. There is a UK bike coach who took over the team and they were dead last when he took the team over. And just like John Wooden,

arguably one of the best basketball coaches of all time, started every season by training all his new players on how to put their socks on was that by getting 1% improvements on every aspect. So that bike coach, he got slightly lighter bikes. He got slightly more aerodynamic helmets. He had different types of pads so they didn't have bruising in their crotch from all the time that they're on the bike. He like had different types of shoes. He made sure that they were hydrated a certain amount. And every one of these tiny things just prevented some people from getting injured, prevented. It added more people getting a little bit, you know, shaving seconds here, shaving seconds there to within a few years, they were unbeatable and they won six world championships

after that. For me, the worst team, and they did no silver bullets, just hundreds of golden BBs, and the work that needs to be done, the level of effort to build the amazing YouTube video, the amazing influencer brand, the amazing business that you want is rarely one thing. Because if it were one thing, everyone would do it. But it's a lot of little things that it just takes time to check off the list. And that's what takes a decade, is building something that you've checked off a thousand small BBs on the list. And then people look at you and say, hey, how can I do that in 90 days? And for me, I define having done enough work, which is one of the hardest questions to answer, because you always think to yourself like, it could be better, right? And you may not know this,

but Gerard Tolkien, the Hobbit, he actually never submitted the draft for the Hobbit. He worked on it for a decade. And it was one of his colleagues who stole the manuscript and then submitted it on his behalf in order to get it published because he said it wasn't done yet and then it ended up becoming the big success that it was and so for me i define when the work is done and when one of two things happen one is that any additional effort makes it worse like if i'm adding things that shouldn't be added or if i'm cutting things that shouldn't be cut that's where i'm like there's it is down to its simplest and most pure form whatever the work is and if you think about a software that way it's like How can I make this simple?

How can I make it easier to use? How can I make it faster? Now, things like software, because the world changes, it has to constantly evolve. But something like a book, at a certain point, like it has been packed in. There's no more space in the crevices for more knowledge based on my skill set. In 10 years, I'll probably read this book and be like, oh, my God, I could improve a million things. When I read the offers book, I almost blow my brains out because I'm like, oh, my God, I can prove all these things about it.

But we get better, right? And we get better through doing work. Because when I wrote offers, I hadn't had another 2,000. hours of writing with continuous feedback in front of me. So I'm 2,000 hours of work better now than I was then. The second way that I know that it's good enough is actually from a macro perspective, which is if my work, the amount of time I put in to get an incremental return in this one thing yields me less than me taking that same level of effort putting into something else that ultimately achieved this goal, that's when I say the work here is done enough for the ultimate goal. And so that's when you go chunking up and chunking down goal. So for example, if I was that biker, maybe my like off the track time, like right off the start is like something I was improving. At a certain point, how much time I have to do in improving that, I might have another aspect of my game that is weaker relatively,

so then I take the effort that goes there, put it in my hills or whatever. And that will overall improve my bike racing time. And so whatever the goal is, it's reversing the constraint and knowing that whatever my incremental level of effort is, compared to somewhere else I could put it, will get me more output. So whenever it no longer is the biggest bang for buck, I shift to the next thing that'll be the biggest bang for buck. So in writing the book, first it was making sure that all the content was there. Then it was making sure that we edited it to its shortest possible form. Then we edited it for punctuation. Then we made sure that it was below a third grade reading level. And so each of these sense, like, well, I finished the punctuation thing. Well, now I could

probably work more punctuation, but I think it would be more valuable for me to go through the reading level and lower the vocabulary. And that's how you kind of shift through, even though the overarching goal is to write the best book ever, I might, in a micro perspective, finish the work to be done in this narrow sliver. I think all of this comes down to working on yourself versus working on the project, seeing yourself as the output of your work rather than the thing you're working on. So it's like, I worked on becoming a better writer. The output of that work was a book. And I will continue to work on becoming a better writer because I'm not done. The book is done, but I'm not done. And so on my journey, my first book was, you know, Jim launched secrets,

which is a manual on how to make gyms more profitable, is not as good as $100 million offers. Now, my do, I think it's a very good book. I spend a lot of time on it. But it's not as good. It's probably, it's also just not as wide. Like, not nearly as many people want to learn about how to make their gym business more profitable. But I've, and part of becoming a better writer is making things that you think will be palatable to more people. Like, I think the next book I write will be palatable to even wider audience because it'll be about sales and influence. That, whether you have kids, whether you have, you're joining for employees, you're doing it for sales, the influence and the persuasion component of it is going to affect everyone.

So it'll be a wider, bigger book. And so for me, I am the output of the work I do rather than the thing that I'm working. So I can see progress every day rather than thinking like the book isn't published yet. And I spent two years on it. Like that is a very long trough for most people, like most people can do anything for 90 days. So like, we're going to book for two years is tough, right? On the 17th draft being like, we need another draft. That can be hard, you know. But it's hard if you're measuring it based on the book, it gets easier if you're like, I'm better at writing now than I was on draft one.

And so I'll be better in draft 18.