The Game with Alex Hormozi - Breaking The Poor Mindset (w/ Lewis Howes) Pt. 1 - Oct. '22 | Ep 485

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

The biggest gifts I got from those wasn't even the education, but it was the perspectives on reality. Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on Lewis Howes’ Show to talk about why it’s becoming harder for people that haven’t made money, the skills and habits of wealthy people, and why having a poor mindset can ultimately lead to your downfall. This is part 1 of the interview.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.Check out the episode on Lewis Howes’ YouTube Channel!Timestamps:(0:45) -The poor mindset & finding the right mentors(12:57) - The skills and habits of wealthy people (25:44) - Why is it so hard for people that haven't made money?(38:03) - Protecting your ego vs. helping others accelerate faster than you(41:00) - What does Alex’s vision look like now?Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

The big misnomer I think is that people think they need to have a new thing. You can start a cleaning business to become a billionaire. You can start a long care business to become a billionaire. You can start a roofing business, become a billionaire. There's clear problems. All you have to do is just do what everyone else is doing. Learn how to sell. Learn how to deliver consistently and learn how to lead.

If you do those three things, you can do just as well as everyone else and just do it better. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building acquisition.com into a billion-dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us to get to 100, million dollars and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy. I feel like a lot of society keeps people kind of trapped in this broke mindset. It's hard to kind of get ahead, right? Because of people investing in things when they don't have money, so they're in debt and they kind of stay in debt. What is necessary for people to break the broke mindset that society has kind of trapped

people in that keeps them poor? So I think like people have two sets of resources, right, that they allocate, that they've got time and they've got money. Yeah. And so, if you look at someone's bank statement and you look at their calendar, you know what their life is. And you can also predict where their life is going to be in X amount of years, right? And so if someone wants to change what their life is going to look like, you have to reallocate where you're investing the resources that you have. And so from a time perspective, people who are poor, in my opinion, spend a lot of time not doing stuff. And that sounds terrible to say. But like, at the base level, they're distracted. They're not doing the right stuff. Right. I would even say,

not doing anything. Just distracting them. Right. Playing video games. Netflix, etc. You know, all that stuff, right? So they've got, there's like the basis, like, they don't do anything. They're purely distracting themselves from their current state, which is hard because

it's hard to confront reality. If you're like not happy, it's easier to distract yourself, right? Now, the level above that is you've got people who are operating, they are working every day, but they're operating in low leverage opportunities, right? So they're doing things that do not give them a lot of return on their time. Right. And so it's like I could work, it doesn't matter how many hours I work at McDonald's. Like, it's very, very difficult to become wealthy there.

It's just near impossible, right? Versus, like, you could buy a building for $10 million and then sell to somebody else for $11 million, you know, for $11 million, just get the contract and make a million dollars on the exchange. Super high leverage, right? From a time perspective, which is crazy for somebody who doesn't have money to even contemplate something like that. But the only way that that happened and that required no money is skill, right?

And so, like, that's an example of, like, it didn't require money to make that money. That's skill that's required to do that. And so first is the time, right? People are not doing stuff with the time that they have or they're doing low leverage activities with the time they have. And then they're not trying to increase their output per unit time, which means investing in their skill set. So, like, one of the easiest ways to gain leverage on your time.

And when I say leverage just for everybody, like leverage is the difference between inputs and outputs in a system. So, you know, Archimedia said, if you give me a lever long enough, I can move the world. So the same degree, if you have enough skills, you can do anything, right? And so skills give you leverage on your time. So you get more out of each unit of time. So if I'm a master cold caller, I will get more sales and calls booked for the same unit of time that's going to suck at it. Same time, more output, right?

But because they developed a skill at a masterful level. 100%. Yeah. And so when people are allocating their time, they're not by percentage, they're kind of like consuming their time rather than investing their time. So they're either doing nothing or they're consuming the time rather than putting time in, to getting higher returns on their time, which is education, right? And so education you can have from like the conceptual learnings, watching stuff like this, or and or the actual doing, right?

And so, you know, you learn more. Taking action, failing, messing up, you know, feeling like an embarrassment in the actions, yeah. The first thousand cold calls you make, the first thousand cold emails you do, the first thousand doors you knock on, the first thousand, you know, like you'll learn more from that than you'll learn from every single book you read up to that point on the concept. Like you'll learn, right? And so people don't allocate nearly enough time to that in the beginning. And so I think one of the things that the formal education system did really well that people poop on it is the idea of going into debt to gain education is something that fundamentally makes sense.

Yes. But it's got to be the right education that can make you money. You got to get a return on it. Yes. That's the issue. You have to get a return on it. Because the idea of borrowing from a future self that can make more money to pay for the thing that you're getting the skill for makes total sense. I think Elon was saying something about how NeurLink in the future, it's going to be such a competitive advantage that they could price it at whatever they want because once you have it, you'll be so much more able than anyone who doesn't have it that you could so easily pay off the price of the thing. That's how it should work conceptually, right? So education is supposed to work. This is the simplest example that I have. So a friend of mine has a 17-year-old daughter. She got a job at a bowling alley and she makes minimum wage. And he said, why don't you become a full bottomist? She was like, well, I don't want to spend the money.

It's like, it's $500 and it's a two-day certification. And then after you have that, you make $25 an hour. So she didn't have the money. Now, she could save it to get the $500, right? Or she could take a loan for the $500 for her dad and pay back in a week. Right. Right? Because she has higher earning capacity.

And so it was like she could either save her eight weeks, right, from her bowling alley to pay the $500. Or she could take a loan for the $500, do the two days, and then pay it off in a week. So at that one week, she now has seven more weeks of earning capacity. This is a micro example, right? Seven weeks of earning capacity at her new level, and she'd be net positive on the next seven weeks of earnings, right? And so that's just a micro example of what skill investing does. A lot of us talk about, like, you've got to get educated, you got to learn stuff.

And like, you learn stuff by doing it. And a lot of times you pay for that education or access to people who can teach you those skills because a lot of people aren't going to give it to free. That makes sense. It's okay. It took them time to learn the thing, and they compressed that time to give it to you. So I mean, that's why I'm like, educate, if there's one thing that's my life's mission, it's education. And so I was telling my coaching students last night on a call that I had with them that I have multiple coaches that someone was asking about mentors. Like how do you find mentors? How often you stay in touch with them? And I was like, listen, when I was broke, whatever was 15 years ago, just getting started in this space, I was lucky enough that I had a couple local mentors in Columbus, Ohio, that kind of had pity on me. But they saw that I had this hunger, this desire. I was like, I'll do whatever you tell me to do.

And then I came back two weeks later. I was like, I did it. Here's the results. Here's where I failed. And that's a fuel for mentors to be like, I gave you wisdom, you took action, you got results. I'll give you some more feedback. But if you just keep asking and you don't act, we talked about this with a mutual friend we have, it's frustrating for a mentor.

They don't want to give you that time. And I told them, I go, this is why I pay mentors. You know, there's a big guy in media that has a, massive business that I messaged him. I'm an acquaintance with him. I said, hey, I would love to pay you for some coaching. He said, I'll just do it for you for free for 30 minutes. Now, I want to pay him because I want to be able to do it more frequently. He said, I'll give you to you for 30 minutes because he likes me. We're friendly, but I know I can't call upon him for 30 minutes every week. So now I'll go back in six months and say, I take action on everything you said in that 30 minutes.

Here's our results. Can we do another call? Yeah. And that's, that's, kind of like what you can expect with a mentor is that type of opportunity, unless you have a serious bond and they just want to give with their time. But investing in it, like you said, is so much more powerful in getting that speed of information, in my opinion. Totally. The single highest return on investment thing I've ever done, and not to sound trite here, but I just like using scenarios, like if I had taken all the money that I had spent on coaching, mentorship, courses, workshops, seminars, and put that in the S&P 500 10 years ago, the amount that I would have right now is inconsequential compared to what I currently have. It's because I

invested in something different. Rather than investing in the S&P 500, I invested in the S&E 500. So I took all of the excess cash that I had every single month. And rather than saying like, oh, I'm going to a dollar cost average, you know, long term, I wait four years, whatever, I was like, I just don't make enough money. So like I could be the millionaire next door who saves every penny, doesn't go to Starbucks for my entire life and have two million dollars when I'm old or, you know, whatever. For the last 10 years of my life. Right. And literally enjoy nothing during that period of time. that doesn't sound like this it's not a trade I wanted to make and so I had a belief that I know I will work hard and if I'm given the right tools I will be able to implement them and so I took all

my extra money and this is kind of you know a lot of people might not necessarily agree with me on this but it worked for me so I put all of every dollar I had even went into debt to get access to communities and mentors and coaching programs and masterminds yes and those were the biggest gifts of all. And it wasn't even just, like, the biggest gifts I got from those wasn't even the education, but it was the perspectives on reality. It was people disproving things that I thought to be true. So I was like, this is the way the world is. And they're like, that's false. And my whole paradigm shifted because I just, I had distortions of reality. I thought reality was different than it was. And so right now for people who are poor, it's because they actually don't see reality for

what it is because the way they see reality they see making money to be impossible or incredibly difficult or it's only for a certain select people not for them right it's just because they literally cannot see it and so I'm trying to think of an example of when like you can see something that you know an easier example is like kids and parents right like a kid thinks the world is a certain way and the parents like you just haven't seen enough stuff yet and so you know as you level up in the entrepreneur space there's also just more levels of that where other people are like this is the perspective you need to have and you're like no way that's possible and so So that's where those rooms gave me the highest ROI. The other skills, because there's so many people there that are trying to learn the same things, they already said, hey, get this program, read this book. And so they helped sift through the amount of information that's out there because I only have one resource, which is time at that time, right? And so it's like, okay, I'll spend it, but where do I spend it? And they're like, okay, if you want to learn real estate, these are the top three guys. You can join this Facebook group, get into this guy's community. He is a coaching program that helps you do wholesaling. This guy is a coach brother that does Airbnb. This guy does, you know, like, and so it's like, which one do I choose?

The answer for everybody who's curious is do them all. Because you're just like, you're not, like people are like, which one should I do? I'm like, you're not going to be poorer by learning more. Right. Right. And it's not like you have a finite capacity to learn. The more you learn, the better you get at learning. Right.

And then the more lines and synergies you find between different skill sets and opportunities. The more dangerous you become. 100%. If you just learn cold calling. Yeah. But you didn't also learn, you know, copyrighting and email marketing or speaking on stage. You know, it's the combination of multiple skills that make your earning power so much greater. I get, I'm literally getting goosebumps.

Dude, I love it. The compound. And so I have this example where I break down Jay-Z, right? And so if you look at Jay-Z in the beginning, like he had, you know, he probably had a natural proclivity for rhyming and beat or rhythm, whatever, right? So that was his first, like, kind of skill. You probably practiced that a little bit because he was into it, right? And then he started RAPIC.

Right. So that was his first level skill. And then he learned, you know, writing lyrics and psychics. That's another skill. Producing. Right. Exactly. Then he learned producing. And then he learned performing on stages or something else. Yes. And then he learned

how to sign other people to his, it's how to start a label. And they started a and so with each of these skills, it wasn't one plus one plus one, it was like one plus one equals 10. Right. And so like in a formal world, like the world that's not rap. Like if someone's good at math, they can learn accounting or bookkeeping first, right? It's like, okay, that's a level one skill. Then you learn accounting. Okay, now you're making more. And then you learn how insurance works. And you're like, oh, okay, now you can start to see this person evolve. And then you learn how tax and tax efficiencies work. And you're like, oh, and then you learn how to package and sell businesses and negotiate those deals with,

you know, private equity and things like that. All of a sudden, that's a CFO. That's somebody who's making multiple million dollars a year, but it's the same basic few skills that stack on top of each other and get disproportionate returns on all the prior skills with each new additional skill. And so the idea is not, like, people ask the wrong question when they're like, which course should I buy, which program should I do? Do them all. Yes. Yes. Do them all. Yes, to all, yeah. Yeah. Like, is each one of them you will learn things.

And there's going to be either different ways that someone's teaching. They'll have different communities, they'll have different beliefs. You'll learn from all of them. And this is something I think, I'll hear this sometimes where people say, well, I just invest in this program. I don't know if I have the time to invest in this next course or read this book or whatever it is. And you've got to think of like, you know, I'm doing five, six interviews a week where

I'm constantly learning. You know, every time you come on, I learn something new. It's not like there are things that confirm what I already know, but I'm also learning new things. It's not like I've said after 10 years of doing this. I don't need to learn anymore. I don't have any more time to learn. It's so important for me to develop as a human being, and that's why I'm constantly learning. People need to sit down and do interviews with people all day long. They can learn in different ways, but I don't think the investment ever ends in how much you can learn. And it compounds. Compounds. That's the best part. What would you say the three main

skills for someone to want to have the potential of being a six- or seven-figure earner? that they need to start learning now. So, 2023, they have that potential. My opinion, there's three main skills in business in general. You've got to learn how to sell. You've got to learn how to build. You've got to learn how to lead. So you've got to learn how to get people to give you money for stuff.

Got to have the stuff to sell them. And then you've got to have people that work on your side to help deliver on those other two. If you can do those three things, you're unstoppable. And if you do one of those three things, you can make as much, like you can still make a ton of money. But if you can do all three, you're unbeatable. Sell, build, like. building a team, building. So that would be on the lead side. The building is like the product and services that you have. So you have to figure out a way to deliver value to somebody.

To develop a program, a product, a service that you can package and sell. And people are like, well, how do I do that? All you have to do, there's, this is the perspectives thing we were saying earlier. It's like, I don't know where their opportunity is and people who are on the opportunity everywhere. It's like, and my biggest red life is that I can't live multiple lives because there's so many things I want to do. But it's because all you have to do is look for problems. You look for things that people hate. You look for inefficiencies. You just look for things that are nuisances. Like, what are things that people do every day that they hate doing?

A big one, a big misnomer I think is that people think they need to have a new thing. You can start a cleaning business, become a billionaire. You can start a long-care business, become a billionaire. You can start a looving business, become a billionaire. Like, there's clear problems. Like, all you have to do is just do what everyone else is doing. Learn how to sell. Learn how to deliver consistently and learn how to lead.

If you do those three things, you can do just as well as everyone else and just do it better. I was in the elevator this morning coming here. And I have this cat sitter that used to, you know, watch my cats, right? But he mostly works in a different building that I used to live in. Now I'm in a new building. He was in the new building because he had some other dogs. He's a dog, he's a dog like walker, right? But I asked him to watch my cats one time. And he, literally for 30 seconds in the other, I was like, hey man, good to see you. And I go, dude, how much you make it now? Because I see him hustling. I see him like walking around with all these

dogs. I'm like, and his prices went up over the last few years. Like when I first had him watch my Cats was like 25 bucks. Now it's like 40 bucks for a session. I go, dude, what are you making like five, six hundred bucks a day? He goes, I go a thousand. I go two thousand. He goes, I go three. He goes around three K a day.

I go, what? Walking dogs. And I go, he goes, now it's seven days a week. It's a grind. Yeah. I've got three employees now who are like, I'm walking. Walking dogs. But he's like the go-to guy in Beverly Hills.

And he's like independent. He's not with some, you know, big dog walking company or something. three grand a day walking dogs. I go, there's a need, especially in this community where people are busy, but they love their dogs and they have money to spend on their dogs. And he is providing a service. It's incredible. Three grand a day, man. That's crazy. I love this example. I'm a wrong business. I need to be walking dogs, you know? I love this example because it's perfect because everyone can understand. It's like, what's the problem that they're solving? It's like, people don't have time to work their dogs. When if you're looking at any problems, time is one of the

easiest ones to solve is that people don't want to take the time to do something, right? It takes too long, you want to do it faster. Jason Flatlin said the easiest business model in the world is find what someone else is doing, do it in half the time. It's just you can do it. And you can look at any business that exists and do that. And so it's like, what did he have to do? He had to learn how to sell, which means he had to get people to give him money for the dogs, which is part of that's marketing, but I'm just wrapping them. It's promotion getting people to give you money. He had to deliver, which is like, okay, what are the best routes to walk on? How do I manage 17 leashes at the same time? He had to figure all that stuff out, right? And then you don't learn how to lead. So he has two

employees or three employees. Now he's got a place. But before he was like, he's exhausted. But now he's figuring out how to build and lead. And what will happen is he'll stop walking, dogs. And then he'll have... He'll be managing it, yeah. Right, exactly. And so it's like, that's like such a perfect microcosm of the three skills being put to use.

I was taking him years to do it. It didn't happen overnight. He had to build his brand. He had to, you know, show that he could deliver the value of the product consistently and all these different things. He had to be communicating and, you know, be reliable, all these things. And he was like, I'm doing it seven days a week. Yeah.

So he has no life, right? So it's like an extreme, but it's possible. And so the three skills I heard you say is sell, build, and lead. You can never get enough training on how to lead yourself and how to lead others. Because there's so much of a world inside of each one of us that has to learn how to overcome insecurities, fears, traumas, triggers that will make us poor leaders of ourselves and of others so that people respect and trust us. So leading skills is probably the hardest. And it's also the one that's almost a meta skill in that it. actually can layer on top of the other two.

So if you think about, like, as a hypothetical example, imagine I know how to recruit and lead people. And I don't know anything about marketing. I don't think about sales. I don't know anything about delivery. But I have a vision for what I want to accomplish a problem that I want to solve that's meaningful to me. And I think it'll be meaningful to other people.

I can compel people. I can persuade them and influence them to want to work and help me solve this huge problem together, right? And so you don't even, like, real talk, you don't even have to know how to sell and how to market. You don't have to know how to build a product, build a service team. because if you can lead, you can get all those other people to do that. And leading is also selling in a sense.

If you're a leader, if you're a leader, your energy is an enrolling energy. Your way of being, how you show up, how you communicate, is selling you in your vision. You don't need to know how to sell a product and get on stage and say, buy my stuff. But you need to be able to enroll people into a vision that they are in alignment with. And I think that is one of the hardest skills because people don't have the belief in themselves. A lot of people don't believe in themselves. They don't love themselves enough to be enrolling, in my opinion.

And so they discount. And that doubt, people can feel that energy and that doubt. Yeah. You have to be certain, not confident. You know what I mean? I think part of it. So it's easy to say what we just said about the whole leading thing. And like, as much as everyone's like,

well, I'll just jump straight to leading. I feel like there's some sort of, like, and this is me, I could be speaking, a limiting belief of my own. So, you know, disclaimer, right? But it is my belief that there's a certain amount of, like, spiritual strength that you gain from having done stuff. Still, developing skills. Right.

Developing skills. Because you know confidence with these skills. Yeah, because you have evidence. Results. Yeah. And so people, you can enroll someone. You can subscribe someone to your vision. And because the next, the first question someone's going to always ask is, why should I listen to you?

Or why should I follow you specifically? Right. And unless you have a solid answer, that's not you being crazy, right? Being like, I have done these things. they give me evidence that I can move the goalpost further than what we have to done before because of what I have done behind me, right, because of the path I've already walked. And so I think like learning how to sell, learning how to build the first two skills, and then leading you learn consistently along the way for the rest of your life.

What would you say the most important habits someone can develop for themselves on a daily basis to support their opportunities for earning more? Most important lessons that I've learned in my life have come from doing and mentors. And so on a day-to-day basis, it's reducing the time between when you wake up and when you begin working, right? A lot of people lolly gag and delay and procrastinating things like that. And if you just think about there's only a certain amount of time in the day, I want to increase my output per unit of time as much as possible. A lot of people have these superstitions that they have to do a certain thing or they must do X, Y, and Z. But all you have to do is talk to a single mom who has like five kids and they still start businesses.

They're not doing any of that stuff. They're waking up and they're working before their kids are up. And then once their kids go to bed, they work then too. And they're not doing all the log like stuff that you see trending all over social media. It's like they're working. And so like the single greatest skill, in my opinion, is being able to find a place that you can shut out external stimuli and you can focus. Yes. Because for me, the single highest ROI habit that I have is that for me, between 5am and noon, I have nothing on my calendar.

It is just work. No meetings. and then all my meetings happen after noon. This is for the entrepreneur. Now, if you're like in a job right now, then it's got to be in the morning before you go to work and in the evening after you come back from work. But like having that dedicated time,

and if you're like, well, I'm not a morning person, fine, then just work late. Like, that's okay. Like, I've got billionaire buddies who are like, oh, I wake up at 10. But they work really late. That's their special time that no one bothers them. It tends to be at the bookends of the day,

though, just from my experience. Because in the middle of the day, you get pester it and it's hard to get into that deep focus that really, that deep learning that you get when you really pour yourself into something. Yeah, and I think I saw Layla mentioned this in a video clip where she was like, I just wake up and I start working. She's not spending an hour morning routine or something like that.

And I think you got to figure out who you are. It's like if you want to spend an hour or two in the morning and taking coffee and going for a walk and working out and kind of like preparing herself, great. I think for me, there is some importance to at some point in the day, setting an intention either for the day or at night for the next day. Agreed. So if you want to get up or work right away at night, what are the three most important things or what are the actions you're going to take, they're going to get you closer to your vision

that next day. So having some five, ten minutes to have an intention and then act on it, right? As opposed to just reacting to the world. Yeah, 100%. That's what I believe. But there was this one to consolidate what we were saying earlier because I like, this matters a lot to me. Yeah.

Most skills can be learned decently with about 20 hours of focused effort. 20 hours. Like the first 20 hours of you actually doing something, you learn the most you're going to learn about the thing. If you just consider by percentage of learning from like you know nothing to 20 hours in, you already have a really good understanding of the thing. The problem is that most people will take years to start the first hour. And so that habit that you're referencing is that my speed, at least now is that, you know, I've gotten better at this stuff, is that, like, I try and detract the time from when I want to learn something or when I want to start doing something to starting it as soon as I can, because I just want to start getting through those 20 hours as fast as I can.

Yes. And so that's just been a very tangible because it seems like this amorphous thing, but there was a study that was done. There's like, in the first 20 hours, you can learn almost any scale. Playing guitar, running an ad, doing a cold, like, you will learn more in that first 20 hours than any other time. So it's like, then just get to that 20 hours and don't delay. Yes. And that's been one of the most, one of the deepest lessons I've had because it took me four years. to learn how to build a website, and it took me one day to actually learn.

Crazy. Because you decided to act on the learning. Four years to delay and procrastinate and say, I'm not a tech guy. I'm not a tech person. This isn't my kind of thing. I'm a local business owner. I should pay somebody to do this. I'm above this kind of thing.

Like all these stories, right? And then one day I sat down on a Sunday morning. I was like, I'm going to learn this thing. You Googled it and you just learned it? Step by step by step. And you know what? I set the whole day aside. It took me four hours.

Crazy. It's amazing. I bet you've heard this so many times. people are like, I want to launch a podcast. I want to start a YouTube. I want to launch a book. And they've been saying it for years and years and years when you can literally go on Amazon and upload a book in an hour. If you just learn the steps, it might feel daunting and over like, I don't know how to do this and how to link my payments and create a book and put it up there. But you can create a one-page book and launch it to least say you did it. And now you know the steps. So it's not as scary. So many people are afraid to launch their thing because they don't understand how to do it.

and they think it's going to take a lot more time than it actually is. You may not be good at it right away. Your website probably wasn't perfect, but you got the website up within four hours. And then you can make it better over time. That first hour is you pang down the fear of uncertainty. It's all these fears of not being enough. What if I feel stupid?

Because you have felt stupid when you try to figure something else out. But if you remember how hard it was to learn how to tie your shoes when you were a kid, because it's like, I have to remember. And then this one, the two bunny years, you know, the whole thing, right? But now you can do it in your sleep. And it's just the emotions we have about beginning work because the judgments we're going to put on ourselves about how we're doing. But if we can remove the judgment of how we're going to do and say, I assume I'm going to suck. And all I'm doing is I'm going to start pulling the thread of this 20 hours.

That's my only goal is to start sucking. That's it. I just want to start sucking rather than nothing. Hey guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff. Sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways. You can check on my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free.

Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show. You got to love embarrassing yourself the way I feel like it. These skills are you going to learn. They're going to bring you a lot of value long term. They're not easy to start with. They're not. And so you've got to be okay with accepting embarrassment of your own self.

What's the belief that why is it so hard for people that haven't made money? Let's talk about like the don't. number for a lot of people, which is seven figures. It was hard for me to get over the hump mentally and psychologically of like, how do I go from $5,000 a month to $10,000, then $10,000 to $20,000, and then how do you get a business? I'm talking about business owners. How do you get it to six figures and then to the seven figure mark as a business owner? Do we overcomplicate money in our minds if we've been taught stories as kids or been taught beliefs about it? And how do we get over the overcomplication of making seven figures as entrepreneurs.

I agree with you that I think it gets overcomplicated. And so we just have to boil it down to the first principles of the math. Like what math is required to make a million dollars, right? Like we can either sell, you know, $110,000 things. We can sell a thousand, $1,000 things. We can sell. And when I say things, you don't have to price your product at $1,000. You're just lifetime value of a customer must be $1,000.

Right. So just how much somebody is going to spend with you over the period of time that they buy from you in general, right? Now, if yourself fills the products, that might just be the lifetime value. But if you sell services like the dog guy, he probably has people who stay with him for years. And so he has to add up that total lifetime value as the number. And it's like, well, how many of those do I need to sell? And then you just divide it, you know, to back into it. And so once you know the math, right?

So the first is like, what is the math to get to the million? And you have to figure out how many units you're going to sell. So let's just use something that's, let's use $1,000 because it's an easy one. Okay. So you have to do a thousand sales, but $1,000. Exactly. So we have to do $1,000 sales. Now, how are we going to break that down on an annual basis? Because 1,000 sounds like a huge number.

Well, it's about three a day, right? Like, okay. Well, three a day is all of a sudden a lot more manageable. And we're like, okay, well, what creates a sale? So at some point, to get set, I'm going to take one step before for six figures, for anybody who's not there. It's like, you have to sell, and this is again for business owners and entrepreneurs. If you have a job, then awesome. But like, if you're trying to make money, it's you have to sell something to someone.

That's it. It's all you have to do to get to six figures to do that. So that's one avatar, one, one medium, one channel, right? One product, one channel. That's all that is. You add the fourth piece, which is. consistency, right? That's what goes from six to seven. That's hard for people. And the consistent, yeah, 100%, because then you can tackle all the emotional or whatever it is, that why you're not

being consistent. But from a math perspective, we just have to break down, what are the primary actions that result in the output, right? And so if three sales means that I sell one out of three people who want to walk, or one out of two people who come for the dog walking, okay, well, then I need six appointments a day. Okay, how do I get six appointments a day? It's like, well, I have six ways that I can get appointments, right? I can get appointments from referrals. I get appointments from affiliates. So I make a deal with the local grooming place for dogs or the local vet for dogs. I put my flyers up or something.

Or the urgent care for dogs or pet coat. Like whatever. I mean, like there's a million ways, right? Like I get one of those guys. I figure out to deal with them. And I say, I'll give you the first two months of what they pay me to you if you just send them to me. Yes. More money for them.

And it probably helps their customers because it's a need that they can't solve. But they have the same avatar. Cool. So you got referrals. You got affiliates. You could just reach out to people you know, just one-on-one. Like, hey, I've got my thing. do you need up with your dog?

You can reach out to people you don't know, which you can do through post-notes, cold calls, emails, door knocking, flyers, yeah, all of those things are ways that you can reach out to people you don't know one-on-one. You can make content about how dog-locking is amazing and ways to walk your dog better, ways to take care of a dog. And the whole point of that is to get people to feel comfortable with you specifically in your brand, that you will do a better job taking care of their dog than they will. Exactly, right?

You want people to feel guilty that they're not doing all this stuff for their dog. And then they would start, you know, then you start getting, you field it inbound, right? And then finally you have ads, right? You have unpaid ads to get new appointments booked, right? And so those are the six primary things you can do to get customers, right? And so it's like, okay, I need six appointments a day. I have those six different ways that I can get them.

Which of them do I feel more comfortable with? Because you can win at all of them, right? And it could be soliciting your customers for the referrals. It could be getting the affiliates of relationships set up. It could be the one-on-one DMs. It could be the ads. It could be the content. Any of those six would work, right?

And so we just have to pick which one you want. And so then you just reverse engineer those actions of, because even one step after, obviously, this is something I do a lot. So if you reverse engineer the affiliate thing, right? So how do you get affiliates? It's like, well, I need to reach out to 100 people a day. So you'd still use one of the other methods, so cold outbound, warm outbound content or ads, right? To get those affiliates and say, okay, well, if I reach out to 100 affiliates a day

that are in my local region to see if they will partner with me. some sort of relationship. If I do that every day, maybe I'll get two of those referral partners a week. And if each of those referral partners a week can get me 10 appointments, then for me to get my six appointments a day, it's 180 appointments per month, if I need 18 affiliates. So all I got to do is get 18 affiliates. But then if you're thinking right now, you're like, well, wait, but I would be able to get 18 affiliates in probably like a month or two. And the answer is you're right. But people just don't think through the math of how to do it. Because if we're being real, there's no reason you should cap your business at.

a million. And so to the same degree when we asked the question like, how do I make a million dollar business? You also think in increments that somebody who's trying to make a million dollars thinks in, right? Because I got asked on this TikTok. So they gave me this prompt. They said, hey, Alex, how would you make six figures a year? That was the question. And my immediate response was, I would sell something for 100 grand and then figure out what I would do for the rest of the year. And so it's like these people think about money differently. You know what I mean? And so if you think about how do I build this thing into like a hundred million? And you have to think of a number that's as high as you can fathom. Right? If you can't fathom a hundred million, don't think that.

But like as high as you can mathematically fathom. So it might be $10 million. Okay. Think like how many dogs would need to walk and you just reverse the math into what you need, right? And then people are needing to hire and yeah. Exactly. And then you start and then you start with the inputs because in the beginning, the only inputs you have is going to be the content. It's going to be running the end. It's going to be doing the warm. It's going to readouts. That says. Those are the inputs. And then everything else is going to stem from that. And then what will happen is if you have that, the advertising machine on the front end to bring people in, the bottleneck becomes you're leading

rather than the selling and the product. You're leading. Right. And so then the focus then becomes if you really want to get deep on those. How do I use that same skill set of advertising and then shift it to my internal? Because I still have to do warm reach ads. I still have to run ads. I still have to make content. I still can have affiliates or get referrals from my employees to get more team. And so every business has two funnels. You have the front end funnel that get your customers and the back end funnel that gets your team. And so as you crank this guy and you need to crank this one. And then that's that you can scale these things to the moon without stopping. Is it harder to get leads in sales or harder to build a powerful team with the right culture?

I think they're both hard and both easy for different people. You know what I mean? Like Layla naturally is very good at the backend funnel. I mean, she's so good at building culture. But she has this thing that she's kind of spoken over me from a belief standpoint, which is if you are a really good marketer, a really good salesman, a lot of them are like, oh, I'm not a good leader, I'm not a good operator, not a good whatever. and she's like, if you can sell all those people and influence all those people,

you can use that same skill set and just face internally to your team. It was a nice belief shift for me or belief breaker for me. I was like, she's totally right. And so to the point that you were making earlier, like leading is selling and influencing, a lot of it really comes down to being able to move people and being able to clearly communicate what you want. Why do you think it's so hard for people to overcome their limiting beliefs around money in general?

A lot of people were told things about the world that were not true and they take them as fact. And so they're making their decision calculus. off of something that is not true. And so they're making conclusions off of false data. And so that's why they can't see it because what they're basing their assumptions on is false. But believing it for so long.

Yeah. So how do they change that belief when it's been baked in their psyche for decades? Yeah. I think that the way that the biggest beliefs have been broken for me have been one of two ways. Reality proves me wrong.

Or someone tells me a story and gives me evidence from their lives. Like I remember when we went to a mastermind and we were just starting out. I was not making a ton of money. And the guy, a guy got up there and he gave his little spiel. And he was like, yeah, you know, we're making $300,000 or $400,000 a month. I don't really know what I'm doing.

I'm not sure I like the business, blah, blah, blah. And the guy did not seem smart. You were like, how is he doing this? And it's funny you say that because my actual first thought was, if he can do it, I can do it. Right. And so that was like he, he, through evidence, like he reshaped my reality. It was one of the most momentous thing. I remember, Lail and I both had the same takeaway because she was next to me.

when we both saw this guy do this. Like, we walked out, we're like, dude, if he can do, like, we both immediately had the same conclusion. Like, if he can do it, we can do it. And so you either have reality prove you wrong or someone else is that reality for you where they tell their story about, hey, I used to feel the same way, I used to think this thing. And then I will share my story so you don't have to have the scar.

Yes. So you don't have to give up five years of your life to learn this lesson. I'll just give you the story so you don't have to have the scar. There's certain things I think we need to learn on our own and fail, you know, and make mistakes on our own. but there's a lot of things we can learn from other people. Being the youngest of four kids, I watched my older siblings fail and succeed in their own ways as a model and say,

okay, I don't want to make this same mistake. I made other stupid mistakes, but I didn't make certain mistakes that they had made and able to accelerate that time from the pain that I was going to feel by making the same mistakes. I think you're going to make mistakes no matter what, but I think that's seeing other people and learning. This is why it's so important to have coaches, mentors,

is people that can break the beliefs in you and tell you what you need to do. If you think about the human race, just to zoom out, because I think it's a really interesting concept. I was talking to Caleb about Gary. And I'm a competitive person. I like, you know, thinking like, oh, by the time I'm that age, I'm going to be further. You know what I mean? And it's lovingly. And he said this thing back to me that like, it hit me. He was like, dude, Gary didn't have Gary. Right. He just had to do it in his own. Right. And so the thing is, like a lot of us, and myself included, I get, caught up and then like, man, these kids have it so easy, you know, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, right? YouTube wasn't even around when I, you know, I got all this stuff, right? But the thing is, if you ask most entrepreneurs what they want to do with their lives, they say they want to make an impact on the world, they want to make the world a better place. But like, making the world a better place, what that looks like is it being easier for the next generation. And so rather than lamenting the fact that the guys were younger have it easier, that was the point.

Yes. That was the, like, mission accomplished. And so it reframed how I thought about being the greatest of all time, because I think a lot of people have that goal to be the greatest. I mean, a lot of people have that goal. But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I can't have that goal. Because if I did my job, then I have to have made people who are after me get there faster than I got there. And so the mark of the success is that I'm not the greatest of all time, but that other people who come after me are even better. And so it really shifted my relationship with how I saw past generations,

the guys were older than me who were killing it. And I used to think, oh, I'm going to beat them. And if I look at how much I'm worth at this at this age versus them like I just doing the math I should be further along than them by the time of their age and it was this kind of like different competition rather than this gratitude for like well of course I'm going to be bigger than they are at their age I had them to help me they didn't have them to help them and so I'll age up and we'll be multi-billioner whatever it is right and then there's going to be a young whippersnapper who had me to help him out because I'm seeing you know we have guys who apply for acquisition dot com who are in their 20 is doing 100 million a year. And I'm like, and that was, that wasn't possible 50 years ago.

It just wasn't. Right. Right. And so we think about like the human race in general on a macro perspective, right? You have like, rather than seeing the people who are older than you as the old dogs that you have to kick off, right? And by all means, play hard on the paint. Don't me wrong. And the people, the young whippersnappers behind you as, you know, resetting them for the fact that they got it easier. It just flipped the script for me in terms of like, I'm so grateful for these guys who came before me because they didn't have them. And then if these guys do eventually beat me, right, or they're further along than I was at their age, rather than lamenting them to protect my ego, because what it really says is, you're better than I am.

Because if they're making more money at a younger age than me, that it means they're better at business in some way than I was at that age. That's just the fact of business. Right. They're better than me at that age. And to protect my ego, I want to say they had it easier, right? But rather than... What does that do for you if you protect your ego as opposed to help others accelerate? fast than you. I think it just reframes it. And so it takes the ego away from, I need to crush these guys or I need to poke at why it's easier for them and instead say, like, it being easier for

them is my purpose. How can I say that my mission is to document each other best practice of building world class companies and then not be pumped for someone to use the best practice of building world class companies 10 years before I learned them to accelerate way past? And so anyways, That was a frame of reference that completely shifted the narrative for me in terms of competition. I still am pushing as hard as I possibly can to transform my potential into reality, but it feels different. It feels lighter. And I like it.

So anyways, I just want to share it because it was a cool breakthrough that I had recently. Yeah, you do it's a little lighter. Yeah, I'm bomb. Mentally, emotionally and physically, you lost a little weight too. It's funny, I just had Steve Young on, who was a Hall of Fame quarterback in the NFL, won multiple Super Bowls. He was just on a couple days ago. And he said, back in the late 80s, and I guess it was the 90s, Bill Walsh, the coach,

who was like, he said three generations ahead of every other head coach at that time, he had a camera guy with him all the time, documenting his processes. And he would package it into these, I guess, via H tapes and put it in a box. And he would give it to all his assistant coaches and say, I want you to learn these skills. his offense was the West Coast offense so it was far ahead of its time where most people were just running the ball down down the middle

so he gave away everything for free and he said I want you guys to learn this and then come and challenge me you know use my information and come and people he said years later some coaches would leave to become head coaches and they would compete in big games together sometimes we would lose

because these other coaches that he coached and he loved it and he is still reviewed as a leader in the space because he was ahead of the time, because he documented it and gave away the skills to his other coaches. And I think that's really cool. I mean, you're not going to be able to do this forever. So you might as well leave some legacy behind in that respect as well. It puts the game above the player. Yes. Rather than putting the player above the game. And so like I think right now if Elon had a choice of having somebody else accomplish

all the things that he is setting out to accomplish and it not be him, my hope, my belief from everything that I have seen and witnessed of Elon is I think that he would be stoked. and because it's mission first rather than ego first. And so, like, Steve Young put the game of football, and it consistently being elevated to be played at a higher level as more important than him, because in three generations, no one will remember him, right? But the game will always have his fingerprint, right?

And so, like, you can live alone in that way. Exactly. And the same degree in the business game, it's like, we honor the game by playing to our absolute hardest and by doing our best and passing it on to the next generation. So, anyways, I love that stuff. That stuff gets me out. What is the vision for you now?

because when do we first have you on? I can't remember. It was a few months back, right? And we've hung out for dinner a couple times, and I've seen you a few times. But there's been like a transition in you in like three to four months. You know, there's been like an evolution already.

I'm hearing you say you're having realizations recently and before it seemed harder, right? And now it seems like there's something that's unlocked inside of you. So I'm curious, what is the business vision that you have? What's the number you want to reach? Yeah. And personally, for the business,

all these things. I know you've talked about being a billionaire. It's just going to take a matter of time. When do you think being a billionaire will happen for you? I'd like to do five to seven for a billion. I'd like to hit 10 and 10. That's what I would like to do. I think that we can do that math-wise, based on kind of the inflow of deals that we have, like the returns that we're getting in general. Like, I think we can do that. But the thing that really drives me, though, is acquisition.com's the wealth machine that is behind Alex and Layla's media, right? And so I wouldn't be a very good business educator unless I had proof or evidence that I actually was good at business, right? And so we obviously could just sit on the laurels of the three exits that we had last year, three exits

we had last year. But to me, that's not like, as crazy as this will sound, it, it's not super impressive. You know what I mean? At least for where I want to go. And so I want to have a billion or multi-billion dollar thing because I think it would be so cool, like how cool would it be if we, if Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Elon Musk and all those guys had documented everything that they learned throughout that path, all we get is these snippets, shareholder letters every once in a while, and it's just like they're so little and they're going to die, and we're going to lose it. We're going to lose all those lessons. And so part of it that excites me is just calling my shot because I think that always just like enlivens a little bit of the competition. But I do believe from a mathematical standpoint we will get there, so it's not, to me, it doesn't feel like a super big, I'm not really pointing that far to the fence. But seeing the hordes, the scores of businesses that are using the stuff in the books and the courses and YouTube and podcast and, you know, TikTok and Instagram and LinkedIn and use those and the message I get every day of like, dude, you help me go from a million to five million a year. You help me go from, you know, quit my job and then start my dog walking business. And now I'm doing, you know,

six figures a month. And like those stories, I know that I will probably never meet most of them. I will probably never work with the vast majority of them. The fact that it's happening just amps me up. Like it just gets me so lit. That's cool. And so the media has been really cool and new for me, but I like it. And so I'm learning it.

And so it's just a new thing that I get to learn, and so I'm really loving that. And then seeing the vision of where we're going in terms of what we're building on the acquis and the companies that we're scaling there and the impact that they're having, because many of them are also education businesses,

not all of them, but probably about half. Seeing that on both sides, like us directly influencing through media and then the actual wealth machine on both sides, It's like I just see them both expanding. That's cool. And so we were talking before this, but it was like I saw a limit with gym launch, prestige labs.

At least my vision was limited. And that could have been me being younger or whatever it is. But like I don't feel like my vision is obstructed in terms of where this can go. And so that is what amps me up. A buddy of mine sold his company for a couple billion. And he's been in a little bit of like a rut since then. Yeah. It's interesting after people sell for a lot of money.

why do you feel like they go into a depression or a funk after they sell a billion-dollar company? They lose the vision, right? Like the vision, like, I think the vision is another word for hope, right? It's hope for a better future. That's what we're marching towards, right? And you basically give that away to someone, right? For money. Yeah, in exchange for money.

Right, right. And then the hope ended up fueling you more than the money ever does. But different conversation. But he said this one thing to me, and really resonated. He's like, I'm just looking for my next big bone to gna on. And that visual, for whatever reason, like, stuck to me. So I'm like, I just need a big bone to gnaw, knowing that I'll never chew through the entire bone, but being pumped every day to just get a little bit further down the nub.

What happens if we don't have a vision for our lives? I think you have less direction. And so you make less progress because you're not actually, you can't make progress unless you have direction because otherwise you're just moving. So like you can only have direct, like a vector, right? You know, movement in a direction if you know where you're trying to go. And so it's like the first thing we have to do is figure out where we're trying to walk. And then we can start walking there.