The Game with Alex Hormozi - Confidence Is Your Best Strategy | Ep 679

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

“The ultimate win at life is where you can shift things that are out of your control that you deem winning to things that are under your control which you can deem winning.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares insights on building a billion-dollar business, emphasizing the power of consistent practice, and the value of hard work. He explores key success factors including persistence in content creation, using evidence to build credibility, and redefining personal success through effort and character development.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:18) - Building confidence through experience(2:18) - The power of persistence in content creation(4:39) - The turning point: from obscurity to recognition(5:00) - Content vs. context: the real game changer(6:39) - Redefining success: effort over outcome(10:25) - The infinite game: a new perspective on winning(12:35) - Building character: the ultimate winFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

If you make your stuff so fucking good that only one person who gets exposed to it sent it to somebody else, then you have nothing to worry about and you will eventually get discovered. It's a time game. And in the meanwhile, you just keep getting better. 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. The first sales consult I ever took, didn't close. And I say that because everyone just imagines that Mosey just came in, just slinging credit

cards and stacking bodies, right? It didn't work that way. I came in. It was a five-minute conversation. The girl was like, I need to go get my card from home. And I said, oh, yeah, okay, go do that. And she walked away. And I went to my boss. He's like, how to go? I said, oh, I closed her. And he was like, oh, that's awesome. He's like, you got the credit card. I said, oh, no, she's going to come back with the card. And he literally stopped what he was doing with six other guys around him and they all nonstop laugh for a minute straight. Like they couldn't breathe because they thought how stupid what I had just said was. But I had no idea. And so that was my first ever experience in sales. I'm known for sales now. And I wouldn't even say I'm confident in sales. It's just more like

this is what works and has worked for me. Take it or leave it. And so people perceive that as confidence, but it's simply just based on experience. And confidence comes from experience. What it really is is a prediction, what you think is going to happen will happen. And so even in statistic, what is your confidence metric? This is 0.7.8. It's literally just what the percentage likelihood that what you thinks would have happened is going to happen.

And so how do you increase the likelihood that what you think is going to happen is going to happen? Have it have happened already? I could have either spent 30 minutes every day looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself I was going to be a great sales guy, or I could have reviewed the fucking script. Which one do you think would make me a better salesperson? Reviewing the script. You can take all the time that you're trying to spend siking yourself up, and you'll feel

significantly more confident not having done that and simply knowing what you're going to set, which you get from practice. The world belongs to those who can keep doing without seeing the result of they're doing. And the longer you can wait to see the result of your doing while still continuing to do is the extent to which you can win big in life. For example, to be a top 1% podcaster, you have to upload 21 podcasts. 21, top 1%.

90% of people don't get past 1. 9% don't get past 20. And then 1% of podcasters, of all of them, make it to 21 plus. So when people say try harder, it usually just means don't give up. The price for excellence has never been so low. people give up so easily now that it's just so easy to win by just being willing to post 20 times.

You're in the top 1%. Like the top 1%, we're not even talking 10, top half. Top 1%. People are so afraid of being humiliated. They get the long-term humiliation of never amounting to anything. No one's going to watch it for 20 episodes anyways. And even if they do, it doesn't matter because that's not what you're building towards. Like, you posting those 20 isn't what you judge yourself on. You should be judging yourself on the difference between your first one and your 20th one. Are you better? Probably. And the difference between your 20th one and your 100th one,

because the win is you. You are the asset you're building, not the downloads that you get on your first shot. Mosey immediately had a podcast with millions of downloads every single month. No. I spent four and a half years making two podcasts a week. week straight, didn't miss. And guess how many podcast downloads I was getting per month at the end of that? Two to three thousand downloads a month. Not a lot. I used to think to myself, okay, well, each one of these podcasts gets like 200 downloads. Well, 200 downloads is like an auditorium of people.

And so would I feel okay giving a speech to 200 people? Yeah. And even before that, when they was getting like 10 or 15 downloads per episode, if I had a little lunch and learn that I used to have to do to like get leads for a business, I'd be fine talking to a group of 10 or 15 people because the reality is that those people are doing me more of a favor than I'm doing them. They're literally giving me their ears so that I can practice my voice and how to talk and how to present. And it was only a year four and a half to five when things started taking off. And you know what the two things that changed are?

One is I did call it, I changed it from Jim Secrets to just the game, which was a business thing, so it made it more applicable to more people. And the second thing, and here's the real one, is that I sold a company for $46 million. And so people are like, oh, what does this guy have to say? And the big thing that everyone misses is people try and dissect my content. The message is 10% of how people consume it. 90% is the context around the message.

So Elon Musk can tweet on the toilet and be like, I'm on the throne taking a shit and it'll get a million likes. Why? Because it's Elon Musk and he's the richest man in the world and owns three of the biggest companies that are most innovative of all time. I don't kid myself and think that like my content is so much better than other people. There's plenty of people have better content than me that don't get the same views. And the reason is because you don't have the context. They don't have the proof and solve for the proof and then the content

will take care of itself. Because one, you will know what you're talking about because you have proof that you know what you're talking about and people will believe you, which is why you should solve for evidence above everything else. Like evidence gives you the confidence. If someone says, Alex, I don't think you know shit about business, I'd be like, okay, it doesn't really affect me. I do know we crossed $100 million net worth at age 32. I know that. But if someone said that to you and you haven't accomplished anything, you don't have anything to stand back on. And it hurts you more. But I have proof. So it's like you can just deflect it towards the proof and keep living your life. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably

tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur. The secret to longevity is, especially in the content game, but really in any game that you're trying to at least help other people with, is that if you've done the thing, you can be certain rather than confident. Be certain based on what you've done, not based on what you say

other people should do. There used to be too big to fail, and I think there's an alternative, which is too good to fail. If you make your stuff so fucking good that only one person who gets exposed to it, sends it to somebody else, then you have nothing to worry about and you will eventually get discovered. It's a time game. And in the meanwhile, you just keep getting better, which is the point. Because at the end of the day, you're going to die. Everyone's going to forget about you anyways. And so you might as well just work on the one asset that you get to keep for the rest of your life, which is you. And rather than measuring yourself based on how many views he gets versus how many views you get, measure yourself by how much work he puts into one of his shorts versus what you put into one of your shorts.

And then you might think the output is more reasonable. And if there's a top sales guy in your organization who's making more money than you, compare not what his commission check is to yours every month, compare how many calls he's making, how many times you practice this script, how many calls he's making, how many calls he's making, how many calls he's made before you, how many sales he's closed before you, what time a day he shows up at work, what time a day he leaves, whether he works weekends or not, whether he's willing to hop on the phone in a family context so that he can still close the deal. If you're doing all the inputs, the outputs will always match on a long enough time horizon.

And if you are new to the game, then my recommendation is not only to match inputs, but to double or triple the inputs that someone ahead of you is doing. And the reason you do that is because if you just match your inputs, then you're always going to be behind them because they're already ahead of you because they're better than you. And so if you both do the same amount of work, they're going to keep getting better and so are you. So you have to do twice the work. You've got to be like Kobe, right? Everyone else is doing one practices a day. You do two practices a day.

And in the beginning, they'll be better than you. And then you'll match them. But because you're doing twice the work, eventually you'll get better. And then that's how you win. And one of the biggest misnomer is in whatever endeavor you're trying to track is people track the wrong metrics. They track the lagging metrics rather than the leading metrics. Lagging metrics are what happened. Those are the outputs.

And if you want to track those, fine. But the real things to track are what you're doing to create the outputs. So I don't want to necessarily even track sales. I want to track how many calls I'm making. If I'm trying to get in shape, I'm not necessarily going to track the weight I'm doing. I'm going to track how many calories I'm eating. And so the more ways you measure, the more ways you can win. And so the idea, the ultimate win at life is where you can shape.

things that are out of your control that you deem winning to things that are under your control, which you can deem winning. Because if you're measuring on whether you lost the fat or not, sometimes people take longer, some people don't. That's something that you actually can't control. Well, you can control the inputs. And so if you say, based on this, if I do this one thing every day for a long enough period of time, I'll eventually get there. The real winners cut out the I'll eventually get there and say, if I do this every day, I have won. The thing that I try and focus on now is the delta between how hard I tried and how hard I can possibly try. And if I know that the gap between those two is zero, then I have won. And I've decided to spend

an inordinate amount of effort trying to make that my definition of winning is that there's nothing left in the tank. If you get into a harder career path or one that takes more reps to get good at or more reps to get into, then every day you can win based on saying like everyone else does a hundred, I do 250 and I have nothing left to give, I won. And that should satisfy you. And if you're, if you're obsessive on the external thing, that takes too long and you will give up too soon. One of the things that took me too long to learn was the difference in the finite and infinite frame. And so finite frame is where you have known players agreed upon rules and a way to win or lose at the end and the game is over. An infinite frame, you have known and unknown players,

no agreed upon rules, and the point of the game is to keep the game going. And all the greatest games that I've ever participated in, marriage, health, business, you don't win at marriage. The point is to stay married. You don't win at health. The point is to stay in shape. You don't win at business. The point is to stay in business. And so by default, if you don't give up, you win. And so that's the big frame shift, which is why leaving everything on the field is the way you have to define winning if you want to win in the long term. Anything worth doing takes great time. If you stick with it and you make that the win, you'll notice that the external win will just happen on its own. And if you really commit to that perspective, it won't even mean much to you.

Because if you make that everything, it's the same thing with the guys who win the goals and then kill themselves or win the championship and then go to these massive depressions is because they're playing the wrong game. When Kobe was asked shortly before he died, Like, do you think that you're somebody who's afraid of losing or do you think you're somebody who loves winning? He basically denied both frames. He said, I'm paraphrasing. I just love playing to the best of my ability. And that's what he measures himself off of. The fact that the world chooses to measure him on the fact that he's won so many games, that's the world's problem. Not ours. It's saying, I'm game master, not a player. And I choose to play by these rules. And as long as I am playing,

I win by default. And it's because I'm not accepting the world. world's rules for winning, I make my own. An easier analogy here is, and this is a Naval Ravicon quote, he said, what looks like work to other people should feel like play for you. If you look at an artist and he's painting, you're like, hey, how soon you're going to finish that painting? The point for the artist is to paint. He'll finish that piece and he'll start the next one. But the process of painting is the thing that they enjoy. And so the idea is that if you can commit and the broader you can generalize what you're committing to, the easier it will be to stick with it. So you might be like, I love making calls, but I hate entering things in the CRM.

Well, both of those are required for the role of sales. And so I prefer to chunk up a level and say, I prefer to do hard work because of what that work does to me. Then, whether I'm putting shit into the CRM or editing a document or having a hard conversation, all of those things are difficult. And I see those as all contributing to the person I ultimately want to be. until eventually I die and it won't matter anyways. And so the only asset that you really get to keep with you is your character, and that's the only thing you keep building.

And so if you make the character, the W, at the end of the day, did or I did I not contribute to the character of the person that I want to become, if that's the W every day, you can never lose.