The Game with Alex Hormozi - Controversial Truths You Need To Hear - Pt.1 (on the Modern Wisdom Podcast) | Ep 654

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

“If I were to make that man, what would I put that man through to make him who he is?” Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on the Modern Wisdom Podcast with Chris Williamson to talk about the interconnected topics of decision making, personal success, happiness, and mindfulness. The discussion explores coping mechanisms, challenges societal norms, and emphasizes finding satisfaction in the journey towards goals. With personal narratives and insights, the episode highlights the importance of embracing the present, finding joy in everyday moments, and breaking free from societal pressures. 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.Follow Chris Williamson on:➤ Instagram | Spotify | Apple | LinkedIn | X / Twitter➤ Check out full episode on YouTube!Timestamps:(0:30) - Facing mortality and living authentically(6:00) - Overcoming fear and taking action(11:56) - The impact of unmade decisions(20:21) - The importance of understanding and forgiveness(27:16) - The fear of failure and the power of trying(31:21) - The power of perspective and choosing your regrets(37:41) - Living authentically and leaving everything on the field(44:26) - The importance of consistency(50:41) - The power of resilience(57:54) - The importance of self-reflection(01:03:02) - The impact of personal growth(01:15:14) - The power of mindfulnessFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

I will do enough work that there is nothing left to be done. And that means that I can also do fewer things, which means I have to be more selective about the things that I choose to do. But when I do them, they will be done well and they will be done. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

Today, we're going to go through as many of your lessons as we can in about three hours, and we're going to see what we can get through. First one, a friendly reminder that in three generations, everyone who knew us will be dead, including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted all along. Imagine that someone you know achieves every dream and hits every goal they have. Years later, they get old and die. Two years after that, how much do you care? About as much as everyone else will if you accomplish your goals and dreams, do it for you. So I think about death all the time, because it's probably the central theme. It's probably the thing

that I think the thing that I think that influences how I see time and also how it influences agency. Like what actions I'm willing to take despite the judgment of others. And so a lot of times, it might be because I have more insecurity than everyone that I think, like, man, I want to do this thing. And then I hear all these other voices of reasons why I shouldn't do it or why somebody else will say, like, that's bad or you'll bad or like, that's wrong, whatever. And so I think I've had to come up with a lot of these devices to get around my own insecurities to take action despite those insecurities. And the biggest one that I think about is that it doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I don't. don't achieve all of the goals in three generations, I'll be forgotten. And the only people who were naysaying against me will also be dead. And so then it's like, just do it for me. And then

when I wake up every day, there's only one voice I have to listen to. But that means that you need to be able to work out what to do from first principles. You now no longer have societal norms or assistance or role models or archetypes or expectations and that's also difficult in a different way. I think that the more you flex whatever that muscle is of like independent thinking, the more it becomes the default way that you think. And then everyone else's action is to start looking more and more insane to you. What like, what's an example of that you can think of? I mean, shoot, just the most basic ones of like living the life that you don't want, not wearing what you want to wear, not dating who you want to date. Not living where you want to live. Not living where you want

to live. Like, you're living at home and you want to move and your parents say no and you don't make the move or you're digging a girl because she's socially accepted, you know, by your friend group. She's safe. But like, there's always some distance in between you, but you're like, I don't want to risk it, right? Or like, you're in the job and every day you go there and you're like, I mean, it's okay. And the idea of just living an okay life just sounds so terrifying to me that the freedom to fail over and over again is still more fulfilling to me. At least it feels like it's real than walking through kind of on autopilot. And so I think that's a lot of the choices that other people make that seem insane to me now, but didn't seem insane to me a decade ago. You know what I mean? I think it's just

like as you practice taking more agency, taking more responsibility for the decisions, then you just get better and better at it. And then it just seems more and more ridiculous. You're like, they're like, I just can't quit my job. And you're like, why? Like, no, physically, why? Like, why can't you quit your job. Like, like, you know what I mean? They start hyperventilating. It's like, you could, could you move in with your parents? Could you move in with a friend? Could you split rent? I mean, I could, but I mean, other people who are going to die in a hundred years would think what. And one of my favorite ones is, and I say this all the time to Layla, like, whenever we're getting to some sort of like mini complaint. It's like, you know if you zoom out far enough you can't see the earth? So we're talking about like,

oh man, they're going to mess up this order on this vendors, do blah, but I was like, you know, If you zoom out far enough, you can't see the earth. It's just like, it just puts everything immediately into perspective of how ridiculous some of the things that we're concerned about are. Sean Puri's got this thing where he says, don't follow what most people do because you don't want the results that most people get. The average person is obese, likely to be divorced and has less than 1K in the bank. It feels safe to do what everyone else is doing, but it's actually a terrible decision. It's like the best way to guarantee to not have the life that you want is to do what everyone else is doing.

Unless you want what everyone else has with no one, which no one does. Yeah, it's being able to think for yourself and treating it like a muscle, I think, is a smart way to consider it because in the beginning it's really, really hard. You've been resting on societal norms and the way you've dealt with past trauma and your parents' expectations and what all of your friends do and what's accepted and all of this stuff for so long that when it first comes to you needing to, to step on that muscle. It's like trying to move your ears. Like all humans have got muscles that can move their ears. But because no one works it as a child, they just atrophy away. And this is

the ear muscle of personal growth. I think I had a lot of practice with it because I had a, so like a lot of people have many voices that they hear that they feel are judging them. Right. They have their friends. They have their uncle. They have their siblings. They have their cousins, co-workers, whatever. I think I had just one voice that I heard really loudly. And I was talking to one of our employees the other day. And I was trying to put it in perspective, a younger guy. And I was like, I imagine how much you care about your mother's opinion and your father's opinion and your siblings and all of those other people. I was like, and now imagine that there's literally only one because I had no siblings. I basically had no mother. I had just a father. And so like,

his approval was literally everything. And he disapproved of the path that I wanted to take in my life. And so I think a lot of these mental faculties are these little frameworks or these isms. just came from like, how can I combat this incredibly booming voice in the background? Because like when I look at what I was doing at the time, like, I was a consultant. I, you know, I graduated in three years. I took the consulting job. I did all the things. But the craziest thing was at the moment that my father was most proud of me and he approved of my life the most was when I was the saddest. And so that's when I was like, maybe his approval isn't the right way to feel good about life. And so that started basically the six-month journey from when I decided that,

I wanted to change my life till when I changed it. And I think that like as you become more able or more potent or higher agency, that timeline between when you decide you want to do something and when you actually do it just continues to compress. Right. Like now if I want to change something, I'm like, let's change it. Like done. We walk out of a thing. It was like, we're never going to do that podcast again or I don't want to talk to this person again or whatever it is. Right. Whereas before, it's like, okay, I have to sleep on it. I have to really think about it. And like, how am I going to, it's like, why do I care about how I'm going to say it? This is what it is done. And it's It's just like that timeline is compressed, but the hardest one for me, like the first one was by far the hardest.

And everyone since then, the nice thing is that no matter how difficult your circumstance is, if you have, like, the bigger the wall that you have to get through is, as soon as you get past that one big wall, you then can use that wall is the evidence for why you can jump over the next wall, because that will be the biggest one. And so like, after I did quit my job and left my house and left Baltimore and didn't tell my dad until I was across the country because I was so afraid. Like people think of me as like some big alpha whatever. I was like, I was such. I was so afraid of my father's disapproval that I didn't tell them until I physically left the state.

Like, I'm not like, think about that. Like, I wasn't even just one state over. I was like five states over. And then I was like, hey, by the way, I'm going to California. And he was like, well, let's come over. We'll talk about it. And I was like, I'm in Ohio. Already here.

Yeah. Already. Yeah. And then obviously he had a different reaction. But like, but then after that, it was like, what do I have to do now? It's like, oh, I got to sell strangers. And I was like, I told my dad. I didn't want to do what he wanted. How hard could this be? And so like it then becomes this one huge

proof point. So the bigger that the dragon is that you have to slay, the more evidence you have that you can slay the next dragon. And I think that is if there's ever been a good point for why getting over the one first hard one is so hard, is that it will then give you the reinforcement that you can do whatever you need to do next. Yeah. The life you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations and you're living a life you hate because you're too afraid to have them. I think about that a lot. because like whenever I feel anxious or insecure or angry or sad, I'm like, what conversation do I need to have that I'm not having? And so then, and usually if I just think for not that long, I'm like, this is the conversation I've been putting off. And then, you know, I'm not the poster child of mental health. And so I'll just call myself a pansy for not having the conversation. And then and then I just have it. And so again, I think it's like, I need to have this conversation. And so again, I think it's like, I need to have this conversation. And so, again, I think it's like, I need to have this conversation. And so And the time between when I have it versus when I know I need to have it when I actually have it just because continues to compress. And if you've ever had like a breakup or employee firing one of the or quitting if you're an employee like these things that you dread. I don't know if you notice it, but like the day you do it the moment after you do it, I'm like how many other conversations can I have? Like I'm like, I'm like, who else do? Yeah, totally. Because the serial killer for awkward conversations when I, so like the next series of hard conversations that I had after I, I've left home was actually like years. later. So I had, I had multiple partners in what I said, I had a partner in one of my gyms. I had a partner in

four other gyms. I had a partner in a Cairo and dental marketing agency. And all of them relied on me to make money. And so all of their livelihoods were still dependent on me, but I was splitting everything. And it was just, it was horrible for me at the time. And so I remember when I, I ended up getting in a DUI and, you know, I talked to a, uh, uh, a performance coach or whatever. And he was like, your stress and these conversations could literally kill you. He's like, they almost did. So I got an head-on collision at 60 miles an hour and I walked away.

No injuries. But it was like my wake-up call, but not to stop drinking. It was my wake-up call that I needed to have these conversations. And that's what I was avoiding when I was drinking. It wasn't the alcohol. What were the things that I'm avoiding that I'm using alcohol to get away from? And so the next day, I had the first conversation with the first partner. And it was horrible.

But the moment I was done, I was like, I got to call the other guy. And I called the other guy. And I called the other one. I was like, this is how it is. And the thing is, I had this backstop of my death of like, you almost just died because you wouldn't have this conversation. And so then it just gave me this courage to just be like, like, and whatever the reaction was, I was like, I'd rather be alive.

Like, that was it. And so it's weird, though, because death has been this really recurring theme in my life that like the same thing happened when I was, like, the only thing that gave me enough balls to stand up to my dad, to be fair, from a distance from the car when I was driving halfway across the country. Like, let's not make me in a too big of a hero here. Um, was the idea that like, I started thinking like every day. I was like, I hope I don't wake up. You don't I mean. Um, and that was the, that was the thing where I was like, this is a big enough problem that like, if you don't want to wake up, then what have you got to lose? Exactly. And that was it.

And it was like, I have nothing to lose. And that was when, that was when, I think in the last podcast, we talked about this where it's like if everybody who's like at the bottom and feels like they have nothing going for them, reframe that as I have nothing going for me, which also means that I have nothing to lose by taking action, it makes you a much more dangerous person. And I think that was the flip that I've had repeatedly shown to me in my life that allowed me to take the step that I was afraid to take. Have I told you about the region beta paradox? You've seen that one?

Okay, so this is interesting. So imagine that you had to go a mile or less, and if you did... A mile? A mile. Okay. If you had to travel a mile or less, you would walk it. And if you had to go more than a mile, you would drive it. Okay.

So paradoxically, you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile. Uh-huh. If you follow that rule, the important insight here is that if you only take action, when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can. feel worse than worse things. Oh, yeah. So if you look around and you see that people are stuck in region beta, this zone of comfortable complacency, right? It's the guy that sticks and it's just okay job because his boss isn't too much of a dick, but the pay isn't that good and he's not really that passionate, but it's all right, whatever, whatever. The person that stays in the acceptable

relationship, they're not that fired up, but they're not really in love and their partner's not really got much alignment with their interests or the person that stays in a crappy apartment And it is a bit of mold in the ceiling, but it's cheap and it's in a good area of town or whatever. All of these people would be better off if their situations were worse. Because it would give them the activation energy to kick them out of the bottom. And that only regret would be not doing it sooner. Did I love that? So it's funny because if I look back on the instances that were the most painful in my life,

every single one of them without fail has created a disproportionate gain, right? Like the most painful thing early on was for me was quitting my job and leaving, you know, leaving my dad, basically. And then that created the, you know, my first, my first business and the gyms and all of that stuff. You know, getting into the DUI, the head-on collision. And like that whole situation got me out of all of these failed partnerships that I wasn't willing to do.

But in the moment, I was like, I'm such a failure. Like, I suck at everything. But that gave me the springboard. When I lost everything the first time after that, that then gave me, like, the idea that I needed to change the business model around. Right. And that's what switched me into the licensing model. Right. And so, like, each of these times.

And then that became, you know, the first real fortune. This is kind of like alchemy. Yeah. Like turning something which is worse than useless. Yeah. Into something that's as precious and useful as possible. you know, I'm sure you know the parable of the, you know, the man in a son and he like buys the son a horse and then it falls and he breaks the leg and then they're like, oh, it's so sad. And then the army comes, then his son doesn't die. And it's like, oh, it's how great, right? And so it's one of those really interesting ones where like whatever negative situation, and this is probably good for the audience, but like if you think back to all the negative situations, you have like the really, really bad ones, when you expand the time horizon, most times they become net wins. And so then it just means that like if you're in a really tough time right now, You just got to wait.

And then you get, and then you'll get your reference point back on all the things that changed as a result because most times when shit is bad, it can't get worse. So then you feel like, well, it can't get worse than this. And then your action threshold decreases and you take and you do all the things you know you should have done anyways. And so it's like we have this big stack of should do's. And we just wait until it's two miles. Yep.

And then you just, you're like, you're like, like the firing conversation. And you're like, well, I just fired one person or like, I just ended one partnership. I just broke up with one girl or whatever it is. And you're like, who else do I need to talk? to today, right? Like, and then in like a period, like you have these rapid periods of growth that happen. And then you have the next web of comfort because it's way better than you were before. And I think it's, I wonder, this is more just like an open thought, but like, I wonder how long, like more successful people stay in that next plateau. Like, I wonder if their threshold for

action stays low. Yeah, they're media, like, all, like, I'm getting comfortable, like, how quickly they get comfortable into like, I need to change. I need to get better. Next one. The heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions. The reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you're not making them. That's a good quote. You said it. You said it.

I think a lot of times the decisions that we make are predicated on the conversations we need to have. Because usually like that it. And what's interesting is like you can define commitment by eliminating alternatives. So if you're committed, you've eliminated alternatives. actions. You can say I'm committed, but until you eliminate other options, you're not committed. There's always a get out of jail free. Right. And so a lot of people make decisions to end relationships, to quit their job, to start the new thing, but they don't become committed to the decision until they remove the other options. And then you're forced to take action on it. And so I think actually defining

those two different things. Now you could define, you know, decision is to kill off like Decadere from Latin, but from a, from a, from a, from a colloquial thing, I think there are two different instances. It's like, I need to change this and then I do change it. And the making the decision is when it becomes a commitment. Why are unmade decisions so heavy? I think, at least for me, it's because I have this hamster wheel on the back of my mind where I keep playing out different scenarios. And so I keep thinking like, well, maybe I need to change what I'm currently doing.

Maybe if I just rethought, like, because I'm a big frame guy. So I'm like, maybe I just need to be thinking about this differently. Maybe if I zoom all the way out, the earth doesn't exist. So maybe this doesn't matter. Or maybe I'm just making a problem that doesn't exist. maybe the best action I should take is nothing, right? Like I, you know, I reframe all those things. Um, but usually is just because I'm afraid of something. And then that's why I'm not making the decision. And I think once I name and put a face and it's usually not even a thing that I'm afraid of,

it's one person's judgment I'm afraid of. And then when I name the person, then it becomes, then it becomes real instead of being this amorphous like people, society, judgment. It's like Tom. Like, do I really care what Tom thinks? I guess so. It seems like I'm not making this big change in my life because of Tom. Looks like Tom's more in control of my life than I am. Dude. So I remember this. When I was 19 years old, I was super angry, like all 19 year old men, right? That's the standard default, right? I was angry at both my parents for because I was 19, right? And I remember blaming them for everything. Blaming them for my life, blaming them for not being a better person. I literally blame them for being a bad person. And I remember realizing that when I blamed them,

that I gave them control over my life. And then the idea that the people that I hated the most at the time were the ones who actually were controlling me was the thing that most sickened me to then actually flip my narrative to actually taking control. Like that was the one thought process. Like my mother, I'm giving her control over my romantic relate. Like my mother controls this. Fuck that.

I was like, no. And so like just the idea that somebody who I was disgusted by at the time. had that much power is what gave me the power to start taking action. So this hamster wheel thing that continues to distract you, I've got this concept called anxiety cost. So kind of like opportunity cost. When you have an unmade decision, every single second that you spend thinking about the unmade decision

could have been gotten back had you just made the decision. Oh, yeah. And realizing that it's a justification for, eating frogs earlier in the day. I need to answer that email. The longer that you wait until you answer that email, the more times you will think the thought, I need to answer that email. And if we assume that what truly, truly matters in life is the time and the attention that we spend within that time, your time is being captured and your attention is being captured by a thought that could have been gotten rid of had you have just done it, had you just had

the conversation, broken up with the relationship, left the job, told the father, whatever. done your stretches, cleaned your teeth, had a shower, whatever it is that you needed to do, all of that anxiety cost could have been gotten rid of had you just gone and done it? You can move through life at seven times the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're going to make a decision from end of week to end of day. So think about how that stacks up. So it's like, let's say that there were four decisions that you needed to make. If the normal person takes a week to make the decision and then there's,

mind moves on to the next thing that they have anxiety for and start making that decision and decide another week, decide on another week, decide on another week. It's a month to make those four decisions. Whereas the super, the Superman that takes one decision day one, second decision day two, third decision day three, fourth decision day four, they aren't even finished the week yet and they're where the other person is at the end of the month. And like that speed of decision making, like not paying the attention cost, the opportunity cost of your time, I think it's really profound in terms of how quickly people move through life in terms of achieving the goals that they set out. Because people are like, how is that guy so young and he's achieved X, Y, and Z? It's like, well,

what takes you a month to make a decision? We make in an hour. And then the next hour, I make another decision that takes you your next month. And so, like, that's how you can go 30 times or 100 times faster than the, quote, average person who's overweight, has a thousand dollars in their bank account, you know, and is going to die at 70. Can you just go back to before you made that first decision with your dad because you've mentioned it, you know, people might look at your, I would say ruthlessness, at least in some regards, with decision making, you know, hiring and firing and making these business decisions and there's all of these great stories about, and I had this thing and I realized that partner wasn't right, so I got rid of that business.

And, you know, that's the sort of thing that would tear most people up for six months, 18 months, maybe forever. Yeah. And to look at that degree of cutthroatness or at least decisiveness, I think is almost unfathomable for a lot of people. Are you a representative avatar? Is pre-leaving Baltimore Alex a representative avatar for the average person? I think so. I mean, I was high achieving. I mean, like, I did well in school. I tried hard. I did those things. But in terms of my risk tolerance and my fear of failure and my insecurities, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if anything, real talk,

I'll bet you that I have more insecurities than most people because those insecurities are what drove me to do well. in those things, not because I cared about school, but because I cared about what other people thought about me. Yeah. Yeah, I, I've spoken to hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of high performers. On balance, people are driven way more by fear of insufficiency than they offer with some well-balanced, perfect desire to just maximize their greatness in life. Like, the activation energy for almost everybody is, I'm scared I might be a piece of shit. What Hang on. Oh, God, I might be a piece of shit. I genuinely might be a piece of shit. I need to go and do something so outrageous that I can't be a piece of shit. There's no way that it could happen. I might be a coward. Oh, my God. What can I do to stop myself from being a coward? That's the activation energy. it's funny because if you regress fear to its most basic form it's death and death is the greatest

motivator and like you can prove it in a simple example it's like if i all of a sudden go up to anybody on the street and i put a gun in their head and i say you know point a gun at their head and i say go do this thing they'll go do it but if i say you can have anything you want if you do this they're willing to go 10 times harder with a gun in their face to not die and so if you take fear and regress it all the way down to its basis form like that's with the insecurity is like if they think I won't be enough. And if they don't think I won't be enough, then this won't happen. If this one happened, this one happened, I'll be alone. I'll be dead. But like if you just regress it all the way down, like that's all it is. And so like the biggest

achievers in life, I think have most directly tied them not doing whatever it is that they want to do to death, whether they're consciously aware of it or not. And then that's what motivates them harder. You're not afraid of failing. You're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail. But if you're afraid of that, imagine what they think of you when you aren't even trying. Oh yeah, they aren't. I'm such a dick sometimes. Is it strange to hear your like angry toilet tweets read back to you now in the cold, harsh light of day? God, that was a particularly difficult poo I was cracking out there. You know, real talk, the tweets that I have, people don't know this, but the tweets are notes to sell.

So they're just directed at me so that I can look back on them and be reminders of like, hey, don't do that. And so like, I think to myself, man, I'm afraid of doing this. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm afraid of what this person's going to think about me. Because if I were to be able to fail in quiet, in complete isolation, then I wouldn't care. And then I think, well, what if I, what if I don't succeed in public? What do they think then? Nothing, right?

They don't think about me at all. And so obviously that comes from the perspective. of seeking to gain approval and attention from others anyway. So it's like, listen, if you're insecure, which everybody is, let's be real, you might as well use the insecurity to get something out of it. Right. Like one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is like use what you've got. And so a lot of people think that they need to fix their conditions in order to get like the perfect conditions before they start. But the perfect condition is whatever one you're in because it gives you whatever assets you have, that's the cards that you're dealt. And so you just play the hand. And a lot of people

have great cards. It's like, man, I'm so afraid it's like use it. It's like, I have nothing. It makes you very dangerous because you have nothing to lose. Right. Like one of the really interesting things about, I think about it from a business perspective, but it probably applies to everything is that there's always an advantage and a disadvantage from every position. Right. So like I remember one, I mean, Jim Walsh is still a big company and still continues to grow.

But in the gym licensing space, there's not many people who can compete with us there. Right. And I would talk to guys who are in the space. You know, I would talk at a conference, whatever. And, you know, younger guys would be like, well, I want to be in the space too. And it's not fair because, you know, you have this big advantage. And I was like, you have a way bigger advantage than I do. And I was like, because if I were in your position, I would go to every single gym owner and be like, you don't want to be with Jim launch.

You don't want to be with Alex. You're just a number to him. Like, you're never going to talk to him. Like, you're just a cog in the wheel there. With me, you're going to get my personalized attention. There is just some employee down the chain that's following some process, right? I was like, but on the flip side, if I'm talking to that same gym owner, then I'm going to say, you don't want to talk to Jimmy. He lives in his mom basement.

He has no proof that he's good at what he's out. the reason that we're number one in the space is because we've done it so many times and we have a system that we know that if you go on this side, you will get this result on the outside. I was like, there's always a position and there's always an advantage. I was like, you just have to play the one you've got. And most people just look at what everyone else's advantages and don't think which one do I have. When you're talking about it's not you that's afraid of failing. You're afraid of other people's opinions about why you're going to fail. The reason I think that cynicism is so popular on the internet is that the upside of never trying is never having to

feel the pain of failure. That's fundamental. It's sour grapes at an existential level, right? It is a cynicism safety blanket. It is protecting you from ever having to feel the downside of anything. I will assure my own failure in private so that I never have to face my failure in public. It's kind of like investing. Like everyone's afraid of losing money when they invest, but the only guaranteed investment that doesn't work is never investing to begin with. And so it's like, they take the long failure rather than the short one, right? I mean, it's what it is, right? You just fail long. And they're like, I prefer that. But that's, I mean, that's, yeah, it's, it's like, you and are going back and forth on trying to figure out how many different ways can I say that either

the people that you're worried about judgment are going to die or that you're going to die, or that even if you do achieve the thing, they won't care anyways. Or if you don't do anything, they won't think about you to begin with. And don't you want to be thought about it. about to begin with. Like, don't you want some level of significance? I just, you're going to die. And I think, like, I was very grateful. So one of my biggest inspirations or whatever, you know, influences when I was in Baltimore was I would have lunch with my grandfather three times a week. So he was 90. Old guy. So I'll go to the nursing home and we'd have lunch three days a week. And listening to him talk about the regrets that you had in life, it's so much more.

more painful to watch someone who has no options left. Like he's gonna die. He means he died tomorrow and he died a couple years later. I mean like he lost all his mental faculty. You know, almost sadly, basically when I stopped, when I left Baltimore, one of the sad parts is I was one of the only people that kind of like kept him lucid. You know what I mean? And after that, no one really, no one really visited him.

No one really did anything. And so I think he just rolled down. I think the lunches might have been the only thing that he looked forward to. And, um, seeing someone. old with no options and nothing but regret. Now, not that he had everything to regret, he had things that he did really well. And I took those things from him. He would repeat the same lessons. You know, like every lunch, the spirit of a lot of older people kind of repeat a few key lessons. And everything that he had, he flew during, and he fled during the World War II. You know,

he fled from the Germans and all that stuff because he had a Jewish sounding last name. He wasn't, but it was enough that he was fleeing. right. And he always used to say, he's like, you have two hands and one brain. I was like, use them. And that was always this thing that he said to me. And I think just like when I would think about the things that he was going up against, compared to the things that we're going up against now, it just made me feel like, all right, like this is not as big of a deal as I really think it is. I don't have Germans at the, at my door. What were the regrets that you had? Him? Yeah. He would have spent, I mean, again, there's deathbed regrets and then there's real life regrets, but there's,

there's things that he would have done differently in terms of the business. There's things he would have done differently with his wife. He got divorced. He would have done things very differently with his kids. So my mother and her sisters, which actually talking to him about how he raised my mother, helped me in some way forgive her for some of the things that I felt were wrongdoings that she had done to me. And so it's funny because, you know, one of my favorite quotes from Blaze Pascal is to understand is to forgive. And like when you, when you, I think there's another saying that I like a lot, which is, it's really hard to hate close up.

it's like if you really see someone and you see all the things that they went through and the things that happen to them to become who they are, then you understand them and then you understand why they did X, Y, and Z. Because if we don't understand, we assume that it's because they're just evil people. And most people aren't that way. They're this way because they've been reinforced or punished for doing something like that in the past. And especially for her, she was reinforced for acting a certain way over and over and over again to the point that it was core to her character. And so when that got put on me, I was like, I hate you. You're terrible. You're evil. Like, blah. But like, when I looked at it on much longer time, rising of like she was four years old when she came here she couldn't speak English she got beat up as a kid like all these things I'm like you know what maybe give her a little grace you know and I remember when when I came back and it was right around that same time where I realized I was giving this person all this power she yelled at me for something when I came back home from college my freshman year and it was a standard fight you know like here's the button that I pressed to get into the normal fight that

we get into um I just remember she hit the button I just like wasn't that upset and I it's like I felt nothing she like hit the button she like hit it again harder and I was like I just remember looking at her and be like, I get it. I'm sorry. Like you had a tough, tough life. And then she just broke down and started crying because it was like she felt understood. And I think, I know that was a roundabout way of getting back to regrets, but he regretted how he had raised her. But his, through his regrets, I got to see why she was the way she was. And then it diffused the bomb that was between me and her. Did I tell you that story, Douglas Murray told me about regrets from Christopher Hitchens.

Brilliant. So Christopher Hitchens, one of the new atheists, was sat in some British pub with Douglas Murray when Douglas is young. And, you know, you can imagine it's some musty Chesterfield sofa. He's probably got a cigarette in his mouth and a glass of scotch or something. And Douglas is vacillating between these two different choices that he needs to make. And he is complaining, lamenting the fact that I have this thing, but I have this thing.

And if I do this thing, I can't do this thing. And what do I do? And apparently Hitch, like, sat back in. Douglas, in life, we must choose our regrets. And I was like, fuck. So I'm three Manhattan's deep in Douglas Murray's apartment in Manhattan at two in the morning. And he sneaks off to the toilet. And I quickly write this down because I know that my, like,

half cut alcohol brain isn't going to remember it. So I note it down. That was all the trigger that I needed, which is also a good argument for noting things down. And I reflect, I must reflect it on that for a year. I must have thought about it for a year. In life, we must choose our regrets. What the fuck does that mean? Okay, first off, in an existence where opportunity cost is baked in because you don't get to split test life and by doing a thing, you can't do a different thing. I have the choice between going to the gym and going to the theme park. If I go to the gym, therefore I can't go to the theme park, even if the decision of going to the gym was the right call, I will always have the open loop of, yeah, but what if I'd gone to the theme park? You can't ever know, right? Okay,

so that means that fundamentally regrets are baked in to our existence. And I'd always thought that the reason that I had a regret was due to some suboptimal decision I'd made. If only I'd made this decision better, I could have ameliorated the regret. Okay, so regrets are an unavoidation. part of being a human and they're a byproduct of opportunity cost, which you can't get away from. But what does it mean that you have to choose your regrets? Okay. Well, if regrets are inevitable, if they're going to happen no matter what, an easy way to look at the decision is rather than which do I want to do, which regret could I live with? Because there are certain regrets that you can't bear living with. Now, you can bear living with them, but they're going to be worse than other ones.

So what is the difference between I need to have a difficult decision, I need to have a difficult conversation with my boss about leaving to go and do this thing, or I need to, that's the regret. That's one regret of the sitting down and seeing them face to face and telling you're going to leave their small mom and pop business and you're the main salesperson and it's going to be terrible and they're going to cry and you're going to feel like a piece of shit. That's one regret. Another regret is looking back at a decade that you waste in a job that you fucking hate. So in life you have to choose your regrets.

I love that as a decision-making frame because it also jumpstarts our fear engine because rather than saying like, what do I want? It's what do I hate least? And so we get to run it. So then you get to use your run away from engine rather than you go towards to it. Yeah, the mouse and the cheese again. Yeah. And was it you was telling me that? Yeah, with a cat. I mean, so I'm just going to butcher what you told me. But why don't you share the like how much, yeah. Yeah, this was on our last episode, so this is sequel for the people that were listening.

Jordan Peterson talks about the study where they starve a rat and they put it into a tube. They waft the smell of cheese in from the front and there's a spring attached to the rat's tail so they can work out how hard it's pulling. How hard it's pulling is a proxy for desire for how much it wants it. And you'd think this rat is starving. It's going to pull

as hard as it can. So it waft the smell of cheese in and it runs towards it and whatever. They do another iteration of the study. this time they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the smell of a cat in from behind. It pulls harder. Yeah. Why? Because not only in life do you want to run towards something you want, but you want to run away from something that you fear.

And this ties into the three most common traits of very successful people, superiority complex, massive crippling insufficiency and impulse control. So superiority complex, I can achieve this thing. That's the cheese. crippling sense of insufficiency. I fear the cat. Impulse control. I'm in a tube. There is only one direction that I can go.

I don't need to make a choice. Yep. I love this a lot as a frame for decision making because that, like, think about the decision that we were just talking about, right? So it's like, I'm the sales guy and I stay. And like, if you were to frame it in upsides, it's like, upside is I keep these friends, right? And but I want to leave so that I can.

start this business, right? Those are the upsides. But when you think about it in terms of like, I wasted decade of my life, not living the life I want, to me, I mean, even when I say it, it sounds more motivating, even though it's the exact same thing. It's like losing $100 versus gaining $100. People have three times higher loss aversion. And so it's like, if you can't get yourself to do something, think about it from the perspective of what you have to lose rather than what you have to gain. You've got a quote that I love. My biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and thinking I wasn't good enough. What's that mean? And I'll define good enough is I could have tried harder. Like, I want to leave everything on the field. And one of the things that has helped me a lot,

I mean, in the quote that went unbelievably viral. Do you want me to do it again? Do I need to do it again? You don't gain confidence by saying, shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by stacking, giving yourself a stack of undeniable proof. There you are who you say you are. Outwork yourself doubt. And again, a lot of the tweets that I have are notes to self. Because like, I have a, you know, I have a big presentation coming up. We got 500,000 people who are registered for this book launch that are coming out. And I'm thinking to myself as like, how can I guarantee that when I step off stage, no matter what happens, I feel like I've accomplished that I've done a good job, that I can look at myself in the mirror and say, good work. And when I was younger, I used to have no way to do

that. That's because I measured everything on outcomes. But I feel like because I've got a little bit more experienced. I do have a way to win now, but it's hard. And the way that I win is when I finish and I say that there's nothing else I could have done. And so that means that like the reason that I feel confident about this book that's coming out is I wrote 19 drafts of the book, four full rewrites end to end to make the book. I did six hours a day, my first six hours from 6 a.m. until noon every day for two years to get this book to get this book to where it is now. And when I was done with the book, I was like, there's nothing else I can do to this. Like, this is it.

There's nothing else. Like, I can't make it simpler. I can't make it shorter. I can't cut it. I can't add a visual that I should have added. It's done. And so to the same degree with the presentation that I have, I gave myself this framework of like, okay, well, if I were to speak in front of 10,000 people, I would probably spend a good

amount of time prepping the presentation to make sure it was good. I was like, well, I'm speaking in front of 500,000. I was like, so I can, I can rationalize spending 50 times the amount of work and effort and time to make this thing exceptional because, I mean, I mean, you. I mean, the numbers are hard to fathom, but that is the numbers. Like if I had a 10,000, that's what I would do. And so it allowed me to take a presentation and, you know, I have 900 slides that I'm going to get through in 60 minutes.

And I have now, every single day, I do a full draft of the, you know, I'd say the presentation in my head. And then I do a second run where I say it out loud and I record it. And then after I record it, I play the recording with the slides up. and I fix or add every slide where I stumble or there's something that should be there or visual and I keep going until now, right now I'm a week and change out. And there's there's not much else I can do to it. And so I'll still continue to do that from now until the day that it happens, but I probably won't have as many changes because I should just keep nailing it. And then when I get

up there, it doesn't matter if the tech doesn't work or if the, you know, the book shopping page cart it doesn't, you know, doesn't work or whatever it is because I'll be able to step off stage and look in the mirror and be like, you did everything you could. And the thing is just like, no one else will know that because I know that like I could not do that. And I probably like, you know, a lot of people were like, dude, you have so much goodwill. You could probably just say like, here's, you know, here's the book. But I would know. And if I, if I believe what I say I do, which is that I'm the ultimate judge jury and executioner of my own self-esteem, then I'm the only person. who can say good job or not. And unfortunately, I have incredibly high standards. And so I can either

just always feel like a failure because I always fall short of my own standards, or I can create a standard that I willingly and consciously accept, which is that I will do enough work that there is nothing left to be done. And that means that I can also do fewer things, which means I have to be more selective about the things that I choose to do. But when I do them, they will be done well and they will be done real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words so we can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers.

And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I ask you do is you can just leave a review. It'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world with someone else. They say that true hell is on the person that you are meets the person that you could have been. Yeah. And a lot of the time, I think we look at sports stars.

I'm watching this quarterback on Netflix at the moment. And Patrick Mahomes is just this artist. You know, he's halfway between a warrior and a savant and an artist and a musician and an everything rolled together, right? The reason that we love seeing behind the scenes with stuff like that is it is somebody at the absolute zenith of their capacity. And they are putting everything that they can into. making this as good as possible. And I think that I sometimes find myself getting, I certainly did before I had the podcast. I was wistful that I have the raw materials to work very hard at things and I'd never had a pursuit that I could have applied it to. There was nothing, I remember the

first time I ever heard Peterson say, work as hard as you can at one thing for a year and see what happens. And I'd never had a thing that I could work. I could work hard at business. But the line between your inputs and your outcomes is so meandering and messy that I can always excuse away good or bad performances as not being on me. And for the most part, I would take responsibility for the bad ones and not take responsibility for the good ones because that's how I'm wide. But I never had something that was linear, close to linear. I'm like, I put an hour in and I get an hour out or more than an hour out. And it's direct. And then about three years ago, I had this conversation with Dean, my video guy, I was like, I want to turn pro. I read

Stephen Pressfield, War of Art, and then I read Turning Pro. I want to turn pro with the show. What's that mean? What would it mean if I treated this pursuit like an athlete does? So an athlete, they review game tape and they do mindset work and they've got a sports psychologist and they look at what they eat and they look at what they drink and they go to bed on time

and they're hanging around with people that are growth-minded and they're getting the right coaches and all the rest. Everything is done in order to facilitate performance in the thing that they say they care about. but everybody has the opportunity to do that. You just need to define what the thing is. I'm never going to be Patrick Mahomes, right? Yeah. No.

But I managed to find my thing and then nearly kill myself in dedication toward it. There's a photo that I put up on my Instagram a little while ago, two weeks after I ruptured my Achilles. Yeah, yeah. I saw that. And I'm in a boot and I've got the laptop on my lap, and we've created this arm that'll bring the mic. to me because I didn't want to stop doing the podcast because I'd made this commitment. I'm going

to turn pro. And for three years, we haven't missed a single episode three times a week, three times a week, three times a week, three times a week for three years now. And before that, it was two a week for a year. And before that it was one a week for a year. And it just keeps on ramping up. And the opportunity to commit yourself fully to something that you care about is beyond a blessing. And when you do it, the way that you feel once you know that you've worked hard is great. And we said before we started, you got this big coming up, which I'm super proud of you for managing to achieve, even though it hasn't happened yet. The difference between being nervous and being excited before you do something is your level of preparation in advance of it. If you step out on stage or in front of half a million people

on a webinar, which is the craziest sentence I've ever said, if you step out on stage in front of half a million people and you've done absolutely everything, there's nothing to fear. And that's why it's not about what everyone else will think, because when I'm on stage making that presentation, the only person whose voice I'll hear is mine. and I will know if I have done everything in my control to be prepared or not. And what's the best thing that comes out? I didn't do everything that I could to prepare and I managed to fluke my performance. Right.

I managed to like close my eyes, throw the dart and oh, wow, it hit the bull's eye. You'll even know that. They'll even be guilt. You won't even be able to fully enjoy your success because you'll have tarnished it with your lack of input. And what's interesting is that when you start defining your own success that way, it actually starts to feel under your own control. But the downside is you realize that you can do very few things. And then all of a sudden, life feels very short because you're like, shoot, there's like not that many things I can do

before I die if I'm going to actually do my best. And what was interesting is I was talking to a CEO friend of mine. He's a public CEO. And he was like, I need to start making content. Right. I'm like, you're managing a billion dollar company. I was like, you're doing okay, man. But because of that type of person, it's like, I need to be doing better with my content, right? He's got a few hundred thousand followers. Anyways. And so I was like, all right, well, how many pieces is the content you're putting out a week? And he was like, well, I mean, I put out one a day. And I was like, dude, I was like, we put out 300 a week. And he just, he didn't even respond. He just took, he just like, pursed his lips and nodded. He was like, thank you for resetting my minimum standard.

It's always like, thank you. Like, and I'm sure like when you talk to Phil Heath and he talks about the volume that is required in order to gain muscle and how much, how dialed in he is with food and all the other things. Just the amount of sheer work, like the biggest change. in, or I'll say, biggest reason that I've had significantly larger returns or outcomes that have happened later on in my career and they continue to get bigger and bigger is because the minimum standard for how much work I know I can do on something has multiplied a hundredfold. Like I look at the first presentations, I was telling Quinn this earlier. I look at the first presentations I ever gave. And I remember thinking to myself when I had this, I was like, this is a good presentation.

It's like 25 slides with like a heading in like three bullets on each slide and being like, man, This is good. I'm like, this is a, this is, this is, this is a pittance. This is like an afternoon. But in my mind, if I spent a whole day on something, that was like a lot of work. Now it's, I, you know, I like using this term like measure in hundreds, which is like, measure in hundreds of hours. How many hundreds of hours have you put towards something? If you do that, I promise you, the thing that you're making will get a lot better. And you'll also see how much more you're capable of, which is what I think like my undertone of listening to what you were just saying with the podcast is like, the more you do, the more you realize you can do. And so what happens is you're actually even though you're you're going pro right now you're like dude next year I'm going pro yeah because this is now just a minimum standard of course I work out three days a week of course I do three podcasts a week but dude once we have the the reality TV show and we have the full crew and we have the headquarter like because then the path gets lit of where you're going to go because you're so singularly focused and you know you have no other distractions the attention cost isn't you're not paying that down anymore and you're just like how many times can I repeat this

effort. And then that's when you start unlocking mastery, right? Like I have this process for creating presentations. And before we turned on the mics, we were talking about it. But it's like, I've done a handful of presentations in my life. And I've gotten decent at making them. But the process now is so refined, which is like, it is game tape. It is, I make the thing. I do the thing in my head. I do it out loud. I watch the recording. I edit the thing. I do it in my head. I do it out loud. I watch the recording. I edit the thing. And I just keep doing it until it's glass. Dude, I listen to every podcast that I did for probably the first two and a half years. I listened back every single time.

But at the time I didn't cringe because I thought that you crushed it. Anybody can go back and listen to episode one with Stuart Morton in my old office in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. And you'll notice every other sentence that he says, I go, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, it's fucking infuriating. It's absolutely catastrophic. My accent's terrible. Everything, everything, everything about it is awful. and yet at the time I thought it was great. Here's another interesting thing I've been thinking about recently.

When you don't have anything to say no to, it's easy to focus on one thing. As success begins to get you more opportunities, your ability to say no becomes increasingly important. And that's something that I'm feeling now. Just more attention. We're hockey sticking quite aggressively. And I'm not anywhere near like even middling Zedlist fame. but it's enough for people to see what they think is a penny stock and decide that they're going to try and throw the hat in the ring,

which means that there's like 20 things I need to say no to every single week from new people that want to do a thing. Why don't we try this thing? And why don't we do that thing? And why don't we do the other thing? It was a piece of piss five years ago to say, or three years ago in the middle of COVID to go like, I'm going to go pro and I'm just going to focus on this one thing.

Because what else am I going to do? All of my nightclubs have been shut down. I got nothing else to do with my life. Now, oh, you're going to do. said you were going to go pro. Interesting. Let's see what happens when you have 30 other things every single week vying for your attention. Now let's see how committed you are. This is my favorite analogy for this, which is the woman in the red dress. But many people have seen the matrix. If you haven't seen the matrix, you don't need to have seen it to understand the analogy.

So Neo is going through the training program, the protagonist. Morpheus is his educator, his teacher. and the education program only has one objective. And so he's walking through the city. People are going left and right. He's bumping into people going through like crowded New York. And then all of a sudden it's kind of a black and white paleish look. It's green black and white, but it's still black and white. And then all of a sudden this woman in a red dress enters the frame.

And you can't help but stare at this woman in the red dress. And she's a complete knockout. And Morpheus is talking to Neo trying to teach him something. And as he's talking, he's like, Neo, were you look at me or you're looking at the woman of the red dress? And he says, look again. And he looks back and it's Agent Smith holding a gun to his head. And he says, freeze.

And then everything freezes in the frame. And he's like, if you're not one of us, you're one of them. And I see that as the opportunities that we have to say no to every day. It's like another woman in the red dress. And it's become a term that we use internally. Right. It's like, it's a woman in the red dress. And the thing is that the more successful you become or the more able you become,

the hot of the woman in the red dress is. Right. Like you've got a homeless girl that you're walking, you know, pass on the street. She's like all dirty, but she's got a real. red dress on, you're like, the thing is that that homeless girl when you were in your apartment actually looks like, pretty hot. Yeah, right. She's like, you know, I'm not, you know, I could, you know, right? But then the better you get, the bigger the opportunities. And that's where you have, not your hypothetical 10, but what about your hypothetical 100? Yeah. And I had a mentor say this to me right

as we sold gym launch. He said, Alex, that you know now that if it's not a billion, it's not worth your time. And that was such a single, a great razor for all decisions. And so people, they're like, hey, we should do this endorsement. Hey, we should partner with this, whatever. I mean, think about it. Like, we're in the deal world. So how many deal we get? We have 3,000 companies a month that reach out to us to do a deal. That's 100 a day. Currently. And we've done 13 deals in two years. And so like, you think about the acceptance rate. It's like, you know, and I'm not saying you shouldn't apply. But I'll know, it's go to Acquisition.com and apply if you have an awesome business. But the point is that like your no muscle isn't really a no muscle. It's just a yes

muscle for the one thing that matters most. Heroes and villains always have the same backstory. Pain. The difference is what they choose to do about it. Villain says the world hurt me. I'll hurt it back. The hero says the world hurt me. I'm not going to let it hurt anybody else. Heroes use pain. Villains are used by it. And full kudos here. This is a permutation of what but Donald Miller said, who's a great writer and he has a number of books. And he talked about the first element, the second element of that quote is the part that I added to it about heroes using pain and villains being used by it. And so one of the things for people who are not where they want to be is that they have pain,

like oodles of pain. And I remember when I was starting out, I was looking for passion. I was looking for purpose. I was like, I just want to find something that I'm motivated by. but it's the cat and the cheese. It's like we're looking for cheese, but we have all these cat behind us and all we have to do is look and remember that they're behind us and chasing us. And so if you have the cat and you're staying in your current situation, you're being used

by the cat, right? You're being used by the business owner who, you know, it doesn't treat you well and is, you know, and you're in this job that you don't really want to be in, right? Or you're being used by the situation or the context of the relationship that you're in with the girl that you're like, not that into, right? versus saying like, this is terrible. And because of this terribleness, I now have something that I can run away from.

And then, and then, and then like, rather than not looking at the knife or trying to take painkillers to not feel the pain, it's like completely sobering up, taking the knife and twisting it in your own heart and being like, I'm going to fucking do something about this. And I think that that's, that's what the heroes, like, if we're heroes in our own story, it's not avoiding pain. It's choosing from the very beginning, the alchemy, which is, It's like you have these terrible situations. It's like, and you have the opportunity to turn them into magic and skip or shortcut

all the growth you're going to have in a really short period of time simply by twisting the knife and being like, I'm going to do something about it. Yeah, I think because people presume in the beginning that passion and purpose and meaning and joy and fulfillment are the things that get people going. But as I've said, of all of the high performance that I've spoken to, the vast, vast, vast, vast, of them are driven by insufficiency and resentment and terrible parents or terrible upbringings or a chip on their shoulder about bullies in school. Pick your poison. They have decided to use that to create the activation energy, right? You can lower your action threshold and increase how many points you have to prove. It's like, oh, I want to live a better life. Yeah, that sounds good. It's like, I want to prove the bullies that said I was a worthless piece of shit in school

wrong. It's like, that's some fucking potent fuel. I do believe that scaled over a long enough time, it's toxic. And I don't think that it's necessarily... How long? That's the question. Like a lifetime, right? But, I mean, it'll fuel you for a decade pretty well. And I think that, I look at me, I look at, you know, I was bullied pretty badly in school and was an only child and had, expectations from parents. And, and, you know, I combined all of those things together. And I did have a chip on my shoulder. And I did want to prove to the world that I was worthwhile. And I did want people to, to realize that they had doubted the wrong person. Fuck yeah. Yeah, damn right, I do. I think being really specific about your pain is helpful. So, like, even being specific about

the cheese, really specificity in general is helpful. But like, even more so, like, what is the twisting the pain. What is twisting the knife? Like what is how do you operationalize twisting the knife, right? Instead of being like, I hate my life, right? It's, I hate the way Andrew makes me feel when he says that I'm a piece of shit and I'm not going to amount to anything. Comma, because he's right. Like, why does it hurt me? Like if someone says, Alex, you're a piece of shit and you're not going to amount to anything. If someone accuses you of being poor or fat. Right. I would have, I'd be like, I have evidence to the contrary. So this will probably not bother. me. But the things that bother us are the ones that you know have an element of truth or sometimes

not an element are comprised almost entirely of truth and we just don't want to look at it. And so I think it's it's the twisting the knife is looking in the mirror and saying what if they're right? Success is the only revenge. As you expand, they shrink into irrelevance. As you get louder, no one can hear them. You don't beat them. You cast a shadow so big, no one can see them to begin with. When people copy, they copy the wrong stuff because they don't know why it worked to begin with and when it breaks, they don't know how to fix it because they didn't build it. So don't sweat it. Copycats will always be behind.

Good shit. Well, success is the only revenge. It is such a lovely, there's that, um, let me tell you the story behind it. Damn right. Yeah. So I was 15 years old. So this was really early in my life. Still jacked.

Still jacked. Always jacked. Permajacked. And I, uh, this is going to sound so lame. So I had this teacher, so I'm freshman in high school and I might have been 14, whatever the ages. And I'm walking through the hallway and this teacher is like an admin of some kind walks out of his office.

And he's like, he's like, son. And I was like, I'm like, either in trouble, what am I going to do? And he's like, you work out? And I was like, no. He's like, why not? I was like, I don't know how. He's like, I'll show you. He's like, you got the jeans.

And so that teacher, Mr. Gibbons, ended up. working out with me every day in high school and showed me how to work out and he probably saw on some level that I was some angsty teenager that felt angry about whatever and I during our workout sessions would be like this guy said this to me like you know you know or like this bull whatever and I was like man I'm going to come back at our 10 year reunion and I was like I'm going to show him I was like he's going to be working for me like blah blah right and he's like no he's not And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, let me just have my moment.

He's like, no, he's not. He's like, and you're not going to do that. Not if I have anything to say about it when you come back for the 10 year reunion. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, because if you come back at a 10 year reunion and say, hey, John, like everything I have, look at me now. He's like, the guy's going to laugh and be like, you did all of this to try and prove me wrong. Man, I feel sorry for you.

And when he said that, when he actually played out what my like revenge fan he was in real life, I realized it looked, it looks stupid. Petty. Yeah. I looked like the beta in the fucking situation, right? And so he was like, the only thing that you can do is win so big that all of them constantly compare themselves to you. And then you'll forget they exist.

And that's when he said, he said, success is the only revenge. He's like, it's not the best revenge. He's like, it's the only one. There's no other revenge because everything else is petty. Everything else does show that you were thinking about these people all day long, which means they win by default. He's like, all you can do is think about your goal and winning. He's like, and when you win, that's when you become so big that they shrink into a relevance. You cast a shadow that no one even can see them behind you. This is the nuance, I think, on the previous point when we were talking about the toxicity of that fuel long term. You can see me light up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that when you think about, um,

the activation energy of using the things that you don't like. You have to be careful that you're using them and that they're not using you still. And a lot of the time, I get this, and in my more juvenile moments, I see myself do this, where I'll know that there's a game that somebody else that I don't like cares about.

And I'll imagine myself playing that game to beat them so that I can stick it to them purely for the reason of sticking it to them. Let's say that there's someone that really cares about being in shape, and I'm not in as good shape as I have been in the past, and I know that with muscle memory, if you give me 18 months and a good amount of testosterone, like the thing that they care about,

I would be able to make them feel really bad about. Right. Okay, so I would hijack my own direction purely to try and prove somebody else wrong in a desperate, and somehow believe that that's me taking control of my life? Are you kidding me? I'm allowing them to ventriloquise me.

Yeah. Through pain that they didn't even mean to give me. Yeah. The woman in the black dress. The black pill equivalent. Right. Like, now it's like not even a distraction from your main goal. It's like, I'm going to make a new goal just to wrong this person and then somehow make, make up the story that I'm in control of my life when I'm really just acting incompletion.

in complete reaction to this person. And so in so doing, in beating them at their own game, they've already won by default. Yep. Because they got me to change the game I was playing. Forget about who won. It's like, dude, you were over there and now you're over here. I see this with a lot of people. I think that it contributes to a lot more of why and how people adopt societal norms, the resentment that they have. It's not just other people want this thing, therefore I memetically want to do this thing too. It's, I know that other people will respect me and that my resentment will feel justified and manifest if I win at it. And that's really compelling. That's like a motivational spit roasting coming in from both ends. And it's really,

really powerful. And you need to be careful. I mean, I think, you know, one of the really early blessings, and I'll be honest, like this is where I think I was fortunate, right? Like, I realized when I was about 28, right, that I had been trying really hard to be, I mean, you'll note as a common theme with a lot of my stories, but I have one central person that I was trying to prove for a very long time, which is my father. And we're on good terms, by the way, because I always get that question. But this was after I left, and he disapproved of my whole thing. And for five years, we didn't talk very much. And so he calls me up to, he says, hey, you're going to want to sit down for this and I'm like, okay, what? Are you pregnant? You know? And so he says, I'm sorry. And I was like,

for what? And he was like, for everything. Right. Now, mind you, like, this is a Middle Eastern father, born in Iran to a Middle Eastern father there who was even more legit. Like, where my father was born, women weren't allowed to drive cars. Cars came with drivers with them when you bought them. The driver came with the car. We're like, he was born in a very different world. Like, Fathers don't apologize to sons. It just wasn't that way. And I have a little bit more, a little bit more awareness than I did then. And I can see that now.

But for me, I was like, now you apologize? You don't know what I mean? And so rather than take it for the olive branch that it was, I said, I didn't care about your opinion five years ago when I left. And I was like, and I don't care now. And he was like, well, we'll see how long your success lasts. And so what could have been a really nice exchange into? of becoming pretty ugly. But the main point there was that I wanted to in the beginning,

like, make as much as my father. Then it was make more than my father. And then it was make more than my father had ever made in his entire life. And once I had achieved that, I realized that as much as like, it sounds terrible to say this, but like I was trying to beat him at his game. And this is pretty alive in a lot of culture, a lot of Asian cultures. Same thing. Making money is a big, you know, like when my dad wouldn't introduce somebody, he'd be like, this is so and so he makes this much a year. So it was just really clear, like, this is how much status someone has. And so, like it was really deep for me. Um, but it was only when I realized that I had won at his game, that I realized I never even asked the question of like, what game am I trying to win? And I don't

know how many people are actually trying to win at a game that they didn't even set the rules up for so many when they're in it. And that's why I say like, I think I was fortunate that I, you know, I hit a really tough goal because my dad was is a successful man, um, relatively early on. Um, but that that exchange and then think like and then reflecting black and feeling terrible about myself from like saying what I said and then I was like I'm I did everything that I've done to this point to beat him beat my father the man who actually raised me who tried to make me the best man I can and when I think when I really start thinking about it I'm like I like I like who I am he raised me so doesn't that mean that he might have been the perfect father

and then that really messes me and so Yeah, so go ahead. Well, it's just, it's hard to think that the people you used to have contempt for or distaste or hatred or whatever shaped you in a way that you couldn't have been. And I often think about how the things I'm most proud of in myself are the light side of something that I was so embarrassed about. Yeah. So ashamed about, you know, being an outcast as a kid meant that I love or I'm capable of being. on my own way beyond how anybody else is. So far beyond it.

I can work on my own in solitude for an endless amount of time. I can outwork anybody in solitude. Why? Because I spent almost all of my time between the ages of six and 16 in my bedroom, listening to audio tapes, right? Listening to audio books and like throwing like a tennis ball against the wall or like playing with my like fucking mighty mouse from Mars. whatever they were called. What was it called? Biker Mice from Mars. That was it. And that was what I did.

So, but all of that discomfort and all of the challenges that I went through there are the thing. One of the things that I'm so proud of myself for now. Okay. So what if I look back and I said, well, all of the bullying that I went through and the challenges of feeling alone and being on the outside of social groups meant that I developed such attenuation and attention and focus and an ability to distill down what's happening socially, which is why I became one of the best club promoters in the UK for a decade and a half. Because for all of my school life, I'd been obsessing over how Alex wears his tie. Maybe that's why he has friends and I don't have friends, or the particular brand of shoes that he's wearing, or he carries his bag on that shoulder and I carry mine on this

shoulder because I couldn't deconstruct why I didn't have friends and everybody else did. Okay, so looking back, would I have rather had the friends and had the brother or sister and not develop this skill? I can't split test life, so I don't know. Right. But my life ended up pretty good and I'm happy with it. So I need to not only look back at that stuff as something not to hate, but something to genuinely be thankful for and that is frankly something I'm still working through. Yeah. It goes back to the first thing, which is like the most traumatic events that happen in our life. You know, they happen for us, not to us. But when you expand the time horizon, like those things. And to be fair, there are people who do have really crappy things happen to

them and then it destroys them. And then that's it. And then they're just done. And that's all it is. Not everyone has like a moderate amount of childhood bullying and an only child with like parents that care about them or whatever. Because you were a child coping with the world with the coping skills of a child. I'm still largely that as an adult infant. Right. And so um but I think that I mean the keep the at least for me you know my key takeaway from both both of these kind of stories is more that all of the all of the negative things that happen on the micro have the opportunity if doubled down on to be huge wins in the macro. And sometimes in ways that just a micro win would never have the ability to be

doubled down on and become a capital W win in the macro. This is probably one of the heaviest hammer blows, I think, for today, this next one. This is a real hammer. My anger tweeting? No, it's not. It's an existential one. Oh, fun. You've already achieved goals you said would make you happy.

You've already achieved goals you said would make you happy. Alex's notes to self, right? Because we all know the happiness formula, which is when this happens, I'll be happy, right? When X, I'll be happy. Or if X, I'll be happy. And so I've set up that equation, I'm sure. I know you've never set up this equation for yourself in your life,

but I've set that up. And I think that just serves as my biggest reminder. But it's also why I probably am a pretty existential nihilist overall. because I've had so much evidence that none of those things, quote, brought me joy, but the things that we were talking earlier about anticipation being kind of the hot button on pleasure. I feel like the hot button on joy for me is what I'm doing right now. So like I haven't done the event yet, right? I haven't given the presentation.

But when I'm in the rocky cut scene of like beating, I'm not going to say, beating the cow carcass, I'll say that. I was trying to avoid certain words. Anyways, that when I'm putting that work in and doing the reps, like, that's when I'm actually my most in flow and enjoying myself the most. And so it's actually a lie that I've been telling myself that like once the presentation goes well, I'll feel good because in some ways now I feel like when the presentation happens, I'll be disappointed because I won't get to do this anymore.

I'll have to find something else to pick as a target so that I can get back into my rocky cutscene. And so I think that that is taken some time, and I've gotten better at it. I really do think I've gotten a lot better at it, at least recognizing because the more, the more times I've had Ws and then realized that right afterwards, I felt nothing. I had to think back of like, what are the things that I enjoyed most in my life? And it's always in pursuit. And I'm like, well, then, why don't I set something really big, really far so I can be in

pursuit for the longest period of time possible? And that's where I think a lot of people from the outside, you know, they cast their expectations of life onto me and say, I wouldn't live my life that way. You're always, you're always working, you're always doing these things. But it's like, I'm actually always spending my time in pursuit, because in pursuit is my button for enjoyment. Well, what about if it wasn't achieving the thing at the end, if the reason that you set yourself goals is exclusively to motivate yourself to enjoy the route toward those goals? And I know that it's not the destination, it's the journey, is kind of cliche. And I think this is slightly subtly different, which is that it's actually about setting the destination.

Without the destination, you wouldn't do the journey. Like the way that you set goals and then achieve them and the dopamine and the trigger that you get, I often think about the balance between like serotonin Chris and dopamine Chris. And I don't even know the difference between that. It's like, am I feeling sort of lovey and present and wanting to connect with people? or am I driving toward a thing because I have a goal that's in front of me. And I'm very sort of dopamine, Chris, a lot of the time. But I genuinely think that if you remind yourself, these are the golden years.

Like this right now, when you look back, these will be the golden years, right? When I had my health, I had my full mental capacity, I had control of my bladder, I had all of the money that I needed to do the things that I wanted, to crush it with my friends, to fly around America and film these podcasts or to launch this book that I spend all of this time on. And you can even see it in the micro. You can even see it when you look back on stuff that you've done in your day-to-day business or what you did at university. What were the times that you enjoyed?

Was it when success came to you easily? Or was it when you stayed up and ordered dominoes because you had that project that needed to be in at six in the morning and you ran an all-nighter and John slept under the table and everybody ordered monsters and then the next morning we got it done? What was good about that? Was it when you submitted it? Or was it the Domino's and the 3 a.m. sleep under the table? Because I'm pretty sure it's that.

I love this as a side note. But one of the things that really motivates me, or one of my most powerful motivational frames, is thinking about the person that I want to become as the destination. And thinking like, I want to be bulletproof. I want to be bulletproof in these ways. I want to be bulletproof in my marriage. I want to be bulletproof in my business, et cetera. and I think about that man, whoever I want him to be.

Like we said, hell is when you look at who you could have been and realize that you're not that person. And then I think, if I were to make that man, what would I put that man through to make him who he is? Like it wouldn't be easy times. It wouldn't be quick wins. It wouldn't even be easy wins. It would be the toil and the struggle of achieving and reaching for things that are right out

of grasp, that are right out of grasp, that are right. right above my threshold and continuing to do that to like lift the weight to build the muscle to break it down and do it over and over again because like that's what creates the character traits that are the man that I want to be. And so when I'm going through those like really harder times, I like to think of like looking in my mental mirror of like, I'm making you. I'm not there yet, but I'm making you. And that has helped me get through some of the harder times.

And from a gratitude perspective, my most powerful frame for gratitude has been thinking about my 85-year-old self, waking up as my 30-year-old self, and all of a sudden looking at Layla and be like, man, I remember when we were this young. And then looking out the window and being like, man, Vegas wasn't even developed. Like, there's no flying cars yet. Like, man, they were still used gas. Like, this is so cool. And I get out of bed and I'm like, then my elbows don't hurt. My knees don't hurt. Right? Because I'm thinking about what my 85-year-old self would think. And, you know, we're talking about whatever. But it allows me to enjoy the mundane in a way that I know that I would give everything that I had when I was 85 to enjoy again.

And it's just, it's a, it's a trippy frame. But like, if you can think, like, what would 85, 85 year old me would be like, I'm just not, my body doesn't hurt. You know what I mean? Like, I actually have energy. Like, I can think clearly. I don't have brain fog because I'm 85, right? And that has been probably my single most powerful frame on feeling grateful and allowed me

to feel more present at times when I start, like, when I start to feel like I'm going through the motions and just like clicking in the routine and just like day after day after day and they feel the same, that's been my biggest slowdown where I can pull the reins and be like just, and mind you, it lasts a few minutes. But when I think back on the days where I use that frame, the part of the day that I remember is just the few minutes that I use it. So I did this episode with Sam Harris. A lot of people have problems with Sam Harris. I found the time that I spent with him unbelievably enjoyable. I sat opposite him and a couple of times caught myself thinking, I am having so much fun

doing this. And he said this thing and I really wish that I'd ask him another question. I should email him about it. I was talking about presence and the importance of presence and you could use it as a proxy for gratitude.

And he said that really what you're aiming to do is find small moments in the day when you just open up and realize what's happening. Yeah. Right? Connor McGregor won the featherweight title twice

because he won the interim because Aldo was injured and then he won against Aldo and somebody asked him what are you going to do differently this time before the Aldo fight that you didn't do against the in the Mendez fight he says this time I'm going to be present

and there's this photo of him and he stood like this at the way in and you've got this entire stadium in front of him and he stood like that he said the first time he did it he couldn't remember it because he was just drowning in what was next. And what I really loved that Sam said,

and I think that you look at somebody that's a master meditator, or you set yourself high bars for what it means to be mindful, and you realize that you can be present with a sip of a coffee. Okay, I can be present with this one sip of a coffee, and then it, like, sand in your hands

or like trying to remember a dream, it just evaporates, right? Okay, well, what if your goal was just to try and get five of those a day. What if that was it? What if being mindful was just five moments when you allow yourself to be where your feet are, where your feet are underneath you?

And then what if you tried to just string like two of those together five times a day? Like just this first sip and then as I put it down the view out of the window, oh my God, like that's two things in one. And then I can do that five times. And if I'd asked him, I would have said, really is the path to just increase the frequency of the times that you are where your feet are underneath you.

And one of the cue that I love that I got from an embodiment coach is the times when you see in your peripheral vision, you're looking and the way that our vision actually works. You're focused so heavily on what's directly in front of you. If there's ever a time when you see what's out here, you realize that it's impossible to see all of that and not be in the present moment because you've naturally just opened yourself up. and I love that cue. So during the times when I'm doing things, like that Sam episode, I'm like, the next question, and there's millions of people watching it

and all this stuff, and there's this guy in front of me and he's super smart or whatever. This is fucking cool. Just that one moment. And that, when I look back on that episode, that's what I enjoyed. That's what I enjoyed about it.

So I think that being where your feet are underneath you and allowing yourself to open up and stringing those together largely allows you to enjoy being, whilst you're in the process of becoming. It's also interesting, those moments, you can capture a moment independent from your surroundings because a lot of times those moments, you're not thinking about the goal that you have,

the meeting that you have, the prep that you have to do for some talk or some podcast or whatever it is. And I can't remember where I heard this, but they were talking about Gladiator, the movie. And the film opens with this like little bird on a bow, right, with like the leaves and not. And then they zoom out from that little bird on the on the on the on the bow. And it's this disgusting war scene. Right. And so it's kind of like micro macro micro um of how no matter how tough whatever the moment that you're going through is. If you can just take a picture of the corner of the room and look at the beauty in that right of being present in that moment even if it's

the suffering right like you get punched and you're spitting blood. out, but it's like this moment that you capture, then all of a sudden, like, everything fades away and you are present. And so it can take this, what would be a brutal war scene of death and dismemberment. And the thing that makes it memorable is the zooming in on a detail. And so it's like if you feel like you're going through life too fast, it's like just look for a detail.