The Game with Alex Hormozi - Controversial Truths You Need To Hear Pt.2 (on the Modern Wisdom Podcast) | Ep 657

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

“I would rather be somebody who has absolute power and have nothing to show for it.” Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on the Modern Wisdom Podcast with Chris Williamson to talk about how to optimize productivity, the role failure plays, and how to eliminate a victim mindset. He further delves into the concept of the 'Zygonic Effect', aligning work with personal desires, defining 'learning' and 'intelligence', and warns against not evolving our strategies under similar conditions. This is part 2 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:(1:15) - The double-edged sword of fame(6:22) - The role of hatred in success(13:23) - Self-love and holding yourself to a higher standard(27:46) - The power of authenticity and originality(41:34) - The power of positive mindset and self-belief(48:59) - The struggles Alex faced in the beginning of his journey(59:19) - The importance of doing boring work(1:12:47) - The power of acceptance and moving on(1:26:33) - The importance of learning and doingFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

I think that most things are actually significantly easier than people think they are. They just don't know how to try hard. Because the harder that you try, the easier it gets. And so it's like if you can just learn to love what trying hard feels like, then all of a sudden it becomes unreasonable that you can't win. 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. Whenever I wanted to try and get myself back into the present, I used to have brain fog a lot in my 20s. Oh, really? And maybe not brain fog, maybe just the clarity of my thoughts now is so much better than it used to. I don't fucking know. Maybe it was hung over.

That was a big. Maybe it was just the drugs. I don't know. But one of the things I used to, I used to have this, I still have this BMW sat on my drive with a perforated steering wheel. And I remember that if I ran my thumbs across the steering wheel and I really felt the perforation, really felt it. Or I'd do it with a leaf. I'd pick a leaf up. And I'd really feel the sensation of the leaf.

I couldn't think about anything else. You can only have one thought at one time. You cannot think two things, right? You have a super computer inside of your head, and it's got one megabyte of RAM. Yeah, yeah. So just think the one thought. Okay, so this next one, me and you text each other pretty frequently about,

we've seen this cool thing and someone's repurposed like one of the things that we've done, which is cool. And it makes me feel good that things that we've said, or that you've said largely, get repurposed. This is something that hadn't happened before, which is you misquoted me, but improved the quote. So this was like the human centipede of content creation and then I named it.

So this is Fames seesaw. When you're on your way up, everyone roots for you because you remind them of their dreams. When you're at the top, everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on them. And you have one, which is for anyone who needs a reminder, no one is going to hate on you for doing worse than them. And this is interesting because kind of like the challenges you feel. in the beginning, you don't have anything to say no to, therefore the woman in the red dress is easy to say no to, or there are fewer women. This is a challenge that nobody is going to give you any sympathy for. It's a very unique category of challenge because the total addressable

market for sympathy is basically zero. Because almost everybody is on their way up and very few people are at the top and the people that are at the top are seen as having a degree of privilege that almost legitimates you twisting the knife or you poking the finger. This is how public figures can have normal everyday people on Twitter say unspeakable, like heinous things to them, dehumanizing things because they do not see them as human.

They don't see them as a person. There is no person on the other side of this. There are a representation. They're a menagerie of ideas. Therefore I can say whatever I want to them because they're not really a person. But they are. And the fact that before there is any status associated with tearing you down,

no one is incentivized to tear you down. And you haven't changed. Fuck, dude. The Lewis Capaldi documentary, I've watched this twice now. No, Lewis Capaldi is the singer, Scottish singer, amazing dude. Really fascinating story. Suffering a lot with mental health. Makes this first album.

And billions, billions of streams. World tour. phenomenal. And he's playing songs that he wrote in 2017 and played in working men's pubs around Scotland. The same songs go to number one. So not just that he's become better. He's the same guy. Yeah. The same guy. Maybe his production's improved. Maybe his recording quality is improved. He's got better mastering and his voice coaching's got a bit better. But he's largely the same person. He hasn't changed. And he has this quote halfway through and it really spoke to me and he said, fame doesn't change you.

It just changes everybody around you. Yeah. And that when you're on your way up, everyone roots for you because you remind them of their dreams. When you're at the top, everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on them. That really, yeah, that spoke to me. I wrote an essay on this because I'm a psychopath. Yeah. When I was a gym owner.

So a lot of people don't know this, but I got a writing scholarship in college. I was a vice president in the newspaper. I was editor of the creative writing magazine. So like I've been writing for a long time. I enjoy writing. And I wrote this essay. I said, I think the title of it was,

everyone believes in the American dream until it comes true. And I remember because what had happened was everybody when I was sleeping on the gym floor, right? Like, you know, I was the underdog and everyone, you know, my clients were all like, oh, good for you. You know, you're going after your dream. I mean, they'd see my blanket and my pillow in the corner of the gym, and they knew I was sleeping there. And it was evident.

You know, I lived there. I didn't have a shower. It didn't have a shower to go to the YMCA, I had to go shower. And everybody was like, pro me. And then people would come in, they sign up like, I'm going to support you, right? And then within nine months, I had hired people and I had a manager. And I pulled up. And I remember I walked in the lobby and all the same, the same people were like, oh, boss man's here.

oh, you're not too good for us now, right? And I remember being so jarred by the experience. And I was like, you guys rooted for me. And I was like, and now I did what you said you were rooting for me to do. And that was when I realized that people want you to do well, but not better than them. And I was like, I had gone from underdog to the man. And I was like, when does that happen? And the litmus test of when it happens is depends on who the person is.

because for the person who was working at my gym who, you know, was a janitor or a cleaner, it happened really quick, right? For the people who were more successful, it took longer. And then, you know, the only people at the end who had still were for me were the business owners who were doing way better than me, right, who were still members of my gym. And so that was a really interesting experience that happened when I was 23. And that was the first time I went from underdog to the person that someone would want to attack. But I had a performance coach telling me this. He said, hatred isn't

something you avoid. He said it is a requisite for success. He said, if you get no hate, you are not successful. And for some reason, that just like really stuck with me because then it just like rather than it being this thing that I was trying to avoid, it actually became a leading indicator or an indicator that I was on the right path in achieving things. And so I think that's why, I mean, I don't want to toot horns or anything.

But in terms of like my ability to deal with the naysayers and things like that, I feel like I'm pretty good at it. Like it doesn't really bug me very much. And I think in large part, it was because of how it's framed, at least how, you know, in this discussion, how it was framed from me early on, which is that no one hates you from above. And even, you know, even when I think back about like the bullies and whatnot that you had earlier, like, even in middle school, like, there were things that I had that were.

going for me that I couldn't recognize because of course everything that comes easy to you are things that they're easy to you so you don't think that they're you know new or interesting or cool and but like at the same time I was like I'd advanced a grade in multiple in multiple subjects I had you know stray days I worked really hard I was in shape right and I but I had these people who would hate but I you internalize it but like now I can look back and be like it's kind of like the parents were like it's because she's into you right It might not be the same that way, but just thinking about it as an indicator that the hate is actually the light that you're on the right path. We spoke about this last time that nothing is going to be worthwhile that doesn't come with an associated amount of discomfort.

Therefore, when you start to feel friends around you and the people that you used to be able to speak a common language, with start to push back and start to make the quips of oh not drinking tonight yeah oh you must be too cool for us now I know it hurts I know it hurts that is the lead indicator not even the lagging indicator that you are doing the right thing and a lot of people listen to this podcast I get messages from people like hey man I'm a 22 year old rugby player from the northwest of the UK I live in Cumbria none of my friends are understand me. I want to do personal growth. I don't want to live in the UK. And when I listen to modern wisdom, I feel less alone. And it makes me tear up because I'm like, fuck, like, I see me

in that person. I see me in that. And it's so hard to reframe it. The pushback you are getting is the indicator that you are doing the right thing. It is. And if you can reframe the distaste that you get from other people as the same as that. Because they're projecting the things that they know they should be doing that you are doing, that they're not doing, and you remind them of that. And so it's that it's even, so even though the mountain that you're climbing is actually a smaller one than the one that

you ultimately want to climb, you're actually at the top of their mountain. And so they start tearing you down. So like, that's where the underdog story that we said the very beginning of this with the quote, which is like, on the way up, they root for you.

And then when you're at the top, they try and tear you down. because you remind them of the dreams that they couldn't accomplish, right? And so you quitting drinking or you staying in to work on your side hustle or your project or the business that you want to launch to the podcast, that might be, you might be at the top of their mountain. And so they are tearing you down because now you remind them that they haven't done it. And it's purely a projection of them onto you and has nothing to do with you.

And that, I hope that that comforts someone. Because what you said, I think is like, if you're going through that right now, and like, and I promise you, every single person who wants to do something with their life and has done something with their life has gone through the exact chapter that you're going through. And it's the lonely chapter. It's the chapter where you're, you don't fit in with your own friends, but you don't have the outcomes yet to fit into a new group of friends. And you're doing this thing. You're consuming content on the internet. You're doing these free tutorials online to try and figure out how to set up a podcast and where do I host this thing. And then there, and you're going through this and you're

like, is this even worth it? Because you have no signs of success, right? But if there's anything that you can take away from what we're saying right now is that the sign of success is the hate that you get along the way. And what you can't do is bend the knee to their hate and fit back into the conformity because it's comfortable and it's warm because like in the Matrix, when Trinity opens the door, when Neo's about to go take the red pill and he wants to get out of the car, she says, Neo, you've been down that road and you know exactly where it leads. And I know that's not where you want to be.

And then he closes the door. Like right now, this moment that you're going through is Trinity opening the door and being like, you could go back. But then you'd have to remember exactly what the reason was that you decided not to go out to begin with. Because you listen to this podcast and you consume this constant and you're like, I can fucking do more than this. Like, because you are starting to live in some of that how where you look in the mirror and you're like, I can do more. And you start to see the person that you could be. And you're like, this does start to feel like hell. The reason that it's uncomfortable and the reason that I do have sympathy for the people that see this is ignorance in some regards is bliss. As soon as you begin to posit an ideal, you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal. And the gap in potential between you and the person that you could have been begins to get more stark. And even the slightest glimmer of, wow, I can read a book or follow a course or listen to a podcast and then work really, really hard on one thing and change the thermodynamics of my mind, change the texture of my own existence day to day because I worked at a thing. And now I understand nutrition. I know Kung Fu.

I understand nutrition. Or I can, I understand how to sleep well. Okay, as soon as you know that sleep is important and what you need to do to do it, every single night of bad sleep that you have is on you. Because before you had the excuse that you're ignorant. And guess what? Now you don't. every worthwhile goal is worthwhile because it has a cost associated with it. And so the cost that you're going through is what makes the goal worthwhile to begin with. Because if what you are, we're setting out to do, we're immediately available to you, then it would mean it would be immediately available to everyone, which means it wouldn't be worthwhile. So the very fact that it's difficult is why it is worth doing. And so like, we can't resent the price tag of the shoes that

we want to buy. We just have to make the decision or whether or not we want to pay it. There's another real hammer blow. You don't get very touchy-feely with like, you know, I live in Austin now, so I'm like in the psychedelic mecca of the United States. And people talk a lot about like trauma and improvement and stuff like that. Self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anyone else does. That's really interesting to me. I think it's believing in the 85-year-old version of you, who's exactly who you want to be, and then ruthlessly looking at the discrepancy between the pittance of a human that you are now compared to that man or that woman, and then step by step, breaking down the many differences and starting on the first one

and pulling the thread. I love the idea that, you know, true self-love a lot of the time is wrapped in acceptance and a degree of belonging. I reject this entirely. I just want to throw it out there. That doesn't surprise me. The idea that self-love is holding yourself to a highest standard than anyone else does, you believing in you more than anybody else does,

is such a first principle's way of looking at self-love. Okay, so I'm supposed to, love myself. I'm supposed to support myself and be my biggest fan, but I don't have the most belief in me. So I'm supposed to have self-love, but I cap my own potential. I have so many thoughts. So right off the bat, even the concept of fan was something that I, I, if I was, if you're, if I was talking to 2013, 2012 Alex, I would have rejected that notion. Not like the, the, the concept of even being a fan of myself was so foreign to me. wouldn't been real to me. And so I'll tell you what that Alex internalized, which was that

I didn't need to deserve success, but I could still have it if I did the things that created success. And so it felt like a cheat code where I was like, I can actually be a shitty person and horrible and suck at everything. But if I still work out and I still eat this way, I can still look this way, even though I don't deserve it. And that was like the first, it actually felt like, I was like, for anybody who hates themselves, you can hear me. That was like my first big shade, my first solace, my first foothold that I started getting on success was that I didn't need to deserve it. I could still have it anyways. And that was like very empowering for me. The other thing that you said about acceptance. So there's this big movement around self-acceptance.

And I want to say that I wholeheartedly reject it. I, you accept outcomes and you accept circumstances. You accept the fact that you were dealt whatever hand you were dealt. You accept that you're 5-8. you accept that you're black, you accept that you're a woman. That's accepting. You're trying to rebel against that is you trying to fight the universe and the universe is going to win every time. But in terms of you framing acceptance as saying that I am comfortable with who I am and I cannot be better and I must be satisfied with that is the biggest embodiment of failure that I can imagine. Is that it's almost, it's almost, it's almost egotistical to say that there's a difference between saying, I am good enough and I am good. So you could say, I am good enough for my current state based

on the work that I've put into it, but I could be better. And so like, you can accept that the work that you have done has created the outcome that you've created, but you do not need to accept that the outcome that you've created is the end all, be all, and the last outcome that you need to, need to have. And so for me, like, the only version of acceptance that I have is that I accept that the version of myself that I want to be is so far from who I am that I have this massive discrepancy that I have to overcome. And then just breaking that down one step at a time and thinking, I don't, I don't deserve to be that man, but I can still do the things that can create it. And it also means that I have to go through the circumstances that that would create that man, which means that if I have

unbelievable big dreams and big goals, then I have to go through hard times. It's like hate, the hard times a requisite for success. And so if you're going through hard times right now, it means that you're on the path to success. And it's not that you're on the wrong path. It's the feeling of being on the right path. And one of the things that I talk with the CEOs in our portfolio company, and I'm going to bring it back. One of our companies, they were struggling with growth, big company. And he was like, honestly, the issue that I have right now, he's like, I don't know how many locations I can open every month. He's like based on the cash flow that's coming in and out. And I was like, this is kind of like the Morpheus free frame. And I was like, I need you to freeze this moment. I was like,

the feeling that you have right now is that you are missing a finance function, is that they didn't have a good finance leader. And you're like, why is this relative to what we're talking about? I'll bring it back. Which is that if it's the first time you're going through it, you can't recognize the science because you don't have anything to compare it to. And so hopefully listening to this podcast and listening to other people, not just, you know, not me and Chris, but like other people who are even more successful, whatever, they can at least tell you what it tastes like. They can tell you what the room looks like. They can tell you what the temperature feels like. They can tell you what it feels like in their body so that when you are going through it, you can say, okay, I haven't been here before, but this sounds like Albuquerque. This sounds like a missing finance. And that's why having like, and if you're in their early on stages and you're going through the, like, you're consuming the free content and stuff, it's like, use this because the most viable thing you can get is the context of what the experience feels like when you're going through it. So someone can describe to you their experience so that you can relate it to your present and be like, okay, I'm on the right path. Yeah.

It's the feeling of loneliness and uncertainty. Hang on. What if this is a sign that I'm not supposed to be here? What if this is a sign that I'm doing it wrong? Right. And relinquishing that. If there was a big meta indicator that you're doing the right thing, doing what everyone isn't doing is already probably the single biggest indicator that

you're doing the right thing. Like, it's the, if I could wish nothing else on my child, whenever I choose to have them in the future, is that they have high agency, which is that they are. They make decisions independent from the opinions of other people. And when we hear words like authentic and original and things like that, it's because the person starts at square one and says, well, what do I want? And then they start building from there.

I had a conversation with one of my teammates who runs our LinkedIn. And he said, you know, Alex, it's easy for you. Always, always a really great start. Great way to trigger. To a sentence. Really good. Please. Tell me more.

Why do you go on? He said, it's easy for you, Alex, to create this personal brand. He's like, you have so many interesting things about you. He's like, you dress a certain way, you act a certain way. And he said, it's different than everyone else does, right? And I said, I don't think that's true. I think that everyone has a personal brand that is unique and different. But everyone doesn't look that way because they conform to what they think everyone else

wants them to look like. And so the fact that they are boring and they resent the fact that they're boring is because they are living out reflections of what they think everyone else wants them to do. And so all you have to do is start at square zero and be like, what do I want? Because I realized after I got out of gym launch that, I mean, I dressed a certain way for gym launch because I was the head of an entire community of gyms. And it made sense for me to dress that way because I needed to look that part. Right. But when I was at ground zero and I was like, okay, what do I want? And I thought about it for a long time.

And I was like, well, what would 85 year old me wear? I was like, 85 year old me would wear probably the most functional thing he could wear because he doesn't care what his shoes look like. He doesn't care what his shirt looks like. He just wants to be comfortable. And so I just started trying all of the things that I could possibly imagine for shoes, shorts, hats, whatever, to find the thing that I was like, you know what? This is the most comfortable.

And this allows me to do the most things in the most rooms without changing. And so people then are like, man, that's so unique. but it was actually just saying if I were to or if everyone was gone from existence, what would I do? What would my work be? Right. How would I dress? Who would I date? Who would I date if no one else told me what they thought about it?

Maybe someone different than you're dating right now. And if the person that you would want to date isn't the person you're dating right now and the person that you'd want to date would never date you? Then maybe rather than dating these mediocre Mollies or mediocre mats, you take the period of time. You go on the untrodden path. You have people reject you and say, oh, you're not coming out tonight. You're going to the gym again. Right? Oh, can't eat with us.

Right. She's on a, she's on a diet again. How long are I'm going to stick with this one, right? Because the thing is, is that the stick to it in muscle itself is something that you work on. Because if you started diets and you failed and you start working out and you failed, if you just make it longer every time before you fail, you're still making progress and you're still doing something that everyone else isn't doing. Yeah.

And that is the biggest meta indicator that you possibly can is if, if, because. everyone sucks. Like so many people are mediocre. Like half of the United States is in debt. They don't even have a dot. Like they're negative net worth. And so like just saying different than that, like the bar isn't high. We talked about this.

Dude, go for it. I know, I know what you're going to go on. Just go for it. The bar has never been set lower to separate yourself out from the pack. Never been set lower. And this is for, you know, the black pill internet. What's black pill, by the way? it is supposed to be one step beyond the red pill to see that life and dating largely for men is

there's an uncomfortable reality that if you aren't blessed with the right physical attractiveness, status or money, LSM looks, LMS looks money status. If you don't have the right prerequisites, you're basically doomed. You're a genetic dead end and eat shit. Is that a bad thing? According to them. So, okay, I'm going to zoom out real quick. And I know we're going to go on this.

So if we're looking at a species, right, let's look at deer. A lot of people have deer in their backyard, right? Well, what is natural is that one buck inseminates 50 dough and he competes with all the other deer. And the reason for that is because then it actually allows the, quote, best genes to proliferate. Now, best is determined by what actually continues on. Right. You're being perilously close to eugenics here, Alex. Well, I'm just talking about, I'm just talking about deer.

I'm just talking about deer. I'm just talking about deer. I'm not saying this is what it should be. But the point that I wanted to make was not, I think, where everyone thinks I'm going with this, which is that a lot of the, you know, the black, whatever you just said, right, black pill, I would imagine are casting an expectation on the universe that it shouldn't be this way. Why not? And this is exactly like the hater who says, you're not going to amount to anything.

And the reason that it hurts is because you're like, what if they're right? And then it like staring at the mirror with that question of like, what if they're right? What if I am out of shape? Like, because the thing is, is that like in order to be the top quote 1% or even the top 10% shoot or even just above average, right? You just need to not be overweight. Dude, the bar. You need not be overweight, right? You need to be gainfully employed. The bar is so low. The bar is so unbelievably low. I got this idea. I got to I got to teach you about. The alpha history fantasy. Modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them, mistakenly believe that they would have somehow done better in medieval times. They are adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1,373,000 whose favela was sacked and destroyed. And it's this wistfulness for the past. And dude, I get it. Like if you feel lost and alone and like nobody understands you and like you've been forgotten and things shouldn't be this way, guess what? they've always been this way. And right now, the bar has never been set lower. If you have the

opportunity to sit down and listen to me and Alex waffle on for three and a half hours, you have the capacity, the conscientiousness, the wherewithal to be able to go out tomorrow and take one thing that you've hit from today. This is something that I want you to get on to, which I think is important, which is avoiding the mental masturbation. You know, we can do this thing and like speed fuck quotes into the ether and like a like an oozy right just unloading all of these different things and I think that a lot of people feel a general overwhelm of indexing of information and oh my god I'm learning all of this stuff and I don't feel like I'm making any progress and I really wanted to try and cut through this at some point in the conversation today as

well which is Tim Ferriss has an idea called the good shit sticks all right I, when I first started out on this journey of personal growth, felt guilty because I didn't have a perfectly curated, ever-note, external brain with nested folders and all of my book summaries and I was supposed to keep all of this thing and how am I going to remember it and blah, blah, blah. Five and a bit years later, people come up to me and ask, one of the most common questions to get asked is, how the fuck do you remember all of the things that you remember? Two things. First off, I don't remember anything that I don't care about. And the second thing, massive amounts of exposure.

Those are the only two things that are going on. I've done 670 podcasts in five years for hours. And all of the reading I had to do beforehand and all of the listening I had to do beforehand as well. And I didn't stress myself about what I had to remember. So if you listen to this three and a bit hour podcast and you go, they said a lot of words there. Alex said a lot of words, Chris said a lot of words.

What's the one thing that you couldn't stop thinking about? And there may be nothing. Fair play. We failed. If there's one thing that you can't stop thinking about, that story about the kid from Cumbria, that time when Alex had to drive across the country, that's the thing. That is the thing. And allowing yourself to naturally select whatever the most important learning is from the content that you consume is the best way to work out what is going to resonate. And it's the best way to act on it as well. If you can't stop thinking about it when you go to bed tonight, and you can't stop telling your friends about it in the morning, and you've clipped it from this podcast or any other podcast,

any of the book or whatever, whatever the thing is that you keep sending photos of and you keep on reciting to people and you try and tell your mom about it, and she doesn't care. That is the thing that you need to work on. And you don't need to do, if you take half a thing from this podcast or any other podcast, and you work on it for a month,

you have made so much progress. And do you understand how blessed you are to have this opportunity? You could have been born in the Middle Ages before the Gutenberg printing press when they wouldn't even give you the Bible in the common language so that you had to go through the priest to be able to have a relationship with God. Right now you can search for whatever it is

that you're dealing with, find the greatest minds on the planet, listen to them, and then the next day implement it and you move not only yourself, but you move the world around you. You get to nudge yourself and the rest of the world in a direction that you want to go and you get to feel proud about it and it's within your control. you have never been more blessed.

There's a quote that I want to hit here that I think would be relevant to we were just talking about with the people who were sad and alone. And one of the biggest breakthroughs that I had from a mental perspective was actually defining emotions for what they are operationally. So sadness comes from a lack of options or rather a lack of perceived options. And that's why it feels like hopelessness because you don't know what to do. But when I realized that sadness meant that I didn't know what to do, it meant that another way that I could define sadness was ignorance. And that is solvable.

And so whenever I feel sad now, it's been my trigger to immediately think, what do I not know? What option do I not see? Because the opposite of that is anxiety, which is you have many options and you have few priorities. Looks you have many paths that you could presume you just don't know which one. And so being able to operationalize what these emotions felt like. So if you feel sad, it just means that you need to go learn more. And that you can do. And then all of a sudden, the learning more becomes the option and they don't need to feel

sad anymore. And that was like one of the biggest breakthroughs from my like mental health or whatever you want to call it mindset that set me free. And I've taken a lot of effort to try and operationalize emotions so that I can either get out of them or lean into them. So like patients, for example, right? I'm only bringing this up because I think it might be relevant to some people, is that most goals are attainable if you expand the time horizon, even enormous ones.

Like you can do anything in 10 years. You could walk to the moon. You could do, there you go. You can do anything. And so for me, I am, I would say, a naturally impatient person. Like, I tend to want things immediately now. And you know what? You probably are too.

But once I defined patience as figuring out what to do in the meantime, it allowed me to control what I did. because now, like you and I are being patient for your stock investments. Right now, as we're on this podcast, we're being patient for that because we're doing things in the meantime. And so whenever I felt impatient and wanted to change course, I had to just redefine what do I need to do today. And if you are sad and impatient, then it means that right now you need to learn what the option is that you need to go pursue. And then that makes it very much under your control. And so step by step, each of these emotions over time, I spent a lot of time trying to define them out.

so that they no longer control me and I know how to solve them. And then now it just becomes a faster and faster muscle. Like, oh, I feel anxiety. That means that I have many options that I don't have priorities. Okay, what's my priority? And then all of a sudden,

what used to take days of anxiety and feeling this, you know, frog in my throat was just, oh, I need to make a list of all the things that I'm looking at, which one's the most important? Ignore the rest. And then,

I'm good. And what you just take days, takes minutes. One of yours is choosing the plan isn't hard. Doing the plan isn't hard. Sticking to the plan is hard. Charlie Munger said, the money isn't made in the buy and it's not made in the cell. It's made in the weight. And that, like, I just feel like that's such an elegant way of thinking about it. It's like,

the hard part about the plan is sticking to the plan. Like, the plan wasn't bad. Your first plan was good because it's easy to go say, I'm going to work out three days a week for the next year. And it's a good plan. Pretty good plan. It's a pretty good plan. And the interesting thing is that, like, a mediocre plan that's stuck to always outperforms an amazing and perfect plan that you never stick with to begin with. And I know this obviously from the fitness world, but applies to everything. And so, like, the stick to it muscle is the one that you have to flex.

And that's why, like, if you're going through things, especially in the earlier days, like, I'm a race to start and stop and start and stop. And I try this thing. I try that thing. It's normal because you haven't been reinforced enough of sticking with something. Right. But the thing is, you have to stick it out long enough that you get that first carrot. You get that first cookie. And then all of a sudden, everything that you did to get there, you're like, oh, more of that will get me more cookies. And then it just becomes this self-perpetuating cycle. And then you get addicted to working. And then you do a launch to 500,000 people and you lock yourself in a closet six hours a day for two years. Yeah, that's exactly that. Because I've been rewarded in the past because the first time I actually spent a lot of time on a presentation. And I felt good when I walked on stage and didn't feel anxiety.

I was like, oh, I want this every time. Yeah. And then I had this the second thought, which is the much scarier thought, which is, now I have to do this every time. This is the new bar. This is the new bar. I want to round out something on that sort of black pill side, which is, if you listen to this and you think must be nice or easy for you to say, I get it.

Like, I get it. And if you feel like there is something that you can't get over, some genetic, societal, cultural defect that means that you do not have the same ceiling that you think that you should or that other people appear to have. I get it. And the question I would ask is, what do you want? Like, do you want sympathy? Because I will happily give you sympathy. I know what it feels like to be someone that has no belief in themselves and that believes that you are fundamentally a loser and that nothing is going to come to you and that you deserve for nothing to come to you. I understand what that feels like. But what does that mindset

get you. Like, fundamentally, what does that mindset give you? Okay, so let's say, let's say that you have been dealt as difficult of a hand as possible. And? Yeah. And to quote you to you, I can promise you that there is someone who has had it worse and has done it better. I put this clip out a while ago, this, like, just random, talking about a morning routine

thing, and it was pretty basic, but it went fucking interstellar, and the real internet got a of it. You know, like, not your fans, but like the real internet. Like, the general public internet got a hold of it. The most common comment was something along the lines of, tell me you don't have kids without telling me that you don't have kids, which is, must be easy for you to say, I have a daughter to get up in the morning. I'm like, okay, tell me what that mindset gets you. Genuinely tell me what that mindset gets you. It says, I'm in a situation which I cannot get over, and there are things in reality imposed on me which stop me from doing something. There is somebody out there who has three times as many kids as you,

and they still do it. So what is it that they've got? Like, what is it that they're doing? Have they got an unfair advantage? What is it? Tell me? It's also, if you take down, if you walk down the natural logic of that statement, who do you blame? If you're saying, must be nice, or tell me, tell me that you don't have kids without telling me that you don't have kids, then does that mean that you blame your child for all the things that you don't have in life. It's a tough, tough wait to put on a kid. Because I mean, I would hope that they don't see that comment because then they'd be like, wait, mom, dad, like you didn't live out your dreams because I exist. Tough. Another one here. A sequence actually that I love. You don't have to feel good about it.

You just have to keep going. The feeling will pass, but you will remain. You are greater than your feelings. Going to bed late and waking up early to work for a few days won't kill you. You're not going to burn out. You're doing what it takes. If you're one of those people that push work-life balance, just remember the people who like working a lot don't care. I've never regretted trying harder at anything ever. Hard times last long, but an epic story feels like a lifetime. Nailed it. Fuck yeah. I just think when I look at you in particular, and I realize this during our second conversation at the start of this year. The reason that people get confused about your motivation and your workload is that they don't realize that the thing you do for work is the thing that you do for fun.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding that people have. And because of that, you're prepared to work hard. And working hard doesn't feel like wasted time. Lots of people associate working hard with not making progress. therefore working feels like wasting. So the idea that working hard doesn't make progress is one of the biggest farces that exists in humanity because at the end of the day, whatever you amount to isn't going to matter anyways, right?

And so if there is anything that's eternal for us, at least as individuals, it's going to be who we become in the process. And so one of my favorite quotes is, the work works on you more than you work on it. And so if you want to be the best in the world at something, you do the work to become the best in the world and the work works on you. And so, I mean, there's a biblical proverb, I think it says, like, there is, there is profit in all labor. And that means that even if the thing that you're working on right now doesn't amount to the outcome that you expected that it would. It doesn't mean that you don't become better through doing it. And so I'll give you a very real example. So I spent five years

building a chain of gyms. So I had six locations. And after that, I sold five of them. I shut one down. And then I transitioned to doing turnarounds. In the transition between shutting my gyms down, I got a big payday because I sold my five gyms, big for me, relative. I took all that money and I put it into the next thing. The partner that I had in that next thing ended up taking the money and disappearing, filing bankruptcy and sending it to his girlfriend in Sweden. I couldn't make this up. So there was no way I could get the money back and he had filed bankruptcy. There's no, there's no course of action for a lawsuit. And so a lot of people would probably go through that mental situation and think, and I went

through this, was thinking, I just wasted the last five years. Like I literally started a chain, like put everything into the second location, put everything in the third location, the fourth location, it kept going, right? I kept doubling down. And then I get my big pay day. And I put it all on black. And then it disappears with one spin of the roulette. And so here I am.

And I'm like, I have nothing to show for the last five years of work. But then in the next 12 months, I made more money than I'd ever made in my entire life up to that point. The five years, I made, I made more profit the next 12 months than I made in the last five years times like five. And it was because, and this is only, I was only able to realize this in retrospect, which is why I'm sharing it, which is that the thing that was the outcome of those five years was me and the skills and the experiences that I possessed through going. through it. And so whatever the next mountain that you're trying to climb is, of course it's going to be higher, but it's going to require you to go through the smaller mountains to get to that point. Because the more able you are, the more able you realize you can become. And you will get way bigger outcomes from the things that you had, like the path that led you here, then you, then you,

then you think you can. And so that's why since that moment, where I lost everything and then I was able to make more in the next 12 months, I realized that no. No work is wasted because I am the output of the work, not the outcome. And that was one of the biggest frame shifts for me in never thinking that work is wasted because the more I work, the bigger my work ethic, the more my work capacity increases. And to give an exercise example, because I think it's cool and interesting, is that a lot of people talk about this concept of overtraining. Don't worry, I'll bring it back.

All right, they talk about this concept of overtraining. I remember I was talking, I had this woman that Layla and I are friends with very successful business owner had a boy toy with her. and he was like, aren't you concerned about over-training? And I was feeling a little pissy that day. And I said, bro, once you start looking like you work out, you can worry about overtraining. I was like, until that point, you don't need to worry about overtraining. I was being a little bit mean.

But I think he did remember it and he did change the way he trained and he did gain muscle afterwards. So I felt okay about it. Now, the point of that little quip, right, was that what I explained to him is that your ability to recover from working out. itself is trainable. So when you do more volume, your ability to withstand volume, your work capacity increases. And so to the same degree, people are like, I feel burnt out. The thing is, is that you either die or you adapt. That's it. Right. And in the fitness world, you either die, get injured or adapt.

Right. And since you're probably not going to die, you really just need to make sure that you don't get injured. And if you don't get injured and you don't die, you get better. And so that mental process in terms of how I see work has been like the most self-fulfilling prophecy that I've had, because the more I work, the better I get it working, the more productive I am per unit of time. And so, and then I get the outcomes that happen eventually. But the point is, and you probably, I mean, I already know, you know this, but the outcomes become so irrelevant compared to the reward that you get in the meantime. Because the people who are experts, and this is from my good friend, Dr. Kashi, people who are experts at any skill become experts because they learn how to become rewarded

from the work itself. And so, like, they don't actually have something. that you don't. It's just that they measure success differently. Judge yourself by your actions, not by your thoughts. I became significantly less disappointed in myself when I started judging myself only on the actions I took, not the thoughts I had. So patience is a virtue that I feel like I haven't had. And it's been something that I've spoken over myself for many years. I was like, I'm an impatient person. I want things fast, etc. When I realized that I should use the same lens that I judge or the people on when I judge myself, which is someone might say, I'm a really honest guy. But if I have

no evidence that you're an honest person or when I put you in a situation where you could be honest and you're not, I would say, no, you're not. Now, that person probably thinks of themselves as honest. Or to the same degree, I'm a really loyal guy. But as soon as I put a 10 in front of you and you've got your girl at home, you jump. You're not that loyal. You just haven't had the opportunity to show that you're loyal. And so for me, my thoughts about what I thought I was were actually really negative. But when I try to think, okay, well, I can be. be patient if I act patient, even if I don't feel patient. And then that allowed me to start giving myself a stack of undeniable proof that I am who I wanted to be. And I don't believe in

binary traits, meaning like he's patient or he's impatient or he's loyal or he's disloyal. It's the question is, how loyal are you? How honest are you? How patient are you? And by switching the character traits that I wanted to have into progressions or continuums allowed me to make progress on them simply by giving myself more proof or one more penny on the scale that says I'm a little bit more patient. I'm a little bit more patient. To the point where I have so many pennies on the scale that I can say, I think I am pretty patient. Even though every time I put a penny on the scale, I don't want to put a penny on the scale. I want to get the thing to happen today. I wanted to happen yesterday because why is it taking so long? It didn't take that long for this person.

I feel like I work harder than them and I feel like I'm better than them. Why am I not doing that? But I put the penny on the scale. Hey, Mosin, a minute, quick break just to let you know that we've been starting to post on LinkedIn and want to connect with you. All right, so send me a connection request and note letting me know that you listen to the show and I will accept it. There's anyone you think that we should be connected with, tag them in one of my or layless posts and I will give you all the love in the world. All right, so let's get back to the show. Well, ultimately, what is patience? Is patients feeling patient or is patient doing the thing that is patience?

So Sam Harrison, his first conversation with Jocker Willink about 10 years ago, they talk about how courage is an unfakable emotion and it's such a good frame you're going to love this so he said if you do the thing in spite of being fearful of doing the thing that is courage and if you don't do the thing even though you felt like doing the thing that is cowardice and I think that motivation and patience are exactly the same if you're patient despite not feeling patient that is patience yes that is how it works and that was that realization that you just said was the reason for that quote because it was me realizing that I can actually have these traits even if I don't feel like I live those traits. And so that's why I probably, at least for me, when people are like,

whatever the trait is, like he's so humble, he's so whatever. Like you probably will never feel like you have the trait, but you can still have the trait based on evidence rather than emotion. And I think that frame of evidence has been, I mean, if I had a north star of personal development for myself, it's been just give myself proof. And I mean, in so many ways, like the reason that I didn't, I mean, I'm going to go on a tangent, but again, I'll bring it back. I didn't talk about how to run gyms until I had six gyms because I didn't feel like I was qualified enough to talk about it. And I only started talking about gyms when so many people were like, dude, how do you run your gyms? How do you run your gyms? And if I rewind even before that, I didn't

feel qualified to talk about fitness, but I had a six-pack for a decade. You know what I mean? and I had multiple state, state records. But I still didn't feel qualified to talk about fitness until everyone was like, dude, how do you do this? How do you strength? How do you eat this way? Whatever it is. Right.

And so if you can give yourself evidence, the world around you, like fame, like your evidence, like your evidence will change how people treat you independent of how you feel about it. Well, this is why the must be easy, must be nice is so flawed because what you're saying is I see the outcomes and I have no idea of the difficulty of the input. I have absolutely no idea what barriers you need to get over. You could be, you could find it 99 out of 100 difficult to be patient. And yet you are. Must be nice for you. You've got that patience, Gene. You go, eat shit. You have no idea how hard it is for people to do the things that they do. And the people that make it look easy in some regards contribute to this problem.

Like, and this is why I really love, I'm a massive fan of a lot of your work. And I think that one of the reasons is that it's so honest and self-effacing about the challenges and about the steps that you have to get through. And because the journey is relatively well narratized and you can, you can track it step by step and you've created a kind of a cohesive timeline of how all of this stuff worked. there is a point along specifically your journey, but hopefully mine and other people's too, where people can inject themselves and say, oh, I'm at that bit. I'm the 15 year old that I'm at that bit. I resent my parents. I've just lost all my money. I feel like I need to, you know,

like you have every different problem that you can encounter in life is present in Alex's timeline. And I think that that's really important. I think this is one of the, I would say this is a criticism that I have about some of the personal development, self-growth, and a lot of the business advice as well, even the bad times are romanticized. And they're not fucking romantic. Like, it feels like hell. It feels like shit. To do the thing, to fail, to not feel like anybody cares about you, to not even know that there's going to be glory in retrospect. It feels despondent and destitute. shoot and sad and alone. And I get it. And I think that the more visceral that we can make these stories, the better it is, because I know that that's what would have resonated with me,

because I would have gone, that's an undeniable stack of proof that you were where you said you were. I'll tell you one that maybe will resonate with somebody in the audience. So I remember when I decided to move, so I moved to California to start a gym or get into fitness. And I got there and And the guy who I said I was going to mentor under was like, where are you staying? And I was like, I don't know. I just got here. And he's like, what do you mean you don't know? I was like, I don't know. I just showed up. And so he went, he said I could sleep at his place that night. The next morning went to the gym and he got on a chair and said, hey, who here is going to house this kid? And one guy came up to me. He was like, I'll give you a room. So I rented one room in a house for 400 bucks a

month. And then when I left that room to start sleeping at the gym, which was an hour away because I couldn't make the commute. So I say 400 bucks a month. I remember being actually kind of excited about it. I remember being like, man, this is going to be a big story. Yeah, this is my rocky cutscene, right? The thing is that the rocky cutscene lasts 30 seconds in the movie. But it can last five years in your life. And when I was sleeping on the gym floor, I'll give you a detail that that'll tell you that the stack of a nine roof was that I, my first gym was underneath of a parking garage.

And so there's these metal dividers in the ceiling. And so cars would drive over this and it's a concrete box. And so it sounded like a gunshot, like do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-ch. And it would happen at all hours of the night. And probably the most painful from an emotional perspective experience that I would have on a regular basis was that it was also abandoned enough parking a lot that college kids, kids my age, would go up and party on the roof. And so, like, while they were partying literally above my head and making noise that would prevent me from sleeping, I would be down below in a dark warehouse, in a city that I knew no one. like I was from Baltimore. I drove across the country.

I went to Huntington Beach. I literally knew no one and no one knew me. And so I'm sleeping there and then I realized that I can't really sleep at night. And so I'm taking basically, I'm living on naps for the first six months of the gym. And like homeless people are sleeping in my parking lot and I have to like go out and tell them to like go away. And then I get back, lock the door. And I go back on the astro turf, which is where I slept with a blanket and a pillow.

And I bring this up because like the visceral feeling that you go through when you're going through the mound of shit period or the shit eating what feels like a marathon is that it's it becomes a 30 second sound bite in my story. Yeah. But it was years. And so like even to the same degree, people are like, man, you're such a natural salesman. The first job I ever got offered out of college was a sales job. And I said, I'm not a salesman.

I'm an academic. Oh. And then as soon as I opened my gym, I was like, oh shit, how do I pay rent? And someone walked in the door and I was like, please give me money. I promise. And I had no equipment in my gym because I couldn't afford any. So it's an empty gym with just turf. And I was like, I promise you, I will get you amazing results. And they were like, are you going to be here tomorrow? And I was like, I sleep here. I have to be here. I promise I'll be here. It's impossible for me to not be here. I can't leave. Right. And so the early people took pity on me when they literally paid the first 29 numbers I signed up in the first two weeks before the gym

opened was from pity. It wasn't from charisma. It was pure pity. I'll be real with you. And it was the exact amount that I needed to pay rent. And I remember the first month of rent that I paid with this is actually wild. I only, I only looked at this in retrospect. I made exactly $4,972 my first month of my gym. My rent was $4,972. And I remember working like a dog to get that. I'd never made money in my life. I'd never like really asked anyone for money. And all of a sudden, I'd have come up $5,000 in a month. And then at the end of the month, I watched it go to zero. And then I was like, I have to do it again. And that was when like the reality of the situation of like there was no escape. There was no one who was going to come to save me. And there was, I couldn't

blame my dad. I couldn't blame my mom. I was the one who had chosen this life. But the alternative was that I had to go back to my father a failure and have him look in look me in the eyes and say, I told you. Come here. Come here. Don't worry about it. You know, you know, I told you this, this gym stuff, this fitness stuff, this starting room, but it's, it's for later. It's fine. Just go back. Hey, you've got this, you've got this great degree. You've got, just go to go to the business school to do the thing. And I knew exactly what had happened. But what would have happened after that is that for the rest of my life, he would have had absolute authority over everything that I did. And that felt like death. And so that was what I ran away from when I was

in that moment. Like, whenever I felt like my back was against the wall and I didn't know what to do. And it felt like the Instagram reels of like the motivation weren't going to get me through what I was going through because no one cared that I was sleeping alone. I let them know I'm sleeping on the floor and a month later when you're still sleeping on the floor, everyone's like, don't care. Like, great. You're pursuing your dream, right? Early days. But despite that, the must be easy mantra is the easiest indicator that you have a victim mindset. Because what it means is I can't achieve this thing because on some level of you say, it must be easy. There's some level of desire that's there. you're like, I'd like to achieve some aspect of this.

And then rather than feel the pain of saying that I'm inadequate or I'm not taking action, we cast our inadequacy on some outside object or some outside circumstance. And by doing that, we remove all agency and all power that we have over our lives. And for me, I'd rather be somebody who has absolute power and have nothing to show for it than somebody who has all the things to show for it, but know that I'm life's bitch. life being one protracted training montage is a really important lesson to learn the fact that in the rocky movie it is 90 seconds and then everything is fixed and that can last for decades that can last for years and i think that the lack of glory the lack of certainty yeah it makes it it it turns it from worthwhile majesty into it's not even

sufficiently triumphant to be called sad like it's just like weak and pissy and you have no idea if anything's going to work but what's the alternative entropy is going to come and fucking get you so what's the alternative like my Twitter bio says locally reversing entropy and I think that

that really is what you should try and do because it's going to fucking come for you. The lack of certainty is what actually makes it worth it. And so here's my point. Let's consider the alternative, which is that you are on the path and you are guaranteed to know that you're going to get the outcome. All of the mystery is gone. There is no excitement, which is why they said, you know, in the ancient Romans,

or so ancient Greeks would say that the gods always envied the mortals because their life was so ephemeral. They had so much chance that could happen to them, right? Where the gods always knew that they weren't going to die and it was completely guaranteed. And so what we do is we basically have this wish that if it actually came true, we would hate it even more than our current circumstance. If you knew that you were going to succeed, it wouldn't be worth doing to begin with. The fact that you are uncertain when you start is what makes it worthwhile. And the fallacy of being in the pursuit is the worry or the concern that it won't amount to anything because who you were becoming is the thing that you are amounting to in real time every day.

this was something that Mark Manson tweeted he put it in his newsletter actually and it made me think of a lesson that I learned a long time ago stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in the only way to become more successful than most people is to be willing to do something most people aren't willing to do and this is that lean-in mentality again take luck it sucks it's shitty you're tired everybody says that you're leaving your friends behind, leaving your family behind, betraying your culture, betraying whatever expectation it is that they have on you, you need to do something that most people aren't willing to do because, as we've said,

the average American is obese, in debt and divorced. Like, is that really, oh, brilliant, fantastic. I'm in the fucking center of the bell curve distribution here. That's really, congratulations. And then the other side, stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in. Okay, so you didn't lose weight this month. Did you follow your diet?

Well, I did for half the month. Okay. So is it any surprise that you didn't lose any weight? How's your content creation game going? Well, I, you know, I spent a lot of time planning for the podcast that I'm going to release or for the Instagram that I'm going to start or from the substack that I'm going to begin writing on. Okay.

And what did you actually do? It comes back to like, the work doesn't care. Yeah. Charlie Munger in one of his seminal speeches, he talks about how to guarantee failure, how to make sure that you were a failure. And he inverts the concept of success. It's like, what could you do to make sure that you were a failure? It's like, well, you would definitely get involved in drugs, drinking.

He says, was it leverage liquor in women? That's, you know, the Charlie's, Charlie's big one, right? But one of the ones that he has, I think he has seven in his, in his speech is consistency. He's like, you have to make sure that you're inconsistent. He's like, because if you are consistent and you have none of the other attributes, He's like, it's, you still might be successful. He's like, it's very tough for people who are consistent to not be successful. And he makes an especially pointed point about consistency because in my opinion, it's one of the

most difficult of the virtues for humans to do because we're so attracted to novelty. And so, like, I mean, I used to do with this with, you know, people on their diets all the time. I remember I ran gyms. And so someone would come in and I would always ask the question. So have you been following the meal plant? And then they would say, yes. And so then I started changing the way I asked the question. So I'd say, out of the 21 meals that you were supposed to eat, how many of the 21 did you have exactly the way it was on the meal plan? And then they would be like, oh, I mean, at least half. And they would say it as though that was a mark of success. And right now, the meal plan could be your content plan. It could be your showing up to work on time plan. It could be the time that you want to put towards your side hustle. It doesn't really matter. But if there's one muscle that you can flex, it's learning to do the same thing over and over again. Like one of the values that we had at gym launch is do the

boring work because boring is what makes you rich, right? It's, it's, it's, it's writing the follow-up sequence to your, to the purchase page that you don't feel like doing, but you know you should do. It's running the split test for the 10th time. It's, it's actually going through and prepping for 20 minutes before you have the meeting because it's amazing how much smarter you can appear with 20 minutes of preparation. Like, you can appear 50 IQ points smarter if you just prepare for meetings for 20 minutes. I remember I did a, consulting day, which I've only done three in my entire life. And when I showed up to the day, because I always want to make sure that everyone always gets more for me than they give me,

I had taken, I don't know, four hours, not a long time, but a long time for, I think, some people, but for me, four hours is nothing. I count in hundreds. So this was irrelevant. And so I put like four hours and actually took the time and put it in to do research on the individual. So I looked at every single page to head, every landing page, every offer, every everything. And I had seven pages of things that I thought would make them more money. And so when I started, I was like, this is what we're going to go through today. And I'll walk you through line by line. And you'll have this as a take behind so you can execute it with your team.

It was a bigger company. And the guy was shocked. He was like, never in my entire life as anyone had this much preparation. And that's what goes back to like, you need 20 podcasts to be in the top 1%. The bar for excellence, like I have this timer that I have on my desk, which it's the It's the easiest purchase you can make. I think it was like seven bucks on Amazon. It's a little twist kitchen timer. It's very easy. And it's been probably my biggest focus act to date, which is I turn it when I want to start working. And part of it allows me to think how long, I get better

at predicting how long it's going to take me to do something. So I think, I think this will take me 35 minutes. So I turn the clock to 35 and I click on. And then I start working on the thing. And the moment my phone rings or I look at Slack or whatever, I stop the timer. And so you actually see that your time on task is usually significantly less than you think it is. And I think that in my early days, I would spend a very long time in front of a computer telling myself that I was working with very few minutes actually on task. And that's why I think that most things are actually significantly easier than people think they are. They just don't know how to try hard. Because the harder that you try, the easier it gets. And so it's like if you can just learn to love what

trying hard feels like, then all of a sudden it becomes unreasonable that you can't win. So like for the presentation that I'm giving, I explained a little. bit earlier about what my process looks like. If you were to say, what would it take for somebody to be unreasonably good, that it would be impossible for them to not be a top 1% salesman or a top 1% content creator? And you said, what would that person need to do? Irrelevant from outcome, what would be the actions or evidence that they would have to do prior to that thing that would make it unreasonable that they couldn't succeed? And then you do those things. What happens is you realize that it's actually not that hard because you put so much work into it. And the bar from other

people working is so embarrassingly low that they then ask you how you did it and it must be easy. Consistency doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't reach success. You have a productivity hack, an easy productivity hack. Instead of spending time, getting in the mood to work, just start working, confront the work. People think they need perfect conditions to start when in reality starting is the perfect condition. I'm married to that. I love that. Because if you think, like I, you know, I obviously am somebody who always wants to optimize how much work I do per unit of time. And so I, I was, you know, there was definitely times earlier in my life. I was really romanticized by these like very extensive morning

routines and supplement rituals and like all this stuff of mental masturbation around the work that need to be done. But when I looked at two hours later and nothing had actually gotten done, the moment you begin working is when your output per unit of time goes up. And so that makes beginning the single greatest hack that you can have for everything else that you do and work. Because the thing is when you start working, you start getting in the mood to work. Right. Like everything else is procrastinating around the work that you think you should do. But like I have noticed for me at least, I have these, I have some big mental tasks. You know what I mean? like big content piece or big thing that you need, like, you know it's going to take real mental

effort. It takes me like five minutes of actually being in it to then get a little bit of a lay of the land to then get into it. But I used to take hours to delay to start the first five minutes. And so my time compression of when I thought I should start doing something and when I started doing it, over time it's just compressed to the point where it's like the moment I think that I need to start doing it. Sometimes I just start it because then what happens I get this open loop. And so rather than complete work at like, because a lot of people were like, I want to complete it at this really nice, clean point. Stop halfway through the sentence because it'll drive you mad. That's the Zygarnic effect in full work.

Do you know this story? Zygarnic? Oh, wow. This is, well, that's, way more than I do. That's what you shut up. That's what you're leveraging here. So the Zygarnic effect was a study originally done on servers in restaurants. Okay.

And they realized you've ever been at a restaurant and a server comes up and stands with the hands behind the back and go, what would you like tonight, sir? And you say, I'll have the lobster roll and a glass of red wine and a blah, blah. and you're like, this motherfucker's not, he hasn't got a pen or a pad of paper, he's crazy. And then they go off. And what they realized was servers in restaurants were unbelievably good at being able to recall exactly what a table's order was while that table's order was still open. So guys in table 16, they want to swap the peas out for a little bit of extra rice and

they're doing this thing. As soon as the table was closed, they couldn't remember anything. So this is an open loop, closed loop system, and it's built into the brain. The brain abhors an open loop. It's the same reason why Netflix cliffhangers at the end of every episode guaranteed you'll watch the next one, because you can't bear the fact. There's even novels in the dark romance genre that make guarantees that there won't be cliffhangers. They put it on the front or the back of the book, and they say no cliffhangers guaranteed,

which is people have so much distaste for it that it's a sense. selling point that you get the closure at the end of it. And finishing halfway through a sentence reduces the activation energy required to begin that sentence the next day. And it keeps it in your mind too overnight. So I think, yeah, whether you've stumbled on it or whether you knew about it, you've managed to leverage a pretty powerful piece of psychology there. Sick. Going back to the work thing, another one from you that I absolutely adore, it just takes work, shit loads and shit loads of work.

Every time I try and dress it up or cut a corner, I get brutally reminded, the work just needs doing. The work doesn't care who you are. It just cares that it gets done. I'm actually going to reverse quote David Gagans on this one. But I love this quote that he has, which he says,

there's no shortcuts for you, David. Or there's no shortcuts for you, Gagons. I heard him say that. And I just love that as a refrain, which is that a lot of people look for a shortcut. But the idea that you say like, they're not for you, you don't get to use them. You are immune to shortcuts. I just love it because then it just further shortcuts the path to the work that needs to get done.

And I wrote that tweet on my, I don't know, 11th run of this presentation that I'm doing because that's a recent one. And so I was, it was like 11 o'clock at night. And so right now I'm working triple shifts, which is not common for. for me. I usually do two, not three. So for me, in normal work days, like, I wake up, I start working at, you know, six or seven, and then I go until about six-ish. So it's like 10 to 12, really concentrated of hours work. And that I can do six and a half days a week. I usually take Saturday afternoons off. And it's really just because at that point, I can't work anymore in my brain stew. And then I get my one half day and then I'm good to go. And I'm rearing to

kick on, you know, to work on Sundays. My triple shift is I get, I go to dinner and I come back at 7.30, then I work from 7.30 until 1130 or 1 or whatever, right? And when I'm putting in triple shifts is when I know I'm like really gassing it. And that's, that's when I'm like repeatedly doing 16, 17 a day of actual productive work. And I hear the same thoughts that everyone does, which is like, it's not going to matter. Like, it's fine. Like, it's good enough. Like, I hate that. Like, it makes me sick to even say that. Right. Because the thing that I, like, David Goggins, right, he's got like, there's shortcuts for you. I would say the one that I have two that are like my internal ones. One that is probably the most common is I will do what is required. And this work needs doing. And there's

just no way around it. And it's just looking at the face of the work and it's like smiling back at me like no one else is going to do it. And like I love that one. Like when we're recording content And in the early days, we were doing like a hundred shorts every time we did it. And it was direct to camera. And it was the only time I could fit it in with all the portfolio stuff they were doing. And so it was always like, I will do what's required. And that's been a really helpful refrain for me when I'm confronted with, especially when you know what needs to get done. And the second one is, but I'll know.

And so like, even if it does go well. And even if everyone else says it's great, but I'll know. and it'll then rob me of all of the joy of all of those moments in that experience because I'll know that I could have done better. And the thing is, to quote myself from earlier, like, I've never regretted working harder ever, not once. And some people were like, on your deathbed, you're like, no, because I lived every moment of my day doing what I wanted to do. And I remember I had a boss when I, my first boss after college, she said this thing. I had a particular good weekend. And she said, I'm pretty sure happiness is stringing as many of those days in a row

as you possibly can. And although I hated the job, that piece of advice has actually been probably what I, has been my blueprint for how to live, which is like my birthday, it looks the same as my Tuesdays, which looks the same as my Sundays. You know what? The original name pool for this podcast was, It's the only time in history, I've done branding my entire adult life. And with club nights, all you're doing is coming up with brands. Paradiso, oh, it's tropical. There'll be a flamingo. Skint.

Oh, it's a cheap night. It's for people to get fingered in the corner. Like, it's we, all I did was branding. Right. I was the branding guy. I'm pretty good at copywriting. All I did was branding. The one time I've had divine inspiration, three in the morning, wake up with the name was

modern wisdom. The one time out of every business, every night, every brand. I've ever come up with. That was the one time. But on the list of the others, mind and matter was one of them. The other one was a quote from Tim Ferriss. It's called crushing a Tuesday. And he said that what you should aim for in life is for your average Tuesday. Not the spectacular one-time private jet with the friends to go for the whatever, whatever, not the UFC power slap lunch party staring at the back of Dan Bilserian's dirty mullet. Like, Not that. You want your average Tuesday to look the way that you want most of your life to do.

And when I think about the days that I look back on at the end of my day and think like today was a good day, invariably, it's the same few things. It's I worked very hard on something that I felt was worth doing. I worked out and I spent time with people that I enjoy being around. If I do those three things, I had a good day. And so that's been my, you know, Alex's simple blueprint for doing things. And I think the point that you were making earlier, I think it's worth hitting on again, which is just that like most people's definition of work is a negative one, which is why they abhorre it, which is also why they misunderstand so many people who quote, I'll say quote here, are successful ahead of them or whatever, is that both people,

one person says the word work and the other person hears the word pain. And so the first step to like becoming more successful is understanding the language that the people who are successful who are using, they're actually defining the word differently. And so whatever that thing is that you actually enjoy doing, where you lose track of time when you're in it, even if it's challenging, but usually it is challenging, right? Like it's not easy because then it's boring, right? Which is also why the uncertainty thing is so key, right? To not knowing if it's going to work or not, you are going to work though, either way, is that the people who are, quote, addicted to work make it easy to be addicted to work because they do things worth doing. And I think a lot of

lot of it is coming down to making sure that you take the few precious seconds that we have to do the few things that are worth doing for the rest of your life. The more I listen to this, the better my life gets. If they don't have what you want, don't listen to what they say. There's no greater waste of time than justifying your actions to people who have a life you don't want. That was a message to my younger self. But I remember I got it in.

And well, I won't, I won't call it out. Let me see how I can say this the right way. You know what? I'll just say it. I'll whitewash the names. So I was with a family member and we're all around the kitchen table and it's during the holidays because I don't go home very much. And they kind of started attacking me.

And they were like, I would never live your life. You're so unbalanced, like attacking. And I was like, what are you saying? And she said, I just would never do that. And I was like, all right, well, what part of my life is unbalanced? I was like, do you feel like my health is unbalanced? I was like, do you feel like my marriage is unbalanced? I was like, do you feel like my finances are unbalanced?

I was like, what part of my life do you feel like is out of whack? She was like, you know, I'm not as good with words as you are. And that was the, and I was like, okay, so the fact that you can't make a logical argument, I'm not going to continue how that conversation went. But the the TLDR of that was I really thought a lot about it. And it came down to, I wouldn't live your life. And my response to that is good, don't. It's not your life.

It's mine. Live yours the way you want. And I wouldn't live your life either. And so what ends up happening is they become these statements, these projections that are not actually real. Now, on some level, maybe they were saying that because there was envy in that aspect of wishing that was there, you know, that they were living that life. But in this particular instance, I don't think it was. I think they genuinely were trying to help. It was a family member. And they thought that I was being misguided. This is an intervention. Let me hold the talking pillow. Alex,

we've all come together because we care about you. We really feel like we need to have a conversation here. It's exactly what it was. And I got so angry. You? So angry. No. And you know, you can hear Layla like patting my back. Like it's, I'm like, see, you can feel the heat coming off of me. It's like, I go upstairs and like, how, how dare she?

You know, whatever. But it really just came down to like her just saying, I don't want to live your life. And I think the answer to that question is good. Don't. And I think that has been one of the things that has diffused so many of these like hateful comments where people dehumanize you or whatever and make you into this ideal that they reject. It's like, you're right. One of the things that I had a mentor tell me to say is like, when you're in an art, if somebody's like, it's like, you're, you're a terrible person,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just say you're right. And. And then they have nothing, they have, they have, they have nothing to say. And then you just move on with your life. And so like, in that way, it's acceptance, but of like your, your idea of who I am that you hate so much. I accept it. I can live with that. Even that, but like, we don't want to think, What if I am? I don't believe that, but I can do that and I can end the conversation. So I'm taking improv classes at the moment because I'm doing my first live shows in the UK and Ireland.

Oh, so good. Thank you. Yeah. Everything's... Like this? No, solo. Stood on stage for 90 minutes. Comedy?

No. Just lessons. Insights and stuff. Probably some shit that I've learned today. Anyway, we released it and every show sold out and then got. venue upgraded and then sold out again in less than 45 minutes across all of the days, which was great. But then scary because I now had to speak to like three times as many people per night

for additional nights on top of what I thought. Anyway, I'm doing improv. In improv, there is one rule. And the rule is don't punk the game. So we're doing some exercise where we need to make silly noises as we pass this imaginary energy around. And I need to go like, boing and send it back. And you need to go whoosh and pass it on.

all this sort of shit. The one thing that you're not allowed to do is not make one of the noises that's allowed. Yeah. And I really think about punking the game an awful lot. And you see it happen in podcasts. You see it happen on TV. You see it happen. And it can be both destructive and constructive, but it's always destructive to the people that are trying to play the game. And it can sometimes be constructive to the person who is punking it. So what you did is you punked the game that we are playing a game of tennis. We are hitting the ball back and forth. Here I go.

I hit the ball across the net. And where is it? Is it hit it back? Hit it back to me. Like this is the game that we're playing. And you didn't move reciprocally back and forth. You went orthogonally. You went across on a different axis.

And you're like, I'm not playing this anymore. This is a different game. I'm not bothered. There's not even words to describe what that means. Now, the way that it can be destructive is, especially if you're having, let's say, a meaningful conversation, sometimes people who are uncomfortable with getting into their emotions can use a variety of different things.

They can be scathing. They can be mocking. They can laugh. Because they don't want to sit with the discomfort of this particular part of the conversation. That's punking the game in a way that I think is destructive both externally and internally. That was one that was destructive externally. It broke the game, but it was constructive internally.

and it is a way refusing to play by the rules that somebody else is set in a game that you didn't agree to is the best prophylactic against stepping into a situation that you do not want and it's one of the things

that wealth affords and it's one of the things that freedom affords and freedom is often downstream from wealth remember George one of my really good friends being on a show like five time George Mack you'll follow him on Twitter he's fucking phenomenal

he was on Fox and Friends yesterday talking about his cocaine phone and his kale phone. Like, what the fuck? What world is this? Yeah. I remember before the first time that I moved away to work, I've been, I've traveled a lot, but it was always in between work. I never traveled to work. COVID happens. World gets shut down. Just after Halloween, Boris tells all of the UK, we're going back into lockdown in three days time and all flights are cancelled. So I messaged George. And I was like, I'm not doing this. I'm, I let's go somewhere. He wanted to go to, I can't, I can't even remember, some island that has 300,000

people on it. And I was like, why don't we do Dubai? It's a five-hour flight. The weather's great. I know people. It'll be fun. It's not got 300,000 people on it. It'll be the Uber. And I'll never fucking forget what he replied to me with. I got up and I paid 350 pounds for my COVID-fit-to-fly test before he was awake. But he'd sent me a message the night before. and this is what compelled me to do it. He said, what's the point in having fuck you freedom if you never say fuck you? And I was like, I was so fired up reading that message.

And I was like, yeah, why have I put all of this work in? Why have I done all of these things if I don't ever punk a game that I didn't agree to be a part of? I think this is really big if we go all the way back to the earlier part of this podcast, when you have the friends who are telling you, oh, must be nice. Or you think you're better than us.

Or, oh, so we can't drink anymore. That's when you can be like, yeah. Then what? Well, then we wouldn't be friends. You're not going to be friends with them eventually anyways, I promise you. Anyone who says that you're not going to be friends with. If you want to ultimately become the person you want to become, they're only going to reject you harder and harder until eventually you have nothing

to share about. And the only thing that you'll talk about is the past, which, by the way, one of the great leading indicators of, at least in my opinion, of a great way to know when to cut a friend is when they only talk about your past. And so punking the game. And it's it's one of those really uncomfortable things the first time you do it, but then you get more and more comfortable with it because they're like, I would never live your life. And you're like, I know. This relates to another one of yours. Don't trade your self-respect for someone else's. It's easy to lose theirs and hard to get yours back. Yeah. But I would know. But you would know. Yeah. Related to the sort of cynicism thing that we were talking about earlier on, I call it the cynicism safe. blanket that sour grapes at an existential level. I had Sean Puri on the show. You know, Sean,

you've been on his, you've been on my first million. He casually dropped this. I don't think this episode's going to be out before this goes, but it's money. And he said, the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. And from you, I think the winner's mindset sits in the uncomfortable place between two surface level contradictions, extreme paranoia. in the present and unshakable faith in the future. The tension between the two makes someone hard to beat today and hard to outlast tomorrow. The cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. One of the biggest fallacies of the advice from people who are in your current situation is that they are right most of the time. When you bring a girl home, 99 times out of 100, when your parents

say, she's not the girl, I don't like her, she won't last. They're right every single time, except for the one time it matters and you end up marrying the person. Right. Like when they say like you're not going to succeed, like this idea of yours, it's not going to last. And they're right every single time, except for the one time that matters when you hit it big. And so it's one of those things where they are right more times, but they are not more right. So good. Yeah.

I wonder whether it's a function of all of our opinions being permanently etched in stone on social media. that it's very easy to seem smart to have a heterodox idea if you go against the mainstream because it's romantic. Oh, I had this alternative opinion. I had this negative opinion. I'm not like one of those sheep. I'll believe that things are going to be worse than they are. And then if it turns out better, guess what? I say your expectations super low. Congratulations. You can thank me later. You're like, that is distilled down. British culture at its worst is low expectations. Low expectations delivered through satirical cynicism. Why are you doing that? That's lame. That's for losers. That's something that we wouldn't do. You should stop doing the different thing.

Tall poppy, you're the one that gets cut down. And it's all that it's, all it shows to me now is a kind of group think almost like the worst kind of mental telepathy where everybody believes the most unuseful thoughts that everybody else has at scale

and all it does is lower the bar that you need to get up I think it's that your right thing which is someone says that's lame that sucks, blah, blah, blah, and you just say like, you're right, it does. You just keep punking the game. Like when anyone comes to trying, like, they're playing a different game than you.

So you shouldn't try and play by their rules because they're going to try and get you to play their game so that they can beat you at that game, which is the status game of that little circle. But you're playing a much wider game that includes more players. And so even though locally you have these, your incoming information that you're taking in is disproportionate with your people that you're not actually playing against. And so it's basically just noise. It's irrelevant.

Because if you look on a long enough time horizon, the likely that you're like, I mean, again, I think about death a lot. But the idea that when I die, people will be dividing up my assets, arguing over who gets what, there's going to be a caterer at my funeral. Some people won't make it because something came up and they got busy. And then the few people that are there are probably no one that I have in my life right now. And the fact that every single person that I have in my life might not even make it to the funeral to speak over me while I'm dead. It's like, why on earth would I listen to them while I'm alive?

Like they can't even make it to probably the single most important personal day of someone's life is someone's funeral, right? The one time you can pay your last respect and they don't even do that. And so it's like, why would I give any weight to what these people are doing when they're not even going to be there on the day that matters most? And six months later, they're not even remember who I was. And anybody who's had a death in their family recently knows that in the moment it's terrible for you. And then six months later, life moves on. But the thing is that we just never paint ourselves as the person who dies. But to me, that's incredibly freeing. Because then it's like, if six months after I'm dead, no one is going to say my name, no one is going to remember what I did, then no one's going to, then it doesn't matter what I do today. And I think that some people see it as really hopeless, but I see it as very hopeful because it means we have absolute freedom. And we can do crazy. shit like why have fuck you money if you can't say fuck you yeah learning isn't a spectator sport it comes from doing which means if you're not doing the stuff you consume every day you're not learning you're just procrastinating oh this is fun all right so i'm gonna define some terms learning let me say this way intelligence means rate of learning like that's what that's how

remember i talk about operationalizing words so rate of learning is intelligence So then you, which means it's a rate, not an attribute as an aside, which then means you have to define learning. Learning means same condition, new behavior. So if I hold up a red card and then I slap you, and then I'll hold up a red card again, and then you duck, you've learned. If you wake up every day and life shows you a red card, and then you don't duck and you don't change, then you have learned nothing. And so if you go to a weekend and you go to a workshop, and then the next day, you go back and you do the exact same activities in the same conditions and you have no new behavior, it means you learned nothing. It also means you're stupid because it means your rate of learning is

slow. So if someone is intelligent, I can show them the red card and on the first go, they change their behavior. And so by defining intelligence that way and defining learning that way, it allowed me to start thinking, well, I want to be smart. And this circumstance had this outcome last time. And so the next time I see this circumstance, this red card, I'm going to change my behavior. And so when we consume the information that you have on this podcast or whatever it is, there's probably a circumstance, whether it's a conversation that you're supposed to have, but you aren't having. It's a decision that you need to make, but you're putting off.

That's the red card. It comes up again. And the question is whether you're going to get slaps or you're going to duck. And that's whether you know whether you learned or not. And every time you get shown the red card and you do the same exact thing, you just proved to yourself that your rate of learning is slower. And so for me, I want to have that evidence that I learn quickly. And for me, that's why, like, people see me as ruthless as you said, because I'm willing to cut relationships. Because if I think that I'm going to eventually cut the

relationship, then why would I not cut it today? Because I might as well start enjoying the benefits of cutting that relationship as soon as humanly possible. Alex or Mosy, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love you to bits. I genuinely do. I think the work that you put out, the messages that you put are very, very needed. And yeah, I could do this for days. We could run this back, literally for days and days and days. So this is going to go out after your big event. Where should people go to support you, to learn more about the shit that you do, and what have you got coming up? Well, I've got my next book, $100 million leads. The first book is $100 million offers. What's answered the question, what should I sell? So a lot of people are like, what should I

sell? It tells you step by step, everything you do like worksheets. I have a free course that goes with it. You don't even have to opt in. It's on my site, Acquisition.com. You can just start watching it. I think the Kindle for offers is $1.99. Like, try to make, I mean, our mission is to make real business education accessible for everyone. A hundred million dollars a leads has been six hours a day, 6 a.m. to 12, um, 12 p.m. every day for the last two years. So the first six hours of every day has been dedicated to writing that book, which is why I have 19 drafts, four, four, four rewrites. There's a hundred and six hand-drawn images, um, that went in the book that I put in there. Um, and I'm going to be releasing it at this event that Chris and I were talking about.

So you're going to be listening to this after that event. And so you can go on Amazon. It'll be available there or you can look at acquisition.com because they'll be a course and things that you can go through free materials. And that the $100 million leads answers the question, who do I sell it to? And so you need leads. Right. So you're like, okay, great, I have the thing I'm going to sell. How do I go get people to find out about it?

And so a lot of the things that I have in the book are defining some of the terms that people hear a lot, which is like, what is the lead? What is advertising, right? Advertising is the process of making known. And so if no one knows about your stuff, no one can buy it. And so the reverse of that is everyone knows about your stuff. And that book will show you how to get everyone to know about your stuff. And the reason I made the event as big as I did was because I used every advertising method in the book to advertise the book.

So Offers was an example of a Grand Slam offer is how do you make something so good, everyone feel stupid saying no, which is the subheadline of the book. And so offers in and of itself was a grand slam offer, which is what I argue that everyone should have. It was a $2 book that it comes with a course, it comes with works, it comes with worksheets, all these things. And $100 million leads, the way that I wanted to exemplify and meta show, demonstrate that the concept of the book work today and will work tomorrow and will work in 100 years is because humans haven't changed. And so the process of making known remains the same because our hardwiring is the same. So you don't need to know the Instagram hack because my first ever advertisement was on Facebook and I don't do anything on Facebook now. And it doesn't matter.

And as soon as YouTube and podcasts and all those things die, the principles remain the same despite the platform's changing. And so that is what I wrote each of these books because I want them to be around in 100 years. And that's why I spent so long on them. But I'm very proud of the book. And I think it's my best work to date. Alex, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you.