The Game with Alex Hormozi - Creating Conditions for Success | Ep 689

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

“Thinking through conditions first rather than willpower first has been incredibly helpful for me.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares productivity tactics and strategies for success, inspired by B.F. Skinner's behavior theory. The discussion includes managing time and attention, distinguishing between 'maker' and 'manager' roles, prioritizing deep work, and practical tips for goal setting and minimizing distractions.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:35) - The concept of conditions for success(5:57) - Applying conditions for success in various aspects of life(9:28) - Makers vs. managers: optimizing your schedule(20:52) - Practical tips for setting up success conditions(24:55) - Maximizing productivity and decision makingFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

If you look back a year from now, the only things that will have really moved the business forward is the deep, non-urgent, but incredibly important work. And so you just never want to sac- And I'm just telling you, like the amount of times that having somebody come butt into my life has really been a positive, just gets smaller and smaller over time. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

Today's theme is around goal setting, so let's rock and roll. In the first direct podcast I've done in a very long time, creating the conditions of success. And I think this is going to be really, really tangible for many of you, entrepreneurs, business owners is how you manage your time and your attention. And the specific tactics, first off explaining conceptually and then underneath of the specific tactics that you can use, or at least that I have used that have worked really well for me. And so if this rings for you and rings true for you, share this with your employees or share this with your team because it may help them understand how to work with you better. But I wanted to talk about something that continues to be this repeated theme that I've seen from business owners actually at all levels.

And it will end up blocking you at some point in your career until you get unstuck from it. And so some people it blocks them at 10,000 a month, some it's 100,000 a month, sometimes it's a million a month. But once you hit this wall, you can't get through it. And so I think for somebody who's listening, or maybe many of you, this may be like the missing link. And so what I want to talk about if I would put a theme for this is something that I'll call conditions for success. And there's this quote from BF Skinner that I just recently made a post about that is always just like really stuck with me, which is, you can lead to a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. But that's not true, right?

Because if you salt the horse's mouth, you dehydrate it, you leave it out in the sun and then you put a bucket of water right next to his mouth. You can veritably guarantee that it will drink. And so that's a paraphrasing from B.F. Skinner. And said in a completely different line, if you hang out at a barbershop long enough, you're going to get your haircut. Right. And in, in AA, they say, hey, don't go where it's slippery. Right. If it's, if you go to the bar long enough, you're going to start drinking. And so I think we can take this concept and apply it to the behaviors that we want. And so Jerry Seinfeld, for example, was known for his creative process, was he would lock himself in a room with only a pen and paper. And he didn't have to do anything,

but he only could write jokes. So it was either write jokes or be bored. And so some days he was just sit there for 30 minutes doing nothing because he had no other distractions. And then he drank the water, right? Because he had basically salted his mouth, dehydrated himself from any external activities and made the one thing that he actually wanted himself to do, the inevitable only action that he could do as a result. And I think that entrepreneurship is inherently a very distracting thing. Right. It attracts people who are a little bit ADD anyways.

And then it is arguably one of the most ADD professions you can possibly have, right? Because you've got, you know, customer support emails. You've got marketing stuff you have to do. You've got leads you have to follow up with. You've got sales consults. You've got employee issues. And you've got Slack notifying you every single day. And then you're like, how did that post do or whatever it is?

Right. And so you've got all these different things that are coming in. And at the same time, you're like, how do I move the few things that matter forward? And so what I want to do is give you a handful of things that have worked for me. And the big, the TLD you are on this is that like if you feel really burnt out and you feel like you don't have the willpower or the discipline or whatever, whatever the famous, you know, good word is for this, that this will kind of help you. Willpower from all the stuff that I've seen is a finite resource, meaning there's things called decision fatigue. Like by the end of the day, you feel cooked. You're like completely cashed.

You're like, man, let's save that for tomorrow morning, that big decision or whatever, right? So you have this juice in your head that you have to manage how you're going to spend it, right? And the thing is that, in my opinion, the brain doesn't differentiate. between what am I going to wear, what am I going to eat for lunch versus which post am I going to make or what edit do I want or what topic do I want to talk about? And obviously, one of those things is higher ROI than the other. And so the idea is it's absolutely great to have willpower and discipline. Like I'm never going to say that that's not a good idea. I think that's a great idea. But you want to save it for the times where you have a condition you cannot

control. And so the idea is that we have conditions every day that we that enter. We have new variables that enter and then you're like, shoot, I got to adjust. Right. And that's when you use up that valuable resource, use up that brain juice to make an accurate or good decision. But the thing is, is that 90% of the conditions that were exposed to in our lives are conditions that we've seen before. And so I always was amazed by, you know, salespeople who like would go on a hot streak during one kind of condition and then not try to recreate that condition. And so I think in a lot of ways, the things that have helped me move forward, this is just what worked for me, do whatever you want, move faster is I look back at periods of time where I had exceptionally high output

for desired behavior. So if it's like, man, I made really good content during this period of time, rather than think like, oh, I just need to try harder at making content, I like to look at all the other things that were around that time period. So it's like, well, what was, what did my day look like? What was my schedule look like? What did, what was I wearing? What time a day was I doing it? Were there people around me that helped me create better content? Were there conversations that are having on a regular basis that have stopped? And so I like to look at what are the conditions that have changed. And as a total side note for business owners, if you had a period of time in the business where sales were good or marketing was good or

customer success was good, you can take the same concept to think, what were the conditions? Rather than trying to just grind on the team and say, hey, try harder. We did better last month. Like, what's wrong with you? I find it more useful and easier. to create sustained success and sustained output at a higher level by simply saying, let's ignore willpower altogether and try and control for every other variable and make it so that we are the horse and we can salt our mouths and we can dehydrate ourselves. And the only thing we want ourselves to do is drink the water. And so the thing is is that this I think can apply to fitness. It can apply to relationships. It can apply to obviously business, which is the context that I talk about.

But thinking through conditions first rather than willpower first has been incredibly helpful for me. And so I think if you were to look at your environment and look retroactively first, what was the times I was making the most money? Or what were the best months where I did for this particular thing? Because I'll bet that if you look backwards, every month in the past, you were not maxed out on everything. Right. Like you had some months of your like sales went well or customer success went well or content was good or whatever, right? And think, okay, what I want to do is if I want to improve marketing, I want to look back at the time where marketing was best and I want to look for all the conditions that are around that. So I'll give an example.

So the best content that I've looked at, so I've been doing a deep dive on media because I'm looking at the next 24 months and thinking like, what are we going to do at Acquisition.com to continue to reach more people, help them make real business education accessible for everyone. And one of the things that I found that worked better for me is when I have a live audience. I tend to do better knowing that people are actually, you know, listening and watching in real time. Now, some people are reversed from that. They're like, I hate that. I actually really like a more pristine setting. But at least for me, I like talking about real business stuff to. real business owners rather than hypothetical business stuff to hypothetical business owners.

Maybe that makes sense. And so the thing is, is like so many of the smaller entrepreneurs, and I say this not in a diminutive way, use up so much of their juice on things that don't matter. And so it's even like the, it's, I mean, I get, I'm going to drill down on this too. You have employees in your business right now that use up like 35% of your total bandwidth for the business. total bandwidth because there's just one person that like when you're at home and you're talking to your spouse, you're like, man, I've got this person and you wake up in the morning or think about this person.

And then you have a conversation with that person or they have a weird exchange on Slack. And you're like, man, in all this time, there's all this juice. There's all this bandwidth that's getting used up. But if we think to ourselves, okay, well, how do we control this condition? So either I have to reset the boundaries in terms of how I'm going to talk to this person, or I might need to eliminate this person altogether because it's using up the single greatest resource that you have, which is your time and your attention. And so the best entrepreneurs that I've seen have exceptional skills at managing their attention

and managing their time and putting all of that into the one bucket of managing their conditions. And so I remember the first time I had an experience with this was I was talking to a guy who's doing $400 million a year. I was 27 at the time. And so he was actually going to set us up with payment processing. He had massive payment processing company. But he ended up, we met through a mutual connection and he just took a likening to me. And so I remember trying to call him.

and it didn't go through. It just, like, the call immediately just didn't happen. And later I got on the phone with him and I was like, what is that? He was like, oh, yeah, my phone rejects every single call that's not on my list. And this was before iPhones had some of these features. This is super early days. Like he had programmed his phone so that he was a kind of tech guy that no, no contact, zero. So no one who he did not already know like no new friends, no one could contact him.

And from a scheduling perspective, he basically didn't respond to emails. And he had this space that he would work in that was just completely quiet and clean. And that's how he managed his condition. Because he knew that when he had those conditions, he created the most output. And so I'm going to zoom out for a second. Now, some of you're like, well, what about like, what if I still have to run the day to day, right, of the business. So how do I handle that? So I see this as having two hats, right? You've got your maker hat, which is your big creator hat. And then you've got your manager hat. And most entrepreneurs, need to go and wear both at different times. And so what's really important is understanding which hat you're going to be wearing. And so for me, I have a maker hat, which is where I do, like when I write

the book, like I have to put my maker hat on. If I wanted to prepare for, you know, doing something like this, I'm going to put my maker hat on. And the thing is, is that this is going to be really impactful for a lot of you. So please listen to this. And this took me too long to figure out. We even wrote a memo internally and it changed how we do business. Makers have long periods of time where they need zero interruption. So a super productive maker calendar looks like a completely empty calendar. So for those of you who like wake up one day and you have nothing on your calendar, are you like, oh my God, this feels amazing. I'm going to get so much stuff done today. Right. It feels good. It feels light. You feel like you can immediately get into flow and just kind of lose yourself in your project,

right? Like you can show me some hearts if you're getting this, right? Okay, cool. So on the flip side, right? If you're a manager, then you have 20, 15 minute time chunk. per day. And the objective of a manager schedule is to fill every time slot. And so a perfectly optimized manager schedule is zero blank space. And so on one hand, you've got a maker whose entire objective have entirely blank space. And you've got managers whose entire objective is to have entirely filled up space. And you're like, how can how can both of these be the objective? And I'm an entrepreneur and I needed both of these things. It's because they're different roles, right? Now, in your company, there are roles that are more maker heavy. So if you have editors,

you have copywriters, you have any kind of creative developers for coding. All of these are deeper tasks that have more complex problems that you have to solve and you have to like drink in lots of information, kind of have it swirl around your head, and then you can really get into flow and start working on it. On the flip side, if you were taking customer support calls, that might be much more of a manager type role or just managers literally in general who are managing their team. Now, where this gets interesting is that if a manager is managing editor, copywriters, et cetera, when someone's performance

Dutch or drop, what do they do? They increase the number of meetings. But by increasing the number of meetings, you increase the number of interruptions that person has and actually hurts them from doing the job that you want them to do. So in understanding this, I try to approach my calendar and saying, and my team knows this now, is like,

is this a maker day or is this a manager day? And I think maker days, at the very least for me, is a half day. So I basically only have two maker slots a day. I've got one before lunch and I've got one after lunch. That's about it. And if you're going kind of Hercules mode because you're in, you got to work double time right now, it might be three shifts. You might have a six hour block, second six, and then you've got a late shift. And that's it. Those are the only blocks you've got. Whereas the manager has 20 plus time slot today. Now if one manager takes a 15 minute time slot and slides it into my maker morning, they kill my whole morning. They don't get that because for them, it's like, what's the big deal? It's only 10 minutes. It's only 15 minutes. I just want to touch base. It's like, but dude, I now know I'm going to have this meeting. I'm going to have to set an alarm so I don't lose my into my project. I start thinking about what I'm going to have to say then. I have to start winding down my work so that I can prepare for whatever that calls can be. And then after that call,

I have to try and get back into the flow, which is basically impossible. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to meet and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur. And so the idea there is that even though it's more efficient for that manager, he cost a half

day of that maker's time. And so to be clear, it's not that makers and managers can't interact. They do. But I think having managers understand the nature of work for makers, and if you're the entrepreneur and you're the maker for the business, it's actually making sure that your team understands this as well. And so, for example, we have an executive team and an executive assistant team. So we have three assistants that work between Layla and I in terms of managing our time. And so a simple, you know, litmus test is like, what do we make in a morning through the business, right? Or what do we sell my time for if we're ever going to like put a time price on it? If someone's going to put a meeting on my calendar, they have to be able to make a very strong argument for why that meeting is going to make us

X or why it's worth X. And if they can't make that argument, then I'm not going to have the meeting. you might think, okay, well then, how do meetings even happen if you were a maker? So this is what I do and do whatever you want. So I'll talk about different periods of my life from an entrepreneurial perspective. So in the earlier days, when I still had to do a lot of work work in terms of like I had to do a a lot of the day to day, I started so early. I started at 4 a.m. and I would work until 10. So I get six hours done before people were awake. And that way at 10 a.m., I would basically start my fire putting out for the day. And the rest of my day was shut. And you guys know what I'm talking about. There's nothing really moves forward besides just making sure that you live to fight another day.

But at the end of the week, I would have five or six maker blocks that I got, I move the big stuff forward. And that's what, when you look back on the month, the only thing you're to remember that you made progress on is the maker stuff. It's not going to be the manager stuff, but you need to do the manager stuff. Otherwise, the business is not going to exist, right? And so in the beginning, you're might like, wait, does that means I'm waking up at four, I'm working six hours and then I'm going to work until like five? It's like, yeah, it's an 11 or 12 hour workday. Welcome to entrepreneurship. I also find it funny when people are like, I started a job so I wouldn't have to work so hard. I literally had somebody tell me that. And I was like, well,

somebody sold you a bill of goods, my friend. That is, I got some, I got some swamp plan for you. Anyways. So if you have this time that you allocate in the morning, then you can, I work better in the morning. And so if you're like, if you're a mom or you're a parent and you're like, I, I can't do that in the morning. My mornings are chaos. Well, then do it at night when the kids go to bed and then you've got your four or five hours at night where you're uninterrupted. I have noticed across all the people that I know, they have a time. It's either like I'm a morning person or I'm a night owl. I'm not religious about either of them. I think what's important is that you have time that you can set aside so you can do your maker work. Now, over time, I was able to go to a second chunk

of maker work for at least one or two days a week. So it's like, okay, I went from just mornings, like early, early mornings to being early until like noon. And I would say that was kind of like the second phase of my entrepreneurial journey. As I could go from like, 4 a.m. until noonish. And then I'd start all my stuff in the afternoon. So all my meetings in the afternoons. Now, if we fast forward to today, my day, my days actually look more almost entirely maker. And when I say maker, sometimes it's strategic decision making. So if we want to, we want to roll out a new product line in one of our portfolio companies, I'm not going to just say, like, let me hop on a meeting and talk about it. I'm going to do a bunch of research in terms of the market. I'm going to look

at customer segmentation data. I'm going to look at our survey results. I'm going to look at the reviews that we have. I'm going to look at what our ascension rates are. And I'm going to look at other competitors that have comparable products. And I'm going to see, okay, what kind of price points can we look at? What kind of essential rates can we expect? And in trying to put this together and then try and translate that into a presentation that I can make to an executive team to say, here's my reasoning behind why I think we should make this bet or make this strategic decision. That's still going to be maker time for me, just to give you context in terms of like the types of work that would be involved there. But regardless, if we fast forward to today, I have Mondays. My whole day is manager time.

And so that's from 10 a.m. on. So I still have another hour before my manager. I still have, I have to do some maker work, otherwise I feel terrible about myself. But 10 a.m. onwards on Mondays is just stacked with meetings. Now, if someone, for example, says, hey, so-and-so wants to connect and they can't make Monday, you have two options. You say, then I guess we're not going to meet. Or you decide to make an exception. Over time, I have found that I have lost significantly less in my life by just saying, I guess we're not going to meet. And you know what's interesting? My life just keeps moving on. There's a lot of people. And some people are going to be willing to do that. And if you're like, if someone's above you, let me put it this way. If you need something from someone, then I think you should be the one to

accommodate their time. And if you need something from them, then it should be worth an entire maker block to go pursue that person or that connection or that introduction or whatever. Now, if you can't justify that it's worth a maker's block, then why are you connecting to begin with? On the flip side, If you're the one who's getting asked stuff all the time, then it's like, well, you're going to be asking me for things. And so you're definitely not going to take a maker block from me and ask me for stuff. Like if we're going to do it, then we're going to meet on my terms. Right. And some people aren't going to like that. You know what? Life is long. You're going to die. So are they. And I will say that when I look back the months of my life where I just said no to everything, guess what happened? I move forward faster. When I see myself getting distracted by introductions and collaborations and let's see if we could sync up. I. I wonder if there's some synergies here. What if there's some opportunities we could pursue? Right? All of that stuff.

You guys have seen these DMs, seeing these messages from friends. I got to introduce you to so. Like, no, you don't. You don't. My life's been great before so and so. And it'll probably be fine afterwards. And a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. A lot of people don't know how to say no.

And so let me give you a little tactic on the little pro tip. If you want to say no to a meeting without offending someone, just say I'm in an absolute season of no until and just put some milestones. For me, it's like until my book launches, I'm not taking any outside meetings besides this time. And by saying that, it's not no forever, it's just no for now, or you meet within these terms. And so that's helped me. So pick a project that you're working on that's really meaningful to you.

Set that as your date. Maybe it's six months out. And it would be really, I'm going to tell you secret. Six months from now, I'm going to have another project that until I'm done that project, I'm not taking any other meetings outside of that time. But that's just between you and me. All right, don't tell anybody else. And so thinking about this for your day, so let's bring this back to back to Earth.

Look at your calendar. explain to your team. There are two types of work. There's meetings work. There's managing work where we have to come together. And my time, I want you, if we're going to have one meeting in the afternoon, put 20 in there. Like stack the hell out of it because I'm not going to just like all of a sudden start

writing a book, right? So stack everything you possibly can in this time. On these other days or these other half days, nothing. Because if you put one thing there, you ruin the whole morning or you ruin the whole afternoon. So either do or don't, just no half measures when it comes to this stuff. And in thinking about managing my time this way, this has made me so much more productive in terms of my output per unit of time is knowing what type of work I'm going to start doing. And so I think many of you, especially if you're actively really, really running the business. Like you're operating and or sometimes delivering or and or selling and or still doing the marketing or whatever it is.

If you know that, then you have to put this time so you can do the deep strategic thinking, do the deeper work that really moves the ball forward. because if you look back a year from now, the only things that will have really moved the business forward is the deep, non-urgent, but incredibly important work. And so you just never want to sac- and I'm just telling you, like the amount of times that having somebody but into my life has really been a positive, just gets smaller and smaller over time. And so that is my note of encouragement is it's absolutely okay to say no. If you do say yes, make it on your terms and making sure that when, you are trying, at least for me, setting up my conditions so it's inevitable that I succeed. And so let's get a little bit tactical on that part too. So that was a little bit from the time

perspective. But let's talk about surroundings. So for me, that means I have earplugs in. I have headphones on. I have blacked out curtains because I don't like to see light. I don't like to see time passing because it makes me feel like I'm, I don't know. I just don't like to, I don't want to look out a window. I want to have the work that I have in front of me. And I think a lot about Jerry Seinfeld that way. It's like he just had a pen and he had a pat of paper and he's got two hours on the clock. And most of the most prolific writers that I know who turned out a lot of high quality content in terms of books, they wrote the same way, is that they wrote either open to goal, which is like, I have to write until I get 1,500 words no matter what.

And sometimes, and they just have a flexible end date or the alternative strategy is I do two hours every day, rain or shine or whatever, I have to do this, period. And if I get there and I don't feel like writing or I don't feel like creating concert, I don't feel like doing whatever, fine, but I can't do anything else. And so by putting those constraints, by salting your mouth, by by dehydrating yourself, and then just putting the water as the only really convenient thing that you have, then you tend to do more of it. You tend to drink the water.

You tend to do the activity you want. And I think this applies for fitness stuff too. It applies for marriage stuff. Like if you're somebody who's like trying to be faithful to your wife or trying to be faithful to your husband, don't go to a singles mix here with your single friend. Probably not a good idea. not a good condition for loyalty. If I was trying to like, how do I create the condition for loyalty?

It would not start there, right? If I wanted to create the condition for a six pack, what would I do? I would probably make sure that I removed all the extra stuff in my house that's not conducive to me having a six pack. And I'd have my meals prep for me when I go to work so that I have limited options. So not only am I get is my default option a six pack because I don't have to think about it. So like I want to make it easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing. And if you do that, not only do you save willpower for the things that matter most in terms of making money,

you also, by side effect, get the other things that you want to. And so I think that really is the key to, quote, having it all is that you make the rest of the things that you have default. So it's default that I work out because I put it, I go to the gym that's literally the closest place that I possibly can. So for me, I've almost always had a gym that's in walking distance, if possible, so that my walk is away for me to clear my mind. And then I go to the gym and I look forward to it, right?

From a food perspective, the food that is literally just, right nowadays is literally placed in front of me. So I don't have to think about it. I don't have to make a decision. I just have food and it always comes at the same time. So my stomach starts gurgling at like five minutes before it comes because my body knows is like, hey, food's coming. And so the food's in front of me and then I eat it. And then I just move on with my life. And so for each of these things is how can I remove as much friction as humanly possible for doing the absolute right thing that I want to do and then create as much friction as I possibly can around the things that I don't want myself to do. And I think that it saved a lot of willpower and allowed me to make

better decisions over the long term. And I think that better decision making process, that juice for when things don't go your way, that is what on a long time rise and stacks to your advantage. And from the outside, people are like, how does you keep making progress? How does she keep making progress? And its reality is that you do less of the things that don't make you money. You don't use your decision making juice on things that are a waste of time, a waste of energy. And you don't let other people interfere with the time that's most productive to you. And explaining, this is a key point, explain to the people who are closest to you how you work and the different types of work. Because what it's going to happen is you explain this like, hey, why are you

having a meeting? I thought this was maker time. It's like, no, this is actually a manager block. So I'm actually trying to do this right now. On the flip side, if you're in maker time, you explain this is maker time for me. And I'm trying to maximize this by having a clear schedule. And so as long as you can understand that, you can explain it to your team or your your employees or even your customers or the potential synergies that you can just say no to. Right. Because remember, we have a big project that's coming up in six months and know until then. If you have that at top of mind, I can almost guarantee that you will get a lot more done and you will be surprised at the rate of progress you have. And I think this happens at any lot, this applies to any level of business is that you just keep clearing and clearing

your space so your output per unit of time for the most important things continues to go up. Hey, if this helps you understand how to work better or you think this would help your team out so that they understand how to work with you or a vendor or whoever, it also tells me that this type of content the stuff that you find valuable as business owners, share it, tag me in it, and I'll do more of it. And if this isn't as valuable, that don't do any of those things. But if it was, then please let me know by doing those things, by sharing it, because then I'll make more of it.