The Game with Alex Hormozi - Emotional Work | Ep 211

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

It’s time to see the good in the bad. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how to balance the feeling of optimism and the facts of reality, and how to confront this inner conflict by rewiring your brain to view bad news as an opportunity to grow.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:(1:03) - Balancing optimism and confronting reality for success.(2:22) - Hopefulness allows us to face brutal realities head-on.(3:24) - Embrace bad news as opportunities for improvement and solutions.(4:42) - Unreasonable optimism and confronting brutal facts work together.(7:44) - Gym Launch's success through innovation, communication, and understanding customers.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Your ability to maintain neutrality is based on your ability to be optimistic. Welcome to the Jim Secrets podcast where you 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 that we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. Hi, everybody. Happy Wednesday. And I want to make a quick little video for you or podcast about emotional work. It sounds like it's a therapy thing, but it's not at all. One of the things that came up from my sales guys on our side for gym launch was that at this current period of time, there are more gyms that are getting on the phone. They described it as being reluctant to confront reality.

And so I kind of wanted to make something about that, which is in the book, Good to Great or Great Leadership, I think it was one of those books. The author talks about, Jim Collins, talks about some of the character traits of good leaders. And he talks about one dichotomy, which are two, you know, it's two kind of things that you have to balance back and forth, which is maintaining almost unreasonable optimism for the future while also confronting the brutal facts of reality. And I think that as we develop as entrepreneurs, there's just fewer and fewer things that affect us. Because like, I'm sure right now, so just to give you some hope and positive feelings about yourself, right now, can you remember what your business was like? maybe five years ago and the things that you used to stress about and the things that used to you know bother you keep you up at night it might have been a one-star

review on Yelp or or a client talking shit or a trainer you know leaving and stealing clients or things like that right and now five years later you've just kind of you've you've weathered a little bit right you just you're like your your your skin's a little thicker and so not to go back to the talent talent stacking kind of module of progression for entrepreneurs, but first you acquire skills, then you acquire character traits, and then you break beliefs, right? And that's kind of a cycle that continues to happen at each level. And I think this one definitely falls under kind of a combination of beliefs and character traits. But I think your ability to maintain

neutrality is based on your ability to be optimistic and think about the things that are going to happen or things that you're currently working on, things you're experimenting on, things that you're hopeful for. And holding on to that optimism is what allows us to then get into the mud and confront the brutal reality of a situation. Because I think the easiest example that I hear of with especially small business owners is just like not knowing how much money you have in the bank account, not wanting to look at your P&L, not wanting to look at your profit, not wanting to look at your expenses.

And that's the dirty work, right? And not wanting to look at what your sales conversion numbers are, not wanting to listen to sales recordings sees you're afraid of how bad your sales team might be. Just all the things like that where it's turning over the rocks and looking at the little wormy things underneath and being like, all right, I'm going to confront this. And I think that, I don't know if you've heard this saying with like doctors is like there's no bad diagnosis. And I think that the moral of the saying is that knowing that you have cancer, for example, it doesn't ever not really benefit you. It just hurts emotionally. But the sooner you find out your bad news, the better it is.

And so we have to rewire our brains to start loving bad news and trying to frame them as instead of problems as really opportunities to come up with solutions. And I think the best entrepreneurs, at least the ones that I aspire to be like, thrive under pressure and thrive in new and unfamiliar environments. And to be really honest with you, I think part of the reason that Layla asked me to make this is that like I've actually never been more calm and I've never been happier. I can't remember a time more recently that I've been happier than I am right now than during this whole COVID mess. And I think it kind of, it's beautiful because it forces you to just focus on the only things that matter. And everything else just becomes extraneous. And you get to have big, new, challenging problems that come up. And so you get to like really flex your entrepreneurial muscles, which is like fun and exciting for entrepreneurs.

Like if you have employees, then you should understand that they definitely aren't comfortable like you are in change. But we are though, because we're made from this cloth, and that's what got us into this business to begin with, is because we love the risk, we love the change, we love to be a certain extent, we love the gamble. And I think that's ultimately what business is in a large thing, is just kind of betting on you and betting on your skill set. And it's like a poker game with an infinite board. Anyways, I won't get into it, but I love it. And so all that to say, it's maintaining the dichotomy of being persistently and almost unreasonably optimistic with the ability to confront brutal facts, and they go hand-eastern. hand. And so if you have somebody on your team who is constantly talking negative, it's difficult for them to even see anything positive and then they end up sabotaging themselves. But you yourself

have to think, or at least for me, you know, you have to catch your own thoughts around that stuff. I don't really feel like I have them that much anymore to be, if I'm being really truthful with you, like the negative thoughts around that stuff because I just, I love the stuff that we have going on. And I don't know if you have this, but this has been something that's been really valuable for me is a board of all of kind of like the big ideas like the big big Alex ideas of things that could just drive massive opportunity for the gyms could drive opportunity for our business and so I always have these things which are new and fun and exciting for me and I balance those that work that I have to do with like the meetings and

the one-on-ones and the and the you know the doing reps and just the the boring work right Mosty Nation, real quick, if you are a business owner that has a big old business and wants to get to a much bigger business, going to $50, $100 million plus, we would love to talk to you. And if you like that, we'd like to hear more about it, go to acquisition.com. You can apply anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see if we can help you get there. And I think you have to have both because doing the boring work, like for example, and I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to potterficate on this real quick. I started taking over the daily call again within gym launch. So that pretty much for all of our customers, they can hop on a daily call with me every single day.

And it was something that we started four years ago. And it has a lot of benefits. Because I have to, it forces me to confront reality. All right, I have my frontline customers on the call. And if they want to unmute themselves and tell me to go fuck myself, they can do that, right? In front of everyone. And so it forces me to solve problems in real time.

And it forces me to solve problems in real time. And it forces me to constantly confront reality. I think a lot of people, a lot of businesses would dread talking to their customers every day in a large, wide format. But I will tell you that it has, in no uncertain terms, has been one of the single cornerstone activities that I practiced over the last four years

that has been, I think, one of the secrets to our success. Because in taking those calls, I, one, know exactly what the needs of a gym owner are today. right now, not last week, not an hour ago, right now. Two, I know the intimate pains that they are struggling right now, which allows me to improve my product at such a faster rate that anyone else does, because I can also test things on a daily basis, have five guys try one thing, five guys try another, report back tomorrow, rather than having to go all the way down through the chain of command,

communicated to them all the way back up, and have that whole process take a month or six weeks. And so, the reason I think that Jim Watch has been able to consistently stay on top of an industry that typically very much cycles through quote gurus, right? And it's been because we've been able to innovate solutions at a faster rate and we've been able to distribute those innovations across our community to faster and more effective rate, number one. And two, we are better able to communicate with our customers, right? And prospective customers because we understand their pains. Now why? Because we talk to them every single day. And if our product doesn't work, we know.

If there's a process that needs to change, like it used to be like this and now it has to be like this, we know. And we find out before the six-month lag time that it would take most entrepreneurs to see a huge spike in churn that then gets them wondering, I wonder what this is, right? And so from a tactical standpoint,

how to use those two things together, the unreasonable optimism with the confrontation of brutal facts is one with the unreasonable optimism, Have your list of, or at least for me that works, is having the list of big ideas that I'm working on and pushing forward. And then on the flip side, being able to confront the brutal facts of reality, which in one term can be knowing the numbers of your business, which if you don't, obviously you should do that. But then also understanding that you need to hop on, you need to be with the front lines and rub, like kiss, you know, is it shake hands and kiss babies? Not because you need to like value your time. Well, my time's worth more than that.

It's not. because the value of the intel of what is going to come to you in terms of the needs of the customer and how much your product can improve and where the opportunities exist will far outweigh the cost of time that it takes. And it also keeps your teeth sharp so that no one can sneak up from behind you and take you without, you know, under surprise. So anyways, that was kind of the juxtaposition that I wanted to break down for you today. I hope you guys are excited about COVID as excited as I am. I'm loving this. I'm loving the fast pace. environment. I loving the change. I'm loving the improvements that we've already been able to net out for our business that even when gyms come back are going to create huge downstream impact for how much money they're going to be able to make. And so I'm just very, very hopeful for

what is to come, even though I think that many, many, many people will go out of business. And I think many gyms will open back up and then only to reclose 90 days later because they go out of business. I think that's very real. But anyways, I hope you have an amazing day. I hope you crush your goals and I hope this was of so many valuable to you hopefully and otherwise lots of love and I'll catch you guys on flip side Bye