The Game with Alex Hormozi - Emotional Work | Ep 605

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

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:(2:00) - Optimism helps confront harsh realities.(3:33) - Thrive in new challenges, embrace change.(4:34) - Persistently optimistic, confront brutal facts.(7:26) - Innovation and customer communication.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original publishing date was on June 02, 2020)

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 have to catch your own thoughts around that stuff. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building Acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy. One of the things that came up from my sales guys on our side for gym lodge 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 I 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 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 bother you, keep you up at night. It might have been a one-star review on Yelp or a client talking shit or a trainer leaving and stealing clients or things like that, right? And now five years later, you've just, you've weathered a little bit, right? You're like, your skin's a little thicker. And so not to go back to the 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 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 that's not looking to look, not wanting to look at what your sales conversion numbers are, not wanting to listen

to sales recordings because 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. 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 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 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's beautiful because it forces you to just focus on the only thing that. that matter and everything else just because I'm extraneous. And you get to have big, new, challenging problems that come up. And so you get to really flex your entrepreneurial muscles, which is fun and exciting for entrepreneurs. 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 assert to a certain extent. We love the gamble. And I think that's ultimately what business is a large thing. It's just betting on you and betting on your skill set in. 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 confront brutal facts and they go hand in 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 they end up sabotaging themselves. But you yourself

have to think, or at least for me, 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 the big ideas, like the 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 doing reps and just the

stuff the boring work right you guys love that you're listening to the podcast if you ever want to have the video version of this which usually has more effects more visuals more graphs you know drawn-out stuff sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways you can check on my YouTube channel it's absolutely free go check that out if that's what you are into and if not keep enjoying the show 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 pontificate on this real quick. I started taking over the daily call again within Jim 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 in front of everyone. And so 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 be, 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, communicate 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 from a tactical standpoint, how to use those two things together, the unreasonable optimism with the confrontation of 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, like, shake hands and kiss babies, not because you need to value your time. Why? Times work. What's 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.