The Game with Alex Hormozi - Get Rich While You Are Young | Ep 1001
Episode Date: September 22, 2026Book Your Spot at the 2-Day, Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas A dollar invested at 25 might be $90 by the time you're 70. The same dollar invested at 45... gets you a ninth of that. In today’s episode, Alex explains why the same effort pays more when you're younger. Before the age of 30, your money, skills, energy, reputation and whatever else is going for you will have a higher multiplier effect. In this episode 00:00 The advantage of compounding money early 01:20 How skills compound disproportionately over time 03:30 Using early wins as stepping stones 04:26 Additional reasons to get rich young 07:06 Modeling the rule, not the exceptions More Value: Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/ Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I'm making this for people who want to get rich.
And if that is not you, that is totally fine.
There's no judgment.
You can skip this.
But this is for people who are trying to call it money max for the short period.
So if you want to max, you have to min and you have to be willing to do that for a period of time.
And so I'm going to give you an argument that I think is very compelling for why you do it sooner.
And so if you want to get rich, then you should try and get rich as young as possible.
And I will break down very logical reasons for why.
So number one, first and foremost, one of the most underrated reasons is the math behind getting wealthy.
All right. So money compounds at three to four times the rate in the beginning as it does later, meaning your increase in compounding on the excess cash you have in the earlier parts of your career will outpace the increase in earning power.
And so, for example, if you have $1 extra when you're $25, it might be $90 by the time.
you're 70, right? Whereas if that same dollar at 35 would only be a third as much, and that same
dollar at 45 would be a ninth as much, right? And so the idea is, the dollars that you make,
even though they may be smaller by proportion, when you get, when you allow compounding to compound
actually results in more money later. Now, my argument there is not that you must take 100%
of your dollars and put it into the SB 500. That's never been my argument. But that
that the dollars you do choose to put into investments of any kind at an earlier part in your
career do get disproportionate returns. So that's thing one. The second thing is that your skills
will also compound disproportionately that you acquired a younger age, right? Like, there's a certain
amount of repetitions that are required in order for you become good. Bill Gates was able to get
those repetitions early because you started coding early and then as a result of able to build
software first and then basically was able to keep this kind of sustained advantage. Like,
I talked to a guy yesterday, not yesterday, two days ago, Mejee, who had $700,000 by the time he was 19, right, that saved up. That was very interesting. Now, imagine that that was a 65-year-old guy. We wouldn't be as impressed, right? And so time has a very real impact on the scope or scale of your accomplishments as it relates to your reputation. Meaning, when I was younger and a millionaire early, it meant a lot more. And so you actually get more reputational gravitas, right? And so you can leverage a smaller win when you are young.
for your reputation because you are younger, right? And I'll give you a secret that I, you know,
only found out later, is that you basically have until you're 30 to be considered young. The moment I
turned 30, I was just a white dude. Before that, I was a young white dude. Then I was just white dude. And
then no one cared after that. Right. So in other words, youth is a multiplier on every win that you
have, whether that be press, network, mentors, capital access. I just made an investment this last week.
I wrote a $500,000 check to a kid who was 18 years old,
and he had just done $30 million a year in an e-commerce business
and wanted to develop a tool to help e-commerce stores.
So I was like, I knew he had the avatar, I knew he'd able to do it.
But the fact that he was 18 and had accomplished that made me think,
okay, this guy is really sharp.
Now, he got into my stuff at age 15.
So it took him three years to get there, right?
But in other words, that multiplier decays around 30, right?
But so you have this period of time where going all in yields higher returns
even for the same outcome.
Now, number three, you leverage early success into bigger, later success.
So he's $30 million business.
Obviously, everything's different in terms of what your scale of success is, right?
But you can ladder on top of it.
They're stepping stones.
So, for example, me, when I went through the beginning, it was like I was able to get in shape really early.
And I was able to leverage that into personal training and online training clients,
which I was able to leverage into a gym.
And then from gym, I got into multiple gyms.
And then for multiple gyms, I was able to start gym launch.
And so the thing is, is that every part of my career has been going back and basically
taking a stepping stone on what I learned from the enterprise I did before.
And then, obviously, the sale of gym launch got, basically gave us our cash for acquisition.
com to start the family office.
And so everything builds on itself.
And so if you're going to have these steps, it's like the steps are set.
It's just how soon do you want to get to this step.
It's just how late you want to start, right?
So next one is that I'll just rapid fire some reasons why I think it's better to get rich while you're wrong young, which is that like you also have more energy. Right. So think about it like this. Like you you like you have to play the cards you're dealt. Getting those repetitions in takes energy. And I only know this now that I'm almost, you know, 40, which is wild to say, that I have less energy than I see some 18 year olds. Right. And so like that is a clear advantage that they have. And so if you have that, then like you want to use it. Right. In addition.
to that, you have fewer requirements, meaning there are fewer things that you must do. You probably
don't have kids yet. You probably aren't wiped up yet or our husbanded up yet. You probably don't
have the same level of geographic dependence. And so you are more flexible. You can go to places
where learning can occur faster. You can have fewer strengths attached. You can live for less,
which means you can be more aggressive with the excess cash that you make to reinvest in skills
or informal investments because you understand the value of multiplying and compounding. Right. And,
Again, this geographical flexibility, I think, is wildly underrated.
One of the things that you get the advantage of when you're younger is that, like,
if you want to be in, you know, politics, go to D.C.
If you want to be in finance, go to New York.
If you want to be in influencer and media, go to, you know, go to L.A., right?
Those are great places to learn.
Now, once you become Joe Rogan, you can move to Austin and do whatever the hell you want.
Right?
But the thing is, is that when you want to get those reps, you want to go where the fish are, right?
You want to go where the fish are if you're trying to fish.
And what you're fishing for right now is skills and network, right?
you're trying to get places and you want to do it before you have strings tying you down and
roots that you have set. And that is again, it's a competitive advantage. It's not to say that when
you're older you can't do it. It's just harder, right? And so if you believe that it's hard for
you now to forego your existing path, which may have been given to you by your siblings or society
or whatever, I promise you it will only get harder. And if you can't do it now, the likely that
you're able to do it later goes down, right? And for me, I want to stack bets where the probabilities
are highest for my success. And whenever you enter a new system, by the way, this is game theory,
the most adaptable player wins. So it's like survival of the fittest, right? And fittest is most
adaptable. And when you are younger, you have the most adaptability. You have the most neuroplasticity
as then you can learn faster. You have the most energies you can do repetitions. You have the least
geographical constraints. You can move to where the action is. When you do earn, you make more
dollars on each dollar you make, all the skills you acquire compound with time because you only
get better at it. The accomplishments that you get from being young mean more because you're young
than they do when they're old. And so the final point that I'll say is this, is that you want to
model success, not the exceptions. Of course, we want to tell the story of Colonel Sanders who started
you know, Colonel Sanders when he's 63. And there's a bunch of, you know, other kind of call it
exception stories of people who are older and then started companies, and then obviously were really
successful. But like, wouldn't it be better to be the rule than the exception? Like, the richest people
often got rich when they were young because they decided to, right? And I will say this because I love
this quote from James Clear, but the thing that separates winners and losers are not their goals.
People's goals are the same. The difference between the people who win and lose is the action they
take as a result. And the risk that they're willing to tolerate and the pain that they're willing to endure
for extended periods of time with an uncertain payoff.
And so if you think that you need certainty
in order to move forward, I promise you that this
world will never give it to you. And so
it's really that there will always be uncertain
and at some point you grow the
cohenes, the gonads, by the way, that's
bisexual or unisex, everybody's
got gonads, you will grow
the gonads or they will drop or whatever it is.
I told you I was going to do some HR stuff.
You will grow the nads you need
to take the bets. And so I think what
really happens is that at some point you realize
that you're not going to die if you fail, you will just
learn and you will get better, which is the point of the process. And you will never finish and you
will never actually win because by the time you win, you will have already planted a much bigger goal
that you want because the goal that you had came in shooting distance. And the easiest analogy I can
say for this is this. When I wanted to bench 315, for example, I was a dream of mine when I was
in high school, right? Because I remember that just one big plate was a was wow, the strong kids could do
a full plate, right? And then two plates was like super strong. Three plates was crazy. By the time,
my bench 315, I knew I was going to hit 315 because I had done
275 for 5 and I did did 295 for a tripler instead of 5. And so 315 seemed obvious, right? And so
the thing is, is that by the time you accomplish goals, the goals themselves seem less
meaningful because you already did the work to make that goal reasonable, which is why you achieved
it, which is why you have to do so much work that is unreasonable that you do not become successful.
And the best way to do that is to start when you're younger for all the reasons I just gave.
All right. That's why you should succeed while you're young. That's why you should ignore the
people who are telling you, uh, who don't have what you want, uh, telling you how to get something
that they've never gotten. All right. Feeling spicy this morning.
