The Game with Alex Hormozi - Hormozi Life Hacks You Need To Hear | Ep 586

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

"If you want to change your behavior, change your environment, change your circumstances.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares various life hacks and tips for improving daily routines. From finding the perfect outfit to spending less money, Alex emphasizes the importance of making decisions based on personal preferences rather than outside opinions. Additionally, he discusses the benefits of changing one's environment to change behavior and improve overall well-being.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:(0:43) - Life Hack #1: ChapStick as sunscreen(2:24) - Life Hack #2: Wear a hat and beard(3:23) - Life Hack #3: Spend less money(6:08) - Life Hack #4: Wear what you want(11:33) - Life Hack #5: Nasal strips for breathing(14:32) - Life Hack #6: Find the right environment(25:33) - Life Hack #7: Drink less water(28:37) - Life Hack #8: "And that's okay"(31:59) - Life Hack #9: Hang from elevated surfaces(33:15) - Life Hack #10 & #11: Mini time management hacksFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Whenever I think to myself like, man, I'm going to look dumb or people are going to make fun of me or people going to say these comments, right? I just always remind myself, I was like, do I want to be the type of person who changes my life to suit people who I will never meet? Like, I'm literally letting them make my life less comfortable because I'm afraid of what they're going to say. I'm like, find better problems. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wish Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. so I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy. I'm about to show you a bunch of life hacks

that will make you happier, healthier, wealthier, or none of those things. Number one is you're like, man, Alex, how are you just so incredibly male model looking with this porcelain skin that's just untouched by the sun? The answer is I always growing up knew that like putting sunscreen on your face was a good thing. It's like one thing that like all dermatologists say. It's like you protect yourself from the sun. and I've actually tried for like a decade to get myself to do this. And so I tried a bunch of times to try and figure out how to get this stuff on my face. And I actually could never stick with it. Like I know how to actually put it on my face, but I never got to stick with it.

And the first thing is I wouldn't start doing it. So I fixed that by using a concept I call watering holes, which is there's a few places around my house that I congregate all the time. So it's like there's a seed I eat in. There's a seed I chill in usually and there's my office. And then I've got my bedside table. So there's the only few places that I actually spend time in. It's like you might have a massive house or a tiny house. It doesn't really matter.

You only tend to sit in a few places throughout the day. And so what I do is I use those watering holes as where I put stuff so that I get constant cues to remember to do that stuff when I sit down. So it's like if I'm having coffee and I always sit in the same seat and I want to do it in the morning, then I put it next to my coffee maker or I put it in the seat that I sit in while drinking my coffee. And so I saw problem one is that I started doing it. But what happened is I started getting punished for doing it. And what I mean by that is I hate having oil on my hands.

Like, I just don't like it. And so I stopped doing it. And so the other day, I was looking at chapstick and it had SPF on it. And I was like, no way. And so I took it and I put SPF on my face. And it actually stuck longer than the sunscreen did. And I didn't get anything on my hands. And it was way more like targeted.

I could like just put it on areas or whatever. And I tend to have dry skin and I stop flaking all over people. And so that is life hack number one. Try this instead of sunscreen. I think it's one of those things you might, you know, be thickable for like 30 years from now. And I'll give you subpoint life hack number two is that if you're an ugly dude, recommend having a hat and a beard because the hat covers the top half of your face and the beard covers the bottom half of your face.

So it leaves as much of your face up to the imagination of the opposite sex. So life hack number two there. And LifeHack 2A is that if you do care about sun damage or try not to get skin cancer or anything like that, The hair on your beard is actually like SPF, and the hat actually covers your eyes. So there's actually very little of your face that gets exposed if you spend a lot of time outside. And I spend a few hours a day outside in the sun. And so just little life hacks that I've collected along the way. And I'm a big hat fan, which you probably notice in all my content.

It's like I've got my instant nap creator whenever I need it. If I'm lifting, I can go into lifting mode and I can go back because usually I put my head, you know, closer to something so the bill doesn't get in the way. Or if I'm doing shoulders or lap pull downs or whatever. And yeah, it works. Life hack number three, stop spending so much money. And I'll show you two hacks on how I think through it to get myself to actually stick with it. So right now, let's say people have talked about like, if you dollar cost average to the S&P, you know, like it, it'll be worth a lot of money in the future. So let's say we put $1,000 in and we put $100 a month towards whatever, towards investing in the S&P 500, which isn't even my favorite thing in the world to invest in.

But even if we just did a normal investment, right? And let's say we do this for, I guess, what am I, 33? So let's do it for 50 years for fun. say this gets the stock market and we're going to compound this annually. All right. So that $1,000 with $100 a month becomes $1.5 million in 50 years compounded at 10%. And so here's how I harness this to actually spend less money. So what I look at is, okay, this $100 or this $1,000 is this much money in the future. And you can type it in. It doesn't really matter what it is. But the point is that, like for me, you can just do a basic back of napkin and say it's going to be a hundred times bigger.

So if I spend a hundred bucks on a shirt, then that $100 is 10 grand of what my future self would use with the money. And basically what it does is it increases the local cost of making a short-term decision such that you're like, you know what, if it was just 100, I might have bought it, but if it was 10,000, I won't. And so that's like hack number one for getting myself to spend less money. The other hack for spending less money is thinking about how much it cost me to get the money. And so, for example, if I, you know, let's say you make $100,000 a year, if you have $100,000 a year, it means you make $50 an hour. So $2,000, so $100,000 by $2,000 is $50, all right?

And so that means that this was two hours of work. And so I then imagined myself if someone said, hey, I want you to work for two hours, I'm going to give you this shirt. I might be like, I'd rather not. But when you make the purchase, you do make that decision. And I made a short about this and I had a few silly pants be like, this guy's trying to tell you to trade your time for money. Geniuses. You make money during time. So you divide how much money you make by how much time it took you to get it. So if I make

one trade this year on the stock market and I make a million dollars and I did that this year and I spent all that other time researching it and planning and networking and whatever, by the way, that costs time. And then I still have all the time that I work divided by the amount of money that I make. So no matter what you do or no matter who you subscribe to, you make money per unit of time, period. It doesn't mean you have to monetize that way, but you still earn income over time period. End of story. So, I like to think, would I have traded this time for that asset or that liability? And probably no. And so then I don't buy it. So there's are two frames that I use to get myself to spend less money on shit I don't need. Life Act number four is I wear what I want to

wear every day. And I spend an inordinate amount of time on decisions that I will have to repeat. And so I think it's less about what I wear and more about how I came to figure out what I wanted to wear. And so I think about the things that I do every day a lot because if I can just spend a little bit more time on the front end to figure out what the perfect decision or best decision is, then from that point going forward, I get to make the best decision every day without thinking about it again. And so common things like that is like you go to bed every day, you eat every day, you sleep every day. You sleep every day. So these are things that I do every day. And so I have a lot of process or time that's gone into figuring out what the best thing to eat was best way to sleep

best way to dress throughout the most days of my life and so I have this outfit that I wear it's almost like a uniform and I actually get really reinforced by wearing this thing for a couple reasons one is that every time I wear it because I know I put about 16 months into testing probably in total four to five hundred different pieces of clothing to find the best brand the best size for every article of clothing that I wear and so it's like this is beater, I tried 30 or 40 different types of beaters to get the right brand. And then when I had the right brand for material and stretch and cut standpoint, then I tried different sizes. And then I bought multiple packs of each size because sometimes mediums on this round is different than mediums on the

next round because they're not as consistent. And so once I found that, then I was like, okay, this brand, this size is what I wear. And now I don't need to try anything else on because I know that this is the best decision. And then, you know, like from my shoes perspective, people have see me probably wearing lots of different types of shoes. And as of this point, these are the best shoes that I've worn for the most environments that I'm a part of because I tend to always be in warm climates. I can go to the pool. I can go to the restaurant. I can lift in these. I can walk in these without getting blisters. They don't smell bad. They don't create sweat underneath your foot. I don't slip in them. They've got great grip. They also have a good amount of padding so you get some

support. I also used to wear barefoot shoes for years until I actually got basically arthritis in my foot because people want to talk about barefoot walking all the time, but they don't talk about the fact that you were barefoot walking on grass. And so people are like, it's the natural way to walk. It's like, yeah, but you're not walking on natural environment. And so I bought into that. So I'm just giving you this warning from five years or 10 years in the future, is that I did that and I actually got a lot of pain on my foot that I still deal with now. And so like, there's a reason that there's cushion in shoes. It's because you're walking on concrete. I walk on concrete every day. And so I now have shoes that are padding and my feet don't hurt anymore. All of these things are

things that just went into my shoes. They're probably a hundred different shoes that I tried on. over a year because I had multiple rounds of test-free choose. So it's like one is like I put it on it and does it fit? Sometimes it just doesn't fit right. So if it fits, then I'd give it a little walk around my apartment. If it feels okay, then that goes into like basically the rotation, which is can I do one full walk, which for me is an hour and change without getting any blisters or any pain. Now if I pass that round, then it's can I wear it for a week or so in multiple environments? So like the gym, going out to eat, and then can I wear it for a longer period of time? and will it smell bad?

And so it went through each of these rounds of tests until I finally found a shoe that checked all of these boxes and it was hard. There's a lot of boxes that I wanted to check. But now I don't need to wear socks and I can wear the same pair of shoes. And when I travel, I have a bag that's tiny because I can wear the one pair of shoes,

I can wear the shorts that I'm going to wear. And I went through the same rounds of tests for all of these things. And you're like, well, you probably can't get into restaurants with a beater and you're right, only for the nice ones, which is why I have flannels that I put on top. And these are nice and stretchy

for me because I tried a bunch of different flannel types on and they work, right? And so I have four different temperature settings. I told you that I'm in different temperature environments. And so I'm never really between 40 and 120 degrees. And so I try to think it's like, okay, with one outfit, I can cover the most amount of different environments. And if I go to the restaurant, I wear that. If I go to the gym, I wear this. If I go to the pool, I wear this. And so it just gives me the most flexibility, which is why I call my Darwin outfit, because I'm the most adaptable. And then that way, I get reinforced by it because every time I put it on, I always think to my, like, it's ridiculous, but I think to myself,

I'm like, this is the perfect outfit. And I mean, like, I get flacked from all sorts of people be like, I can't, those shoes are so uglier, those shorts are so uglier. The takedop doesn't, you know, you look like white trash or whatever it is, but like, fundamentally, my big belief is that if I claim to say that my opinion matters more to me than other people's opinion, the moment I wouldn't wear something because I would fear that other people would judge me for, it means that I elevate their opinion of me more than my opinion of me. And like, why would I care if they think I look cool? Like, it's just like, why?

Because I know that I can walk and my thighs don't shave because I've thicker thighs because I lift. I won't get blisters. I will stay cool. And I can do all the things that I want to do. And so, like, for me, that's Nirvana. And so anybody who's going to, like, say anything against that, it's like, well, then wear whatever you want to wear.

Like, why does what I wear affect you? It doesn't, right? But of course, the internet trolls will try and make you feel like their opinion matters, but it doesn't. It's like they don't exist. It's irrelevant. Right. And so if there's one bottom line of this, it's like, just do you.

And this is just my process more. It's not this outfit per se. This is just my Darwin outfit for my life. I spend lots of time in these environments. And so like you might not go out as a five-star restaurants all the time. So you might not even need that, right? Or you might be in a hotter climate or you might be in a colder climate and need more stuff. So it's more about like, I think the thought process.

than the outcome. Because if I were in a different environment, I probably would have a different outfit that would be better suited for it. Life fact number five, I wear nasal strips, so for breathing. And you're probably seen some of my videos. I actually believe it or not, I try and take them off for most of videos because I get more questions about them. And it hasn't been, like, I didn't wear them to make a statement. I wore them so I could breathe better. And if you ever listen to some iPhone videos of me, you can hear me breathing. And people are like, is it a fashion statement? I've had two nose operations and I probably still need another one. The first doctor ever showed my like inside of my nose two, he refused to operate on me. He was like, this is fucked up. He's like,

you need like a super specialist. So I went to that guy and he was like, I'll give it my best shot. And he gave it his best shot. And he was like, let me have a second round. It's like, all right, did it again. And now I have like one of two nostrils. Before this, I had like 100% couldn't breathe out of one and I had like 15% airflow in the other. Like I couldn't breathe at all. And Layland I basically accepted different bedrooms for like a year, which people were like, oh, what is your marriage on the rocks? I always think as a side note, I think it's ridiculous because when you started dating, you didn't live in the same place and didn't have the same bedroom. And did you still get it on? Probably. Just, I think there's a lot of over romanticism about that stuff.

We now sleep in the same bed again since I got this done. And now I have the nose strips. But just as aside, I think people like reading into that shit too much. So I wear the breathing strips because it prevents me from snoring. Because I don't snore anymore when I wear those. But I keep wearing them during the day because if I don't, my nose collapses. Probably more information than you care to know, but that's why I have breathing strips. Again, I think The underlying thing here is a lot of people, especially before it was like, Mozy Nation and Alex from Mozy, like, I was wearing this shit before it was cool. And it was because, like, breathing was cooler to me than other people's opinions about my face. I guess if there's one underline here is like, if you've got to do shit because like it massively improves your life,

but it looks stupid, who cares? Like, really? Like, just like I would be so ashamed and this is what I have to read to myself because I'm a person. Like, I, you know, like, we're raised when we come up to care about other people's opinions because that's how we orient ourselves in the world. We say, what does that mean? What does that mean? They tell you you what it means, right? And they tell you how to behave. So people are like, I don't care about anyone's opinion. I think that's silly because, one, you respond to the marketplace. If everybody wasn't watching videos or like they only watch a certain type of video, what would I do? I'd respond to the marketplace and give them that. So like, the idea that I don't take

feedback is silly, right? But I think that there are some decisions that incorporating other people's feedback is valuable. And then there are other decisions where it's completely invaluable. And I think people mix the two. And so like about like what you wear and like on your person, what you eat, how you spend your time. Like, that's you. Like, that doesn't affect anyone else. If you want to make a product, absolutely. You have to listen to the marketplace.

You know what I mean? And so I think it's separating those two things out. And for me, the thing that reinforces that is that whenever I think to myself, like, man, I'm going to look dumb or people are going to make fun of me. Or people are going to say these comments, right? I just always remind myself, I was like, do I want to be the type of person who changes my life to suit people who I will never meet? Like, I'm literally letting them make my life less comfortable because I'm afraid of what

they're going to say. I'm like, find better problems. You know what I mean? And so that's how I get myself to not worry about that stuff. Life hack number six is finding the right environment to live. And I'm going to say environment because I think there's a couple important points here. One is that if you want to change your behavior, change your environment, change your circumstances. You probably behave differently in a church than you do at a rock concert, right? You do. Now, some churches are like rock concerts nowadays, but like we'll just leave it at that. Point being is that you behave differently in different circumstances. A lot of people will try and say something to the extent of, well, that's because you're like, you're not secure in your identity. And I think that's complete BS.

Like, I hang out differently with my friends than my grandma, right? It's just different. And so, if you want to change your behavior, then the fastest and easiest way to do that is to change your environment. So we'll give you a quick story, then I'll give you the life hacks. So in Vietnam, I think it was like 20% of soldiers tried heroin. A massive percentage of people tried heroin. And the U.S. government thought they were going to have this pandemic or, epidemic of heroin-addicted soldiers when they got back. But that's not what happened. And you might be like, why? And before I give you the answer to that, when people get on heroin in the U.S. and then they go to a rehab center, they have a 90% relapse rate, meaning they go to a clinic,

they rehab, and then nine out of ten of them relapse back into taking heroin. So what's the difference? The guys who came back didn't go through a rehab program, and the people who go through rehab programs don't succeed. Like, why is that? It's because the environment changed. So if you are a heroin addict in this environment and then you change your environment to a rehab center, then all of a sudden you're not a heroin addict in that environment. You don't have the cues. You don't have the access. You don't have the resources, et cetera. And then you go back into the place that you have the same access, the same resources, etc., then it cues the same behaviors. Now, or rather, it rewards the same behaviors that you were doing

before, which is why you did it to start with. Now, the soldiers had environments, but they were one-time environments. And when they came back to the U.S., they lost all of those cues and all those rewards associated with why they were doing her to begin with. And so because they change their environment, they change their behavior. And so if you want to change your behavior, it is the easiest way to make massive changes in your life. That's the overarching scheme. Now let's talk tactics. So one is you don't have to change cities to change your environment. Like literally just moving 30 minutes across town can be one of the biggest things that you do in your life. Number one. Number two, just moving out from your parents' place can be huge. And I honestly

thing, not just moving out from their place, but like, I think just moving out of driving distance. If you can just get, like, if you get, if you cross 40 minutes for the drive, it's enough that they don't pop in anymore. If you're 15 minutes away, that's on the way to work, on the way back. Oh, it's just in the neighborhood. Just get it. Like, you need to flee the nest for a little bit. Get some space. So number one is you don't have to leave the city you're in in order to get some space and move out on your own. Number two, the living expense you have, especially if you're starting out, I think is one of the biggest overheads that's no value at, especially if you're leasing and not buying, which many, like, I'm not even getting into the difference right now. And so minimizing

how much it costs you to live is one of the best ways to minimize risks so that you can go on the offensive and other aspects. And the offensive isn't like, people always think of like, oh, I'm going to invest in this thing. It's like, no, just invest in you, which is like if you have an extra $1,000 a month, an extra $2,000 a month because you're not spending a thousand, $1,500,000 a month on living, but you split a place six ways and you're living on $200 to $500 a month in rent because you're splitting it and you're willing to be uncomfortable a little bit, then you can take that extra money, buy skills, buy courses, go to seminars, read books, whatever, so that you can then get yourself in a situation where you can earn more. Now, I think a lot of people over-indexed on

taxes, all right? And so I think there's kind of two levels of this. Level one is you can go to a tax-free state if you're in the U.S. If you're abroad then, well, honestly, if you're anywhere besides the U.S., you can leave the country and live tax-free. So like, amazing for you. But for all Americans, so like the U.S. is the only country, to my knowledge, that does this, but you are a global citizen. Meaning, if I go to Dubai, we're like, I get questions like, Alex, why don't you move to Dubai? Because I would still get taxed the exact same rate I get taxed as American because I'm an American. Now, if you live in the United Kingdom and you move to Dubai, you pay Dubai taxes. So you only pay whatever the Dubai tax rate is, I think it's zero. And so the only way to get zero taxes

as an American is you give up, you relinquish your citizenship. You say, I'm no longer an American. I'm a citizen of a different country. And that's a big ask. And then I wondered to myself, the amount of people who leave countries and are willing to give up 40% of their income in order to live here is a lot. And so a lot of people complain about America, but I still think it's the best one we've got. And so I lean towards not doing that. And so within the micro of America, I don't see a big difference between tax-free states and non-tax-free states in terms of my livability. And so if there's minimal cost difference, but you've got, you know, California at 13 to 20, depending on what it is because like capital gains is 20 in California and 13.7, I

think on income tax, there versus somewhere else. Like, I don't have a massive difference, so I'm willing to go somewhere where I've lower taxes in the micro. But the difference between a third world country and here, big enough for me to say I'd rather be in America. Now, the big obsession about taxes, in my opinion, is because most people don't understand how wealth is created. And wealth isn't created through income. It's created through asset appreciation. And so what that means is you get, it's not based on what you get paid. It's based on how much the stuff you own is worth. And appreciation in general is tax. So when you see all these billionaires on Forbes, it's not because they have a billion dollars in their bank account. It's because they own something that's worth a billion dollars. And if next year it's worth $1.1 billion, they didn't get any taxes on that $100 million or appreciation. But they can't take loans against that appreciation. So they can have access to the money without having it to get taxed on. And if you're like, man, that's unfair, consider the alternative. What are they going to do, get taxed on money they never made? It's just learning to play the game, right? And I didn't understand this, which is why I used to be really obsessed with trying to minimize taxes. And I spent a disproportionate amount of time, tried to optimize for it.

And I'll give you the most extreme example. An acquaintance mine set up his shop in Puerto Rico and he lived in Florida. And so he could make a pretty easy trip back and forth and he did it every weekend. And so he did his weekdays in Puerto Rico and he did weekends in Florida, which I get that because then he's spending more than 51%. He doesn't have to think about it. But I remember asking him, I said, so do you think if you didn't have to go on 104 flights a year that you could take all of that time and just live in the place that you want to live

and make the 30% more. And he was like, fuck. And so we ended up actually moving back to Florida. And a lot of people actually do that. Because at some point, in my opinion, realize that you just do this circular logic. You say, I want to make money so that I can be free to do what I want. And then you're like, okay, so then I'm going to give up my freedom so that I can make more money to live in a place that I don't want to live most of the year so that I can, right? Like where, like the logic circle breaks down. And so, in my opinion, remember why you started. Remember why you got on this path to begin with. For me, I optimize for freedom.

And I want to live wherever I want to live. That maximizes my benefits of all kinds. And so if you're trying to pick a city in the U.S., one, here's my little checklist for what I would look for. One is, I want to go in a city that has the most of the industry I want to be in. So that means that there is no right city. There's a right city for you, for the career path or the season that you're in. And so, like, if I want to get in film, I might go to L.A., even though it's tax shitty, right? Or if I want to get in tech, I might move to Silicon Valley or Austin, right?

Or there's some, actually, Denver's actually becoming like a hotbed of software and tech stuff. And so, like, I would look at the different hotbeds, and that would be like, level one. Level two is do I know anyone who's there? Because it's funny because if you hear somebody say, oh, I went to Cincinnati. Cincinnati sucks. There's no way that you actually experienced Cincinnati. Someone went there for three days and they went to eat at four restaurants and they saw maybe like 10 people. And then they made a judgment on the entire city based on that micro experience.

And that's why I said earlier, if you just go from where you live to like 30 minutes away, it can feel like an entirely different thing, which is why people do staycations. It's just a change of environment. But like, it's just as much of a change in environment to do that as to fly somewhere and then get somewhere that you don't know people. So I do. So number one, is it in the industry that I want? Number two is do I know people that like I might like or have some, you know, some things in common with?

Number three is if there's some tax advantage between two places, I would probably go towards the tax advantage one. Number four is I want in the micro wherever I live to be walking distance from a lot of the stuff that I use. And I know for me, having a sick gym is actually one of the few things. that I really care about. Like it improves my, my subjective wellbeing. Like, I have a better mood more if I have a good gym, like in walking distance. And so what else do I like in walking distance?

It's like, I like good places to eat in walking distance. I like fast casual stuff. I also like nice stuff. So both of those things I like to have in walking distance. And I like having places that I can walk in general. And I prefer walkable living areas to not like driveable areas where you have to drive everywhere. And again, I'm sharing my preferences. But you might be like, I like suburban life, which is fine.

do that. The fifth one is I think about access from whatever city I'm in. And if I have the choice between an A market and a C market, they're advantages to both of those. The C market, you can buy more real estate for less money, you can get more space. The disadvantages are it's harder to find talent, harder to get people to move there if you're a business owner. And it's harder to fly in and out of. It's literally more secluded. In A market, you can get more people to move there. You have access to better talent. And the bigger the A market, the more ways you can directly fly in and out of. And that sounds like a small thing, but the, I guess the higher up you go in business, the more you travel. And so for me, having direct flights to as many places as possible is actually like a

huge life hack. Hey guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon. It's called $100 million offers that over 8,000 five-star reviews and it has almost a perfect score. You can get it for 99 cents on Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing that book. And it's my biggest gift to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to get to you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars so that later on in your business career, I can potentially partner with you. So that's my give. Go check it out, Amazon, and back to the show.

And so the last piece is if you're a place where it's a common destination for most people, like the reason that I spend a lot of time in Vegas is because most people flying to Vegas every year or two for something. They fly in for a bachelor party, a bachelor party, for a conference, for big fights, for comedy shows, for like, whatever. There's a lot of things that are going on. And so I actually have built-in networking that happens for me. And so people know that I spend 51% of my time here.

And so I'll get hit up by people who be like, yo, I'm in town. Let's grab lunch. Let's grab drinks. Let's grab dinner. And the beauty of that is that they're here for something else. I'm not entertaining them for three days. They have other reasons they're here. And I get to check in, how you doing?

High five, awesome. And they go other way. And so I can maintain more relationships at a high level without having the cost of entertaining for days at a time to maintain the acquaintance. Life hack number seven, stop drinking so much water. And you're going to be like, what? Let me explain. So number one, I think there's this massive obsession about water and I can't wait to see the troll comments about this. But believe it or not, ancient humans didn't drink as much water as we do and yet they still survived. And when I think about the pros and cons, I absolutely acknowledge that there are pros to being super hydrated. But for me,

there's one massive con. And the massive con is that you have to get up to pee all the time. in two different times. One is throughout the day, which I hate the interruption. Some people are fine with it. But I literally hate working and then having to get up to pee and then come back to work. Because I did it. Like, whenever you're about you're about to talk about, like, I did the gal on a day thing. Like, I get it. I tried it. And I did it for a while. And then I was like, this is so inconvenient. The other part of is that you actually deplete your body of minerals. Usually a faster rate than you put them back in. And so a lot of people who actually drink a lot of water end up getting more cramps, feeling shittier, having headaches. And I experienced all this stuff. Now, I then adjusted and part of it.

Then I started adding minerals to the water that I was drinking. And then I was like, what am I doing? I'm literally just adding shit so that I can drink more to then deplete myself, to put the stuff back in that I'm depleting. And I'm like, what am I accomplishing here? And so the other part, the second, the flip side of this coin of peeing more is that while I slept, I'd have to get up once, twice, three times a night. And so then I'm thinking to myself, all right, I'm depleting my body of nutrients that I have

to add back in throughout the day. I'm interrupting my work throughout the day because I have to pee so much. And then I'm getting way worse quality sleep so that I can feel good about my influencer status as being a hydration pro expert. Nah. And so I actually went completely the other direction and I only drink when I'm thirsty. And when I drink, I drink enough to not be thirsty, not enough to be full. And here's what's crazy is that your body will adjust. So what happens is when you drink more water, you pee more because your body's like, hey, I got a lot of water.

We got to pee this out. If you have less water, your body is like, I'm going to conserve water a little bit more. And so then you pee less and you stay pretty hydrated still. And what a lot of people don't know is that a lot of food has water in it. And so if you like eat fruit, like if you eat a pound of fruit and I eat about a pound of fruit every day, that's a pound of water. Like 90% of that's water. And so like a lot of people think like you have to drink a gallon of water every day.

You might be getting half of this from your food and actually drinking a gallon and a half of water or two gallons of water every day if you take into account all the other things that have water in it. And so I think the obsession about water for me, again, if you're like, dude, I love drinking water, then drink water. I don't care. I am sharing what worked for me. And maybe if you're somebody who pees a lot and it disrupts your day and it disrupts your sleep, then consider not drinking as much water. And I'm telling you, if I get a good night's sleep where I don't get up once, it is worth me not drinking water by a mile. And especially if you're over 30, it might be something

you want to consider, give it a shot for a week. And if you're like, I miss my water, then it won't affect me. It doesn't affect me. Me saying this doesn't affect you either. Life hack number eight, comma, and that's okay. This is more of an approach overall that I think has benefited me a lot in making content, approaching new opportunities, assessing risk, assessing failures, comparing myself to other people. A lot of times, I was saying this earlier today, but a lot of us have heard comparison is the thief of joy. And I actually think that's not true. Let me explain. Comparison is the ruler for measurement. It's how you can see where you are compared to something else. Like you have to be able to compare in order to see if there's a difference so that you

can improve something. And so it would be like saying you should never get feedback. You absolutely need to get feedback to improve. And so the question is, how can I get feedback without feeling terrible about myself? And so it's not that comparison is the thief of joy. It's the judgment about your of standing that is the thief of joy. And so if somebody runs faster than I do, then I should be able to look at what they're doing, agree that they're running faster than I am, see what they have in their form that I don't have, and see if I can learn from them to get better. Where it becomes the thief of joys if I say, I suck because I run slower than they do. And that's where people I think get in trouble. And so one of the moniker is that is actually my team that turned me on to this,

because apparently I say it a lot. But it's just that I will have a negative situation and then just say, comma, and that's okay. And so it's like, Warren Buffett is wealthy than I am. Comma, and that's okay. Because it would be expected that he'd be wealthy than me. And are there things that I'm doing now so that I can create that kind of outcome for myself later? Yes, okay.

Then I'm doing fine, right? And so a lot of times we have these negative things that happen. Like, you know, we'd messed up this meals launch a few years ago. And the employee that I had at the time sent out the text for when the massive launch that I'd spent like half a year planning a day early. sucked. Lost me probably a million dollars. And I just thought to myself like immediately. I was like, comma, and that's okay. Why? Because it's already done. There's nothing else I can do about it. And so, what am I going to get from this now? Well, I've got an amazing story that I've now told many times about

this. And I actually now created an incredibly loyal employee because I asked her, I said, hey, what do you think we should do? She's like, well, you're going to fire me, right? And I was like, no, of course I'm not going to fire you. Why would I do that? She's like, well, what's the likelihood you're going to mess up again and do that same mistake? And she was like, well, I'm never going to make that mistake again. I was like, well, then you're more valuable than you were before. Why would I fire you now? I was like, I just paid a million dollars for to learn this. I was like, now I'm completely confident that you'll never mess up a text date. And she was like, never thought about it like that. I was like, right. Because you only fire someone because of the

likely that they're going to repeat a mistake in the future. Right. And so again, it was like, it gives me this space. Like whenever something bad happens, it's like comma and that's okay. Space. Okay, that means that I can still compare without having to judge negatively about my relative standing. And so like, could that launch have gone better? Absolutely. Do I suck because the launch sucked? No. I learned because would it be, would it be reasonable say that if you're going to grow a billion dollars in value that you're going to make $100 million of mistakes? Yes. So then I have to, that's going to come from somewhere. And when I do make a million dollar or a $30 million or $50 million mistake, then I have to learn from it. And that's

just part of my journey. Because at the end of the day, I'm going to give it all back because I can't take the money with me and I'm going to slide the chips back into the middle of the table and it's going to get recycled. The whole point of the game is to learn. And so how can I resent making mistakes, when they're the only way, not the only way, but they are among the best ways that you learn. Lifehack number nine, I hang from elevated services in order to stretch my back and shoulders out. I've been lifting for a long time, and the longer you lift, the more you realize that it's about staying in the game longer than it is about intensity, meaning if you lift for 20 straight years, you're going to be bigger than anybody who lives really hard for a year.

And so the game switches to being about how can I keep training as hard as I can without hurting myself. And so the more you train, the more you actually start wearing down joints. It's just part of aging. And it's kind of like opening and closing a drawer in your kitchen. Like you do it a thousand times, you do 10,000 times. Like it starts to wear it down. And so one of the things that can help reset posture that I found after, you know,

zillions and honestly a lot of money spent with experts and whatnot, like the biggest bang for buck is I just hang from a pull-up bar for three or four minutes, ideally before and after I train. And there's a host of benefits in terms of stretching your backout, decompressing it, especially if you do any kind of backloading for any of the stuff you train, but also for like shoulder stuff. So if you bench, you do overhead press, lateral raises, any kind of backwork, all of that stuff like tightens up your shoulders, then it starts going into your neck. And so it just kind of resets all of the all of the stuff that I moved the wrong way while I trained gets reset every time I do that.

And it's been probably the single biggest bang for a buck move that I've done in order to extend the longevity of how hard and long I can train. Life hack number 11, which is really a series of life hacks on how I manage my time, probably the one that you were looking forward to, or maybe the one I was looking forward to. time is the one thing that we can't get more of. And so for me, it's my scarcest resource. And so whatever we learn lessons, we pay for our lessons with time or money or both. And we tend to pay with the thing that we value the least. And so, like, if you pay for all your stuff with time, it's because you value your time

less than you value money. Because if you can learn the same thing with money, then you should do it, right? If you have the money. And so time has been something that I continue to spend a lot of time thinking about because fundamentally, if you master time, you can master money. because money is a compressed unit of time, right? So like everybody trades their time for money, which is the point I was making earlier in this,

is that like you make money over a period of time and you trade a certain amount of life in order to accomplish it. And you can look at that over the span of your life. You spent 80 years to amassed this much, and you made X per unit of time. And so money is really just our way of capturing that time that we spent to make the money

and then trade it for someone else's time at the most basic level. And so people who are the wealthiest understand time better than any of the way. one. And so I've studied this a lot. Subsection 11, I give myself permission not to reply to people. This might be one that is relatively controversial, but all you have to do is take things to a logical extreme to prove the point, which is like, okay, let's say you get famous enough that you get a million people who message you every minute and you literally could not respond to all of them.

What would you do? You would come to terms of the fact that you can't respond to people. And that means that if I can make that, if I can consolidate that or I can come to terms of that at its most extreme, then I can come to terms with that today. And so if there are especially as you start leveling up in business that people just always reach out to you because they want something from you. And it might be directly or indirectly. Like they're just trying to maintain your relationship because they haven't asked for you in the future, which happens a lot. I give myself permission to not respond. And that's hard because that means that what are they going to think of you. And again, this is how I do things. Because the people who really know me know how to get in contact with me and the people who don't usually want something from me. I used to feel really guilty about it, but I realized that feeling guilty about it didn't serve me in any way. And I took it to that logical extreme and I was like, okay, at some point I'm going to have to come to terms with this. I might as well come to terms with it now and start doing the benefits of that now. And a big part of that is that one of the biggest time sucks is the cost of change or cost of switching tasks.

And so like if I'm doing something and then I get my phone buzzed, if I stop that and then address this and then come back, I lose a huge amount of efficiency. And so for me, choosing not to respond and even just turning off my, you know, going to airplane mode or not accepting new messages has been something that's really helped me stay productive during the time that I have. Number two, under Time LifeHacks, is I think it's been really beneficial to have like a really simple kitchen timer or something for work and just something that's really visible like right under my screen. And I like that because when I have the impulse to check my phone, check slack, check whatever, check social media, I just look back down at the clock and it's like if it's not done yet, I don't go check. It's just like this one extra piece of accountability to hold me focused on the stuff that I do. Number three is that I control my environment. So this is a little bit less of a time thing, but more of a work thing, which is that I'm a huge believer in cutting out all distractions. So texting is part of it, but the other part of it is like literal physical distractions.

And so I think about it in terms of visual and I think about it in terms of audio. So visually, I almost always work in a closet without windows. And I do that because like I want to stare out the window if it's a nice day. And every time I do that, it detracts from my work. And so we'd be like, well, isn't it nice to look out the window? if that's what you want to do, go for it. For me, I am more productive, and my net long-term benefit being more productive means more to me than the short-term benefit of the window. All right? From an audio perspective, I actually double a double headphones. So I actually

put ear plugs in, and then I put gunshot headphones on top. And what that allows me to do that, there's always noises. And what's crazy is, like, try this, is that if you ever feel really stressed one day, like, if you're like, man, I have a lot of anxiety. Like, there's a lot of stuff going on, like just try this. Put ear plugs in, put headphones on top, and you will quite, you will literally feel the world get quieter. And then all of a sudden, you're like, it gets you into a little bit more of a meditative state because the only thing you can hear is your breath. And so for me, when I work, like imagine this environment. I have this massive screen, so the only thing I look at is my work. I have no windows. I have a timer that's keeping

me on task, and I have two things stopping any noise from getting in. And so my work per unit of time that I'm allocating to it goes up by a lot. I'll give you life hack. Like mini time life hack number three is that I use gray scale on my phone. There's now actually a lot of research that came out about this, but it decreases, I think phone usage by 30 or 40 minutes today on average for people, which is roughly like 20-ish, 25 percent of the average person's phone usage. And so like, I want to stack the chips in my favor as much as I can. I think we all can agree that we'd like to use our phones less. And so just making it black and white changes your behavior. So think about this. Colors change behavior. So if you see an apple that's red,

it means eat. If you see an apple that's black, it means don't eat. Right. If you see a light that's green, it means go. If you see a light that's red, it means stop, right? And so colors influence our behavior. The influence our mood. They influence what we do. And so if we want to change our behavior on the phone, then we can change what we're looking at. We change the colors. And so just going to gray scale affects how frequently you will check your phone. And I found myself not checking it nearly as much and staying on it for less time because it's less rewarding. Oh, okay. LifeHack 11 subsection four, I schedule my time back to front and I start my day early with no meetings with all my priorities. And I'll explain what that means right now. This is probably the biggest one that you can use.

And like if I think about the fewest things that I have done from a habit perspective that have given me the most gains in productivity, it's this. So like this is the writer downer. It's that I start my day as early as I can, and I waste as little time as possible between when I wake up and when I start working. Now, wasting as little time as possible can mean different things for different people. If you want to have 30 minutes with your wife in the morning, then is that wasting time? Fuck no, right? Probably the highest hourly time you have on your life, right? I'm about being deliberate with the time that you have in the morning more than saying that this is what you need to do. For me, I spend time with Layla in the morning. We have coffee together and that's kind of

where we set our intention for the day and what we're going to do, what she's going to do, et cetera. then after that I go right to work and for years for the last decade I have tried to as soon as I wasn't training sessions in the gym I pushed as much as I could until the afternoon and it wasn't because I didn't want to work in the morning it's because I wanted to work more in the morning and I knew that as soon as the afternoon would come for me in the gyms it was I would start doing sales appointments and I'd meet with trainers and staff once I you know leveled out of that to the turnaround business I would do all the ads and do all the creative and check the metrics in the morning and then the afternoons I would touch base with that the sales team, touch base with the managers, all that kind of stuff. Once we transition to gym launch, I would do all of my heavy creative work in the morning, and then I would do all my meetings in the afternoons. And that's what I did for the first decade. So that obviously worked. I now have one more wrinkle on top of that, which has made it even better and even stronger for me. I would wake up four or five-ish in the morning, and I would start working back then. I started working at five or six. I think now I work probably like, I probably shifted my schedule about an hour later.

And I think it's because we go out more, we're up a little bit later, which net has actually been beneficial for me. But I would work from 5 o'clock-ish in the morning until 1. And so I had eight hours. Like I had a full work day before I would actually start working. And so I got to do all the stuff that I as an individual contributor could do. And then I could go into leader mode and do, okay, what do I need to be informed about? What do I need to be consulted for? What am I holding other people accountable for? And then what am I responsible for? Right. And so that's my, the second and a half of my day, and it would start at one. So my team always knew one o'clock is when he'll start his meetings, and so they would

start booking them. So here's the hack. Is that recently, and Layla suggested this. All right, so kudos to Layla. And she was like, hey, why don't we start booking Alex back to front? So meaning, instead of saying start booking him at one for his appointments, what would end end up happening is, let's say there's a day I booked out from one until like 3.30 or four. Well, it's like, now I still have this gap in between then and dinner that's not large enough

that I can really do a ton of stuff. and I'm probably not going to get back into deep work for like 90 minutes, which you could. I just don't. And so we now say, okay, when is the end of the day for him? Which let's say Layla and are going to go do our walk and then we'll go to dinner at, you know, whatever, six or seven. I'm not saying that's when we do it, but I'm just saying if I were going to do that. I have my end of day cut off.

And then we say, okay, well, he has three meetings. And so they're all 30 minutes. And so that means that the first meeting is 430, next is 5, next is 530. And that means that from 5 a.m. until 4.30, I have nothing on my calendar. And so with that, I have all the time to go really deep on stuff like this, writing the book, dealing with a complex model that I need to build out for an investment or whatever. And that has now taken what was already a great strategy for me and just expand it even more because now my total utilization per unit of time has gone up even more.

Because now basically from the moment I wake up until the moment Layla and I both stop working, I am fully optimized for work. And so you might not be able to set up your schedule like that. I am sharing how I have scheduled myself, and you might be able to take pieces of it to apply it to your life, and then maybe in time get to the point where you can have a little bit more control of your calendar where people will cater themselves to your times. The other thing I do is that I give myself permission to demand how I want to be communicated with.

And what that means for me is I really dislike video and audio messages. And so, by the way, Moses Nation, please don't send me audio messages, I'll never listen to them. And the reason for that is because audio and video are convenient for the sender and inconvenient for the receiver. And so what happens is people click record and then they decide and figure out what they're trying to say while they're saying it. What I would like people to do, out of respect for my time, is that you think about what you're going to say ahead of time and then you send me the bullets. Because if I can, and this is, if you've ever respond, if you've ever seen me respond to anything, that's video or audio, I just say, send bullets.

And then usually you can take a three minute waste of time and put it into three things or like just wanted to invite you to my podcast. And then I'd be like, cool, I can do it or I'm busy or I can't do it or whatever. And that allowed me to make quick decisions and not take three minutes to listen to somebody, not decide what they actually wanted to say. And everybody on my team, especially on the company side,

knows that I don't want to communicate via audio. Now, the most convenient method to communicate is that you send audio and you receive bullets because it's convenient for you. But I, out of respect for everybody else, I send bullets and I receive bullets because I also, I hate inefficient communication. And I would rather be very deliberate about what I'm saying and say fewer things that get the point across, which is why if you've ever seen my books and all the stuff that I have out there, it's like I want to compress as much information into the smallest package as possible

at the lowest grade reading level so that I have the highest highest. comprehension from the person I'm trying to send this to. And so that is one of the things that I've done to save myself time and also teach people around me how to communicate with me most effectively. And I think that it's not about what I do. It's about if you have certain like SOPs or standard operating procedures that you know you're like, you know what? I hate it when people do this or hate it with people do this. Then if you own a business or even if you don't own a business, you can say, hey, if you don't own it, say, hey, I'll communicate whatever way you want. Just so you know, I'm more of an audio learner or I'm more of a visual learner. I'm more

more of a reader. It helps me to do this because I end up just translating what you have. I will absolutely do that if you want me to. But if you have no preference, it would mean the world to me if. And that way you can train teammates, train even superiors to communicate with you in a way that you're most effective. And so like, this is just so I can help you more. Time Management tip, number five, double dipping time. And what I mean by that is I like, I think they call it net time, which is like no extra time. There's different ways of saying it. But basically, where you can get multiple things done at the same time effectively. And so an easy example is like, I like doing meals with people that I work with because I have to eat anyways. And so if I can eat with them,

then we get to like build rapport. I get to answer questions. I get to educate, talk more about the vision, understand what's going on in their departments while we both have to eat either way, right? Just like a very simple thing. So I think to myself, like, what are all the things that I have to do no matter what? And is there a way that I can do them with other people or do them in a way that I can leverage it to get more out of it. And so a different example would be like, okay, I can work out with my team. And that gives me three things. One is that like, I get my workout in. Two, I get to spend time with them. And number three, I can capture to make content. And so like the more opportunities I have that I can double dip or triple dip on time, I just get no extra time. I get more for the

time I put in, which means that it is leverage. Like, I put the same input in and I get more output. Time management tip number six is how to create new habits. So there's, there's a, was so much more research that I could possibly handle in one little quick thing, but I'll just give you two little tips. One is making it as easy as possible to do. And so what that is for me is that I don't try and create new habits. I try and daisy chain it onto an existing habit. And so when I was teaching people to like start taking supplements when I was selling prestige labs for a supplement company of the gyms, what I would do is I'd say, hey, I need you to take this in the morning. What do you do first thing you wake up? And some ways would be like, I wash you.

my face. Some people would be like, I drink coffee, whatever it was. I'd be like, okay. So what I want you to do is like, do you have like a face wash you put in the morning? They're like, yeah. I'm like, I want you to take your AM pills and put it right next to it. All right. Now I take a piece of tape. I stick it on top and I'd write two. You'd be like, okay, do you always take two of these in the morning? And then I was like, okay, do you always drive the same car to the gym. And they might say yes. And I'd be like, okay. So what I want you to do is I want you to have your pre, your intro, and your post in the car. Leave it in the car. Why? Because you're always going to have it with you when to go to the gym. And so that way, like, you won't forget it because it'll literally be with you.

And they're like, oh, okay, cool, got it. And I was like, okay, what do you do at night? And it's like, well, I brush my teeth before I go to bed. It's like, okay, well, then I want you to take three of these and put it right next to your toothpaste. Like, right before you put the water on to wet your toothbrush. I was like, put a cup in, take the pills, swallow it, and then start brushing your teeth. So, like, I want to daisy chain the new things onto the old things. And it's much easier to start new habits that way because you're not actually starting new habits.

You're just continuing habits you already have. And when you do it, that way, you actually, the habit itself hopefully should reward you over time and then it becomes self-reinforcing. And so the tip number two is like, is there a way that I can create a reward for doing this, right? So for me, I've, I've always been a random teeth brusher, like I brush them throughout the day or whenever I like remember it. And I was like, I really want to do this at the same time every day. And I've, I struggled with. I told you about the sunscreen thing earlier. And so I actually heard a comedian, Jim Jeffries, talk about how he peas and brushes

teeth at the same time at night. Right. And so I was like, like, you know what? I pee every night no matter what before I go to bed. I was like, I'll just brush my teeth when I do that. And so I was like, I'm already going to the bathroom. And so all I did was just daisy chain in brushing my teeth and it was no extra time because I'm sitting there peeing anyways. And so I got to brush my teeth at the same time. That may seem graphic, but whatever. I try and think, how long are the things that I take to do that I do no matter what and how many other things can I tuck into those activities? And that has been one of the easier ways for me to change behaviors or add new behaviors in that I wasn't doing before.