The Game with Alex Hormozi - How I Gamed The GMAT And Scored 20pts ABOVE Harvard's Midscore AND Gained 35lbs of Muscle & put 100lbs on My Bench in 6 Weeks: how you can use this process to get whatever goal you desire | Ep 104

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

Even the smallest improvement can make a big difference. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses how to achieve success in various areas, including gaining muscle and acing the GMAT. He stresses the importance of intense effort and the placebo effect and shares strategies for achieving goals.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:(1:50) - Achieving 740 on GMAT(3:30) - Diminishing returns for training and test prep(9:09) - Difference between maintaining and growing a business(12:52) - Business growth and physiological change(14:23) - Relationship between effort and achievement(17:23) - Maximizing business growth through volume and efficiencyFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

The inspiration for today's podcast slash video is a conversation I was having with Dr. Kashi about a post that made in his group. And whether you aren't in his group, Dr. Kachachis is awesome. He's super Ph.D. Brilliant. World record holder, all that stuff. And he was talking about how a lot of people physiologically don't know the difference between maintenance and doing what they need to do to massively gain muscle.

right and so he's like the difference between the stimulus necessary in order to grow and adapt versus just maintain are dramatically different and so like the amount of the amount of effort you need to put into maintaining muscle is so much less than what you need to do to gain muscle that most people see this huge gap and so it got me thinking because the the article that I posted inside of the inside of the group was an article about how I gained 35 pounds in six weeks and how I put 100 pounds on my bench in that same period. And it was kind of by thinking through the framework that I want to share with you, which is I used the exact same framework to game the GMAT at Harvard.

And so I wanted to get into Harvard at a certain point in my life for their MBA program. And so I took the GMAT and I think I got a six something on it, like the first time. And I was like, oh, crap. I don't like in there. And like the average score to get in was 7.20. And so I was like, man, how might get? And that's like a 99th percent, you know, percentile in order to do that. And I was like, man, what am I going to do here?

And so the process is basically that I went through was trying to figure out what is the input output ratio or response that you need to figure out within any goal that you have. And then once you've established what that formula is, you just go all into it, right? And so for the GMAT, I found this graph when I was researching people who had high scores and like what things they were doing. And it turned out that I saw this graph and it had a linear relationship between number of problems done, practice problems done, and score on the GMAT. So it was linear. So the more problems you did in practice, the better your score was. And I was like, this is awesome because this means that all I have to do is put as much into this side.

and then I'll get that side to go up. And so what I ended up doing was I had 16 weeks, and so I bought 16 phone books of problems. So for those of you ever took the SCT or the ACT, those books are like this, right? And it's just problems. And so I did one book a week for the 16 weeks. It would take about 30 hours a book.

I would do four hours a day during the week, and then I would do five or six on Saturdays and Sundays of straight problems. And I would do one test every week, which a live test is like three hours. And so I just made it my full-time job besides my full-time job, right? And then, lo and behold, 16 weeks later, I scored a 740, which is 20 points above Harvard's hit Harvard's midscore. And so people hear that.

They're like, oh, Alex must be super smart. But it's like, I mean, like if everyone saw what went into it, they probably wouldn't say that. You know what I mean? It was just like a herculean amount of effort. And so the same thing with the muscle thing, right? Is I put 35 pounds on. I put 100 pounds on my bench.

And everyone's like, man, Alex is genetic. are awesome. And I purposely preach the fact that my genetics are awesome because I want to reinforce that in myself because I want to believe that I get more out of my output than anyone. And I believe in the placebo effect and I want to feed into that as much as I possibly can. But I was really small for the first 10 years of my training. I was a powerlifter. I broke a few state records at 181 in Maryland. But 181 pounds. I'm 5.11 and a half. I was not jacked. You know what I mean? Like I looked like I barely worked out. I'm 2.30 now.

what it took was a friend of my Greg Knuckles talking to me and saying, hey man, and I really trusted Greg. And I knew, I mean, I felt like I knew a lot about training at that point. I had a couple state records. I felt like I was pretty strong. But Greg was much stronger than I was.

And I was like, huh? And Greg's also one of the probably three people in my life I've met who I thought was like a true genius. And Greg was like, it's basically impossible for you to overtrain. He's like, you can't physiologically do it. He's like, it's just not practically possible for most humans.

And I was like, really? And he was like, yeah. He was like, so pretty much the more volume you do, the more muscle you'll gain. There are diminishing returns, but you still get returns. Right. And so it was just like the math problem or the problems with the GMAT, which was I continued to get better as I did more problems. Obviously, the difference between my week one and week two score was the biggest difference I had because I just learned how to take the test and pace and all that kind of stuff. You know what I mean?

And week two and three had another good game. But the difference between week 15 and 16, I might have only gained five points or 10 points on the test, but it was still a gain, right? And so, like, people who are Olympians do their, you know, fight their entire lives for diminishing returns. There's still returns. And despite the fact that they're diminishing returns, sometimes the actual reward for the diminishing returns is the opposite. It's exponential. And so you get these diminishing returns, but the reward is opposite. because for every inkling that you get,

you might be moving forward by a huge percentile in terms of where you sit on the track with everyone else. And the last margin, the last decimal, that moves you from number two to number one in the world has some of the biggest returns. But it's the smallest actual returns from a performance standpoint. So just something to think about. But what I did with the Harvard GMAT score,

I mean, 16 books. Like this is what, I'm trying to use my hands here, But this is four books. I did four times this in the 16 weeks to prepare for the test, right? It's a lot plus a test every week that I did on top of that. For the muscle thing, as soon as Greg told me that I basically couldn't over train, my new objective was to get my body to essentially believe it was under attack. And so I wanted to put it in this huge state of stress, right, where it was forced to adapt,

right? Like it was either going to adapt or break, right? And there's this fine line between the two of those that I tried to walk. Right. And so he basically was like, volume is the main driver. So like, because I was a power lifter by trade. And so I always wanted to go high intensity with everything. But he's like in terms of the like, you just have to be at 65 plus percent of your max for like the sets to count more or less.

He's like and pretty much if you're above there, you're good. And so try and just do as much volume as you possibly can at those weights. And so I started just doing seven sets of 20 every day with bands on the leg press. And then 42 days later, which was really was 42 workouts later, I gained more muscle than anyone even thought possible. Muscle and Fentness picked up the article and was like, they made it. It had like 1,200 shares. And I did it without gear.

You guys can choose to believe that or not. But like at that point in my life, like I did it without gear. and I was lifetime natural. And so I massive amount of gains. And after that happened for me, that dramatically shifted how I trained for the rest of my life because I saw what was possible in a short period of time if you literally put your body into this environment

where it's forced to adapt. Because I wanted my body to think that its job, like my new life was just lifting weights every day. And I was like, I figure if I made my body think that I was lifting weights every single day for my job, it will grow and it will look like its job is to lift weights every single day for its life, right? And so to tie this into why this might be useful for you is that when Trevor and I were talking about this, a lot of the gym lords decided to hop on because I challenged all of our gym lords between now and the summit.

I was like, just train like I did between now and the summit, which is like 30 days. I was like train every single muscle every single day. And it took me about three hours to do this. I was like train every single muscle every single day and do it pretty much. to failure and then you'll come back tomorrow and do it again and come back the next day and do it again because what happens is your body's like oh shit i need to adapt i need to grow because the stimulus is greater than what i have currently right and Trevor was like i wish people just knew what effort actually looked like um because and he was like myself included in that he wasn't saying that

it's like an armchair thing he's like i just wish people knew what effort looked like because the amount of effort that it takes to grow and break something so that it gets stronger versus maintain something is dramatically different from a physiological standpoint. And it got me thinking about the same thing with the GMAT that I did. I didn't think about it like that at the time. I just really wanted to get a good score. But the same thing with business is that a lot of times, the amount of effort that it takes to maintain a business,

first the amount of effort that it takes to grow a business are dramatically different, right? And so that's kind of the point of this whole video is that like for you to maintain your business, it doesn't need a lot of effort. Real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words so we can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast.

So the single thing that I ask you do is you can just leave a review. It'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. for you to grow your business, it's not going to be twice as much as your maintenance. It might be 10 times as much because the amount of effort that it takes to push something and break inertia and actually make changes. And that's both on yourself, psychologically, emotionally, et cetera, that you need to grow, right? And then also the business itself because downstream effects of how you have to move your entire team, motivate them, clearly communicate the goals, put new processes in place.

All these things take a lot of effort, right? And a lot of that effort is perceived as pain, right? Like it wasn't fun for me to do four hours of freaking test problems when I was, you know, 22 and I saw all my friends, you know, parting all the time because I actually left school a year early and so all my friends were like doing their senior, whatever, doing their senior year. And I saw these pictures of everyone like going out and enjoying themselves. And like, I wasn't. I was freaking taking the G-MAT.

You know what I mean? That's what my life was. And that's okay. You know what I mean? Because I learned a lot. And I ended up not even going to Harvard anyways, but I learned a really important lesson. When I went through that four months of four hours a day plus, was that like you can do whatever you want if you actually put enough work into it.

And I know that sounds really trite and over you, so I apologize. But like, I think a lot of times it's the degree of effort that most people miss. You know what I mean? And like the degree of sacrifice, the degree of pain that they have to go through. And it's like, well, this is what it takes me to do nothing. Well, if I just do more than that, I'll, grow, but a lot of times that's like, especially like even in lifting, it's the same thing. Like if you, if it takes you one workout a week for legs to maintain, sometimes two workouts

a week aren't really, isn't really going to push you and get your body in a state that it needs to grow, right? Like you have to break it down to the point where it's like fearing for its life and that's where adaptation starts happening because the stimulus is sufficient to cause change, right? And so it's the same thing with you and maybe the pain that you feel right now, I don't know who's watching this, but if you just had a really rough holiday season, I hope you didn't, but if you did, and you're like, I don't know what I'm going to do in January, if you have that feeling like, let it be the stimulus that forces you to grow.

And don't take it as a negative, take it as a positive, because maybe this is that moment that pushed you over the edge to get you to grow to do what you should be doing or that you have wanted to do, but you haven't had a stimulus that was strong enough. And just, like, be okay with the fact that feeling shitty might just be the precursor to getting you to feel good eventually, right? Like my knees right now, because I'm doing the, I challenge everyone to train like Alex, so I'm doing it too. Like right now my knees are achy as how, you know what I mean?

And every time I walk, like my knees are achy. It is not sustainable. But a lot of times the periods of growth that I've noticed in my life have not been steady. They haven't been like this. They've been spurts and plateaus, spurts and plateaus and it's been the same thing physiologically with muscle and fat loss.

my life that I usually, every year I only gain muscle for probably two periods of time that are very punctuated and then the rest of the time I'm pretty much maintaining, because I don't have the attention to put to it, right? And so I think it's the same thing with business is that you have these moments where you're like, you have, like, you clear your plate enough that you have enough attention to go all in on this one thing and then you have this huge, massive growth period and then it plateaus. And then you restabilize and you find the new maintenance of what, you know, the one time a week you need to do legs. I'm using the parallel between business and working out.

And then you can finally reestablish what that new formula is going to be. Insert the amount of problems that I need to do, my test score goes up. Insert the amount of volume that I do in training, I gain more muscle. Insert the amount of calls I make to reach out to leads, the more amount of money I make. There are these parallels, and I remember when I figured out that one, which the amount of outreach attempts I had with leads was directly portion much money I made. And I was like, huh, how about that? Right. Like, there are plenty of, like, the amount of sales conversations that I have is directly proportional to my closing percentage. There's tons of these parallels in business,

and a lot of us don't think, like, don't understand what volume really means. And so volume, like, you might think, like, well, if I sell, you know, five people a week, well, that might just be maintaining your sales skills, you might have to up to 30 people a week in order to really put a new stimulus on your brain and give it enough attention and enough reps and enough practice to actually achieve a new level of mastery for that skill. Same thing for reaching out of leads. Same thing for managing your team. Maybe like you need to have one-on-ones every single day with each of your team members, not just for them, but for you so that you become a better leader so that you become a better coach. Right? Like it's the same thing. And so

So trying to figure out the dose response relationships that exist in your life is like literally the key to unlocking whatever you want. And then being able to once you identify what the equation is, be okay with the sacrifice and what it costs to put the input in. And then the period of delay before you get the output. And so that was my Trevor and Alex conversation that had this morning was, he was like, I feel like a lot of people don't actually know what level of effort is necessary in order to achieve. the body or the muscle gains that they want and the amount of discomfort that they have to go through. And I say this not to brag, but I think mostly because I'm somewhat masochistic. And because I've been like, despite the fact that I'm kind of young, I've been training since I was 13. Like I had programming written out since I was 13.

And so people are like, man, you have so much muscles. Like, I'm training for 16 years. You know what I mean? And I've had a young man's body to be able to train with hopefully an old man's understanding of the game. And so it's been the balance between the two of those things, but virtually every time someone comes to train with me, and like Lila was a trainer and she was a high-level trainer before she came to start like, before she and I started dating. And I'm hopefully, you know, I don't get a jab in the ribs later for saying this, but Lila gained more muscle in the first 18 months of us being together than she had in the years of training before that. And she attributes it to the fact that like she just didn't know how much volume like people did. did. And I've had some gym lords fly out. I've had other people, other fitness people who have

ended up coming to like train with me and I don't do it to be special. It's just like this is what I'm used to now. But like I always invariably get the question like are we done yet? Are we going to move on to the next exercise because like we're like seven, eight sets into this one exercise and I'm like, oh we got three more and they're like really like actually? And I'm like yeah and then we're going to do the same thing for the next exercise and the same thing for the exercise after that. Because if like I want my back to grow, I need it to get to a point where it's going to like feel a stimulus that's sufficient in order to feel like it needs to adapt. And so, and then like the thing is it's not just doing that today, but coming back tomorrow when you're sore and tired and doing it again. And then coming up the next day and when you're sore and you're tired and doing it again.

And I think that that's what people lack from the hypertrophy standpoint. People like Alex always says great genetics. I don't know. I do a lot more volume than most people do, like period. Especially if you look at a weekly volume standpoint. Maybe one guy does a huge leg assault one day a week. I do the same assault seven days in a row. And so over the period of like 10 weeks, I literally did seven times the volume he did.

And all I ended up getting was maybe twice the gains. But in a world of diminishing returns, I still returned to more. You know what I mean? And so the same thing with sales, the same thing with running your team, the same thing with reaching out to leads. is like a lot of times the diminishing returns that we get are still returns, but the amount that you get from each of the returns, despite the fact that they are smaller, is disproportionate in the amount of gain that you get in terms of skill

and in terms of how much your business can grow. Because let's say you're running on a 15% margin. Industry average is 8 to 12 for gyms. If you can just squeeze an extra 20% out of all of the systems I just walked up through acquisition and retention, ascension, et cetera, right? And you can push your margin from 10% to 30%. You just tripled your business. And it seems like you're only squeezing out 20%.

But in reality, what that means, the business might mean a tripling of how much money you make. And that's the difference between the champions and the people who feel like they're working hard, but aren't actually. I hope it doesn't come off really arrogant. That's not my intention at all. It was just wanted to share a couple of things that have helped me. So anyways, guys, I hope you guys had an amazing Christmas, very restful, and I hope you guys are buckling up for the sprints between now and May that we all get to have with the wind in our sales. And still a frothy economy, despite the recession that is going to come, we still have a pretty frothy economy.

So you guys should be doubling down and pillaging and taking everything that you can between now and summertime. So buckle up, get your teams ready. and otherwise if you're still on here, drop a comment, drop a like, maybe it'll be useful for some of your trainers or maybe in that hard time or maybe you were in that hard time of like, okay, I've identified the input, but I haven't seen the output yet, and that's okay. It's part of the game.

And hopefully you enjoy the game because that's what it's all about anyways. So lots of love, guys. Have an amazing day and I'll catch you guys soon. Bye!