The Game with Alex Hormozi - How I Handle Bad Things From Happening | Ep 435

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Sometimes, a change in perspective can alter how you live your life. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how we should manage the circumstances or the conditions that come to us, the three different scenarios that he uses to create and destroy meaning in his own life, and how changing your perspective dictates the way you play the game. 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:(1:41) - Unlearn interpretations, use time and volume as tools for judgment.(2:52) - View circumstances like weather; embrace both sunny and rainy days.(3:54) - Time perspective: Assess future impact, relieve present pressure.(8:00) - Avoid inflating micro importance; be aware of meaning levers.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

For me, I've relieved a lot of the pressure in my life so that I could make better decisions by zooming way out and thinking 10,000 years from now, will this matter? And then if I can make the decision of like good or bad, based on my new context that I created, then I can live a life a lot easier. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building Acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with

us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share. When you're building a business or you're building your career, there are stressors that come into play, right? And how we manage the circumstances or the conditions that come to us dictates how our life turns out, right? Like, everybody has bad stuff happen. And I say that as a pause because you probably believed and nodded your head like, yeah, everybody has bad stuff happen. But that's not true. Everyone has stuff happen.

And then we choose to make it bad or good. And so I'll tell you a quick backstory and then I'll tell you how I deal with it. So imagine for a second, two children that are playing. And then one child tells the other child, your nose is really big or you're fat. And what's interesting is that the child who hears it is unaffected and the child who says it is unaffected. They're like, you're fat. And he's like, huh. Two people communicate.

Parent comes in and overhears it. And she's like, oh my God, takes the child that was called fat, comforts them. gives them the expectation that they should be upset, and then tells the other one that that was bad. And in a moment, there was something that is now traumatic that otherwise wouldn't have been, because the adult tells both of those children that that was bad. And so when we're kids, we walk into the world with no meaning.

All we do is we observe. And then we say, what does that mean? What does that mean? And then whatever the adults around us tell us and say, this means that, we take as fact. And it's not true. It's their interpretation of the world, and we inherit those. And then we spend the rest of our life trying to undo these and examine these beliefs that we have been told by people that we probably don't agree with.

And so it's hard to track back every single thing you've ever been told means, but you can just on an exception basis when something bothers you, pull it out and look at it and say, what happened and why is this bad? What if it were good? And what would it look like if it were good? And so the two tools that I use for this are, are time and volume. And so the volume example is thinking, okay, I'm in traffic. If this happened every day, would I be upset? If it happened every day, I'd probably expect it, which means that I would not be upset about it because it's just how things always are.

And so if every time every person got into a car, it always took 30 minutes to get somewhere, then that's just how driving a car is. And so then our expectation meets reality, or if you want to make it positive, you say, well, what if every time I got in a car, normally it would take an hour, and today it took 30? I'd be pretty excited about it. And so all we did is just change the volume on the circumstance to recalibrate the meaning

that we're choosing to ascribe to it, good or bad. And so I like to think of circumstances a lot like weather, which is like you've got sunny days and you've got rainy days. And the problem, in my opinion, is that people, any day that it rains, they say is bad. and any day that's sunny they say is good, when in reality it just is. It's just the weather. And you need both. And if it was only sunny every day, you wouldn't be happy about the sun because it's just how it always is. And so contrast is what creates the quote, good and bad when reality there's just a middle line and half of it's above and half of it's below. And so if we know that, then what we can do is

artificially move the line in our minds by saying whatever this circumstance is, what would it look like if it were worse, and what would it look like if it were worse all the time? And then now, how would I look at my current circumstance? And would it be better now as a result if it were always worse than it is today? And if so, then maybe today's a good thing, right? The second frame that I like to use is time, right? Which is if I go not just 100 years out, but 10,000 years out, how much is this going to matter? Right. And so a good example of that is like if you're looking at the reason something affects you is because you have deemed it meaningful. You've said it matters, right? And it's my worldview that nothing matters with a capital M, like nothing matters in the universe,

right? There's one little pebble and a big thing of sand inside of lots of things of sand, inside of lots of things of sand, 14 billion years, whatever, right? It doesn't matter. And the easiest story that I saw about this, I can remember the writer's name, but there's this statue of a head that's in the sands of Egypt. All right? And it's bigger than this whole room. And it's just the head. And it's worn out. And then inscripted along the forehead was, it was that it was a tombstone. It says, here lies, crazy name, whatever. Here lies crazy name, who owned everything that the eye could see, the immortal so and so. And the only thing that was left was a worn out statue head that no one knew who he was. And it was 5,000 years old. And so if that guy who ruled the known world,

to him, wealth probably mattered, right? But does it matter? No, probably not. And so for me, I've relieved a lot of the pressure in my life so that I could make better decisions by zooming way out and thinking 10,000 years from now, will this matter? And then if the answer is no, does it matter to me? And then if I can make the decision of like good or bad, based on my new context that I created, then I can live a life a lot easier. And so for me, that helped me decrease anxiety. It helped me decrease, you know, sadness around certain circumstances. And I'll give you the last example of this. So I had a cat named Bill, chill Bill, rest in peace. Homie, love the cat, really like the cat. And he died, it's like some freak heart thing or something. So he died in like two

years. And he was a cute little cat, really nice dude. Anyways, when he died, I was bumped. I was like, this sucks. But then I thought to myself, what if cats only normally lived six months? How stoked would I be that he lived four times the normal length of a normal cat? I was like, I'd probably be really stuck. I'd be like, dude, he lived a long life. I can't believe we had him this long. And all of a sudden, my perspective around the death completely changed. I was like, I was so grateful that I got to have him as long as I did. Hey, guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon called $100 million offers at 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 1,000 hours into writing that book. And it's my biggest give to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to get 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. When you play with time and you play with volume, how regular is this? Could it be worse? What if worse was normal and this is what today was? Well, then that's the example of the cat or the traffic. Then all of a sudden you can make your current context much easier to deal with or even positive, even though you thought of it is negative because you ascribe a different meaning to it. And then if we think about this on a

very long time horizon, we think that none of it's really going to matter because in 500 million years, the sun is going to expand enough and engulf the earth. And so it won't matter. Like literally everything that you do here is going to get engulfed by the sun. And it'll only, quote, matter if we expand to the other, you know, universes. Now imagine that you invented something that changes humanity. Like the guy who found fire. Good dude. We appreciate him. But you know what? None of us know his name. Did it matter? For us? Sure. Does it matter? that that was his name and he was the guy? Probably not. When you look at your towns that you live in and you see like Henderson and Jacksonville, right, these guys were big deals and named cities after

themselves, and we barely know them. And you probably have areas in your city that you would aspire to have a street named after you, right, or an entire county named after you, Clark County, right? But no one knows who Clark. I don't know Clark is, right? I live here. And so I think a lot of times we inflate the micro-importance of things when in reality they aren't important at all, and we just choose to make them meaningful. First off, we have to be aware of the levers of meaning that exist, and then once you're aware of them, you can start moving them in your favor, and then looking at your current conditions through different lenses and say, what would this mean if it were amazing? What would the conditions have to be in order for this to be an awesome thing? And then all of a sudden,

you just exit the game of Happy, Sad, and get to be your own game maker. At least that's what I try to do when I get upset. Look at it, pull it apart thing. Like, is this real? Is this true? And then go from there. I get asked about mindset a lot on podcast. They're like, you have a unique view of the world, Alex. And to me, it's weird because it's just how I see the world. And so I don't, to me, it doesn't feel unique. It feels like how it is to me in general. And so I have trouble sometimes articulating it because to me, I expect that everyone else is thinking that way when sometimes I was surprised that they weren't. And so the first time this came out was on the ice coffee hour podcast where they talked about just different views I had on things, which apparently were

contrarian, which I didn't know. And so it generated a lot of kind of press and media around it. And so my team said, hey, do you think you could make a video just specifically around meaning since you talk about it so much with us? And so this, although short, is my best attempt to give you three different scenarios that I use to create and destroy meaning in my own life that helped me decrease my stress, decrease the emotional affect I have to circumstances so that I can make better decisions in my life. And so I think the reason that people struggle with this a lot is because they try to control the uncontrollable. They ascribe their feelings to things that they are reactive to, which means if this, so they create these equations for themselves. If this happens, I'll be

angry. If this happens, I'll be upset. If this happens, I'll be stressed. And so their life is just a series of piano keys that are being played on their emotions and they have no control. Whereas if you can flip the script and make it so that you are the one who writes what that equation is, then you can change what the keys mean. So even though it's high on the keyboard over here, it turns out low over here when you hear it because you're the one who's setting what that key means rather than taking whatever the external circumstances. So if people have to treat you a certain way for you to be happy, then it means that your happiness is in their hands. If you have to have a job raise or amount of income every month that you have to make in order to be fulfilled, then you set up circumstances for yourself to not be fulfilled. And so we want to make, at least in my opinion, the feelings that we have, we want to derive them off of circumstances that we can control. And then what happens is then you create the shell around yourself, not realistically, but because internally is where your emotions are being generated.

Now, is anyone doing this perfectly? No. But simply being aware of the fact that these piano keys are being played, but we are the ones who get to assign what the sound is internally, gives you a lot more control over your own perception of life and the conditions that are presented to you.