The Game with Alex Hormozi - How to Identify How Wealthy Someone is Going to Be | Ep 622

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

“You can tell how wealthy someone is by their perspective on time.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the difference between the mindset of rich dads and poor dads regarding higher leverage opportunities. He also explores the importance of measuring sticks in terms of money and time, and how aligning oneself with individuals who have larger units of measurement can lead to success.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:(1:45) - Hang around people with bigger units of measurement for money(3:23) - Identify the unit of measurement people use for money(4:38) - Wealthy people act faster and utilize time better(6:36) - Switch from end of week to end of day as default(7:41) - Impulse control and self-restraint are key drivers of successFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was May 26, 2022)

The difference between rich dads and poor dads and what they teach their kids is that rich dads in general will teach their kids to go after higher leverage opportunities. They'll go after opportunities that have bigger base units of measurement, bigger base units of money that they can compile together. 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 going to give you two ways to identify how wealthy someone else is going to be in the future

and how you can align yourself with those individual character traits. This came from a conversation that I was having with a good friend of mine. He exited his company for like half, just under half a billion. And we were just having like a philosophical conversation around, you know, what is it that makes people successful and what are kind of the things that you can identify early or mindset shifts in terms of perspective that allow people to have an unfair advantage? And so it, you know, if you followed any of my stuff, I talk a lot about time. I talk a lot about money.

And so it's unsurprising that the two traits have to do one with time and the other with money. And so one of the things that's interesting about this is the concept of measuring sticks. And so a lot of us have these base units that we measure things in. And it's kind of like shorthand that you use in your brain. And so I'll give you a simple example. So when I was in high school, I used to measure, you know, how much money something was by the amount of Tripoli burritos I could buy. And because I used Chipotle Britos because it was an understandable, like, quantity of value for me. And so everything was like, how many Chipotle burritos is this?

And that was because that was like the amount of money that I was making. And that was a material amount of value for me at the time. And so one of obviously the measuring sticks that people use is in money. And so the bigger, the people that you hang around with, the bigger the unit of money that they will measure things in in terms of like base units. And so you, over time, you want to increase what that base unit looks like. So you want to start measuring things like how many 10K units there are, how many cars is this, how many houses is this, right? And even just the amount of money itself, how many 10Ks, how many 100Ks, how many millions

there is. And just as an aside here, in Wall Street, in the hedge fund world, they have a term that I learned probably a couple years ago, which is a stick, right? And a stick is their measuring unit, which is a million dollars. So they're like, yeah, give them a stick or, put two sticks in. And they say that because they have these measuring units that are significantly bigger than most people can fathom or imagine, but because our brains think in units. And so if you can hang around people whose base unit of measurement around money is far greater than yours, then you

will start chunking up and thinking about money in those greater terms. And all of a sudden, for example, let's say your base unit of money is $100,000 or $10,000 even, then it makes it much less likely for you to go participate in an activity, right, that's going to generate you $100 or $1,000 because it's not even a full unit of measurement. So it's like almost why bother? And what happens in the difference between rich dads and poor dads and what they teach their kids is that rich dads in general will teach their kids to go after higher leverage opportunities. They'll go after opportunities that have bigger base units of measurement, bigger base units of money that they can compile together, right? And so the first thing you can do,

in terms of identifying in other people and then also within yourself is what unit of measurement do they use? Are they using Chipotle burritos, right? Are they using $1,000 units? Are they using $10,000 units? Are they using million dollars units? So the bigger the unit of measurement they're using for money, likely the wealthier they are and the wealthier they become because they only will participate in activities that can be measured in those units. So that's number one. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth.

And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur. Number two is measurements around time.

And this has an interesting kind of like part A and part B to it. So part A is that they, on a micro scale, day to day, they're going to act faster. They're going to be better utilizers of their time in general. And then on the macro side, and this is like to go back to iron out the first point, on the micro side, it's just about speed. It's about execution speed. If you start interacting with somebody and their speed of communication is rapid in terms of their turnaround time, in terms of when they communicate with you, in terms of how they respond to things, you can be sure that that person is far more active. And I'll give you a reason for why.

why people move forward so much faster in life when they have that trait. So imagine you're trying to get something done, right? And let's say that you message someone and then, you know, they wait a day and they message you back and then you wait a day and you message them back. And then let's say it takes five interactions like this to get this project done. So that would be 10 days. Like you one day, then one day five times, right? And so that would be 10 days.

Now imagine a different scenario where you have two people who are wealthier in terms of how they manage their time, right, how they leverage their time. And they're able to have that entire exchange within a matter of 30 minutes, right? And now, if you look at the difference between a 30 minutes and 10 days, it dramatically compresses the time to achieve the result. And then this is where it gets interesting. Now, after that 30 minutes, let's say they do that again and again and again and again. In a very real way, they will have accomplished more literally in a day than other people will try and accomplish in a month or more, right? And this is how you compress time. and you can drag your future into the present by increasing the speed with which you take action

and you communicate with other people. All right. So that is the part A micro for time. Now, part B of time is macro. And so this is an important one when it comes to measuring sticks. And also, again, with the measuring sticks on the first one, because I really just want to drive this point home. I made a video about this, but it's the idea of switching from end of week being your default to switching to end of day or right now being your default. So how can I just make the default in my company end of day? Like if no one says anything, it has to be done by end of day, right? Or how can I say that my new default is by four hours from now? Right. And so that becomes your new micro measuring step in terms of how quickly you can get things done and reply and move things forward, et cetera. So you

want to do with people who have very condensed micro push things forward in terms of their activities and how they see things getting done. On the macro's perspective, it's when people, it's when people are talking about decades and not days, right? And so you can tell how wealthy someone is by their perspective on time in terms of how long they're willing to wait to see something through. And so this is kind of like a very extrapolated version of the marshmallow test. If you've never heard of that, it's a pretty famous test where they have two kids and they said, hey, you can have a marshmallow now or I can give you two marshmallows in a few minutes. And the kids who said, I want the marshmallow now and couldn't use the self-restrain or self-control were significantly less well

less successful later in their lives compared to the kids who could wait for the second marshmallow. And if you wanted to add an interesting wrinkle to this, you could actually ask, you could make the marshmallow even further out. What about if the marshmallow was in five hours? What if the marshmallow was the two marshmallows were tomorrow? What if the two marshmallows were a week from now? What if the two marshmallows were a year from now? Right. And I can guarantee that the person who had the furthest out date of when they were willing to restrain themselves would be significantly more successful. And that is because impulse control or self-restraint is one of the key drivers of success because you can see where you're trying to go. And it takes from a macro perspective a long

time to build amazing things, right? Rome wasn't built in the day, which is a quote that is said all the time that people don't actually live by it. And so if you surround yourself with people who use measuring sticks of money that are significantly larger than yours, they have microunits of time that are significantly shorter than yours. They get things done faster. They communicate faster. They move things forward faster, right? And then in terms of how they measure the goals that they want to achieve in their life, they measure in decades instead of days or weeks or months, if you surround yourself and you give yourself those three, which is two with, you know, two with two micros, the lens is to see other people and then also to judge yourself, you will be significantly better off and you

will move far more rapidly towards the goals that you want to achieve.