The Game with Alex Hormozi - How to Rank Life Priorities When Everything Feels Important

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Get your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube   Most people let life design their priorities by default and wonder why they feel empty in the end. In this birthday episode, Alex gets unfiltered on the 10 life categories most people claim to care about and how to rank them. He explains why he believes optionality is overrated, and why every real win in life sits on the other side of commitment.  More Value: Book Your Spot at the 2-Day, Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas        Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle   Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured  Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/  Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi    Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training   DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

Today is a not so special day, but it is the day that I was born. And I'll read some stuff to piss some people off in the comments just to get things cracking. How's that sound? Don't say I never did anything for you. And so, yeah, let's begin with the tweet that has pissed everyone off. Your level of maturity is inversely correlated with how much you want other people to celebrate your birthday. I have never admired anyone who insisted his birthday was a big deal. And I want to be really clear.

I think celebrating other people's birthdays, absolutely. Honoring people for being alive, for making this far, all for it. I think the difference is when you demand everyone do it for you. I think that's where you get the, this is my birth week, this is my birth month, all that kind of stuff. And I think that is, I think that is the wrong direction on entitlement. My two cents, obviously, you know, it's all it's worth and you can take it for what it is. but on this not so special day one of my team texted me this thing which is my favorite text of the day

and he said today is the day Genghis Khan died and you were born quote from the Khan there is no good in anything until it is finished and I love that it's all about starting what you finish and so I'll read this to you because I've had a lot of deeper thoughts on my mind lately as I think you when you hit whatever deadlines you have tall, don't crack, endure, you can die tomorrow. Today you do the only thing you can do. You fight, you rage on, you do what you came to do, you finish what you started. Now matter how much it costs, how long it takes, or how much it hurts, because you said you would. Being cringes the tax you

pay when you start to prove to the world that you care more about what you want than how you look. One of the things that no one tells you about delayed gratification is that once you learn how to do it, you keep doing it until you die, and then what you delayed never happens. Your goals will become easier to accomplish when you become harder to distract. Whenever you get worried about not achieving your goals, just remember there's plenty of room at the top

because the majority of people are just whiny, overweight, in-dead little bitches. You'll blow past them so fast, it'll look like they're standing still, because they are. Be more dangerous than the forces that hope to destroy you. Make reality your bitch today. If you do not have courage, nothing else matters. So with that being said, as our premise for today, as we get cracking and lacin, I thought I would, I had this little video that put some notes together for you, that

thing might like. I think the goal of youth is optionality and the goal of adulthood is commitment. And these two things are at odds. And I think that at some point, you have to reconcile which one you are. Are you still stuck to your youth or have you decided to become an adult? An adult means you eliminate alternatives. You walk through one-way doors where you know you can't walk back. It's difficult to undo a marriage.

It's difficult to impossible, possible, but not really, to undo a child, right? There are some one-way doors, and I think that a lot of the best things in life come on the other side of commitments. And I think that we have a society that overemphasizes the value of optionality. And the reason that I said what I said earlier, which is that if you delayed a gratification, And optionality in a lot of ways is delaying gratification. It's this idea that I'll keep my options open. But the thing is, is that options only have value when they are exercised. And until you exercise them, they are valueless.

It's like dying at the end of your life as an ant that put a big pile of crumbs that you never ate. At some point, you have to pull the trigger. You have to make the call. You have to make the decision. You have to cut off one future. And so I think what's interesting is that when you make that decision, it means that you're going to decide that one thing is more important than another, which means that you also open yourself off for criticism, which I think a lot of people have a lot of difficulty with.

And so I want to give you 10 priorities, which make no sense at all, because priority, only recently in the English vernacular, was ever even used in the plural. Until about 1950, it was only priority. There's only one, because only one thing can come first, right? That's how it works. But here's our 10 things that most people say are incredibly important.

And so how do we make sense of them? So number one, we have community, giving back to your community. We have romance, marriage, your partner, we have parenting for your children we have family so to your siblings into your parents and your cousins etc we have recreation so having fun relaxing we have friends spending time etc we have your career your career aspirations professional aspirations your physical health you have your spiritual health and then you've got your personal growth and so that's ten different elements of life and if i were to ask you to prioritize them you will have a different priority than the person next to you

And so the reason this is really interesting is that if somebody looks at your list and it is different than theirs, they will call yours wrong because you do not live your life the way that they would prefer. And that is why they're fucking retarded. All right. Like we don't have to, like, we don't have to live according to anyone else's preferences. You have to follow the law. But besides that, you're pretty much free to do whatever you want. And we are so shackled by the idea that other people don't like what we're doing. It's like great. That's why they have their life to do what they want to do. with. And so what's interesting is that you get to pick your regrets or they will be chosen for you. Real. And so whenever you invest in any of those 10 things, you pull away from others, right? If you add an hour here, you take an hour from here. We have a zero-sum life when it comes to time, right? And I do have one interesting tactical strategy that has helped me navigate these. But I think the biggest one is just in understanding that you will live an imperfect life, period. Like, you cannot have a house by the mountains in isolation and then also be walking distance from restaurants and then also be on the beach and also be ski and ski out it doesn't work and you can't have a rich neighborhood if you want to be

in isolation now all of these things are okay to want it's just that they will not they literally sit in it they're they're conflicting they're conflicting priorities and so whenever you say and you make a decision in your life people will take the equal opposite extreme so if it's literally the the upset spouse, right? Your wife comes in and says, hey, do you look good in this dress? You say, yeah, you look great in this dress. She's like, oh, so I don't look good

whenever I'm not wearing this dress. That is what people will do to whatever decisions you made because they're too cowardly to make themselves. And I really mean this. Like, people are fucking cowards. They walk around afraid.

They don't want consequences. They don't want conflict because they think that other people's opinions about their lives matter more than their own. And it's ridiculous. you must make trades you have to make a trade and i love the definition of the word decadari because it's latin but the root of it means to cut off and it's just what what future are we cutting off today and i think that that is and i think as i'm you know i'm i'm at an annual little date for myself and so i look

back on on the last year and i think that your maturity level is directly related to the amount of commitments that you have made the number of people who rely on you and if those commitments are the elimination alternative it means that you've cashed in optionality right you've chosen to do things in lieu of others and so even if you were to divide your life into 12 hours per day so let's assume that you've got four hours for eating showering you know hygiene all the living right and let's say 12 hours is the hours that you can just be focused right on anything if you were to divide those we've got those 10 things that I outlined. If you were to give an hour and, you know, 10 minutes per day to each of those things, it's like, okay, you're an hour and 10 minutes to your career, an hour, 10 minutes to your

spirituality, an hour to 10 minutes to your family, an hour and 10 minutes to your kids, an hour and 10 minutes to your relaxation time, an hour and 10 minutes to your physical health, like you go through it and it's just like, I can't, I can't do it all. It's like, right, you have to make fucking trades. It's what it is. And so I'll just say as somebody who has, I would say, min-maxed to a degree on some of those traits, really helpful to just order them for yourself. Which of these is most important for you? And, and here's the, this is the one tactical tip I've got. This is, this is it.

This is my one tactical tip. Try to do things that check multiple boxes. So, for example, the reason that lifting with friends is so valuable to me is that I lift with people I work with who I'm also friends with. And so it checks off recreation. It checks off a degree of career growth. It checks off physical health. And so I get three or four boxes checked from this one activity.

And so I'm able to block more time with it. And there's probably some version of that for you that you can do for two or three things. And I'm not saying you're going to get it for everything. But every once in a while you can get lucky. And you can just do, you can check a few boxes with one action, right? No extra time. And so I think that's a big W. Now, I think that you will do the best that you can.

can to manage these things. And at the end of your life, you will think to yourself, it would have been nice to do these other things. But when you say that, you do that from the position of having already earned the benefit of your existing trade. And so what we want is the benefits of the trades that we did not make and the benefits of the ones that we did. And so we look at the benefits of a different priority being first and then saying, man, it would be nice if I was also hyper-spiritual. It would also be nice if I was in the best shape. It would also be nice if I had the best marriage. It would also be nice if I was a great parent. It would also be nice, et cetera, et cetera. But you can't, you can't trade everything in. And so basically, like, you get to pick your regrets. You get to pick the things that

you say were less important. Otherwise, they will be chosen for you. And I think what's really interesting is whenever I think this to this natural end, I think to myself, I am the problem. So let me explain. I think we always want what we can have. And I think this is an inherently human trait, right? Single people want to be married. Married people want to be single. People with no kids want kids, people who have kids want a night off. Employees want to start their own business someday. Employers are jealous of how their employees can clock out and not take their work home with them. There's just countless examples of whatever you don't have is what you want. Because right now, everyone who's listening to this, you have accomplished things that you said would make you happy.

Like there is something in your life right now that earlier on in your life you said, if I had this, I would be happy. And yet here we are. And so whenever I think this, I just think, like, I am the problem. Like, I am the constant. Like, the constant source of dissatisfaction is me. And it's just because we want it all. But you go to a store where there's 10 amazing shoes and each shoe is $100. And you have $100 in your wallet.

And in order to justify our decision, we make everyone else feel bad about buying a different set of shoes than us. when it was just a choice and I don't think there's anything wrong with that because a lot of people I think look at you know the life that we have which I think is you know super blessed et cetera but we've traded other things you know we've traded other things

and I think that if those things are more important to you than like good for you to the degree that you can possibly believe a stranger on the internet I mean this from the bottom of my heart if you like the priorities that you have then fuck you won you won you've already got it Like, you know, like you're there.

I think where people get in troubles where they allow life to make those priorities for them, right? They make the, they don't get to make the choices. They sit passively by and let options expire. And I think that's, if there's anything that I can hopefully, you know, transfer, it's, you can be your master of your own life to a degree. If you can just say, I'm willing to give up these other things for the things that I care about most. And so that's my, that's my two sentences. Take those 10 things, rank them 1 to 10, and then of those, see which one you think is off,

as in like, okay, I said this is number two, but I don't think I'm really putting number two out of 10 effort into this. And I'll tell you two for me. I think that I've been, I've been not as good of a husband as I probably should have been. I probably should have spent more time with Layla, and I'm going to prioritize doing that. and I've started to do that. And I think that I've, I have, I have a higher desire for friendship than I have in my current life.

Like I see friends sporadically, I would say outside of me like lifting, which is basically almost the entirety of the recreational, like, friend time that I have. I had a buddy of mine who was here for my birthday, which was awesome that Layla kind of surprised me with, which is super sweet of her. And those are very like filling to my soul. And I think that I'm going to,

make trades in the coming future where I'm going to decrease some of these other stats in order to make some room here where I think that the incremental return that I'll get on losing an hour on, call it career and adding an hour somewhere else, I will have a little bit less, but my overall life benefit will be higher. And so I think the meta of this is the game that you want to play. And so I'll give you an interesting story on this. So I can't remember the name of the founder, but he was on David Senra's podcast. and really smart guys.

I told him for like $10 billion, something like that. And he said, you always want to look for the most dominant game. And I was like, huh, that's a really interesting concept. He said, so for example, MySpace lost to Facebook because Facebook had a more dominant game that they were playing. And so MySpace, for example, wanted to get the most users. That was the game they were playing. That was the metric they were optimizing around.

Facebook was optimizing around monthly active users, MAU, which then became kind of like the social media norm in terms of what social you know social platforms were measured by but that one little misstep in terms of what metric they were optimizing around meant that facebook was literally playing a superior game and so in thinking about this concept of like there are there are subset superset games there are some games that even if you were just playing them you beat everyone else because the game that you're optimizing for is just a superior game and so i think that um i think this is entirely individual but if we look at those 10-kine categories that I outlined. So I'll repeat him again for those you were just joining. So the list is

this. You've got community. You've got romance slash partner, parenting for your kids. You've got your family. So siblings and your parents. You've got recreation and rest and fun. Friends, career, physical health, spiritual, and then personal growth. Those are kind of like 10 categories of living. And I think that some people make their entire game one of them. And I think the I think the larger game is trying to win it life and realizing that each of these are components of it. And I don't know if, and I think that you will have different. And when I say this prioritization thing,

like people also have a hard time allowing other people to change because it just makes them, it's just intellectually more work. And so it's like, how dare you change your mind in front of me? How dare you? Right. How dare you be really into your physical health and then decide that your kids are more important and so you don't work out as much.

Right. How dare you? And so I think that like people get upset because they're weak. Like people are pets, like people, people are so small-minded, self-interested. And the things they will say in no way have complete context in your life. And so it's like trying to listen to 100 people. that know two sentences about you. None of their opinions matter. Because the person has the most context on you is you. You're the only one who has to live with you. And I know obviously it's hard

because when we're kids, we're raised to listen to other people and shame has a very good place in society. You should feel bad if you do things that hurt people and like those things work for enforcing social rules. So it's this very odd, you know, dichotomy between, you know, it's good to have other people in the outside telling you, uh, hey, maybe you shouldn't be a fuckass. Um, but at the same time being able to differentiate between, call it, law-breaking activity and rule-breaking activity, what I see is very different. So we have legal laws, right, that have written out consequences, that we have discerned, like it or not, that you have to abide by to live in whatever area you're at, right? But then there's rule-breaking that's spoken and unspoken. And so many of you get different

cultures, different rules, your parents have different rules. And it's realizing that there are no consequences or the consequences that happen from those rules are not nearly as severe. years we think they are. And so the reason that I opened the book with offers with only three words, which is there are no rules. I guess that's four words. It's because it's always a reminder myself of like, what rules am I being weighed down by right now that I'm choosing, like what box am I living in that I'm unaware of that has invisible walls that is keeping me in? Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount

increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like? Like, what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it? And then what steps we actually took to graduate? And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this. And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com for it slash roadmap just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free