The Game with Alex Hormozi - How to Work | Ep 145

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

"Working is a skill.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the concept of work and the different levels of work ethic. He shares personal stories and examples of how individuals can learn to work more effectively and efficiently and ultimately succeed in their endeavors.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:(1:38) - How to identify those who will succeed?(4:35) - The four levels of work ethic.(8:27) - The more you work, the better you get.(10:09) - Train level ones to work better.(12:33) - Share your story to teach hard work.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Good morning, everyone. Happy Tuesday. Hope you have a terrific start to your Tuesday. I wanted to make this video because I had a conversation with Layla, the lovely Layla, about work today. So we're talking about not work as in the work that we need to do, but work as a concept in general. Things that we get done. And it went in an interesting direction, so I thought I'd bring it up for everyone here and maybe tag somebody who potentially identifies with one stage of the work that we'll go through. So we were talking about, about how, like, could we have a single predictor that we could look at, like one single stat that we could look at that would dictate how likely someone is to succeed with Jim launch over a long period of time, right? And so it's kind of like to the same, I'll back up before I get into the four stages. If you look at, let's say, the financial planning industry, like if you want to become a financial planner, to become a successful financial planner, they know the math. It takes $200 a day, and that's what you need to do.

And it takes three years for you to build enough of a book of business that after you, for three years you could live off of the wealth management side that you would have built up. During that first three years, you're selling insurance and you're getting single pops off the insurance to carry you over until that year three mark. Most people fail, it's like an 80% plus failure rate before the three year mark.

Now, is being a financial planner a scam? 80% of people plus don't make it. Is it a scam? Or do some people just not have it takes to be successful. It's a fair question, right? So the question for us is like, how can we figure out who is going to have what it takes to make it? And one of the interesting things about gym launch is that, and I've noticed this trend, people will come in, having owned a gym for six years, seven years, eight years, whatever it is, and then within

one year of working with us, at the end of that time, will either be successful, or say they've realized they're not sure they want to be in the gym business because what happens is up to that point the success is mysterious.

It's mystified. It's weird systems that you don't know about, right? But with gym launch, the success path is extremely well defined. Like, this is what you need to do, right?

And this is what you need to do consistently in order to achieve X. Right? And what happens is there's no longer a mystery of what it takes to win. And then it forces people to confront whether or not they want to do that. And so once they confront that, it's either a yes or a no. And if it's a yes, then they do it and then they succeed and then they have the business that they want, right?

Or it's a no. And then they realize that, oh my gosh, it's not that I don't know what to do anymore. I do know what to do. I just, I'm not sure if I want to do it. And that's a totally different question. But the nice thing is that I can promise you that by the end of the time you're with us, you will know exactly what it takes to be successful in the gym business, and that it is up to you of whether or not you want to do it. And so to circle back to the original thing that I was starting with was how do people work, right?

What's that one step? And Layla was bringing up that when she started working with me, she said, she was like, I didn't really know what hard work looks like. Like I worked a lot of hours, but I didn't understand what like hard work looked like. And so we always tell this story, but when she did her first gym watch with me, she was supposed to shout at me and kind of see how it worked and went out before she would do her own. And so it was one of the first days of the launch. And I was in the back, I think I was selling someone or I was making calls or I was doing something, right?

And she was supposed to be working the leads at that time. And so she spent two hours straight calling all the leads. And I don't remember how many leads we had at that point. And she came to the back and she was like, hey, you know, I'm done calling the leads. And she was like really proud of herself. And I was like, and she looked at me like, so I'm going to kind of like chill or And I was like, great, call him again. And she was like, what?

I was like, start at the top. Start over. And she was just like, really? And you could see like the joy just drained from her face because she was like, it became real for her in that moment. The reason that we were averaging, like the launches that she and I would do, we'd average 200 plus sales in 21 days, right? It was because the level of effort that went into doing the repeated tasks,

we just maxed out, right? And so what I wanted to work through is just like what I think are kind of the four different like levels of kind of work ethic, right? In the beginning, you don't even know how to work. You don't even understand the concept of how to work. You may have employees right now. There may be some people watching this who literally don't even get what it means to work hard.

They think they work hard, right? She said when she started, she was working a lot of personal training hours. And she thought she knew how to work hard. But just being somewhere and just existing is not hard, right? You show up. That's not difficult because you're forced to be there. What's hard work is where you don't have someone looking at you and you have shit that needs to get done that is not pleasant and sometimes as a repeatable effort that you have to keep doing. Right. That is where it becomes harder. That is where most people can't go from step one. to step two. I mean, I guess there's a step zero of like, you can't even show up places on time

because you're just that irresponsible. And sure, those people don't have jobs, right? Or can't hold a job and can't do basic work, right? But once you can be basically effective and go from like, I can not show up to I can show up on time and do a reasonable level of effort on something, now you're at like level one, right? Level two is that you learn how to work, like, and how to do repeatable tasks that are not mentally stimulating all the time so that you can achieve the desired outcome of which you have from a longer term standpoint. Then once you learn how to do hard work, you then learn how to become more efficient with your hard work, right? You learn that you work better at certain times and you can chunk your workout so that you can work those hard repeatable

tasks in chunked out windows because you know that when you get interrupted, your efficiency on both tasks goes down. Hey guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff. Sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways. You can check on my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free.

Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show. And so it's like level zero, you don't know how to do anything. Level one, you can, you're a basically, you know, contributing member of society who can hold down a job. level two you can you understand how to work hard right but you're like you can do it in spurts but you can't do consistently right level three you know how to chunk your time and work efficiently so that you can have these bursts multiple times per day so that you can get a lot more done right

once you reach level three there's no longer a more is better trade off all right once you reach there's no longer more is better trade-off. What happens then is you have to reverse the character traits that you had to build to get there and then start learning what you were going to stop doing. Because you now have the ability to work hard. You understand how to chunk your time and do concentrated efforts and burst throughout the day so that you can maximize your time. But then the question is, what are the things I am doing?

What dominoes am I choosing to push down? and are there dominoes that someone else could do? And what one to two things can I put all my bursted effort towards that will yield me the greatest returns, right? And so if you see people who advance faster than you in life, it's because they have moved through these series of work faster than you have, right? Or if you have employees who are less effective or more effective, it's usually because they don't know how to work.

They literally don't know. And so working is a skill. Like a lot of people talk about work ethic, like it's a character trait. when I think that almost everything is skills that are acquired, right? Because then it's something that's under your control, right? I mean, it is. And like, the more you work, the better you get at working, right? Like, I'd say you see people become workaholics because they get really good at it, right?

And you get better over time. But what you want to stay away from is being a workaholic rather than a resultaolic, right? Or performanceaholic of what's my output, right? What's my throughput? of what's actually getting pushed all the way through to the end zone, right? And so look at your team, and it might be, it might be helpful for you to be able to identify these things. Like, right now, you're a category one worker.

You went from zero to being able to show up on time and breathe. Congratulations. It's important. Some people can't do that. So, like, you deserve to be accolade, you know, praised for that. But for you to actually stay here, you need to go from level one to level two and understand that you need to be able to do things repeatedly that's, you know, that's, you know, and suck, right? It's not all fun in games. Making calls isn't fun, right? Waking up and doing all of

your sessions with a smile and energy is not fun. Being there is easy. Being there with intensity and intention is not, right? That's the difference. And so that's level two. Level three is you learn how to chunk the time so you can do multiple works like that throughout the day so you get lots of things done. And then level four is learning which of those things to do to maximize your effectiveness. So it goes from efficiency to effectiveness going from level three to level four. And that's way more learning what not to do, choosing what you're most interested in and excluding everything else from that so that you can knock the big dominoes down that give you disproportionate or outsized returns on your effort. So anyways, I hope that was up for you.

I hope maybe you have a trainer or somebody in your staff that's been on your mind and you're like, why does this person bother me? It's probably because they think that. they're a level three worker when they're really a level one worker. And for you, you can either get upset with them or you can give them the path of what they need to do to learn to work. Right. And a lot of times, I don't know if any of you have kids or you've, well, you've probably met a child before. So how about that? Or met a teenager. Maybe you remember yourself as a teenager or someone in college. For most of us who are on here, right, you're most people watching this or business owners, you probably remember a moment where you learned the difference of effort

of the work that you needed to do to succeed, right? Like, there was probably a moment where you realized that. And I think for me, it was when I was in college, I ended up having to pledge a fraternity. And what they made me do was I had to do three hours of studying every day. And I hadn't done that in high school. I did really well in high school because I just, I got by. just being quick enough. But in college, I couldn't get away with that.

And so they forced me to be in the library for three hours a day because they wanted to make sure all their pledges got good grades, so they wouldn't get in trouble with the school. But when I actually had to work for three hours, like it was timed, I had to be there for three hours and I had to work, they wouldn't let you not work. I was like, holy crap. And I started learning I could get ahead on my work.

I could read chapters ahead. I could take notes ahead. I can look at the next assignments that were coming up and get on top of things. And after I stopped the whole pledging, process, I realized how much time I had in my day because I only had to work three hours a day for pledging and I got the best grades I'd ever gotten at that point in college. And so then I realized, I was like, oh my God, there's nine other hours during the day that I wasn't doing anything with

before. And I was like, I'll bet you if I worked 12 hours a day, I would be unstoppable at school. And that was my epiphany. That was when I got out. I was like, I'm literally going to work and work out. And that is it. Like, that's all I'm going to do, right? Besides my social life that started at nine, right? But from nine to nine, everyone knew where I was was either at the gym, after the cafeteria, at the library. That was it. And so there's probably a moment that happened to you that you know that was when I learned how to work. That was when I went from a level one to a level two worker. I learned how to batch my work and push through it. Right. And so you may need to tell your story to the person who you were talking to or create an environment for them to have that

kind of aha moment where they learn what hard work looks like. So anyways, I hope you guys have an amazing day. Perfect Tuesday. Thanks for all the love. I see Nicole. I see Sean. See Matt, Joey, Rico, Krista. Have an amazing day, guys. Hope you guys are doing fantastic. Lots of love. All right. Bye.