The Game with Alex Hormozi - I Followed an ANTI-ROUTINE that Made Me MILLIONS | Ep 395

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

No, no, and NO! Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how a simple change in mindset helped him follow an “anti-routine” and resulted in being more productive with his time, knowing his priorities, and getting millions! 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:(1:40) - Intro to how Alex started his "anti-routine"(3:12) - Remember, two things CAN'T be equally important. Start saying "NO".(7:14) - Alex used tactics to change his life, like changing his phone number.(10:19) - Setting priorities will guide you. Know them and say no.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Literally, when I looked at my schedule, half my day was like one-off calls that I was like, well, maybe this is an important thing. But you would be amazed at how much blank space appears in your calendar when you say no to everything. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. I'm going to walk through the exact anti-routine that took me from broke to taking home over seven figures a month in income, not revenue, and income by the way. time I was 28 years old. And that may sound totally unbelievable to you. That's okay. You can Google me. My name's Alex Romozy, a business investor, I own acquisition.com, which the portfolio of companies says about $85 million a year. And the reason I'm making this is because I see stuff

on the internet all the time of people talking about their million dollar routines, all the stuff. And all the guys that I know who are like me are like worth nine figures and up, don't do it that way. All right. And so I'm going to walk you through what people actually do and the things that I had to go through in those seasons of building that are not commonly talked about. All right. So what I want to do is actually walk you through the paradigm shift that happened in my life when I went from looking up bankruptcy lawyers to 18 months later, taking home over a million dollars a month when I was 27 years old. This is half a decade ago. But there was a very distinct process that happened that that transformed my life. And it did have to do with a routine, which is like the most fodder thing ever that most people ask me for which is like, hey, Alex, what's your routine? But what I'm going to do is break down to you why the questions that people are asking me. wrong because they're asking them the wrong way. So the first thing here is that most people have the assumption that when they say, hey, Alex, can you tell me your routines, can you tell me your rituals that you do every day? They think to themselves, there's something that Alex is doing that I am

not doing. And therefore, if I do those things, I will get that result. And I will tell you that you are wrong. And here's why. Most people, most champions do not have something that you do not have. They lack something that you have. For a champion in the physical, round a lot of times it's they don't have an off switch they just keep going you have an off switch it is your lack their lack of it which is what drives their success right and so to the same degree you probably do things every single day that you should not be doing and so what i want to introduce to you is a concept of the anti-routine as the most productive routine that is humanly possible for you to accomplish what you want and so during this 18-month period of time when i went from

almost bankrupt to taking home a million dollars a month when i was 27 years old was the following changes that ended up happening and mindset shifts. I'll walk through the mindset shifts and then I'll walk through the tactics that actually changed my life in a real way, the things that I stopped doing, rather than the things that I started doing, that ended up yielding the results that were outsized. All right. So number one is obviously just shifting the perspective of I need to do more things and I need to add more things to my routine when in fact you need to stop doing things that you're currently doing so that all that is, all that remains is the work to be done. and then you become very clear about why you are not being effective.

All right. So number one is that priorities mean two things cannot be equally important. And here's the mentally challenging thing about this is that when you work on something, and let's say I spend 30 minutes on this thing and I spend 30 minutes on item B, right? If I spend 30 minutes on both things and I say this one's more important than this one, I can say that, but that's not reality because I basically, just said they were both important, which means neither of them are, which is why most people cannot get shit done because they cannot say no. And so the theme of this entire video is the word no.

All right. And so this is the word that I will give you that you can tell yourself, you can plaster it on your wall, is the season of no. And I'm not saying it's forever. I'm saying it's just for right now. All right, because a lot of people don't need a new things to add to the routine. You need to have a routine of saying no and an anti-routine and that is the thing that's going to yield those those outsized returns on productivity. So you can't say yes to everything and therefore it means that you can't do two things with different levels of importance. It's either important or it's not important. If it's important, it means you mean to say no to everything else. All right. So if you say this is the priority, then it means you do not do other things besides that thing. That is how it is a priority. That is

how you literally prioritize. All right. Number two is that from a communication perspective, one of the things that I had to really understand, and I'm a pretty people pleasing person, I enjoy other people, like I'm social, is that when people communicate with you, when people reach out to you, when people text you, when people email you, they actually have an implied ask within the communication from you. It's actually a take. And what that take says is that there's a request to reply. Are they're asking you to do something, which is to reply to the message and to illustrate why you can't do this. this at scale is because let me imagine right now that 500,000 people text you. Do you owe them all a

reply? The answer is no, because you couldn't literally do anything else in your life besides reply to those people if that's what you did. And so here's what's crazy. Most people have the time to reply and conflate the fact that they have time with the fact that they are obliged. They are obligated to reply. And so when I show you that 500,000 text example, it's to show you that if I can remove the time from your brain, that means it would be physically impossible for you to reply, you realize that the obligation of reply never existed to begin with. And so during this season of no, during this anti-routine period of time, what I did during that 18 months was I stopped replying to people. And not only that, and I'll get to the taxes of how I did that in a second,

but I just stopped replying altogether. And this was a huge thing for me. It was very, very difficult for me. 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. The next thing is that I realized that. all of the events and masterminds and coaching programs, they were mostly for social needs. They were not because I had a problem that needed to be solved. And so I ended up going to a mastermind,

getting what I needed, and then I didn't show up to that same mastermind for the next 18 months. And then from there, 18 months later, I was like a huge success story in the mastermind. And it wasn't because, like, I got what I needed. And then I spent the rest of that time executing. And there was no point to me going back because I knew what needed to be done. And it needed doing.

And that was it. And so here are some of the tactics that I ended up implementing during this period of time that massively changed my life because it got me to stop doing everything that I was doing so that all that remained was the work to be done. All right. So number one is that I changed my phone number. I changed my phone number because all these people were always asking me to reply. And so there's the actual time of communication of the constant texting back and forth, all the interruptions. but also the hey you got a sex hey can we hop on a meeting hey can i bend your ear hey can we talk about this thing hey do you want to jam on this topic right and as somebody who likes to give i was

always literally when i looked at my schedule half my day was like one off calls that i was like well maybe this is an important thing but you would be amazed at how much blank space appears in your calendar when you say no to everything you would be amazed at how much blank space shows up on your calendar when you say no to everything so number one is i do that changed my phone number. What I did is I actually gave my phone number to my EA and I got a new phone number. And the only people that I would choose to communicate with were people that I realized that I needed to and that I would find their number, right? Rather than being responsive to every single person who had mine, whichever the years was a lot. So that's the first thing I did. The second,

like I said, is I stopped going to all of these events because I knew what needed to be done. So I didn't need more information. I needed more execution. Right. And so if you look at your own self, it's like, do I need more information or do more execution? Now, if you're ignorant in terms of knowing what you need to do to succeed. You need to go like what needs to be done is you need to find out that information. But once you know what needs to be done, anything that is you not doing that thing is getting in the way of you accomplishing what you want. Number three is that I stopped taking meetings from 4 a.m. to new every day. I worked for the first eight hours, completely uninterrupted. And it was because during that first season, when you're, you know,

zero to one million, one million to three million, sometimes even at five million, sometimes you're still, you don't have enough leverage because of your team or maybe the number, the level of talent on your team that you need to still be doing a lot of doing, right? Like you can't look at what like my routine might be now, right? Because I have teams of people that if I, if I say, hey, go do this and do this and do this, I have 20 people who can execute. And those 20 people are going to amount to more work than I can do possibly on my own. And that's because I have leverage. But until you have leverage, leveraging your time appropriately is what is going to move the needle the most. All right. And so from 4 a.m. to noon every single day, I accepted no meetings and only worked on the priority, which meant I did the thing and I said no to everything else. All right. The next thing that I started saying no to, what is I said no to bedtimes that were different on weekends versus weekdays? I stopped treating weekends different than I treated weekdays. And I had the same bedtime, so I had the same wake of time so that every single day, I could say no to everything during 4 to 12. All right. Now, once you say,

say no to weekends as a different day to weekdays, the next thing is like, well, what are the other things that you changed about your life in terms of allocating your time? What about your health? Well, during this period of time, I only worked out about twice a week and that was because that was my minimum effective dose for working out, right? Because that was all I needed just to maintain. I wasn't trying to make progress on multiple fronts because it was not the priority. And I'm saying this again because people always want to make, you know, progress on 100 friends. Sometimes, like, you have so much growth juju. You only have so much and you have to allocate it to the things that are highest priority. And if it's a priority, then it means saying no to everything else.

All right. Now, the next piece is like, what about food stuff? So for me, it was actually more productive for me to fast one or two days a week because then I could work and not be interrupted by the eating, preparation, thinking, cleaning of food. So two days a week, I would just have caffeine and bone broth. And that was what I did for the day and it was super easy and that way I stopped, you know, I started starting losing a little bit of fat while I was at it. All right. The next thing I did was I deleted all social media from my phone. Okay. And that is because I realized that I could have an accurate time on my calendar, which was just to post and I could do most of the apps from my computer. So if you're actually just going there to post, not to consume and interact, you can do most of the social media stuff

from your computer. And that's what I ended up doing. So I deleted all that stuff from my phone. And you'd be amazed at your like ghost thumb of how addicted you are because most people spend like three to five hours a day on their phone consuming social media. It's literally the new age of watching television. And we're like, I can't think about how I can get some time. It's like, if you got those three hours back, you would have so much more stuff done, which goes back to the anti-routine. It's not what you are not doing, right, which is causing, it's not like there's some secret magic routine that's going to get you there. It's just that most of the stuff you are doing, you need to stop and you need to enter into a season of no. All right. And so those were the

primary tactics that I changed during the 18 months of going from almost bankrupt to taking home over a million dollars a month when I was 27 years old. And all right, so I appreciate you, Mosy Nation. If you're new, welcome. Bye.