The Game with Alex Hormozi - I Spoke my Wealth Into Existence | Ep 643

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

“I chose to stop giving trauma power.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares powerful insights about the importance of character traits in achieving entrepreneurial success. He discusses how the beliefs, skills, and character traits we possess directly impact our business performance. He explains how some entrepreneurs struggle with the stories they tell themselves, which become obstacles in their path 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:(0:34) - The power of self-narratives(2:47) - The importance of character traits(4:47) - The role of beliefs and insecurities(6:22) - Changing your identity and character traits(9:00) - Transforming negative character traits(11:11) - The impact of character on business successFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was on August 11, 2022)

And so what you have to do is you have to peel in your past and say, when did I exhibit these things? Because all of us have exhibited these character traits at some point in our life. And then what you do is you say, I am this way because, and then you tell yourself the stories of the things you did in the past that exhibited those traits. 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 wished Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy.

The most powerful things that change our behavior and our character are the stories we tell ourselves. I think that when I started out in business, I heard all these things in the personal development space. Like you should read these affirmations every morning, blah, blah, blah, blah. I never did that. And it was because it felt stupid to me. Now, that being said, there might be some people who've had life-changing results from doing

that. But what I did notice is that the stories I would tell myself about myself were the things that changed my beliefs. They were the things that changed my character. And so a lot of times I've talked about how entrepreneurship is about three things. It's about changing the beliefs that you have. It's about increasing the skill set that you have. And then the character traits that go along with that to make sure the skills are successful.

So I'll give you a simple example for this. So a friend of mine, he started a fitness app. It was doing about $20,000 a month. He was a top cross-fit games competitor. But he was really ashamed because he wasn't the winner. He was like, you know, really, really highly ranked one, but he wasn't the winner. And so he felt, he believed that his app wasn't good enough. And so he never promoted it.

So it grew to $20,000 a month in revenue with him doing zero promotion. And when he realized that it was okay for him to promote it and people got a lot of value from it in the app was good enough, he went from $20,000 a month to like $150,000 a month like that. And the difference was his beliefs. His skills were the same, right? His character traits are the same. He changed his beliefs. Right.

So let me give you a different example. So when I actually started out getting in my own business, I had a chain of gyms. This was a very, you know, this was 10 years ago. I had Jane and Jims. And I knew how to run sales teams. I knew how to generate leads. I knew to do all these things. But what ended up happening was I had one missing piece, which was also a belief. Darned, I was actually trying to give you a different one. But I had a mentor come in and say, you need to be, you need to get in the licensing business. You need to license this model of lots of people rather than doing the actual model yourself. And so I did make that transition. And then we went from, I think, you know, I think we did like two or three million dollars to doing seven.

and the next year we did 28 million. So the year that we made the transition halfway through is what jumped us from two or three to seven. And it was just in the last like four months that we saw this crazy growth. And then we did 28 million the next year. And so it was because I had all these skills and I also had the character traits. I just needed again to change with the beliefs. I was trying to give you an example, let me think of one. Ah. So if you have, for example, if I had had those skills, but I didn't have the character traits of being disciplined and being focused on one thing, I would have jumped between multiple entrepreneurial endeavors and never been able to see success. Because even though, I had the beliefs about what was possible. Like if I'd said, okay, I'm going to do gyms and I'm going to do chiropractors and I'm going to do dentists. I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, right? Until I had the character trait of focus, the character trait of discipline, then I would not have seen the success, right?

And so the next natural question is, okay, well, if I have to have aligned beliefs, skills and character traits at each level of the ladder, because you can have, and this is what's crazy. When you see the overnight successes, this is what happens. I want to describe it to you so you understand it and how you can do it. All right? So let's say that there's a ladder, all right? and you've got this pole on one side, you've got the pole on the other side,

and you've got the middle bar. Okay. You need all three to move to the next level of the ladder, right? And so, for example, you might have the left side built up six stories above where you're at. And you might have the right side build up 10 stories from where you're out right now. But all of a sudden, if you change your character and that character trait development gives you three more rungs, all of a sudden you go three rungs because you already have the constraint has been removed. And so you can be more advanced in your beliefs than you're on your skills.

or it can be more advanced in your character trait than you are in your skills. Or you can be more advanced in your skills than you are on your beliefs, right? And so it's having all three of those that are checked off at each level of entrepreneurship that gets you to one, one million dollars year, three million dollars, or ten million dollars, you're, a hundred million dollars year, whatever it is, right? Is you have to have all of them. And so the point is to get you to understand how to actually develop those soft things because the skills are straightforward, right?

The skills are you just go buy the course and you read the book and you consume the content like this and you practice, you apply, right? That's what you have to do. That's it. That's it, right? One of the skills that I see lots of marketers these days not have is they don't know how to sell. They don't know how to develop a sales team. They don't know how to manage and grow a sales team. They don't want to lead a sales team. That's a skill they don't have. And as soon as they do, they're doing. I was fortunate because I had a ton of the skills in my skill toolbox. But I went for making nothing to tons because I had all of these rungs of this ladder already built out to a $30 million level. except I just didn't have the beliefs. That was my issue, right? And candidly, I think still one of my biggest issues is belief. I suffer from a lot of insecurities. And so my wife was the one who was like, you can do this. Like you don't have to have these gyms. Like you can license out the model. Like you can really succeed like this. And I honestly just thought she was a really smart person and very

wise. And so I trusted her belief in me before I really trusted it for myself. And so hopefully you can have somebody like that in your life. But maybe that can be me. I trust in your, I trust. trust in your skills and your belief. So hopefully you can borrow some of that trust because I promise you the world does get better when you take those leaps of faith. But the point is, is if you have these three things, right, the stories that you tell yourself, right, one of the things that Layla always says, who's my wife, she has her own channel, you can check it out, is she's like, what's the evidence, right? What's the evidence that you're so bad at this? What's the evidence that you have? Because you keep beating yourself up about this, but what's your evidence, right?

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.

What I do when I identify a character trait that I lack, or I identify a skill that I don't have, or a belief that I don't have. And this one I'll just specifically talk about the character traits because I think it's really important. It's probably the one that people struggle with the most. Is what are the stories that you tell yourself about yourself, right? a lot of times I had dinner recently with a $5 million year entrepreneur and he was like,

I had a lot of trauma when I was a kid and that's why I am this way. He speaks like he is this way because. And I was like, I think that's a really convenient story to tell yourself about why you are anxious or why you exhibit anxious tendencies. I was like, but what if you did that and you just didn't exhibit anxious tendencies? What then? What if you just chose not to? What if you chose to not give power to that situation or that parent when you were growing up? They already, made you suffer. Why would you let them make you suffer more by telling yourself that they gave you this character trait? And it's because it's uncomfortable for you to suffer through the change of changing your identity. But Layla and I both believe this is that your identity is fluid

and you need to be able to change your identity and your character traits based on what the business requires if you want to grow. If you're not a patient person, then you need to become patient macro, micro speed macro patients, right? If you want to develop a reputation, you need to become a person of integrity, which means sometimes short term you have to sacrifice. Right. have to not make the quick buck. If you want to be disciplined and have focused, then it means that you have to be able to say no. Strategy means what do you say no to that still looks like it makes sense on paper? That's strategy. That's what it is. It's what things do we choose not to invest in, right? And the people who learn how to make the most money are the ones you know how to focus. And that's a

character trait. And so what you have to do is you have to peel in your past and say, when did I exhibit these things? Because all of us have exhibited these character traits at some point in our life. And then what you do is you say, I am this way because, and then you're you tell yourself the stories of the things you did in the past that exhibited those traits. And by doing that, you'll start reminding yourself. So if I want to say, like, because I'll tell you, I used to have more angry tendencies. I used to tend and trend towards being angry as a response to things that I didn't like, right? But one of the things that I liked, like that I try and tell myself is that I am wise, right? And this is a character trait that's probably been the number one

character trait that I've tried to develop over the however many years just because I believe discernment is the single greatest character trait you can have. Because if you make the right decisions, the whole world is your oyster. If you can make the right call, the whole world is your oyster. And so for me, wisdom is the number one character trait that I wish to develop. And so when I think to myself, I am wise because I use the same formula that most people and most of us, myself included, used to destroy ourselves with these insecurities, with these negative character traits that we believe we have. And instead of saying an affirmation, you tell yourself the story of why we're what you're saying is true. You learn to argue against your own thoughts. And that's how you start

developing this muscle, these traits that start to become a whisper and then a shout. And then they become, they emanate from you and you project them when you walk in the room subconsciously. But it's a practice that goes from active to passive in your mind. Right. If you are a patient person, if you are a kind person, if you are an integrist person, right, if you're a hardworking person, right, we all have these stories that we tell about ourselves. And so if you have a, limitation right now on your character trait or traits. You don't feel like you are patient enough. You feel like you are too easily distracted. You feel like you don't focus enough. Then you need to start telling yourself the story. I am this way because not I am wealthy, stupid, in my opinion. I think

our brains are too smart for that stuff. You have to give it the reasons. You have to make the argument. And I think instead of affirmations, if you make affirmations into arguments that you make with yourself every day, then those become things that will change who you are. And if you change who you are and how you make decisions, you'll change your entire life. And you'll be able to watch your business grow as a result of who you have become. And so this is one of the things that was most powerful for me in my entrepreneurial journey. I had tons of insecurities, right? I had tons of anxieties. I had lots of anger. I had lots of perceived trauma. And I'll say it that way because I don't even want to make it into trauma. That's just what I perceived as trauma because I was a child in

old with the emotional regulation of a child. And so things, of course, affect you more when your kid. Everyone's traumatized, traumatized, perceives trauma as a child. Like, if I go to a stage and I say, hey, who here had a traumatic childhood in some instance or had a traumatic event occur? Everyone's going to raise their hand. So stop thinking that because you have trauma, and I don't say this, I'll say it this way. I'll say it this way better. For me, I chose to stop giving trauma power. And I think if you can do that and you can tell yourself a different story about why you are who you are and make arguments instead of affirmations, you'll be able to have stronger, faster change in the direction that you desire and you'll

have more control over your emotional state. And then in so doing, you'll be able to level up the business that you have because most of the times when I see business owners, the reason they're not successful is not because they don't have the beliefs or because they don't have the skills. It's just because of who they are. I'd call the other day and somebody hopped on and they're like, and honestly, the guy was an asshole. He was like, man, employees suck. And I can never keep any good talent and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just paused and I was like, well, that's not surprising. And he was like, what? I was like, have you met you? Like, I don't know what else to say. Have you met you? Like, I don't need to change this guy's marketing,

right? I don't need to change this guy's beliefs about his own business. He just changed who he is. And the only way for that guy to do that is for him to get over the reasons that he tells himself it's okay to be who he is. And I think a lot of us do that. We give ourselves the excuse for being impatient. We give ourselves the excuse for cheating. We give ourselves the excuse for being unfaithful. We give the excuse for being unloyal. Well, my dad was, where my mom was, or my brother was, or whatever, right? Or when I was growing up or from my town, I, X, Y, Z.

I'm this way because because is one of the most powerful words in the English language. It's great for persuasion. Make sure you use it to persuade yourself in the right direction. So anyways, that's just my two cents. I might not know anything. If you found value in this, hit subscribe. I have other videos that like this for entrepreneurs who are trying to scale their businesses, keep being awesome, keep being amazing, lots of love.

Love Mosy Nation. Bye.