The Game with Alex Hormozi - It’s Okay for Friendships to End | Ep 628

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

“I would be far more sad that I had not realized my potential or what I hope to accomplish in my life in exchange for relationships.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about forming and losing friendships as one grows, evolves, and moves closer towards life goals. He also delves into the importance of nurturing relationships that align with one's growth and values, and underscores the necessity for mutual value exchange in relationships.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:(1:17) - The cost of dreams and the price of fame(2:08) - Reality of losing friends during personal growth(5:12) - Concept of exchange in relationships(6:52) - The pain of losing friends and the promise of new ones(7:44) - Importance of choosing the right friends(10:04) - Role of friends in personal growth(11:41) - Embracing change and growthFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was April 26, 2022)

What's interesting is that a lot of people root for you until you do better than them and they stop rooting for you. And it was just because they didn't actually want to see me win. 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. A lot of people have heard the term your network is your net worth. And to a degree, that's true. To the other degree that's the average of the, the five people you spend the most time with. Well, it's not true for Bill Gates and for Jeff Bezos,

because the people that they spend time with are less than their net worth, which would mean that their net worth would be less than that. And so, you know, there are statements that are thrown around frequently that don't have necessarily a lot of evidence, but, you know, are, I would say spiritually correct. In the last year, I would say that I fell out of touch with the last two friends that I had from high school and or college. And this has been a process that's happened, you know, gradually over time. And I was having a conversation with Dean Graciosi, who has become a very, very close friend of mine. He and his wife, Lisa and Layla and I have become, you know, close couple friends. And I brought the topic up with him and I thought the discussion would be worth sharing.

And so one of the things that he told me early on in our relationship, which really, really gave me a lot of pause was the cost of his dreams. And so I asked him earlier on and it was about 18 months ago before Lela and I decided to build kind of our personal brands, et cetera, about, you know, the cost of fame, right? And he said, yeah, you know, I've got people who show up at my house and people who leave weird, mean comments. And he's like, all the time, you know. And the thing is, is that that is a price I'm willing to pay to make the impact that I want to make with my life. When he said that, it just, it really struck me because to me it was in a lot of ways, you know, selfish to kind of not spread the message out of fear of what it would cost me.

That being said, there's obviously pros that, you know, we've made whatever decision that they outweigh the cons. But it was just an interesting perspective in terms of just it is a price that he was willing to pay. And so I want to lead this discussion towards the friend conversation that had with him. And he had said that he recently had lost one of his last friends, the last friend that he had had from kind of his childhood. And I think that there's a lot of people who are like, you know, never forget where you come from and the people who supported you, et cetera. And I think that's true. but I think for the mass majority of us, a lot of people don't support us on our way up. At least it felt that way for me. And what's interesting is that a lot of people will root for you until you

do better than them and they stop rooting for you. And I'm not saying that the people that I'm talking were like that, but it's just that was like the first wave of friends that I lost, right? And it was just because they didn't actually want to see me win. And I had a quote that went pretty viral on Twitter, which was real friends talk shit to your face and praise you behind your back. And freight friends do the opposite. And when I say talk to, shit, I mean like bullshitting. You know what I mean? Like give each other flack, right? If I'm giving someone flack, they know that we're homies. Like, you know, Dr. Cashie, I was thinking about patencing the Hermosy advertising cycles. I spent so long developing the cycle, which is going to be in one

of the books that comes up, you know, in the future. And his comment was get over yourself. And that's exactly what I want from a friend, right? I want somebody who's going to say that rather than be like, oh, that's cool. And then be like, I can't believe this guy. Right. And so we have these people that we collect, you know, throughout our lives. And sometimes that come in, you know, you probably heard the saying, they're here for a season, a reason, or a lifetime. And I think, you know, for me, a lot of people have been seasonal. And so I wanted to share that because I know that, I'm sure some of you have had a similar path to me and that I didn't have a tremendous amount of support from my parents. I think they now retroactively think they supported me because it's much easier that way. But I did not, I did not have any support from my parents for the decisions that I took until it was already beyond obvious that I was going to be successful. And that took years. And that was very hard for me at the time. And I think friends fell in that same category. And so when I was having this discussion with Dean, we dove into this a little bit more. But as we, you know, ascend towards our goals. And I don't say ascend in a

literal sense in terms of like socioeconomic status or whatever, but just like we move closer towards where we want to go, and our vision and our mission and our lives become clear, it also becomes clear when you have contrasts with people from your past. And I have several rules of thumb that are, I begin to develop around these relationships. One of them is, if I can only talk about the past with someone, they usually aren't good friends of mine because I don't really live in the past. I live in the future. I live in where I want to go, what I want to do, the things that I find interesting or the present of the things that I find interesting today or right now, top of mind. And if I can't talk about those things with somebody, then our friendship kind of, by its very

nature, will decline over time because there's no growth, right? Because it's only in the past. And I have felt a tremendous amount of guilt around the loss of those relationships, but I also felt a guilt of carrying them on, as in I felt like I needed to water these plants out of necessity rather than out of, you know, some sort of exchange. Now, some people might decry that or speak against the idea of having an exchange, but I don't think that's realistic. I think that people stay in relationships because there is an exchange of value that occurs. Now, I think the difference is the strength or depth of the relationship is how long you are willing to wait for the exchange to occur. So a parent, for example, is willing to wait a very long time for a positive exchange

from a child coming back to them, right? Now, some people can make the argument that, you know, children are a gift throughout that entire period of time, and that's awesome and that's a perspective, whatever. But just to use the time frame as a nice thinking process, if you just met someone, if you don't feel like there's a huge benefit to knowing them, you know, within the immediate future, you probably don't really pursue them out, right? And the longer you have had positive exchanges, the longer you are willing to wait for the next one, right? It's intermittent reinforcement from a behavior standpoint, right? Like we are literally reinforced in this relationship. And the way that addiction works is the same thing, right? Like you immediately get positive hits and then you

start extending how long before you get another positive hit, which is also how abusive relationships work, right? Like abuse, abuse, positive, positive, positive, and then like abuse, abuse, and then positive is a little bit later and then a little bit later until the point where there's almost no positive whatsoever. I'm not saying that's how you should run relationships, but more so how we work as humans. Hey, Mosin, Nation, quick break just to let you know that we've been starting to post on LinkedIn and want to connect with you. All right, so send me a connection request and note letting me know that you listen to the show and I will accept it. There's anyone you think that we should be connected with, tag them in one of my or Layless posts, and I will give you all the love in the world. All right, so

let's get back to the show. And so the point of me breaking this down is that I have lost a lot of the friends or almost all of the friends that I had when I started my journey. And the upside is people will come into your life to fill the vacuum that the other people left. But sometimes it doesn't happen immediately. And I think getting comfortable with having space is a good thing. And a lot of people have the impulse or urge to always have people around them. And I think it's to their own detriment. Because I think if you can spend time alone with your thoughts and be okay with just being you without other people, then you are more selective. And it's the same way with dating. Some people can't be alone. Some people can't be without a significant other. And so they just end up

shacking up with the first person they see after they become single again. Right. And it's because they have a fear of being alone more than they have an aligned mission with someone that they think that this person is really the best pick, right? And so a lot of ways are similar to dating with friends in that. We can hold out and really just pick the best people. And I think that, you know, if we, at least for me, if I have two or three good friends, I'm more than satisfied. My cup is very full. But I think where I feel drained is where I feel like I have lots and lots and lots of acquaintances that are transactional in nature, but purely transactional. Or at least they have a much shorter time for the transactions to occur. And so if you have lost friends during the process of the climb,

I don't think it is something that you should lament or be upset about. I think that it is a sign of growth because a lot of people say, hey, you've changed. And the only natural response that I can have to that is you have it. And I think that that's kind of sums up with the entirety of this, which is if you grow, you change. Some people, most people, don't like change, especially if they themselves have not grown or changed and or if they have grown in a different direction from you. And it is natural for us to not want to continue relationships with people that have grown or have values that are too far in contrast to our own. And those values can change over time. And that's okay. And so I think that for me, it took me a really

long time to navigate through this. And it was kind of an emotionally explorative experience to just say, that's okay. And is this price something that I'm willing to pay? And for me, it's a resounding yes. I would be far more sad that I had not realized my potential or what I hope to accomplish in my life in exchange for relationships that I sacrificed my dreams in order to maintain. Now, that being said, it almost appears as though I'm sacrificing all relationships in order to have the dream. And that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that you will sacrifice old relationships and you will create room for new ones. And so I think that there's this, I don't know, old wife's tale or a societal expectation that if someone sheds friends, for lack of better term, or loses friends or friends, you know,

dissipate into the distance over time, that they are a non-constant person. And I think that the answer to that question is, yes, we grow up. And unless the friends you have are growing with you and are pushing you to grow, then they are probably not friends who will stay with you for the long haul. And so for me, I'll leave with this kind of last thing that I think about for the people that I want to be friends with. I want friends who root for me behind my back. And that is rare. Most people do not root for you behind your back. It is sad that there are more strangers on the internet who root for me, right, than people who knew me from back home. And it's because we had a shared context at home and the discrepancy between where you are and where they are over time, they personalize the fact that

they are not with you because they had the same resources at the same beginning. And so you're in a different place as a result of your own decisions. And so as a result, they feel bad and they don't like that. And you're a reminder of that. And so what I seek from the friends that I have are one that they genuinely are rooting for me and that is evidenced by them rooting for me behind my back. I also hope that they talk shit to my face because that is what makes life worth living for me. But I hope to admire them. I want to strive to be more like my friends in certain ways. And I hope that they raise the bar for me to be better and be better in the ways that I want to be better. And so in that way, picking friends who are people who are further ahead of you in doesn't have to

be financially. It can be in marriage. It can be physically. It can be whatever. And then the hope is that you are better in some ways than they are. And then they can grow from you in that way. And in that way, you both get better. And then you have an extended exchange that continues directionally towards both of your goals. And so my definitions and my view on friendship has changed over time. It probably will continue to develop and refine. But I made this because I have a lot of people who message me and are like, hey, I feel really alone right now. I don't feel like a lot of people are supporting me. And I make this to say, that's okay. And I think that there are seasons. And at the end of a season when you have a vacuum, someone does step in to fill it. And I can promise you that if

you have a higher standard and you wait and you don't just give of yourself for no reason just because you are afraid to be alone or be without friends, you will end up with better friends who actually root for you and are not just place fillers or false friends who, you know, smile to your face, but stab you behind your back or actually talk down on you. And so I think if you can have that bar and you can have that tolerance, you can give yourself that space and that permission to say, I've lost a friend and that's okay. And I still love that. them as a human, even if I can't give the time that I once did because it doesn't make sense for me anymore, because we've grown apart. And that's okay. And so I've given myself that

permission to say, these are the prices that I'm willing to pay to grow into the person that I want to be, and that's okay. And so, Mozy Nation, I love you all. The road can be, can be arduous, but I think the road itself is the reason we do it because of the person that we hope to become in the process of becoming, which is the success as I've defined it, is the process of becoming and the process of striving is the success.