The Game with Alex Hormozi - Learning the Right Lessons From Failures | Ep 265

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Failures are always going to be lessons. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares his thoughts and advice on how you can learn the right takeaways from the failures you experience in your life without remembering the scars and how to shift your perspective on learning lessons to a positive view.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:(0:38) - Hardest thing: learning right lesson from failure(1:49) - Dangerous: learning wrong lesson from failure reinforces incorrect lesson(3:50) - Possible incorrect lesson learned: success should come big and fast(6:22) - Entrepreneurship: unlearn to think from different perspective(9:14) - What if success is outside forces and failure is your fault?Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Right now, there's probably lessons that you learn from failures that are the wrong lessons. And just as, if not more dangerous, there are lessons from successes that you had that were not the right lessons to take. 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. What's going on, everyone? I think one of the best things about entrepreneurship is the lessons that we learn from failure. Right.

And I try and share as many as I can on this, on this, you know, vlog, podcast, et cetera. because I think that if I can help you not have the failure to learn the lesson, then you can get the lesson without the scar. That being said, one of the hardest things is learning the right lesson from failure. And so let me unpack that because I think it's one of the most profound things that we as entrepreneurs or just we as people have to learn, is making sure that we're getting the right takeaway. So let me give you a couple different examples to show you the wrong takeaways

and then kind of maybe walk through a framework that might be useful. So let's say, you know, you're in middle school and you're dancing with someone of the opposite sex or whatever you're attracted to, whatever, right? You're dancing with somebody you like. And I'll just use the guy, girl, because that's what I'm used to. So it's like, let's say I'm dancing with a girl and she breaks my heart, whatever, right? If I said, ah, girls aren't for me, right? Girls don't work, right? That would be ridiculous, right?

Of course it would be. It would just mean that that didn't work in that one instance. but if I took the wrong lesson from it, then I might swear off women altogether, right? And what's interesting is that that's an incredibly ridiculous example, but people do it every single day, right? It's like a business owner who hires an employee and the employee doesn't work out and says,

ah, employees, they all suck. They're not for me, right? It's learning the wrong lesson from the failure. And so I think it's just as dangerous, maybe even more dangerous to learn the wrong lesson because now you have a story that you've told yourself that reinforces the incorrect lesson. And then from that point going forward,

you operate under this false guise, this false belief that you've told yourself that you believe is right because you have experience. Right. And just because you have experience, doesn't mean we took the right lesson from it. And so I'll tell you one that's been really, that's been really interesting for me to learn,

is over the last, you know, however many years, right, I have succeeded a lot based on inbound marketing. All right? So that means paid advertising to generate demand inwards. And what's interesting about that is a lot of my successes come from it. But what's interesting is that I think that I've had a really long-term perspective when it comes to my health, right? Health and fitness, like when I work out and how I eat, I've always tried to pick really sustainable things that I can do forever.

And I've been in pretty good shape for, you know, almost 20 years. And so that's been a successful action. that I've been able to repeat over and over again. To the same degree, my marriage is actually probably one of the better things that I've done. I pick that rationally, my partner, Leila, and we both said, we want to go this way. We have this mission. We have these values. And we'll figure out the love stuff as we go.

And we actually got married before we were really in love, mostly just because we thought we were so aligned. And we've learned the love, and every year it's actually gotten better. And that was a rational decision that was made by both of us. and it was based on long-term thinking. But what's interesting is that I've been able to observe my own actions over the last decade, you know, in business. And I actually even think that I've still been more short-term skewed in my thinking because of the thing that I got really good at, which is inbound.

And inbound, you can immediately, you can snap your fingers and make money tomorrow. And you can make a tremendous amount of money in a very short period of time. And I think in some ways I may have learned the wrong lesson from my, early success, which is success should come big and should come fast, right? For me, right? Because that's my own, it's for my own belief. And as I look at the things that I've done that I've done really well for a long period of time, none of them follow that path, right? And so I've been, you know, strategically or deliberately kind of deconstructing my beliefs around what I think success should look like and what growth should look like. And I'm finding myself more and more

trying to move in the direction of sustainable growth, which I remember hearing when I was younger and being like, ah, that's horse crap. But now, as, you know, I feel like I've gotten more scars and more experience, I actually think that if you're really looking on an endless horizon, which is what I try to shift myself towards, then you only do things that you think are worthwhile. And your obsession, my own, obsession with the hurry and the rush, you know, I would love to say disappears, but at least it decreases, right? Because if you're like, you get from the finite to the infinite, you go for the can I do this until I die. I know that what I do in fitness I can do till I die.

I know that, you know, the way that Layla and I run our marriage, I can do till I die. Like the way that we've, we've done this, we can do until I die. Now you might be like,

ah, you've only been married for five years. Sure. Maybe, yeah, maybe, like, maybe I'll have to keep saying this. And then it's like, you've only been married 10 years. I don't know.

We'll see. Right. 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. But it feels the same long-term way the way the other one said because we have, there's way less volatility. It's just a slow and steady progress. And so when I think about how I'm trying to build things now, it's different, right?

In the beginning, it was just like short, hard, fast, like let's go, let's go, let's go. and I feel like now as I've gotten more experienced or more weathered, it's more like, okay, this is our current growth rate. Can we just sustain this? Right? Because if we can just sustain this for 10 years, we'll be at 100 million plus, we'll be at 200 million plus if we just do this. And what that's forced me to do is increase the time between my thoughts and my actions,

which entrepreneurship is so interesting because you have to kind of unlearn some of the things they got you started. In the beginning, you can't do anything because you're so paralyzed. So you do need to decrease some of the time because then you start taking action, right? But at a certain point, you start becoming so good at taking action that you end up breaking things. So you actually have to start increasing that time. And what that does is it gives you more space to make decisions that are rational instead of emotional. And so that's when you see a competitor run an ad or you see an employee leave with clients or whatever happens and you want to have some reaction. And most times no reaction is the best decision.

and this is just like it's been this repeated trend that I've had and so my current the current lesson that I'm trying to see is is actually not from failure but making sure that I learned the correct lesson from my success and thinking it might have actually been bad for me that I was that I was so successful so early on and it might have been that I took the wrong strategy from it and so what I the things that I'm trying to build now are far more enduring and more stable and do not require me or my skill at all. And by doing that, I feel like I'm getting closer to the first time my life where I actually have businesses that truly run without me, like actually.

Not as in like, oh, I don't do the day to day. That's definitely one level and one component of it. But when it can get to the point where it truly grows without me and I'm really just there to guide direction and be a sounding board for the leader. team that's in place. I feel like that's where I should go. And I feel like the things that I'm building now are in alignment with that. And it's been, it's taken years to get here. And so, anyhow, my goal is if you are, if you are in it and you're not growing as, as fast as you want, but you are growing, then extrapolate that over 10 years, right? Extrapolate over five years and say,

can I just grow at 10% every, every quarter? That's huge growth. both, right? Can I just do this every quarter? Can I just make this sustainable? Can I make this consistent? Because what I'm seeing is the richest people in the world just look for reliability. They look for low volatility, which means less of this. And so if I can decrease the volatility in the business by making things more consistent and not going for the big win that's like right there, right? And I just stay patient. It continues to pay dividends. And so that's kind of the chapter that I'm in right now, and the lesson that I'm trying to learn or walk. And so I figured I would just share that with you. And also just the thought process around looking at your successes and

your failures and making sure that you learn the right lessons from them. Because I've definitely taken lessons from my successes that were not correct. And I've taken lessons from my failures that were not correct. And each of them is equally dooming or damning. Right. And a fun final thought that I'll leave you with is, what if everything that you did when you were successful was not because of you, but because of outside forces? And everything that you've done to fail was your fault. I've taken this perspective and tried to apply it to my life. And I've had an amazing amount of inferences and thoughts that have gone around it that have been completely new. So it's like, what if when you were successful that one time, maybe it wasn't because of you at all. Maybe it was

just, maybe it was just chance, right? Maybe it was just coincidence. And, I think a lot of times we apply those frameworks to other people, but never to ourselves. If someone does something bad, we say it's their fault, something good happens if we don't like them. We're like, oh, that was because they got luckier, only because of this outside circumstance that wasn't because of them. But we never apply that to ourselves. And I think that if we do, if you reverse it, because we always want to say we take credit for our, for our wins and we say our losses are because of outside circumstances. But if we flip that, a lot of times, I think you get some really interesting lessons that can come from it. And just, just walking through the thought process, what if this wasn't because of me?

what other things happened that did a line up for me that were not my doing. And by doing that, you'll start to see different trends and different patterns. Then maybe you can take advantage of opportunities when they aren't because of you, but you can still take advantage, right? And so anyways, I wanted to share this thought process with you. For me, it's been incredibly valuable, and I hope it is valuable for you too. So enjoy, and I'll see in the next fit. Bye.