The Game with Alex Hormozi - Leveraging Your "Dark Side" | Ep 465

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about why it’s okay to accept the negative feelings or situations we have and leverage on these emotions instead of improving on them. Sometimes, negative fuel can drive you to do better.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:(2:03) - Utilize life's challenges as energy for motivation.(3:49) - Connect poverty to insufficient rich-creating activities; leverage motivation sources.(5:06) - Learn from painful past; guide for future choices.(6:43) - Turn pain into a fuel for motivation, accept overflowing energy.(10:22) - Gap between perceived and actual best; understand your capability.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

There are elements of shit that I do that I absolutely love. But there is tons of shit that I do every day that I fucking hate. I just don't hate it more than I hate the alternative. Like there is no feeling I enjoy that makes me more sick than the idea that I could have done more. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy.

When I was 15, 16, 17, 18 years old, I was a pretty angry kid. And I thought that I had all these issues. I would tell people, I have these issues, I have anger issues. I'm not a nice person. I would tell people those things about myself because I believe those things to be true. And I saw them as problems. And then I went to college. And in college, it's all propaganda of people who are teaching.

who've never actually done a real work in a real economy ever. They're all tenured. They don't live in reality. And they tell everyone they should pursue their purpose and their passion and the things that they love. And I ate it up. And the problem was that I didn't make any progress. And I felt like there was something even more wrong with me because I didn't feel any of

that stuff. And so I read all these books on Polly Psychology. I watched all these TED Talks. And I never felt those feelings. And so I wasted all this time. And I wish I could go back and tell myself, dude, all the stuff they're saying is just not true. Like you don't need any of that. Like you can embrace the fact that you are angry.

You can embrace the fact that you feel like you are in pain. And you can use that to make the life that you want. You don't have to use the lovey-dovey, purpose, passion, whatever, to build the life that you want to build. Because if you think about it big picture, what it does is it tells people that have a negative emotional experience is a bad thing, right? But half of your life is below average, by definition. And so if you are not using the half of your life as energy or motivation to create the life you want, then you're at a huge disadvantage. And to give you an example of this, imagine, for example, you have this big vision for your life that you want on this side. And on this

side, your family gets kidnapped. And if you don't do something, they will kill them all. Which of those motivates you more right now, probably the one with your family getting kidnapped. Now, why is that? Because it's not trying to harness a lovety-dovey feeling. It's harnessing pain. And fortunately, unfortunately, there's many people who's like I was who felt like I had experienced more pain than I had good at that time of my life. But I saw it as a disadvantage. I saw it as something that I had to overcome that I didn't have this big purpose. I didn't have this thing that I love. I didn't have this thing that I loved. I didn't have this thing I was passionate about. And if I could have just skipped all of that and started the moment I accepted that it was okay to be angry. And what wasn't okay was not doing

anything about it. And so while I procrastinated by trying to find purpose, jumping from thing to thing to thing, trying to find the thing that really lit my fire, right? And just accepted that it was totally okay to work my face off in disgust from Wax. current circumstance and who I was, then I would have gotten to where I wanted to go much faster. And so the reason I wanted to make this is because so many people are believing a lie. They're believing that they have to be happy. They have to have purpose. They have to have passion for what they're doing in order to get out of their situation. They think that they are poor because they don't have passion. That is false. You were poor because you're not doing

the activities that make you rich. And you can fuel those activities whatever way you you damn well, please. Period. And so if you are somebody who is more motivated by the dark side, then lean into the dark side because unlike the Star Wars movie and unlike the saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the equal opposite of that is the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions. You can do good shit with bad motivation. And when I say bad, I mean negative experiences, pain, anger, et cetera, right? And so they've already done research on this. They interviewed the top Olympic medalists, and they found that they don't actually love winning. They hate losing.

When they win, they experience relief, not euphoria. They think to themselves, thank God I didn't lose. If you look at Steve Jobs, he wasn't some happy-go-lucky dude who was like, man, I just want to make the world a better place. He was a tough dude to work for from all accounts of everyone who was around him. But he created something beautiful from that pain. Right. you look at MJ, you look at Kobe, what did they do? They had imaginary situations that they created in their minds to create more suffering in their own lives to motivate them and use as fuel. And so if you are

anything like me, what I have is I have painful experiences in my past and made up experiences in the future that I don't want to go through. And I use those on speed dial in my head whenever I don't want to do something. So if I don't want to make this because I don't want to go through the process of scripting, I am remembering the day or half day I got in front of the camera and was not prepared and did not do a good job and felt embarrassed and stupid for not doing the work. And when I think about that, not how much I just want to like love on my audience and how much I want to provide value as much as I love and wish that that were my motivation. That is not what fuels me. What fuels me is the feeling I had when I felt stupid in front of the camera because I didn't prepare. I didn't do the

work. And so I use that when I'm sitting in front of the computer and I know I should do it and I don't want to do it. I use that because that is more painful than the boring shit I'm about to have to do. Real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words. We can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I asked you do is you can just leave a review.

If it takes 10 seconds or one type of the thumb, it would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world with someone else. I spent so long trying to get the right motivation, the right energy to do what I was supposed to do rather than accept the energy that I had overflowing from me, which was pain. And so if you have pain, it's not a handicap. It's an advantage if you choose to make it that way. Because you can take pain and turn it into something better over time. And here's what's interesting is that I still have tons of motivation from that side. But it waxes and wanes. And so there are times that in sequence later, you do experience those moments where you get tied to that bigger purpose.

You do experience those moments where you actually love what you're doing. Because the thing is, for me, in the beginning, I sucked to everything. And so I didn't like doing it because I wasn't good at it. So what I love doing? Of course I suck. Why are you going to enjoy that? But the thing is, you can use the negative motivator that you have now to get through the periods of suck

because the pain that you experienced sucked more than the suck that you have in front of you, the work that must be done. And so what happens is you can use that negative fuel, hit it on speed dial. Every time you're in front of that thing that you don't want to do, you push through and what happens you do that enough times, you start to get good at the thing. And then you start

to experience some joy from your work. And then you start seeing the result of work that has compounded and start to see a purpose or start to see a bigger vision. The big vision for Alex's life until maybe four years ago was don't be broke. That was the big vision for my life. People were like, what was your mission with Jim? My mission was to stop being poor. That was my mission. And so now we're in a situation where we have acquired enough skills. We have gone through enough experiences that we can provide value and can help other people not go through that but it would be a lie and i'm telling you right now if someone tells you Alex is really motivated by purpose Alex is this big you know he loves what he does and i do there are elements of shit that i do

that i absolutely love but there is tons of shit that i do every day that i fucking hate i just don't hate it more than i hate the alternative which is i hate sucking i hate hate sucking macro not at the thing is that i hate knowing that i could have tried harder like there is no feeling I enjoy that makes me more sick than the idea that I could have done more. So I'm writing my book right now, right? I'm on the 11th fucking draft. All right. And I see people promote their books with their ghost writers and a big PR company and then crush it on the New York Times, which is completely manufactured because they paid the right guy to get on the list, even though the book that I made last year sold two times more than half the fucking books on New York Times.

I know that. It pisses me off. But you know what pisses me off more? the idea that the next book that I launched, people say, you know what, I liked his first book a little better. And so I keep reliving that experience that I make up in my mind because I don't want to write a seventh draft. I don't want to write an 11th draft. I'm like, this should be good enough. But the pain of the idea of that book not doing well or that book leading to people being like, I don't think he tried as hard. That is the thing that hurts so much more than going from the top,

yet again to make another video, to make another article, to make another short, to make another fucking chapter revision yet again to make it better so that when I do launch it, I think to myself, I literally exhausted every option on this. If I were to do more to it, I would be breaking it. And that's where I try to get to. And is the third time I'm filming this. And it's because the first two times was not good enough. And I got really pissed off, as you can say, that I didn't want to do this again, but one of the sayings that I live by is that I will not do my best, I will do what is required. And the difference between what your best is and what is required is the difference between what you think your real best is and what your actual best is. And there's a fucking

ocean between those things. And what your actual best is is the thing that you would do to prevent everyone you know from dying. And maybe if that motivates you, maybe it's you not dying. Whatever the bigger motivator is for you, whatever that, the discrepancy of what you're doing today and what you would be doing, whatever fuel you use. The point of this is that whatever fuel you need to use to go from what you're doing now to your actual best, use it. Because the road to hell is not paved with good intentions. What people care about is the outcome. People care about what you put out in the world. Now, why you do it, what fuels you is purely internal to you. That's your business. And so I kept trying to get permission or I wanted support for the idea that

that I had to love everything, that everything had to be sunshine and rainbows, that I had to be happy all the time. If I wasn't happy all the time, the work was bad. And I should just keep changing the work I'm doing. I should hop from thing to thing to thing until I found something that I was really passionate about. Well, I sucked at everything. So I wasn't passionate about anything because I wasn't good at any of it. So the thing that got me through it was realizing that I hated my current circumstance

and I hated the idea of my dad being right. And I hated the idea of people saying, I can't believe he quit his job to do some stupid thing and not win. I hated that far more than having another person tell me that they were going to think about it and not give me their credit card. I hated that a lot more than we give up at 4 a.m., 100 nights in a fucking row to get up when I didn't want to. But the idea of failing was so much more painful to me that I was able to embrace the suck faster.