The Game with Alex Hormozi - Mastering Your Behavior: The Ultimate Game Changer (w/ Tom Bilyeu) Pt. 1 - Sept. '23 | Ep 621

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

“Experts are not more disciplined than you, they’ve just found more ways to win.” Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on Tom Bilyeu’s Podcast Impact Theory to discuss how to enhance one's actions and behaviors to achieve their objectives. They emphasize the significance of being strategic, consistent, and carrying a learning mindset throughout one's journey to success. They also underline the role of the environment and stimuli in shaping our behaviors and attitudes. This is part 1 of the interview.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.Follow Tom Bilyeu on:➤ Instagram | Spotify | Apple | LinkedIn | X / Twitter | Impact Theory➤ Check out full episode on YouTube!Timestamps:(1:34) - External variables in behavior control(5:08) - Fear and drive in success(9:14) - The impact of self-esteem on success(12:58) - The power of reframing negative emotions(18:47) - Operationalizing success(43:16) - Understanding the importance of words(48:01) - Translating feelings into actions(53:09) - The importance of clarity in achieving goals(01:03:24) - The power of self-punishment(01:13:22) - Addressing performance issues in the workplaceFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

The only thing we can control is our behavior. And so if we define the words in terms of what we do about it, then these all become things that we can control and can change our lives with. 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. You are ridiculously good at writing instruction manuals for how to make money.

Literally, you are singular in that way. But if people think poorly or they do dumb things, They are never going to make progress. So what advice do you have for people that are wasting time on things like porn, social media, or even just a friend group that is going nowhere fast? If you, it's my belief that if you can control every one of the variables externally to an organism, you can control its behavior. So one of my favorite quotes from BF Skinner, who was a behavior psychologist from way back in the day,

was the old saying is, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. he said, well, if you bleed it out enough and you starve it and you leave it in the sun and you put the water right in front of its mouth, he said, I can veritably guarantee that I can make it drink. And so if you were to think about yourself as that horse, then it's like, okay, well, what is the equivalent of the bloodletting, the dehydration, the starving, that you can put yourself into, get the behavior you want. So starving has a negative connotation, but we can also starve out the negative things in your life. Like you can starve the alcohol, you can starve the porn, you can starve the friends. And I think the easiest way to do that is to get out of the environment you're in. Because like, I'm sure you heard about the, I think this was an atomic habits. In Vietnam, I think it was like 10% of troops or something were taking heroin when they were over there in the 70s.

And they thought there was going to be this massive problem when they came back to the States. But when they came back to the States, almost no one continued the heroin habit. And so going from Vietnam where you're doing heroin to the U.S., where you're not doing, taking heroin, had a 90% success rate. whereas the inverse is true of recovery centers in the United States today. People go there and 90% of them relapse and they go back home. And so the difference is that people were doing heroin in a different environment, and then they changed their environment, and then they never went back to the environment that they did heroin in.

And so it's like if you have these behaviors that have cues from the people, the surroundings, the colleagues, family, whatever, I think even if you can't afford to move out of the state, like almost anybody can move across town, even 30 minutes away, to just make it a little bit more inconvenient, for your drug dealer, for your bars that you know, for the friends to say, you know, hey, we're doing fantasy, whatever on Friday. And it's like, I can't make it. Right? You just make it inconvenient to do all the things that you don't want to do

and make it more convenient to do the things that you do and you'll do more of them. All right. So the interesting thing for me about the Vietnam heroin thing, which I've heard before, is, and this relates to why I think people might be struggling now, is there's an underlying thing that's happening that the heroin or the, porn or the social media or whatever is trying to mask and cope with. What is that today? Like we have things amazing. Things could not be better.

But you've got people doing things to numb themselves out. What's that thing that they're afraid to face? I think it's their perceived judgment, their perception of other people's judgment of their failures that haven't existed yet. And so when you're, when you think about constructing a mindset that is going to allow somebody to be successful. Like when I think about your blueprints, if you had to prep somebody to be ready to deal with that blueprint, what are some of the either core beliefs or habits that you would get

them in the routine of doing so that they could actually deploy the things that you teach? I think some of the things that I'll say might sound repetitive to some folks, but I'm a big believer in a lot of the Stoic virtues. And a lot of that just comes down to having your opinion of yourself be all that is required. And so it's like living for the future version of yourself and letting that person be your ultimate judge and no one else's voice. And I think that obviously it takes practice. We're social creatures. We learn how to behave from other people and their judgment of our behavior when we're kids.

And then we have to unlearn it as we're adults because we find out that the people who are giving us feedback actually have no idea what they're doing. So, but like, it's super ingrained in us. And I think it's a long process, but like, how do I prepare someone for that? It's like, everything is removing the limitation, right? It's like, I want to get to here. And so getting there is usually straightforward. It's the obstacles that are all the things that people put in their own way. So it's like, what are, because the obstacle might be have a different name for every person.

And then trying to pull apart, like, why is this thing? like why am I putting weight on this thing? Because you had a strong drive when you were growing up, right? And you wanted to get into film school. You had this thing, like, I don't know what that snap point is. For me, I just like, my fear of disapproval from, you know, my dad was my big, was my big driver. And so that was the thing that could get me to quit whatever it was, you know what I mean, to do the one thing that mattered more.

And I think that's, at least for me, that was, I don't know how to find. find that for someone. You said something in one of the interviews that you were doing leading up to your book launch that really hit me. And that was you rewrote the book something like 19 times. And when you got to a point one time you're like, look, they're going to be able to get this. And the guy that you were working with said, look, there's a guy in Iran and he has one goat. Yeah.

And he's going to sleep with a copy of this book under his pillow. Yeah. Do it for him. Yeah. And that somehow sparked you. Yeah. So my question is, given your response to that, given everybody needs that thing, are there some people that are beyond reach? No.

I don't think, I mean, unless you have like mental disability, you know what I mean? Like I think that barring biology, right? No, I don't think so. I think I'm a big behavioral person, which is like anything can be trained. Even like, oh, man, he has such a great personality. It's like, what is personality? Well, personality is probably 170 individual skills. And so if one of them is when someone walks in the room, you stand up, I can train that.

It means that like when someone's talking, I need you to nod your head like this when the other person talks. I can train that. And if we just had to make a checklist, it's just because it's hard to describe doesn't mean it's that's impossible to teach. That's interesting. Okay. So the spark, the thing that causes somebody to finally get into it can be translated into a set of behaviors. And then if you get the set of behaviors, then you're going to be in a position to go. Right.

Right. So what are some of the behaviors that people are doing now that you think are destructive? And what do we replace them with? A lot of it is inaction. Right. Like, I'd love to say, like, all these people are failing, and this is the thing that would fix it. It's like most people just don't take action to begin with. And so I think a lot of it's between their ears.

To your point, which is why I talk a lot about fear or failure, being the actual enemy rather than failure itself. And really even like, even the idea that people are like, I'm afraid of failing. No one's afraid of failing. People are afraid of other people's judgment about their failure. If you could fail in private and no one would know, like when you play video games and you lose the level, you're not embarrassed. Right? Like you lose.

It's interesting. So I've heard you say that before. Yeah. And I've always agreed. Yeah. But I do think that there is something that will chip away at somebody. So it comes down to what do you build your self-esteem around? This was the big breakthrough in my life was the day that I realized, I got to,

choose what I built my self-esteem around. And I had been building myself esteem around being smart. And so I was constantly putting myself in a position where I could prove to myself and others that I was smart. I began to realize we are both the shout and the echo. And I wish it weren't so. I wish we weren't the echo. And what I mean by that is you're what you do, but you're also what other people say about

what you do. And as a just unimaginably social creature, it is baked so deeply into our DNA. I don't think there's any escaping that. So you come into, whether it's playing video games or trying to build a business or whatever, with a lifetime of being both the shout and the echo. So you have a sense of who you are. You've mapped your self-esteem. And now if part of your self-esteem is I'm good at this thing.

After a while, like you're way happier to fail in private because nobody sees you. So there's no new echo reinforcing what an asshole you are. But I don't think you have unlimited failures on your side before you go, fuck, maybe I'm really not good at this thing. And if your self-esteem is about being good at that thing, then it really will begin to erode you. Do you have, assuming I'm right about that, do you have a thing that you encourage people to build their self-esteem around to avoid the kind of traps that will make them afraid of failure? I think it would be around the traits, which can be evidenced by the things you do, which I think is probably where you made your shift. I'm assuming here.

But like it's not about being intelligent, but about being like hardworking, right? It's like if you build your identity around that trait, then you can always do more of it. Like you always work harder. You can always put extra reps in, et cetera. And I think if people build that trait as their identity and where they get their self-esteem from,

then it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, but they're the ones who are in control of it rather than the outcome. And so that way it's like all of the variables of your identity and your self-confidence are under your control, which I think is cool. Which is very cool. So have you identified the trait smorgas board that people have at their ready to be thoughtful about?

So, for instance, being smart would be a trait, being honorable, being honest, being hardworking. What should people be building their self-esteem around? What traits is there one? Is there a magic handful? I think the ability to delay gratification. and from a behavioral perspective, it's being able to continue to act on a longer extinguish curve, which is like, if I knock on a door, so if I knock on a door and nothing happens, how many more times do I knock on the door before someone opens?

So like, if you fire someone and they're like, wait, I want my job, right? You can measure what someone's curve on how many times they will try again on something before they move on and give up, right? And so the longer you can make that curve on someone, the more likely they will hit the jackpot, which then extends how many more times they'll go the next time, which is basically how addiction works too. But you can also use the same concept for good things. So number one is being able to delay gratification. The second one is I think it's vision of what you actually want to do is like where do you want to go? Because you can have somebody who works really hard at building a restaurant, like one single store, and you work really hard at building an app that's going to change the world. The amount of hours and effort that go into building an amazing restaurant and that are probably about the same,

but the amount of impact is disproportionate on something that can go to gazillions of people. So I think you have to have some level of vision, and that comes from the people that you're around. The third one is having some level of drive, and I think that you can have either pool or away from drive. Pick which one or whatever, whichever one you've got more of, I would say start with that one. And I think it does shift over time because many entrepreneurs have away from. drive in the beginning. We're afraid of failing. We're afraid of not being enough. You know, we hate being poor, whatever your thing is. A lot of times, especially I get a lot of DMs about this. It's like I'm trying to find my passion. I'm trying to find my purpose, my thing. And I don't

think you find it. I think you make it. How do you know if you're going to like anything without trying it? You don't. And most people hate things that they suck at. And how do you stop sucking and stuff? You do stuff that you suck out a lot until you suck less until you're eventually good. And so it's like, so you're not going to be passionate about anything that you suck at, which means that it's a fallacy of thinking. I have a hypothesis that haunts me and that hypothesis is for real, partly because it applies to me. That hypothesis is that people have a very hard time holding sophisticated ideas in their head. Part of what I think makes you so amazing. And P.S., I would like to say that almost a year ago, I said, within the next five years, you'll be one of the biggest names in social media.

and I think you crushed the timeline just monstrously. Well, you killed the predictions. Hey, there it is. Just really, really crazy. But people really have just such a difficult time holding sophisticated ideas in their head. The thing that makes you as amazing is that you are able to hold sophisticated ideas in your head and simplify them so that people can understand and they can deploy them and actually use them. but the inability to hold the sophisticated idea in their head is going to create a tremendous amount of problems.

So when I think about, okay, you're going to have to pick something for your identity that's going to allow you to face failure to go into that loop, to be able to tear yourself down and not have your desire to push forward extinguished, you already have to be able to conceptualize that idea, that you're going to be fighting against your neurochemistry. So you're going to knock on that door. It is going to be brutal. It's going to feel so bad. Like death. And you then have to do mental jiu-jitsu to translate that into, ah, but I build my self-esteem around being the person that can have this long extinguish that I can knock on a thousand doors when anybody else can only knock on two.

And I worry, God, is my big fear that I do think some people are beyond reach? I think that is my big fear. and I do impact theory is predicated on the idea that as long as somebody meets minimum requirements that they're going to be able to do it but to press on this point because I'm deeply optimistic and so Lord knows I hope that you convince me but the more I do this game the more I realize that people get trapped in things like I'm trying to find my passion yeah and that the emotion of nothing feeling real. Yeah.

Is, and what you have to do to build a connection between I choose to make this my passion and how you make that emotionally resonant is so sophisticated that most people won't be able to pull it off. Yeah. You talk about stacking pennies on the evidence call. What evidence do you have for all of us that it, anybody really could. can turn a lack of belief into simple, rudimentary, behavioral things that they do to get those wins. Yeah. So I'll make a statement and then I'll answer that, which is I think confidence without

evidence is delusion. And so the idea that you aren't confident if you don't feel confident right now is okay because the question is what are you trying to be confident about? Like, confidence as a word, right, if we can define terms, is your own percentage, the percentage likelihood that you have that what you think will happen or will happen, right, like in statistics, like what is our confidence score on this metric, right? And so the same thing applies to a person. What is our confidence that when Johnny says he will do this, it will happen? And so we have our own confidence metric for ourselves, which is a percentage likely that we will do what we say we're going to do. And so the way that you can increase that confidence is to have more evidence that you have

done things when you said you would do them in the past. And so I think it's about looking retrospectively and thinking, you know, what story can I tell around this data that would give me more evidence that I actually do have some of these traits that I didn't think about? And I'll give you a funny little quip on this. So when I was selling weight loss memberships way back in the day, I remember a common thing that would come in, you know, a lady would sit down and say, you know, I haven't worked out in seven years and I know I need to be going to the gym. And I would say, that's amazing. And they would just be shocked. What do you mean?

I'd be like, you're so consistent. I was like, so you already have the treated consistency. I was like, we should have to flip it. I was like, it's way harder to learn to be consistent. Then I was like, if you were just yo-yoing back and forth all the time, I was like, it might be way harder. I was like, but you actually stick with what you, and they were like, never thought about it like that.

And so it's just like, and I say that a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but to the same degree, it was really just a reframe for these people. And whether or not, you know, people want to take that and run with it in whatever direction. They're like, for me, I just wanted this person to believe they could do it. And so I think to the same degree, it's like, well, if every day you didn't make 100 reachouts, right, or you didn't make the piece of content that you wanted to. But up until that point, you've always been able to, like, make a couple coffee and, like, sit down at the computer rather than going to the arcade, you know, figuratively or, you know, playing video games or going like more. You don't play video games much to you, Alex. No.

Going to the arcade, boys and girls. Back in the 1980s, yeah. And so it's counting the wins sometimes of losses that didn't happen, which is like, what could have gone worse, which is also a stoic frame? But it's like, what could I have done to mess this day up more than I did? It's like, well, I could have, I mean, I could have taken five shots when I woke up. I didn't do that. It's like, okay, check. Great.

I haven't, I haven't started my day with drinking. Have I started my day with drugs? No. How many days in a row? I've not started my days with drugs, you know, drugs and drinking. It's like, I don't know, a whole year. It's like, okay. well like let's just basically chunk down a level and then you see all of a sudden you like peel back the onion and you're like oh I have tons of evidence that I can be consistent on things I just need to add another thing on top of those behaviors that I already have proven that I can do and so now when I make this prediction of my confidence that I can do this like you just take one step at a time and I think that the big meta skills come from those what we call virtues but virtues are just behaviors which can be trained.

virtues are behaviors that can be trained it's really interesting man i i very much like the way that you look at the world and i think i've tried to um articulate a similar idea and the way that i approached it was it doesn't matter if you think negatively and um act well you'll still get the success out of acting well if you act poorly but think positively you'll go nowhere and this is why it drives me crazy when people's advice is look in the mirror and say that you love yourself and all that it won't work And at the end of the day, success really is just it's doing the right things. Another killer. So I do look out at the world right now and I see where building products that squeeze

our dopamine has created amazing products. The iPhone is incredible and I'm very glad that it exists. But I also see it having a very negative impact on a lot of people that simply pull the dopamine lever. and for people that aren't familiar with, there was a behavioral study done in mice or rats. And if you let, one, you're putting the mouse in a cage, so you're already an artificially limited environment. But if you let it tap the lever for cocaine,

it will tap it until it dies. Now, the fascinating thing about cocaine is that it's dopamine. It's basically the potential for reward more than the reward itself. And so I think that we have a lot of products, do incredibly well because they're all about squeezing that dopamine release. And therefore, for people to do what you're talking about. Like, if let's just embrace the frame for the rest of this conversation and I hope the rest of my life, that truly nobody is beyond this, barring, you know, some, a mental problem

that makes it impossible for them to move forward. So that you really just have to find those behaviors. So if you understand that the world right now is designed to get you to be watching pornography, to be playing on social media, to play mindless video games, I will say, as somebody making video games, I'm well aware there's usefulness and then there's waste.

But understanding all of that, that the world is set up against you, then you have to have a technique that's going to allow you to get into these habits that are going to be effective. Now, one thing that was absolutely transformative in my life was that rules. To just an absolute binary.

And so this will be a hot take that will piss some people off. But I've always said, I do not understand how people get addicted to drugs. Because if you just have a rule in your life that says, obviously, I will exclude pain management. If you just have a rule in your life that says, I don't, let's take drinking. I don't drink more than twice a week, period. So if you've taken a drink for the third time in the week, you've violated your rule,

you know that you're out of bounds. You need to immediately correct course. Do you leverage rules or things, binary things so that you know, like, I do. give myself 10 minutes to get out of bed. That's like my big rule. Do you have anything like that that allows you to? I probably leave the exact opposite way. Not as a contrary point. Just I hate rules. All rules. And so how do you stay on the right behaviors? I do the things that ever worded me in the past. I mean that genuinely. Like when I wake up earlier, better things have happened for me. when I do more work before I have my meetings,

better things have happened for me. When I eat a certain way, I look the way that I want and better things happen for me. And so I just, I buck against rules really hard, and I don't know why that is. But like the moment someone's like, you can't have chocolate or you can't smoke

or you can't whatever, I'm like, why not? I'll do it. And then still win at the thing to prove that that's not the point, which is why like I get, I get annoyed with a lot of the superstition around routine. And what I mean by that is like, you know, I've got, I mean, I remember there was a guy messaged me. He's like, dude, I'm doing my morning routine. He's like, and I have a coal plunge,

a red light sauna. I ground outside. And then I do my gratitude journal. And then like, he, he had this list. It was like, you know, it was taking like three hours to get his routine done or whatever in the morning. And I was like, you know, you could just not do that and work for three more hours every day. I was like, I'll bet you'll make more money. And so I think there's a lot of superstition around, especially in the entrepreneur space, around routine as like, if I don't get my morning routine in, I'm just useless. And I'm like, man, I'd love to compete against you. Right, because, like, you have one bad night of sleep and you're fucked. I was like, I will continue to work because working has worked for me in the past. But I love what you were saying earlier with,

like, success doesn't really care or the result doesn't really care. One plus one, if you still do the addition, it equals two, whether you're a good person or you're a bad person. If you make 100 calls or you, you know, make 100 pieces of content the likelihood that somebody will find out about your product is greater than if you make zero, period. Fight me. And so you can do those things and be you can drink and do drugs and watch porn. If you still do the shit, that's all that matters. Now, those things might make it more difficult, but I always came from the perspective of like, I want to do the formula and then live my life how I want to live. And if that means that sometimes I drink more and sometimes I drink less, or sometimes I work out more and sometimes I work out less,

sometimes eat dessert, sometimes they eat really small desserts, that's fine. And so it's just like what are the actual things that matter? And if you look at, and I know you have a lot of wealthy friends, like people, the way people work, the routines that they have are so varied, which to me means that they don't matter. Because if there were something that absolutely has to be done, then it has to go down to first principles of, okay, in order for people to find out about your stuff, you have to let them know. Great.

So you have to advertise it in some way for people to find out about it, to buy, period. No, like anybody who has a business, that rule applies. Now, some of them are, you know, don't drink. Some of them drink a ton. Some of them watch porn. Some of them don't watch porn at all. And also make tons of money. And so I try to have as few rules as possible to give myself as much latitude to live my life.

That is, that's really interesting. And I will, no, no, for sure. I love that. And I think that's one of the most interesting things about the era that we're living in is people get all these different. perspectives. So for the thing that we agree on is that there are physics to everything. So success has physics. And if you're not trying to do something that violates physics, then you're going to be fine. And so how you get there is somewhat irrelevant. I have a feeling speaking to the people that are caught up in the, they're wasting their time. They're not doing the things that they need

to do. They're going to need to create some structure. Now that structure, that structure, may be as simple as what you're talking about, which is, because if from my frame of reference, the way that I would put thoughts in my own head about what you're saying is, I have a rule, and this is a literal rule of mine. I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals, which sounds very akin to what you're talking about. It's like if I do this thing, I get this output. When I wake up early, I've had better things happen. When I'm in shape, better things happen. When I put in the work, better things happen. And ultimately, that's the thing that I'm trying to get people to anchor around is there everything that you do is a test.

Your test will have results. It's what I call the physics of progress. So to make progress, one must have a hypothesis. Know where you are, know where you want to go, understand the obstacle between you and that. Come up with a hypothesis about how to overcome that obstacle, run that test, look at the data, very frankly, don't BS yourself. And then come up with a more informed hypothesis and try again over and over and over and over. Ultimately, you're steering by results.

And I think very often people either don't know how to, in fact, I think there's a few things that will happen. One, they don't know how to conceive of the problem, so they don't understand the obstacle. Two, they don't know where they're going. Or three, they cannot break themselves out of the dopamine cycle. They haven't identified the pain they're moving away from whatever insecurity they have. And so they end up in that death loop of feeling like they don't have enough time. reality they have the same time as hyper efficient, successful people, they just don't use it in the same fashion.

I think Seneca said that we all think we don't have enough time, but it's really we just don't use the time we have well. And I think a lot of it is around like how we choose to pick our identities to your point earlier. Like someone might say like, man, I'm lazy. I would say like, that's amazing. Like a lot of great CEOs are lazy. That's fine.

let's use that. And so let's just make working more convenient than the other thing. And then your laziness will take over. Or you don't mean just like in terms of how we can frame the problem, right? Like as an example we were saying earlier with the iPhone, like scientific study, anyone can do this. You can decrease your iPhone usage by simply going to gray scale. Like across age groups, if you switch your colors on your screen to gray scale, you will use it 30% less than you normally would. It's like great. For most people, that's like an hour plus a day.

30% is an hour plus? Oh my God, yeah. Well, I think it's way. I mean, I think average iPhone usage is probably like, I mean, I think one hour is like conservative on that. I think it's like, like might be even two. Yalza. Yeah. Hours, it's like, there you go. Found your time. You can make all your content. You can watch a movie at the time that you have from saving it. But like anyone can do it. And so just like, how many, how many these little things can I make convenient? Right. So like if you're, like, if you're trying to eat healthy, right? I mean, obviously. because we both came from that space.

It's like, well, you just make it more convenient to eat healthy than eat unhealthy. It's like, okay, we'll remove all the stuff in your house that you don't want to be eating. Make sure all the snacks you have are protein-related snacks. You know, anything that has calories in it that's a beverage, don't include it. Right? Like, just simple things that all of a sudden you're like, I'm hungry and you're like, I've got cucumber slices and protein chips. You're like, well. What do you think will be more effective?

That or dehydrating the horse? I think that is dehydrating the horse. interesting that one's never spoken to me one because that's not my problem you can fill my house with snacks and if it either violates one of my rules which i'm obsessed with because i created them and they're designed to get me the results that i want or they violate my identity i'm not going to do it yeah that's unique to you i think that's like a tom like one percent thing just me from the outside i think a lot of people have a hard time following rules you don't think people will drive 30 minutes to gorge on something.

I think they could, but they're just as likely to break a rule. And I think it's more likely that they will break a rule because it takes less effort to break the rule to themselves than it does to drive 30 minutes. And so I just want to make it as inconvenient as possible to do the wrong thing and as convenient as possible to do the right thing. That will clearly be advantageous.

So in no way is what I'm about to say arguing against that. So huge. Love that. Total support on board. Now, having said that, I have a feeling that the thing that people are up against, and I thought a lot about this with food, at Quest, I wasn't thinking, oh, I need to make this convenient.

That was part of it, and we certainly were not blind to the fact that giving somebody a package good that they could carry in their purse was going to be really helpful. But the mantra I kept saying to myself was, I want to make food that people can choose based on taste, and it happens to be good for them.

Because I think people will go way out of their way, violate rules, all that, to eat something that makes them feel the way they want to feel. And if I had to anchor all of my fears around people not being able to accomplish what they want to accomplish, it would all be around the things you're going to need to do, don't feel the way you want them to feel. And because they don't feel the way you want them to feel, you veer towards the things that do make you feel the way you want to feel. Now, part of that you can accomplish by reframing, but part of it, I think, is inescapable. You're going to do what feels good.

and you're going to avoid what's painful for the most part. Okay, I love this. So one of the big misnomerers in my opinion about discipline is that people who, like, some people might look at me and say that, oh, Alex is really disciplined. But I actually really do what I want to do every day. And it just so happens to be work that is productive and makes money. But that statement that you made earlier that people, shoot, what do you said?

You said people do. What makes them feel the way they want to feel? Right. And then they use it. Oh, it's because it's not making them feel the way they want to feel. And my only addition to that would have just said, yet. Just yet. And so it's usually because their extinction curve is too low, right, on the behavior.

And so if I go, let's say I'm the best door knocker in the world, best door knocking sales guys. And I knock on five doors. I might not get an answer from any of those five doors. And I walk away and I say, I guess door knocking isn't for me. And I might be the LeBron James of door knocking, right? but if the sample size is too small because my extinction curve just cuts off really fast

I'll never know and so that's why it's like if you can give the thing the opportunity to reinforce its own behavior then it goes from external to internal or like video editors for example like there's people who love

I mean we're going to film school right in the beginning you suck at editing film but then you like make the letters appear and you get instant feedback and you're like whoa that was rewarding right and then you do it again and then you learn another technique and another technique another technique

And so then the behavior itself becomes rewarding and you begin to like work, right? You begin liking your work. And so I think it really is that just getting over the hump in the beginning of knocking on a thousand doors rather than five and realizing that it would make sense that you would suck because you haven't done it before. But knowing that if other people have done it, too, that there is a reward that will eventually come and it will reinforce me just like it has every other human before me who has done this. And I think just like one of my my core, you know, assumptions, as I like to say, is that if somebody else can do these behaviors, I can do these behaviors and get the same outcome, you know, barring external environments or timing and things like that.

But, you know, assuming that those are the same, like, door not going to sell solar today is the same as it was last year. And if I see somebody who's number one in solar and I do the same behaviors as them, I will likely get an outcome that is decent. And so I, that's what gives me confidence going into a new environment is my. modeling somebody and just being like, ignore all of these other things. What are the behaviors? How many times is this person, you know, how quickly do they walk from door to door? Do they only go to apartment buildings? Or they, you know, like what's there, what is all the steps that they do, operationalizing

success rather than kind of like the theorizing that I feel like happens a lot? And I think that's, to be fair, I think the reason a lot of people kind of like some of the content that I put out from a moneymaking perspective is how can I operationalize this word, right? So like patience, for example, is when the people throw out a lot. but for me defining patience was helpful, which is figuring out what to do in the meantime. Like that's patience. Like we're like, I'm not patient. It's like, no, you just need to figure out what to do in the meantime.

That's all. Like, you and I are being patient on all the investments that we made last year while we're having this podcast. Like, they are happening. We're figuring out what to do in the meantime. So we're being patient. And so it's like patience feels bad when you're focusing on it. But if you're not focusing on it, then patience happens by default.

Like sadness, for example, like that was really helped me to find, figure out just just even defining the word in terms of operational perspective, help me get out of those funks faster, which is sadness comes from a lack of options, a perceived lack of options, which is why it feels like hopelessness. But if it comes from a perceived lack of options, then it means that you solve that with knowledge because it's perceived lack of options, which is an ignorance problem, which means it's solvable, which all of a sudden gives me something to do. So then all of a sudden I do have an option, and then you can get out of the funk. And like anxieties that completely, is the reverse of that, which is I have many options, and I don't know which one to pick,

which means I don't have priorities. So, like, you solve sadness through knowledge, you solve anxiety through decisions. And so, like, helping me just spell those out to myself. I'm like, ah, I feel anxious. Okay, that means that I have lots of paths and I need to make a decision. So which one am I going to decide so I can get out of this bad feeling? If I have sadness, great, what do I not know? Okay, now I have to go figure that out. Great, I have something to do. And so, like, you can, I think these are like mental models around using emotions to fuel the behaviors that you want. I didn't want to say a word during that because I think what you're talking about is, so I'm, as you're talking, I'm trying to map my fear about people not being able to make the change. And I, the more I think about it, the more I think this boils down to people feel a way that they don't want.

to feel and they don't know how to handle that. Yeah. And you just, without me even thinking to ask you, you were going through how to deal with different emotions. And by having a plan, by having a procedure, which I think you're going to call operationalizing. Yeah. Then you know what to do. Oh, when I encounter sadness, then I do this. When I encounter anxiety, then I do this. And so it's a very action-oriented plan. So I want to plant a flag in that. And then I want to follow up with how one goes about, operationalizing something. Okay, so I'm going to lay out a thesis

so you can push back or whatever. People, one of the things that you and I have both said historically that I think is maybe the most powerful thing we will ever say and everything after that is just what you do once you get over that. Your life is an exact reflection of your choices.

You are not a victim. And even if you are, it does not help you to think that way. You have to break through that. And one of the intros to this episode that I considered was that every day each of us has to make a choice whether we are going to play the victim or play the game and if you're going to play the game play to win it's the only thing that makes sense but that is

negative emotions can be so gnarly that we need to make it somebody else's fault that to point all 10 fingers back at us and this is one of the things to get higher to impact theory you're going to be asked a question along the lines of something horrible happens to you how many fingers go outwards and how many fingers point back at you. And the punchline is, if all 10 are not coming right back at you, it's just disempowering. It doesn't mean that bad things don't happen. Nothing you can do about a tornado, et cetera, et cetera. But still, to realize that you can make different choices and get a different outcome, but people don't do that. A lot. Because to do that, if you don't have the right frame of reference, if you haven't leaned on the right traits,

if you aren't building your self-esteem around the right thing, in that moment to say that, that it's your fault, fault, fault is just emotionally devastating. And people have not operationalized their encounter with negative emotions and therefore they will do anything they have to do completely unconsciously to not feel that way. Now if that is doing drugs, they'll do drugs. If that's drinking, masturbation, cheating, whatever,

they will do all of it. But it really boils down to what's your relationship with your emotion. Now to push this farther and to really make clear what I think. I don't think emotions are objectively real. I don't think that people ought to believe an emotion. I think people think because they feel it,

it is the right reaction to objective truth rather than a subjective reaction to perception. And if you can understand that all of your emotions are a subjective reaction to perception, that you can take control of that, that you can reframe things, you can have a different emotion. And now, in that moment,

instead of doing something that moves you away from your goals, you can replace it with something that moves you towards your goals. Okay, so that's my thesis as I really think about boiling it down to what messes people up. It's that. If I'm right about that, how do you operationalize anything? Like what does that mean? Because I have a feeling, the thing that makes you phenomenal, is the ability to operationalize everything.

So if I love this, the conversation, just a side note. So in my opinion, a lot of things, even huge departments, practices in business and medicine and everything come down to learning and communication. And so let's define terms. So learning is same condition, new behavior. So to the point, I felt sad last time I learned this new thing from this podcast. an impact theory, which is, okay, if I feel sad, then it means that I don't see an option, which means I need to get more education or knowledge on the subject so that I can figure out

what to do. Well, at least deciding that I need to learn more gives me the next step that I need to do, and boom, I'm not sad. And so you've been sad before, and then it took you five days to get out of it, and you're sad now, and it takes you five minutes to get out of it. Same condition, new behavior. So you learned. And so if we go one degree, move from that, and I'm going to circle back to the original point. If we think about intelligence, right? Like, what is intelligence? As I define it from an operational perspective,

it's rate of learning, right? So somebody who learns really slowly is less intelligent, somebody who learns really quickly, is more intelligent. But that means that intelligence is just a rate. It's a measurement of how quickly you change your behavior in the same condition. And so if you continue to listen to podcasts

and you wake up in the same exact conditions every day and your behavior does not change, It means you learned nothing, which means you are not as smart as you think you are. But it also means that you can influence and have a direct influence on your intelligence by increasing or decreasing the time it takes you to actually act on the knowledge you have when the same condition presents itself. And so for me, that's incredibly empowering because it's like, I can be smarter by simply hearing what this person says, getting the same condition, and then immediately changing my behavior. Wow, that's cool. And so that then like from the fingers perspective, it's like, okay, all 10 fingers are on me of how I can influence my own surroundings and do the things that I want to do. So to circle back to the original question I think would probably dovetailed a little bit was, can you repeat it one more time?

How do you operationalize things? What does that mean? So, okay. So it's breaking down, what does this word mean from a behavior perspective? 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 so 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 ask to do is you can just leave a review.

It'll take 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. So it's it's it's it's really hard like I think the reason that so many people are confused and they have a hard time remembering things and understanding complex topics is because they have lots of words in their heads that they have not defined. I really mean like I truly believe that which is why every book that I have begins with the definition of terms. Just like this is what an offer is. This is what a lead is. Right. These are these are what this means. Right. And until you have that, you're just you're basically making face noise. Right. Like if I say leads,

and you perceive that as something different, then we can't actually have a conversation because we're not talking about the same thing. And so a lot of people have a lot of words that they've heard other people say that they nod along to. And some people are like, make sense? And they say, yes. But when someone says, does that make sense?

We have been trained as humans to nod and say yes. It doesn't mean it makes sense. It means that when we have that cue, that's the behavior we do, right? Because we know that we get punished when we say no, because then it becomes, oh, this big thing. And then, you dovetail into all these other conversations

and you get punished for it. Right? And so you learn what's reinforced. And most people say, make sense, and then you say, which means nod your head when I say this, and you're like, I nod my head. Great. And then you move on. And so I think that's why a lot of people don't learn because they actually don't know what the words mean. And so to operationalize something, it is simply going back down to when I say I'm confident, what does that mean? It's not a feeling.

It's not what other people say about you. Like none of that is measurable. Like how much, like what is measurable? It's a percentage of likelihood that what I say will happen will happen. Period. That's what it is. Now, what you'll also find is that there are a lot of words that mean the same thing. And that doesn't mean that the concept wrong is just the fact that English or whatever language you learn usually has a melting pot of like, well, this is the version of the Nordic word, and this is the version of the Hindi word, and this is the version of the French word. And they're all in the lexicon, but most of them more or less mean the same thing. And so getting away from words meaning what the dictionary tells us it means and just say, what does it mean to me in terms

of what I can do with it, then I think makes navigating life a lot simpler because the only thing we can control as our behavior. And so if we define the words in terms of what we do about it, then these all become things that we can control and can change our lives with. Yeah. Okay. That I think is super important. One of the things that changed my life and the easiest way to explain it is how it manifested in my marriage was to define terms.

And because what Lisa and I were realizing is we're saying the same words, but we don't mean the same thing. Totally. And that's creating a lot of confusion. Now, as a leader in a business, this becomes problematic often, because you will say something that to you is self-evident

exactly what it means. People do the, it doesn't make sense, yeah, nod, and they do that a lot. And so Lisa and I started defining really simple words. Like when you say you promise, what does that mean?

When you say something's important, what does that mean? And so like in our marriage, if we use the word important, it means stop whatever you're doing, I don't care if you're with the president, of the United States, you will immediately get up, leave that, and deal with this thing because it's important.

So if it is meaningful but not important, then fair enough. It's meaningful, but I'm in the middle of something. I'll get to it later. It doesn't mean that it's not something that needs to be addressed, but it isn't important. Cool. Now we have a shared lexicon. Yeah. And I think that going back to my thesis around emotions, emotions are the subconscious's way of

communicating to the conscious mind. So when you think about, and this isn't, I mean, this is me making things up. This is me connecting dots that behavioral science has made abundantly clear. But I am admittedly connecting dots. But Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote a whole book on this called How Emotions Are Made. So this is not me just shooting from the hip, but I'm putting my own words to it. The way that you feel is the subconscious mind, which can process information faster and vaster, as they say. So it's a much larger number of data points, process much quicker.

But when you bring it into the conscious mind, you're going to think either in images or in words. Most people probably think primarily in words. And so it really narrows down your ability to deal with a lot of information. And because emotions are coming from the limbic brain, which we had before we had the higher level cognition that humans have that other animals don't have, you're going to be in a situation where, oh, snake, and you just just just, jump. You just have the emotion and you move. Most people leave things there. And so they're never pulling that into the light to say,

ooh, why do I feel so uncomfortable in this moment? What is it? And if they would take the time to define what the discomfort is, then they might be able to operationalize the response that they should have to this predicated on, at least from my perspective, what's your goal? So I feel some kind of way, but I have a goal. My goal makes demands, which is something I don't think people think about very often. to achieve your goal, just, hey, there's physics to it. So certain things will move you towards your goal and certain things won't. So my goal makes demands, but I feel some kind of way that

make me want to move in the opposite direction of the demands that my goals make. So now, using your words, I have to operationalize my encounter with this emotion, define it, define a response, and then actually adhere to that response in order to move towards my goals. and that the moment where you pull the emotion into the spotlight of your conscious attention and define it in a really simple way I think is where the vast majority of humanity get lost so I do something called Impact Through University and I answer some of the same questions over and over and over and they often have to do with that moment somebody does not understand their own emotions and therefore they cannot operationalize the next move so much to say I will

keep it short. So I want to, so in reference back to what I was talking about like with sadness and anxiety and patience, like these are all, well, patience is more of a behavior. Sadness is a feeling that and then how do we translate that, right? I want to be clear that I use those terms because I want to meet people where they're at. Me personally. And if you look at it from like the behavioral science perspective, you have stimulus and you of response, what happens in the box of like what this person feels, right? Like if I hold up a red

flash card to a random person and then I slap them and then I hold the red flash card again, like all of a sudden some of them might feel anger. Some of them might feel fear. Like what they feel when they see the stimulus, which I've now paired with a response, right, is going to be different. And so I think a lot of effort goes into people and even people in our world. trying to help people describe their feelings, talk through things, blah, blah, blah. And I just genuinely think that it's a waste of time. Because not who cares, but why does it matter? Because you can do it when you're sad, you can do it when you're angry, you can do it

and you're fearful. And again, to the point is, if 100 people more find out about the thing that I'm trying to sell or whatever I'm trying to do, then I have a greater percentage likelihood that I will get this outcome. That's it. And I think a lot of people, they just get into this cycle of trying to analyze their feelings.

And then they're like, oh, it's because I had this trauma when I was a kid. And, you know, because my dad didn't hug me enough and like, blah, blah, blah. It's like the because for most people's explanation is irrelevant.

Because I get, like, I had a podcast question the other day that asked, um, do you feel like, uh, trauma, you know, is, is something that creates success later in life among entrepreneurs,

blah, blah, and, um, I really thought about it. And I really thought about it. And I was like, I think people suffer and some people become successful. So do I think that suffering creates success? No.

I think that everyone suffers and some of them become successful. And then they attribute their success to make it feel worth it to have gone through that suffering because they have an outcome. But I don't think that they're related in any way. Because you were successful because you did the thing. How you thought about it is completely irrelevant. And I just think that there's so much effort that gets put into that conversation which is why I have really contrarian views around like therapy and things like that.

But I think like if you keep opening a wound, like what does it help you? I don't know. Like you still didn't make the calls. So like let's let's create an environment where it's more likely that you create that you do the calls that you need to make. And it just it simplifies the variables that we can control because no one knows like even even adding the because to things like I did this because it's like you don't even know why you're doing what you're doing. And so when people are, like, Tom, what's your number one reason for success? We're making it up. We're making up our response.

I mean, it's what it is. We're like, how do I? There's a hundred things, a zillion things. I don't know. Like, is it because my dad didn't hug me enough? Is it because my mom? Like, who knows? Maybe if he would have been president, it would have been fine.

Like, it could be completely irrelevant. But we just choose to give this thing that some percentage of the audience then says, oh, that's like me. And maybe then I can be successful to. And that's fine. But I think the, the, the boiling it down to the absolute, basics, or not even basics, the absolute truths of it are that there's a stimulus and there's a response. What happens in the box inside of your head does not matter. If you respond a certain way,

you have learned. And if you continue to see the same stimulus and you don't respond the way you want to, you have not learned. So you need to learn. I love how direct and simple that is. See a red card, get slapped. See a red card duck. Yeah. You learned. Or block. Right. Even better. Right. You have beemptively slapped. And if I have to show the flash card to you seven, 10, 12 times, the person I show to once and then ducks the second time is smarter, more intelligent, than the person has to show it to 10 times before they react in a different way than standing there and getting slapped.

Dude, I love that. I will say for all the people that I, because the people that I have, maybe I glom on to because of my own, here's me making up a reason that I've gloned on. to because of my own sort of a, the journey that I've had to go on, the thing I've had to deal with, is that I think where people fall down, because you are right. There is no, in no uncertain terms, if upon stimulus you do the right thing for goal attainment, you will attain your goal. Like that's just how it works.

But then the question becomes, why do the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, majority of people never reach their goals. And I think it's because they're not able to either, because either will work, they're not able to either stop caring about what the reason is, or they never take the time to figure out the reason. Now, given that I think most people struggle because they just don't have clarity, I do think people are going to need to, they might not need to understand why they feel that way, but they're going to need the very thing that leaves them uncertain about why they feel that way is the thing that leaves them uncertain about what they want to do with their life or how to achieve

what they want to do. Okay, I really, I love this. Okay. So the first part of the statement was people aren't doing the thing and then it was because and then the second part of the statement, I would posit that with the because I would put the reason they're not doing the thing that they want to be doing is because they've been rewarded for doing what they're currently doing in the past. And so all they're doing is continuing to do they have learned works. And so it's like if you are continually rewarded, because like there's a reason that you do what you do, right, which is that you have been trained to do it. Now train is a, you know, the environment can train you, which is what most of us switch to over time.

You have an external stimuli that wants to pair a new behavior with a stimulus, right? If you want to teach someone to duck, right? You show the red card and eventually they learn, right? But at a certain point, once you do the red card, and then eventually you pair the red card with a fist, then all of a sudden the person gets into fighting, right? And then you don't need to pair that anymore because the environment will self-reinforce and reward the behavior of ducking and will pull. punish if they don't get if they don't duck right and so if you just think about that as like a really

simplistic microcosm of how we learn thousands of things like even even the concept of speech is a million reinforcement points from the time a baby is alive right so if you think about a baby as stimulus response so they're alive they make noise reward they're here right attention affection approval right reward and then they make no noise and they make noise again reward make noise again, reward, reward. Then, once they learn to make noise consistently, we then start rewarding noise that sounds like words. So it's like, like, oh, right?

And they're like, whoa, it's like, we're not going to reward that one. And then all of a sudden they start approximating the first word. And so all of it is, it's this continuous feedback loop of me doing something and having an extinction curve because nothing happens or me doing something and I get a reward. and so that is the micro. And so you can apply that to everything that's happened. So like when you start seeing the world in that way,

it becomes much simpler to navigate because you don't need to find the reason. You just say like, I do this because I've been rewarded in the past. Cool. So I just need to reward myself in the present for this new behavior. And like how can I pair this new behavior with something good? Which is like as a total side note for me, a little trick like when I go to the gym,

I always get a little shake even though it's a little bit more expensive at the gym. because it's like a little reward that happens immediately after I lift, and I look forward to that. And so it's just like little things that you can do to reward yourself to to hijack that cycle, that changes behavior. And so it's like, we want to change our behavior. I think we have to define the terms of what behavior is to begin with and how we define learning because that's all it is, you know, learning is pairing a stimulus with a response. And so if they want to learn things, that's what they have to do.

All right. If so many people fail, so many people have a victim mentality, what reward are they getting that reinforces that. So it could be that they're, because a reinforcer can be both a more of a positive or less of a negative. Right. So if I remove a slap, that's a reward in its own way.

Or I add a positive. And so they may be avoiding punishment in certain ways by staying in this place. Because in the past, because everything's extrapolations from the past in terms of how we see behavior, because that's our pattern, right? Like we look back at what, like we use our history to make predictions about what's going to happen with when I try to,

turn this door knob to get into the room, I turn it, and I turn it because when I have turned door knobs in the past, it worked. And the first time I countered a door, I was like, what do I do? Now, what I probably did is I looked at somebody else and when they turned it, the door opened. So I know when I see this thing, now if I made that thing solid and it can't be turned, I would like, and then I would think what other types of doors are there? And then you'd be like, is there another handle on the store? Like, and so you go to secondary and tertiary behaviors, whereas the most likely one that's going to work is the first one you start with. And so we have these behaviors that, let's say, laying on the couch and watching Netflix has been rewarded.

Watching Netflix is a rewarding experience. It's, I mean, like, it's more positive and it avoids negative. But then you get into short-term and long-term reward and punishment, right, which is why it's harder, which is why I think it's the meta-skill, which is on top of those things, which is that I know that I can delay a short-term for a long-term payoff. And I think that's where the big leap has to happen. Because if you can train yourself to know that, you can train yourself to know that. that like I know that if I do one workout, I'm not going to look different. And I know if I do six workouts, I'm still also probably not going to look different, right? But if I do 600 workouts, I probably will. And as soon as you have that one first thing where you had to delay gratification,

you got a much bigger payoff, you start to associate the behaviors in while you're doing it with reward. And so the difference between experts and beginners is that experts find more ways to reward themselves while they work on whatever the thing is. And so it's not that they are more disciplined, which is finally the full 360 on this is that experts are not more disciplined than you. They've just found more ways to win. So how do we effectively take control of the process of rewarding and punishing ourselves to keep us on track towards our goals? I think being cognizant of it at the absolute base layer, you start to see the world through very different lens. And you're like, okay, that was punishing. Huh. Like, that was rewarding. Great. I'll do more of that. But then you start to think,

you're like, why do I do that? And you really start thinking about it. Well, because sometimes it's so funny. Like I'll have, because we, you know, we invest in buying products and whatnot. And so I had two different products that were in the same category because I liked the category that was looking at. And one of the products had a better result. Like it had a better end outcome when the customer uses it. And the market leader, and this is who they were trying to disrupt, had a slightly inferior result, but it delivered the result almost instantly. And the other one took like five minutes. and this one was like five seconds. And the other one was objectively better.

Like science, it had all the stats and everything. Like, it was objectively better. And they wanted me to invest in this company. And they're like, we have a better product. I was like, no, you better resolve. You have a better product. The reason these guys are still, number one, is because latency matters more than intensity

when it comes to war. The reason that a little icon on your phone is because it's immediate, right? And then it goes away, right? Like you have this immediate feedback loop. Whereas, I don't know if you've heard this. Okay, so I love the stuff. So if you're trying to train a dog, right, there's this, I wish I could, I'll maybe send it

after the show, but like a graph that shows how you can train a dog to sit or like a treat. And so if you tell the dog the command and then you wait and you immediately reward it, it learns faster. If you wait 30 seconds, it learns, you know, it takes more tries to get it to learn. After a minute, the dog's untrainable. a minute. And so it doesn't know why it's being rewarded. Now the thing is, it's not that you aren't training the dog,

because whenever you have some sort of reward you're training it, you're just not training what you think you are. So you have to look at what happened immediately before, you give the reward which happened a minute later, right? And so we think, because it's like, it sat, I'm going to wait a minute and then give it the cookie, but I'm not reinforcing the sitting. I'm reinforcing the thing they did right before they got the cookie.

And so as a zoom back out here, when we're thinking about, like, and the reason I brought up these two products was that the, the original product, the one that was the market leader, was better because it gave even a smaller benefit, but it gave it immediately. And so people will probably, it seems silly, but when you really try and be honest with yourself, like, why do I, why do I go to this gym instead of that gym? Because I have a bunch of gym memberships. I'm like, why do I, because I like to think about this. I'm not surprised by that. I'm like, why do I go to this place? I'm like, because the other place has better equipment.

And I'm like, the person at the front always says hi when I walk in. Immediate reinforcement for walking in the door. And I was like, I think that's what it is. So I like it. Like when I come in, they always say hi. And I have like a two minute conversation. And like, I look forward to that. I drive 10 minutes further for that.

I'm like, how silly. But when I think about it, when I'm really honest with myself. And so to go back to the person who's on the couch, it's sometimes the rewards are minuscule. And then when you name them, they feel, little bit less powerful, but it also means that you can say, how can I make another ministry reward in another direction that gets me moving towards my long-term goal? And then I can kickstart that cycle where I start to learn like a master does because masters enjoy, love the process. It's like easy for a master to say because you're fucking good at it. Easy for you to say,

right? Like when you're, you know of them right, like I write my 19th draft of the book. I've now written a decent amount. You know what I mean? Like I've spent a long time writing. And so I, the act of writing itself is rewarding for me. Like, you must work so hard. which I do, but it's not that I'm willpowering my way the whole way through, not always. Of course, there's times where it's like not the most fun, but big picture, the process is rewarding because I've gotten good enough that it is rewarding. And so the more ways you measure, the more ways you can win, which is like one of our little monikers. And so it's like how many different ways can we measure so that we can make progress on these little things and have wins

as quickly as possible in the direction you're trying to go and then start the loop. Okay, so to say that really succinctly to make sure I understand. No, no, no, the exploration was amazing. I just want to make sure that I understand it. I think we've covered the reward part. So I'm going to do something measurable and see my growth. And that starts a positive reinforcement loop that's going to send me down the right path. Okay, so that makes all the sense in the world, proximity, the rate at which you get the reward is really going to matter.

that's really interesting from a product perspective. You're the first person I've ever heard talk about that. Super interesting. But now how do I punish myself? Do I? Like, I'm a big believer that you need to punish yourself. But when I say that sentence out loud, I know what people hear and it feels icky and weird.

But it's been incredibly powerful for me. So do you believe in the power of self-punishment? And if you do, how far do we take it? So I will just, just for sake of everyone, I will just state this as my opinion. And we'll just leave it at that. So you have praise and you have punishment. Or you can have reward and you have punishment,

whatever we want to call it. Punishment is more effective to change behavior in the short term. Like if I hold a gun to somebody's head, I can immediately change the behavior, right? Reward is more powerful over the long term. And so, like, if you look at an environment, so we think we talk a lot about this

atadquisters.com because it's kind of part of our mission internally is to create a culture of reward on punishment. And the way that we think about this is if you have like, let's say Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, some of these very big organizations that attract some of the best and brightest and are renowned for having relatively terrible or punishing cultures, right? They work people to death and blah, blah, blah. So what happens is if you put an animal in a cage and they can't escape, then they will revert to the law of least effort. So they will do as little as they can to not get punished. And so then when you're in a punishing environment, all you have to do to get them to do

more is you just raise the bar for what they have to law of least effort do to not get punished. And so in an environment of high performers, that gets everyone to raise the bar, but then quickly burn out. Now, that model works if you have an endless supply of bodies. But if you are the person who is being burned out, then that works for two years or whatever. Praise, on the other hand, or reward can unlock, in my opinion, discretionary effort. So the effort beyond the law of least effort required to keep your job and not get punished. And so the issue is that the people who are the most able are the ones who are able to work the least and still keep their jobs. But they're also the ones who you get the absolute most upside on if they work because they want to, not because they have to.

And so that is kind of our our thesis of how we try and build companies at Acquisition.com and we're not perfect. We, you know, believe me, there are plenty of times when I want to choose someone's that off. But we really try. I know my teams you're nodding, but like we really put serious effort into saying like, so let's say like I find out the dog shits on the carpet when I get home. I hit it.

It doesn't learn. All I'm doing is hitting a dog. like if it was less than if it was within 60 seconds from the time that happened it's not going to learn and so like if you know that and then you hit the dog anyways what does that make you interesting right and so now obviously if we're like punishing ourselves and whatnot that might be somewhat different I'm talking about how we relate to others but you can either avoid punishment or you can seek reward and I think both of them are powerful motivators avoiding punishment is powerful, more powerful in the short term to change behavior. It's faster.

Reward is more powerful in the long term to keep behavior going. Because eventually you, kind of like hedonic adaptation, you get used to a punishment and then it no longer works. So you have to increase the variety and intensity of punishments in order for it to continue to be effective. Do you punish yourself? Honestly, not a ton. I have super high standards. I don't know if I punish myself. I don't know if I'm like, Alex, you're a piece of shit. I don't not really because I you know Layla and I are kind of sit on opposite sides of the like I'm like some people have like a base of anxiety that they like work through I don't come from

that side I come from probably like a base of laziness like and just you know like and that's why I have have all these things to get myself to do to do stuff but punishment just like it's also just never been effective for me like when I get punished I I want to just figure out how to would punishment, not do what they want me to do. When you use punishment to like train kid, you get them to sneak out more, right? Not like they just find other ways to get out of the house quietly. They don't necessarily change the behavior. But if you reward them for staying, then they never want to leave. That kind of idea. The reason people leave when they're younger is because there's more reward outside of the house than inside the house. And so if you want to fix it

long term, make the reward for being home more than leaving home. It's interesting. So this is probably one where defining the term would be very meaningful. I personally use what I call self-punishment. Now, to me, self-punishment is to force myself to acknowledge that I said I was going to do something that I did not do. That's normally where this will come from me. Interesting. I would call that stating the facts. Interesting. I would call that punishing. So, and this is why it's important. So I understand why people always react so negatively when I say that you are missing out on an incredibly powerful tool. If you don't punish yourself.

Now, just to acknowledge, and you've said this as well, we are all speaking from, this is what works with me. So this is the experience that I've had. For the comment section. Exactly. And there, so getting out of bed in 10 minutes or less is, I struggle with it every day in my life. It's hysterical to me that even now, all these years later, I still have to be like, you said you'd get out.

I stay in bed for like 45 minutes on my phone. I can't allow myself to you. Immediately as soon as I wake up. Well, if I'm doing something in bed, I suppose I should change it to working, that I have 10 minutes to be productive is probably the right way to think about it. And because there are times

where there's something that I can do in bed like this morning. When I could start researching you the second I wake up, then I would still call that a win. But if I don't do the thing that I said I was going to do, then I force myself to acknowledge to myself with no, I don't let myself run. So I don't let myself be distracted.

I'm just like, you said you were gonna do something, you did not do this thing, and therefore you should not feel good about the behaviors that you enacted in this moment. Okay. And then I will often confess to my wife or my employees or my community so that I am holding myself accountable and now I'm sitting in something that I do not like the way that it feels. I'm not letting myself run. And so then I'm like, I don't want to be back here.

Yeah. So next time I'm going to take a different set of behaviors. That has been transformative for me. So interesting. And that not using that for me. would be to miss out on a huge motivational. I love this. And I want to draw similarities for the audience.

And I think, this is why I think this stuff's kind of interesting for anybody who's listening is like, is there are different ways. This is why like there are only a few things you need to do to win. And the way you do it is entirely up to you, which is why I love boiling things down to just like, what are the few things that everything has in common and everything else's preference. But with what you just said, I think I have like the first thing. we do is we state the facts is that I said that I would wake up within and do something within 10 minutes. Observation, that did not happen. Then comes the third step, which is that you, this is me putting words, is that you label that as bad. And then maybe label yourself as bad depending on, you know, that I don't do. Right. For the, for the audience, just to be clear.

Okay, I need to not see you. So one. So if one wakes, you know, doesn't wake up in 10 minutes, and then states the facts, I did not do what I said I was going to do, then labels the thing as not good, and then says, I am also not good, then that becomes trouble. Now, one degree before that is just labeling the behavior is not good

or not ideal for the outcome that I want. But I'm not sure how much it matters to feel bad about it. Again, with the behavior box of like stimulus response. Because once you feel bad about it, right? And then it's like, well, what, what do we do to increase the likelihood that next time it increases?

Now, because we could feel amazing about it, we can feel terrible about it, we can feel neutral about it, but all that will matter is what behavior we change in order to increase the likelihood that we do what we want next time, at least as I see it. And I found that I put, for me, a lot of energy into trying to understand things,

trying to label things as good or bad, trying to label myself as good or bad as a consequence. And the only part that mattered for me to actually get what I wanted was the last step, which is what am I going to do about it? And I can also just skip these. I can just skip these other three steps and just go straight from, I always said I was going to do this thing, observation I did not do it, what is the change in my behavior or my environment that I'm going to do next time to increase the likelihood that I do it?

And then, even with the binary thing that we were talking about earlier with rules, I'm actually more of like a weighing system of, okay, over the last 60 days, I got up within the first 10 minutes, 60% of the time, okay, next 60 days, if I can do 70% of the time, I am making progress. And so rather, like, because most people will fall short of perfection. And so I feel like it ends up setting up an inevitability of failure if we define it as binary. Just my own perspective. So how do you then deal with people that are not hitting a standard, whether it's you or somebody else?

I have found in business, if you let you. people get away with low standards, not only will it devastate their performance, it will begin to drag down the company, and it really matters. Totally. So do you stick to only rewards? Do you call it out? Like, what do you do? Yeah, yeah. So we state the facts and then we say what we're going to do about it. And then if someone consistently cannot do, because at some level, there's always, there's always a chunk down skill someone doesn't have. Right. So if I say, hey, can you send an email to so and so? We have assumption that they have a stack. of skills before that. I assume that they can read. I assume they can write. I assume they can use a

computer. I assume they have from an environmental perspective. They have access to internet. They know how to use a word processor. Like they know how to open up an internet route. Like I know this sounds silly, but we make these assumptions. But for some people, they're missing one of those. And so they have all this failure because they're just missing one link on that chain. And so trying to identify what is the skill deficit? And then is it a skill that I'm willing to invest time into teaching somebody. And so we want somebody who have as many base skills as possible that apply to many scenarios. So like if two people go through the same training program, right, and one person gets the outcome and the other person doesn't, it's usually because the training program

doesn't account for every single skill that is required to get the outcome. There are certain assumptions that come in. Like if someone reads my book, I assume that they can speak English. I mean, I'm saying as simple as that sounds, right? But there's a hundred other skills and the people who are successful faster just have more of those skills stacked up so that when they get the right information they can immediately use it. And some people still need to go back and learn how to wake up on time and like have someone say no and not cry. These are these are other skills. And so in the environment of work, how do we address somebody who is not performing? We state the facts. We recommend a course of action that can help increase the likelihood that they do it again

in the future. And if that doesn't happen, then we say like this is what will happen as a consequence neutral of you being good or bad or this situation be good or bad. It's just, These are these standards that we will accept, and you are beneath those standards based on these facts. That's it. Like, if you showed up to work late. Okay. Just to be clear, you understand that our expectation is that you show up on time. Yes, I understand.

Great. You also understand that what you did was not to that expectation. Cool. So, let's do this. Do you have an alarm on your phone? Yes. Do you use it? No.

Do you know how to set an alarm on your phone? Yes. Great. So why don't we do this? From here and out, let's sit two alarms, five minutes apart. at this time, that'll give you ample time to get up, clean your face, whatever, and then get on camera. Is that work? Yes. And then we measure. And if it doesn't happen again, if it does, then it's like, why did that, because then you get into the base skill being, do I adhere to authority? Like, can I listen to

instructions? Like, those are skills. And if someone nods their head and then doesn't do that, then they don't have that skill. And then the question is whether am I, am I willing to take the time to invest in teaching someone this skill when the opportunity to cause? of that time could be allocated to somebody else who might already have that skill or suite of skills. That's how we think about it. So one of the things that is a recurring theme is the idea of extending the time to extinguish. What if we were going to operationalize that, what do we do with people? And if I were going to personify the length to extinguish, I'll give a historical example and then I'll give a more modern. So historically, Winston Churchill, dude, I don't know if you've

read much about him. Unbelievable what that guy was able to pull off and how long he was able to delay gratification. And then a more modern example would be a David Goggins. Yeah. So how do we operationalize it? What do you take from those guys? I think it's the master's thesis of those guys are masters at whatever the thing is. And so they find ways to reward themselves in the meantime. And so we only think that they have supreme, ultra-discipline willpower because we are measuring what we can see as the outcome of running a race, you know, 26 miles or whatever it is. But if they are rewarding themselves throughout the entire process, then if anything, the end of the race might be a removing of a reward and might be actually anticlimactic, which is what happens

with most athletes after they compete in the Olympics or they win the championship or lose the championship. The buildup is where they have all the reinforcement. And then when that thing actually happens, then they have to get right back on the horse of where they get their reward from, which is the work to get there because they are good enough at it

that they can win in more ways. And so just the more you know about something, the better you are at it, the better you are at it, the more you can win, the more you can win, the more you want to do it. How much of that do you think is identity? Like when I look at somebody like a Churchill or a Goggins,

that feels to me like a game of who am I or who do I want to be? One of my favorite Churchill quotes is, well, so quotes, failure's the ability to go from, sorry, success is the ability to go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm speaks directly to this. But one thing that I got reading his biography is he said to his mother when he was really young that this is a paraphrase, not exact quote, but I yearn for a reputation for physical courage more than anything.

I mean, it was, and this is a guy that's, for people that don't know a story, that sent himself into war zones multiple times in his life when he absolutely did not need to do that, including World War I, when he was, like he was basically the equivalent, the British equivalent of a senator. Yeah. Now imagine you have an active senator who felt like he had let people down. and so he said, send me to the front lines. And they're like, whoa, why would we do that?

Like, you do not need to go to the front lines. Even if you want to engage with the war, you certainly don't need to go to the front lines. And he said, nope, I want to be literally where the bombs are falling in the dirt with the men. And that was somebody who had such a strong internal compass of this is who I want to be or how men ought to be. Same idea with Goggins, right? Just felt like I'm a lose.

He's staring at himself in the mirror, the accountability mirror, doesn't like who he sees, decides he's going to change and become a different person. And I'm sure you've seen the clips of him screaming, you don't know me, you don't know who I am. That's an identity play. So how do you see that? Is extending the time to extinguish purely an identity play, or is there something else going on? So I think the wording matters. But if you want to extend how long you continue to do something without seeing the result of your doing, you need to find a way to be rewarded in the meantime.

Like that's what it is, in my opinion. And so whether we call it identity or we call it a skill or we call it a behavior, we call it a character trait. So it's saying like with the many words that ultimately mean, like, what is the percentage likelihood that this behavior occurs? that is really all I would look at. And is it as simple as I was today who I said I was? Like how do we make that,

I mean, not to beat to death the idea of operationalize, but when I think about what I'm doing when I reward and punish myself is I am trying to feel the way I want to feel or not, or make sure that I'm feeling discomfort so that I will move away from that behavior. Yeah. So what is it or how do we leverage identity to feel the,

thing that we want to feel like. Is it just words in your head? Like, how do you play that game? Identity is really internal culture. So if you think, if you define culture as a set of rules of behavior within an organization, identity is just the rules of behavior within an individual. And so I think to your point, you have your rules of behavior that occur. I would say that my rules of behavior, even though I hate rules as a concept, when I do these things, like when I see this, this happens. I do have the, these, these behaviors that have these behaviors that have been queued that I have learned. See, now we have all these words that we've defined. So now we can, at least everybody can agree on what we're talking about, which is why it means

a lot to me. But yeah, I just, I think identity is just a big stack of behavioral cues that we've said, because people change over time. And so it's really just like a mental construct of this is how I behave. Like, what is an identity? It is like, and even if you want to say, like, I know this person, what it really means is that I have a high predictive score on what this person will do or say as a result of whatever I do or say. And so if that's the conversation that I'm having with someone, it's like, oh, I know I'm really well. Oh, he'll love that because I have a good predictive score that when this happens, he will do this. Now, somebody who's all over the place are super erratic, right, then do they have an unformed identity or do I just not know enough about them? Maybe.

And so it just, that has just been my litmus test. And maybe it seems like oversimplification, but for me it has been incredibly fruitful to just because then for me it takes a lot of the superstition, a lot of the magic, a lot of the black box of feelings and emotions and identity out. And it's just Alex is a series of behaviors. That's who I am, that have been trained into me by my environment and that I have tried to learn myself. And I will change in the future because if I get better, that it means I can't be the same person I am today, which means some of the things that I have learned now, I will unlearn and learn new behaviors when I see a different stimulus.

Sorry, when I see the same stimulus.