The Game with Alex Hormozi - Money, Happiness and High Prospects in Entrepreneurship (with Lewis Howes) Pt.1 - Nov. '23 | Ep 639

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

“The work works on you more than you work on it.” Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on The School of Greatness Podcast with Lewis Howes to dissect the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, exploring the fallacy of finding the 'right' or 'perfect' business and the reality of failure before success. They delve deep into the implications of wealth, discussing the correlation between wealth and happiness, the pitfalls of abundant wealth, and learning to manage expectations. They also highlight the importance of the journey towards success, the value of self-improvement, patience, focus and possible speedbumps along the way.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 Lewis Howes on:➤ Instagram | TikTok | Spotify | Apple | X / Twitter | LinkedIn➤ Check out full episode on YouTube!Timestamps:(0:28) - The relationship between wealth and happiness(2:02) - Managing expectations and relationships with wealth(4:42) - The entrepreneurial journey: starting young(8:29) - The importance of emotional readiness in wealth creation(15:34) - The importance of meta skills and starting somewhere(17:36) - Taking action: the key to getting support and advice(21:22) - The value of effort over outcome(25:06) - The power of taking action and the impact of outcomes(29:03) - Reflecting on personal growth and the importance of hard workFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

The only way to get good at something is to do a lot of it. And when you start, you suck. And so a lot of the time there's this fallacy of finding the right thing or the perfect fit. But one, almost every entrepreneur that I know has had many, many, many businesses and mostly many failures before they had their success. 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. People have made a lot of money. People have had huge exits.

People that have private jets and multiple homes and massive banks. account. Do you think the people that you know who have a lot of money are typically happier, or do you know more people who are wealthy who are unhappy than happy? I think it depends on how they got their wealth. So I think if they were given their wealth, absolutely, I would say bar none, they are not as happy. And I think it did. I won't even get into the why. I'd say that's just my observation. For the people who earns their wealth, I would say many of them are, I would probably say the same smorgasbord as the rest of society maybe with like one movement upwards because money cannot buy happiness but it can help you avoid pain and so i think that is the that's the hard

part that is difficult it's the same thing as health where like you can you know money can help get the hospital but you know get you out of the hospital hypothetically but it's not going to get you into super super fitness status they're completely different continuums that people see is one straight line and removing pain versus gaining joy, I think, are two completely different journeys. And so I think money helps absolutely decrease the punishment that we experience in life and the pains that we have to deal with our inconveniences for sure. Why do you think some people, I agree with that. And there's also some outliers where it seems like people with a lot of money almost have

more problems, more pain, more stress, more overwhelmed. Maybe it's too much to handle or everyone wanting something from them or everyone's expecting something now from them, how do you learn to manage the approval or people pleasing of others once you have more money, especially your own family, you're on friends who are now saying, oh, you've gone beyond where the rest of us are financially, and I want some of that, or I have an expectation. How do we overcome that, navigate it? I wholeheartedly reject all of it. Reject what? All of it. Any expectations of me. And so my litmus test for doing deals, for giving jobs, any of those things

for people that I know is that you have to, it's actually the first conversation I had with Layla when we were, it was her first date. So our first date, I pitched Layla on quitting her job and working for me because I was like, this might not work out, but you should totally work for me. We'll make a bunch of money together.

And I said, this compensation has to make sense for you independent of our relationship. So like if we're not together, does this still make sense? If it makes sense, then we're cool. It's on your first day. dating. Yeah.

If we're not together in a week or two months, would this still work for you? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's clear. It's all talent. And I think that that litmus test has served incredibly well for me. Is like, if you want to hire your mom, would you give somebody with your mom's experience

the bookkeeping job? Now, if she's a 20-year bookkeeper, then yeah, maybe. Maybe. And to be fair, but would you pay the bookkeeper? $200,000 a year? I don't know. You probably wouldn't. So I believe in making all deals as though you weren't friends or you have no relationship.

And if it still makes sense, then all of the relational benefit becomes as a bonus. Yes. Rather than I'm going to amend the terms of the deal because of this amorphous value that we have, which can change. But if the deal is made logically, then conditions can change and you will still both always feel good about the deal. because it was made without the relation component because sometimes you have good days with your mom, sometimes you have bad days with your mom,

and all of a sudden you're like, I can't believe I'm paying her, or $200 grand here, right? I wouldn't know, she messed up the books and she took a course on the line, you know, whatever, right? And so, but people make that mistake all the time. And so I think that it has been significantly easy for me to just say, like, would I give you the role

or would I give you the thing if you were a stranger? And if the answer's no, the answer's no. And if that person really wants it, then do the same things a stranger would do. And then I'll have a reason, now if I have two kids, candidates and they're identical, which would be a possible. But if they're identical, then yeah, maybe I would give it, but like they have to still meet all the standards. And then that way,

you give objective, quantitative, like, do these things and then we can have this outcome. Right. Seems like a lot of young people want to make a lot of money. People want to make a lot. People want to make a lot. But it seems like, you know, at least I'm thinking of social media context, you see a lot of young people in their 20s, early 30s that are striving for that. And they're striving for it fast. Yeah. I'm striving for it, you know, I just graduated college and now I want to get there in the next couple of years.

What do people in their 20s not understand about making money or reaching millionaire status that they really need to know before they hit that? So I will probably answer this differently than you expect. I believe that sex is colorblind, age blind, everything blind because there are certain activities that you have to do. If you do the activities, you can get the outcome. Now, if you're in your 20s, it's very difficult to do the amount of activities for a long enough period of time in order to get that. Now, you know, you've got Ben Francis who started Jim Shark when he was whatever, 16 or 17 years old. And he was 28. It was worth over a billion. So he was in his 20s.

And it was, you know, he made a billion dollar company. Is that the exception for the most part? Yeah. That's not as common. You know, I made my, I became a millionaire. I was 26 or 26. 27 is when I had my first million dollars when I paid income. And so, but I started business when I was 22. And so I still had had five years in. Now, that's still fast. Don't get me wrong. It's still fast.

But the accumulation of knowledge because I spent almost all of my excess income on education. And so I wanted to pay down my ignorance tax as fast as I possibly could. And so rather than buy the Bentley or buy the watch so that I could flex on it, I still lived, split a room in a house with six other people while I was making 20. I want to take home because I wanted to have all that money so I could go on the offense if I wanted to go to a seminar or buy a course or go to a workshop or whatever it was so that I could up level my skills and get there faster. And so I think the idea that you want to get there is fine. It's just having a realistic expectation of how many skills you need to acquire to get there. Because if you have all the skills, because I think we'll have continuously younger and younger and younger millionaires and billionaires that are going to continue to happen because now a viral idea. I mean, Taylor Swift was 16 when she started reporting music. That was a long time ago. Right. She's 33 now. Now she's a billionaire. She keeps showing up consistently and building it.

Mr. Bia is a billionaire. It's 24. Crazy. So like it's going to continue to go down as the access to education increasingly gets democratized so more people can access it for free. And so a nine year old can watch. Like there's nothing that stops a nine year old from making and running a Facebook ad. There's nothing. Like and usually they're more tech savvy anyways.

Maybe they're just gotta get a credit garbage. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But if we break it down to like the physics or the action. Right. It's not that art. There's nothing that prevents people.

And so I think that the level of competition will continue to rise. I think young people are more tech savvy. And so, in general, have a continuously improving competitive advantage over older people because the rate of technological change hastens goes faster. And so the advantage of being young versus old is actually, I think, going to continue to expand because tech moves so fast now that I think there will be more. What do you think about? I mean, I had a mentor once told me when I was 24, when I was broke.

on my sister's couch. And I was living for free. I was not paying rent. I was, you know, eating leftovers. Good life, man. And I remember saying to a mentor, I was like, man, I could really use some money right now. Like, I could really figure out how to make some more money.

And he said, money comes to you when you're ready for it. I was like, I feel pretty ready. And he goes, yeah, it could come, you know, maybe you get it and you're not ready and you lose it all because you're not emotionally ready. Yeah. So what advice do you have to people in their 20s who want to make a lot of money, but if they're not emotionally ready, what might happen to them? Everything is trainable.

And so if we define handling money as a skill, then it can be learned. And so if you, and you can look at anything. Like if you were somebody who continues to hop from thing to thing to thing to thing and you can't stick with it, it's usually because you don't have the skill of sticking with something. You haven't been rewarded enough in the past for staying with something or you haven't been. than burned enough from starting over. Like on your fifth time of starting yet another thing and not getting deep enough on it, you have to think to yourself, maybe this isn't the right way to do it. I love giving this kind of like S-curve analogy, which hopefully your audience will enjoy, but there's five stages I see it as somebody goes through the entrepreneurial journey when

they're starting out. In the beginning, you've got the midline, right, where they start. Step one is they go above the midline, and they go to uninformed optimism. They see the grass on the other side, it looks greener, and they're like, my buddy's doing drop shipping, and he's making all this money and that's going to be me and then they buy the course they start watching videos they try to connect things things break they you know buy some inventory they don't know how much to buy and all of a sudden they go to the point two which is now below the line which is informed pessimism so it's hard yeah they find out all the things that they didn't know in the beginning they paid down some ignorance debt but there's still more to pay they're like okay wow so they keep going because

they're like I got to figure this and then they go to point three which is the value of despair right which is where they're like this isn't going to work this is never going to work And one of the hardest costs, and this is like what entrepreneurship feels like if I can give it to anyone who's new to this, is the feeling of uncertainty that you don't know of all of the work that you've been spending all of your nights and weekends and off time investing in will ever pay off. And so it's this fear that you're wasting your time. But the reality is that the outcome isn't the thing that you're building. The person you are is the person that you're building. And that continues to work.

And so there's a proverb in the Bible. I'm going to butcher it. but I think it's in all labor, there is profit. And you can rephrase that as I like, as the work works on you more than you work on it. Say it again. The work works on you more than you work on it. And so it's about who we become while doing the work

more than the outcome from the work itself. Because I lost everything five years into my entrepreneurial journey, but I still had all the skills and beliefs that I had from before that. And then I was able to reapply those and then have a really, you know, big outcome and what we have today. And so I remember when I lost everything that first time, I thought, did I just lose five years in my life? Like, I just moved back on ground zero again.

But I wasn't because I had all these skills that I had learned, you know, owning and scaling six gyms at that point. And so point one, uninformed optimism. Point two, informed pessimism. Point three, value to spare. And then you go to point four, which is informed optimism. So now you do have a lay of the land. Do you understand that there's some skeletons?

You do have to understand how you, you know, manage some inventory. You've got to get ahead of some of stuff. But you start, you learn how to forecast. You can know that weekends you tend to do better and weekdays you tend to do less. And so you can dial back support on those days and dial it up on the other days. You start to recognize patterns. And so you start to know what you're doing, right?

You start paying, you're paying down all the ignorance debt. And then finally, step five is you achieve whatever the original goal was. But the problem is that most people go step one, two, three, and then they jump back to step one. With something new. Right. And so they go to yet again, the grass is green or the other side. But what they don't know is that it's still fertilized with manure. They're still the other side too.

And so there's always everywhere. Let me get into real estate now. Let me get into this. Right. You do whole stocks. Right. Of course, there's all these, you know, quick make money things. But if you look at the people who are making the most money in it, they spent usually a significant amount of time.

And I'm saying this again, but I'm bearing it for repetition is that the rocky cutscene last two minutes in movies and might last five years for most people or 10. And I remember my, so my neighbor, I met him was 15 years old. He now works for us at Acquisition.com. he uh this is a this is a cool story so he's 15 years old and he's like i want to be an entrepreneur and so i you know he worked out with me every day for a couple years um at my home gym and so he he's not jacked now never never more jack than me um and so he then goes to college and after his first semester he's like i don't know like this is you know i'm studying business and i was like

dude are you willing in this or not are you really doing this and he was like well you know i just I'm not, school's not really, blah, blah, blah. And I said, the world doesn't need another three one business degree. Either crush school or don't go. If your goal is entrepreneurship, he's like, well, I want to be an entrepreneur. And so I apparently told him this that he remembers because he brings it up all the time. But I said, you are afraid of going all in an entrepreneurship because staying in college is safe from an approval perspective.

So you're doing all these side things, but you don't have to bear the brunt of not a failing because you're still in school. Yeah. It's like, so you need to get rid of that. You're not all in. Exactly. Yeah. And so he quit school and then he started on the call floor of my, of gym launch.

Now, that's not glorious. And to be fair, to the point we're making earlier, I said, I can't get to the job. I won't give you with that. So I can get you an interview. I was like, it's going to be up the sales manager. I'm not going to tell him that I know you. He was like, okay. I was like, you better be prepared.

And so he did get the job, to be fair, the qualifications for frontline callers, not not super high. And the reason that I started him there was because, because I actually walked in on him one day when he was waiting for me to go work out. And I heard him on the phone trying to do one of these wholesaling, you know, real estate deals. And I said, you know, to close the deal? And he said, I'm not sure of real estate, you know, the wholesaling thing is for me. And I said, well, have you heard you on the phone?

And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, you sound horrible. You can't sell anything. You know, I'm the skill. Of course. He said, well, how do I get good at sales? I was like, you work on a sales team with somebody who's been there before and can tell you what to do. And so I got him the interview.

He took the job. He became the top salesman on the, on the setting team. Wow. And then he became, sorry, the outbound team. Then he went to the setting team, which is the second rung of salesman. They qualify the leads. And then became the top one there. And then he got to the top of the Christmas tree, which is closers.

And he became the top closer. He learned skills. I have 26 guys. Wow. Big team. And a lot of these are men. You know, have families, kids. Wow.

And how much can you make as a top closer? 250. 250 a year. Yeah. It's a pretty good money. Yeah, it is good money. For a 21-year-old, 22-year-old? Yeah.

Yeah, 19 at the time. 19, making $2.50? Yeah. That's life-changing. Of course. And he had to learn how to talk to them in. Right. Jim owners.

40-year-old gym owners telling them how you can help them with their business. Wow. Right. Takes balls. And so I bring that up to say is that when you were, when you're starting out, you need to focus on learning rather than earning. Now, he obviously earned, but it was because he quickly fast-tracked his learning process. And so I think one of the biggest hacks. in the world is getting paid to learn.

Like right now, we have this big societal context of, like, you pay in order to learn. But what if there are a world where you could get paid to learn? Well, that is what working at a company is if you're mindful of what career path you want to get into. Now, if you're like, I don't know what I want to do, then I would recommend starting with a meta skill. So sales is going to, like, if you learn how to sell, it'll work in any company. If you learn how to market, it will work in any company.

I mean, to be fair, if you get into HR, Zillion businesses and HR stuff, if that's you like. And if you're like, I don't know what I like. Well, you're also aren't going to like anything unless you start because we usually only like things that we're good at. And we usually aren't good at things that we start. Right? And so the only way to get good at something is to do a lot of it. And when you start, you suck. And so a lot of the time there's this fallacy of finding the right thing or the perfect fit. But one, almost every entrepreneur that I know has had many, many businesses and mostly many failures before they had their success. It's because each one of them stair stepped. And so there's this paralysis around like, I got to pick the right

thing and it's really you got to pick something and then you'll learn all the inadequacies that you have no idea about once you get into it like I started a gym when I was 22 years old like brick and mortar signed a lease yeah you shouldn't do that yeah it was stupid I had no idea what I was doing but I did have I did sign I was you know kudos to younger me uh I had a mentor early on who's in the gym world that's correct right so you could get advice to learn from yes I mean still it was still incredibly hard but I got I was able to just get you know suck everything like a you know fire house like a vacuum cleaner um to get all the information I needed to just barely keep my head above water until and then things started to work out because I just every weekend I'd go and drive

over to a gym owner and say why do you do this why is your lobby like this how many leads do you convert how do you call like whatever and so I just kept doing that every single weekend because I was such a young guy everyone else yeah yeah exactly and I have a lot to I owe a lot to those older entrepreneurs who helped me out and so in some ways. a lot of what I do at Acquisition.com is kind of my small way of paying it forward. Hey, Mosin, quick break just to let you know that we've been starting to post on LinkedIn and want to connect with you. All right, so send me a connection request and note letting me know that you listen to the show

and I will accept it. There's anyone you think that we should be connected with, tag them in one of my or layless posts and I will give you all the love in the world. All right, so let's get back to the show. One of the cool things is when you're someone who's getting started and you're going out and humbly asking you for advice, but you're taking the actions. Hey, I'm launching this thing. I'm taking the steps.

I'm just trying to figure it out, but I'm taking the actions. And I'm in the process. People usually want to give advice and support and say, hey, why don't you come check out and we'll go up for lunch or whatever it is. But if you're just saying, I want to do this, but I'm not taking any action. People are less likely to help you. Maybe they'll help you a little bit, but they see you struggling and trying and like leaping before you're ready.

It's like, all, cool. Let's help you get it going. I love the saying luck favors the prepared. So, like, if you want to go ask, you know, Lewis to have you on, or to get Lewis on your show, right? Well, what do you do? You don't just ask Lewis. You show how much you've prepared. You say, hey, I went through 50 hours of your content.

These are nine questions that have never been asked to you before that I think would be really good. I've got two guys, two buddies of mine from college who are going to also video it. I've got this church basement that I can get the lighting to look really cool so it can be cinematic. Because to be real, I know I don't have the audience. that you have, but I can help at least give you clips that will distribute and actually convert for you. And hopefully that's enough of a value add. Now, Lewis might not say yes. But if you do that a hundred times, count in hundreds. Right. One Lewis will say yes. Right. And everyone loves to help people who help themselves. Always. Because the biggest fear that anyone who gives advice has is that

someone takes the advice and does nothing. Exactly. They didn't learn. They didn't change their behavior. That's true. Right. It's a waste of the time. So you don't feel like you're teaching. You only teach if they change their behavior if they changed the behavior they learned and so everyone many people like being a teacher I think a teaching role is nice I think most people feel good about it but you only feel like you have a teaching role if you see a change and someone takes action right and you can you can hack the whole system if you just show people that you'll take take initiative 100% if you take that's what happened for me earlier on I was just taking a lot of action and people were like they wanted to add me in the room they wanted me at the table yeah

because I was willing to take action even though I was young and broke and struggling they were like hey this guy's showing up yeah go to every conference that I could in kind of the social media blogging world early on and somehow get to the late night dinners at 2 a.m. with all the speakers and they'd be like hey why don't you come tag along young guy you know you're bringing us a lot of joy at least right even though you have no clue what you're doing you can't offer anything else but joy yeah but you're asking me some interesting questions that people don't yeah so yeah i'm happy to talk about myself for another 20 minutes totally and you get in the room you get access and you take action people will want to keep supporting you totally because you're

applying their teachings and people like that. Makes it feel important. It does. It validates, oh, I know something about what I'm doing. Yeah. And that's good. You want to keep helping this person grow. What do you think your 85 year old self needs to tell you now to get to where you want to be faster? Oh, it's funny that that was the question. I mean, he would tell me. You have the mentors. Yeah, no, I mean, he would tell me, why do you want to go faster? Be like, why, why can't it take 10 times as long. Ah. From 200 to a billion? Sure. Why not? Like why? Why does it need to be five years or 10 years? Why can't it be 50 years?

Right. If you, if it took 50 years but then it all happened at once at the end, would you like that? I don't know, right? It's kind of like the man who lives an amazing life in the last day, everyone finds out he's a fraud. Or the man who lives his entire life with everyone thinking he's a fraud and then in the last day of his life, he's proven right. Which one would you rather be? If you're gone, you're not going to get the experience the fruit of it all, but like... Interesting question. though. Yeah. It's like the painters that become famous once they're dead. Yeah. And so I think, I mean, 85 real old me, I'll tell you the recurring thing is that he works on with me. Um, patience is a big one. Uh, focus is a big one. Sticking with what I committed to. Um, focusing on the controllables

of like, what are the activities, what are the actions that I have to take? And being okay with potentially varied outcomes. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad, but being consistently divorced from the outcome, but trying my absolute damnedest to make sure that everything that is in my control was done to the utmost. And I like, we started there, but I just like, it's hard to understand the context. Like, you hear this. You hear people say this, like, it's about the journey, it's not about the destination. And you hear people say like, you know, it's about doing the stuff. It's not about the outcome. And you're like, yeah, yeah, it's easy for you to say when you have the outcome. Right. When they've already made the money. Of course. I get it. But,

if you can make that flip, like it's just the hard part is the action is so much greater. If you really measured yourself by the actions you take, then you might be embarrassed. So you really hope to measure yourself on the outcome because you can get by on sometimes winning when you don't deserve it. And so 85-year-old Lee never lets me win when I don't deserve it. Ooh, man, I would rather lose, but no, I gave my all, then win and be like, I just kind of just barely showed up today. Right. You wouldn't know. I won, but it's because I had an inferior opponent.

It's not because I played my best. It sucks to lose. Yeah. To know, man, I was freaking gave everything, every ounce of my energy and every trick and skill that I had to play this game and win it. I came short, it's going to sting, it's going to hurt, but at least I know I don't regret the effort that I put in. And I can be, like, here's a great example. This still haunts me today. Yeah.

2002 was October. So it was 21 years ago, is that right? October 2002. Yeah, almost 21 years ago, is that what it was? Are you seven? 2002. We're playing, I'm playing football at Principia College, small school in Illinois. And we, it's my sophomore year there.

My freshman year I went to another school, so I transferred into this school. We're playing, and it's a tight, tight game at home, back and forth. Can't remember the final score, but we lose by a touchdown. I score three or four touchdowns. I think I got an extra point. I got a two-point conversion, and I had 17 catches for 418 yards, and we lost. In the last couple of plays, we didn't score to go and win. And I remember being the last one out of the locker room.

I was in the shower. I was so upset that we lost. And my coach comes in, it's kind of an awkward moment, just I'm in the shower, you know, an exposed open shower, you know, I'm just like kind of pouting and like sad and depressed or whatever and just like in there, everyone's gone. I'm sad we lost the game.

And he kind of comes around the corner and says, hey, Lewis, good game, just to let you know you broke a world record today. And I go, what? And I go, what do you mean? And he goes, yeah, you had 17 catches from 400, 18 yards. No one's ever done that in the history of a football game. You're a new NCAA all record holder. And I go, I'm sad and depressed and angry because I didn't do more to help us win and we lost. And at the same time, I hear that I did something that no one in the history of the world had ever done in the football game. And it was, it was tough because I felt like, man, we lost, but I gave it everything. Yeah. But I was like, but could I still give it more? It's like, I don't know. Yeah. But I feel like, you know, at least.

We didn't win, and I played to a lower level and didn't create that result. Yeah. At least I created something that for me, I can be proud of, even if we lost. It still haunts me that we lost. Interesting. But it's, but I know because we were behind, I had to give so much more that I was capable of. Yeah. And if we were winning, I wouldn't have gotten that effort out of myself.

Uh-huh. So it's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. It is because I would wonder if you had that same exact experience, but you didn't break the world record. Or no one ever told you, whatever. Exactly, right. If you would still, because you said that you had the sting of the loss, and I wonder if Lewis today would feel that way.

Because if you, because you said, like, I don't know if I could have given more, but I feel like on some levels, like, at least for me, like, sure we can get into the hypotheticals of like you can always give more, okay? Of course, yeah. But there are certain times from like, I know I could sprint after the guy, even though I'm probably not going to get, you know. But I could give it the last 20 yards. Right, exactly.

And I think that this is where 85-year-old me is the one that he is ruthless. And I love this David Goggins saying. I don't know if it's a saying of his, I heard it in one of his videos. But he said, there's no shortcuts for you, Gaggins. And I just really love that. Like, he doesn't even look for them because he said, you don't get those. You don't get shortcuts. There are no corners to cut.

And that to me is like the embodiment of that, that 85-year-old self, because he He knows if I could have sprinted or not. And so it's if I can appeal to that man's incredibly high standards, which is why commit to the journey is not the easier path. I think it is the harder path because the standard is higher. And when you really do that, the winning does happen by default. But even saying that still makes winning the objective, right? And you're just saying this is a different pathway of getting to winning,

but winning still matters. It does matter. I think it's a both. It's a, the journey matters and the outcomes matter. The more, the more, the outcomes also give credibility. Yeah, no. You give more context. They give more experience.

They give more wisdom. Yeah. To the teacher. Oh yeah. I, I, I, really. If you had no outcomes, but you said, look at all the efforts I put in though, but I put in 10,000 hours. Yeah.

But I haven't sold a company. I haven't built anything because this is really interesting. Yeah. You need it both in. Yeah. This is really interesting because on some, so I think from a, this is, I'm like really liking this. So from a, from a from a from a fulfillment perspective. Yes. I believe that truly giving your all actually not like try your best. That's just like it's such a it's repeated so many times that it's

lost its meaning. But leaving everything on the field having the tank on zero or empty when you walk off and truly knowing and looking at yourself and you're like I could not have done anything more. And it's tough to do that because we're naturally built to conserve effort. Right. And so you really have to push and overcome the internal mechanisms that you have that say don't spread the last 20 yards. Could I put a little more? Yeah. Right. And that's why like when I walked on stage for the presentation, I was like, I have done this before. I am prepared. I could not have prepared more for this in any way that would have been reasonable. And so to to that degree, I can still define success that way. The outcomes will happen. And I think it's still that little thing where it's like

do this in order to, you have to cut off the in order to. I really genuinely believe that because I remember when I was in my retirement year, which is I still own the company, but we were in the process of selling. I had nothing to do. And it was an incredibly depressing year for me, which is why I've oriented my whole life around work because I really enjoy it. And I remember getting really angry about this and thinking, like, it's not you work hard so that you can. It's like the hard work is the point. Like the point is how hard you learn to work. And that's the whole point where what has changed from last year to this year is like my understanding of my capacity to work continues to grow. And so I am able to work harder and therefore am more proud of the effort that I put into it

because at least for me, I feel like I am, I know in the mirror, did I give it my all? And if I try to play out, this is a stoic frame, but like if I had had like a hurt. hurricane go through and we had not been able to launch because all the energy would have been gone. Let's just say hypothetical. And we did all this prep. Fear virtual event. Yes. Would I have been proud of the effort that I put in? The answer would have been yes. You'd simply let down and disappointed that you didn't get to do the thing. Yes. But I think that it would have been short-lived because I think that is like you asked like earlier on what has been the biggest difference for you specifically. And this has been whatever we even call it super-hour secret.

secret whatever, like this is what has been allowed me to keep my internal temperature separate from the external temperature to the greatest degree possible, is knowing that I'm using my internal thermometer to gauge my success, and I'm not perfect by any flight. Right, right, right. But the more I do that, to use your example, if I had worked my absolute hardest for 10,000 hours, and I knew that I gave it my all, and I had nothing to show for it. Now, I've actually had that instance because five years ago, I lost it. Right. No external results to show for it.

So I do know what that's like. I think at the end of your life, you'd still be more proud of the man that did his everything, gave it his all, left it all on the field, even if he didn't win. And I think that would be the man that I'd be more proud to be.