The Game with Alex Hormozi - More Brutally Honest Advice to My Poorer Younger Self | Ep 661

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

“Business and the level of detail that it takes to go from good to great- it's so much wider than people think it is.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares more brutally honest advice on topics like achieving success through personal growth, developing strong work ethics, and building a unique brand. He shares his unique perspective on building a brand, creating a product, and understanding the importance of leveraging people's perception and reputation, using personal stories and examples to anchor his points. He also highlights the importance of having a clear vision, debunking the concept of rigid morning routines, dismissing perceived limitations imposed by age, and being wary of toxic elements in one's environment.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(0:27) - #1: The work needs doing(1:42) - #2: Actions create the result(3:00) - #3: Spend your 20’s growing(6:56) - #4: Seasons of learning and earning(9:43) - #5: The cost of not knowing(11:24) - #6: Playing the right game(14:05) - #7: What hard work really is(16:49) - #8: The value of brand(20:56) - Bonus: Cutting off relationships that don’t serve youFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

The best thing that I ever did was not listen to other people's opinions about my life. They don't want the best version of you. They want the version of you who best serves them. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wished Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy.

People obsessed with their morning routines make less money than people obsessed with making money. People work, sacrifice, and then they get rich. Then they fill their time with weird routines. Then they forget how they got rich in the first place. And then they tell other people the weird routines made them rich rather than what they actually did, which is whatever it took, not some three hour morning routine. There was a kid who DM me who said, hey, I've been working with this business coach and he has me doing a morning routine.

It could not make this up. After I do my grounded walking, I do my gratitude journal, I do my list for the day. I do my ice plunge. He's like, after I do that, he takes me about three hours in the morning to get all that done. He's like, I barely have any energy to like actually get work done. I just said, I'm going to give you the biggest hack in the world. Cut the three hour morning routine, replace it with three hours to work and I promise he'll get more done. And he messaged me back a week later. He was like, dude, it changed my whole life. I'm getting so much done now. I was like, what a fucking concept? If you work more, more gets done. And I love just looking at

this. It's like, what actions do I have to take to get what I want? Anything that is not that is a distraction from it. Period. If it takes you five minutes to feel 20% better and you can actually measure that your output goes up by 20%, then cool, that makes sense. So I'm not, I'm not against doing things. I'm against doing things for the sake of doing them. And so one of the biggest issues with learning and education, as humans do it, is that we make correlations to things that are approximate, they're close to one another. Tall people play basketball. I should play basketball to get tall. We make these very mistaken correlations, but we should look at is what it took to get there, not what they're doing now. So the better advice is to look at what

someone was doing on their way up in the grind, mirror that more than what they're currently doing at the top of the mountain. So it would be like assuming Warren Buffett is rich because he drinks Coke. All you have to do also on the corollaries are there other people who drink Coke who aren't rich? I've had probably 10 different podcasts. Seed the premise. You think that the fact that you had a hard childhood has created the success today. And I would say, no. I would say the work that I did created the success. And all we have to do is look at all the other people who had bad childhoods who aren't successful, and I think there are way more of those than there are that are to prove that it actually has nothing to do with who is successful. There's also people who didn't

have bad childhoods who are successful too. And so it's just that many people have bad childhoods, some of them become successful. And so that's why trying to figure out why something happened, I have spent less and less of my effort trying to do that and only look at what actions created a result rather than looking at intention or anything else that's amorphous that can't be measured. 30 isn't the new 20. It's an excuse to take 10 years longer to accomplish the same thing. You can die when you're done. Until then, keep going. In your 20s, you're young. You can fuck around. It doesn't matter because life is long. Number one, that assumes that you're not going to die. If you're in

30s, you know someone in your high school class who died. And it's not just the drug overdose people. It's the people who got shot, got in a car accident, had a weird brain cancer. I've had all of those things happen to people that I went to high school with. In one way, I think it's a little bit arrogant to assume that you're just going to live because it means you can waste your life. And I'd wholeheartedly stand against that. The second translation around that that I think has hurt a lot of people is that they can do what I would consider dead-end jobs. And that means jobs that don't have any direct correlation to your personal growth has nothing to do with pay. You can work for free and grow more than anyone else. This is not saying that you need to go into a season of earning in your 20s, but you do need to be

setting yourself up for growth in my opinion if you want the big ultimate outcome. And so most people that at least consume my stuff, they want to be better. They want to grow. They want to get a better shape. They want to have better relationships. They want to have a better business. They want to be bigger in every way. They want to expand. If you spend the decade of your 20s not growing and not investing in your skills and your education, if you do that in your 30s, you're going to be further behind than somebody starts in their 20. You're going to be a decade behind. You know, nowadays, there's kids who are starting out the entrepreneurial journey when they're like 13. And so when they're 23, they're Mr. Beast. He's young, but he's he's actually pretty old in business terms because a lot of people start their business journey in their mid-40s. And so if they're 50 years old and started their business five years ago, Mr. B says twice the amount of time in the ring under the bar that they do. For me, I want to start my time clock on paying down my ignorance debt as fast as seemingly possible because the debt is a constant for everyone. All of us are trying to pay down that debt as fast as we can and taking a decade, arguably one of the most productive decades of your life and not paying down

that debt, you just sit in such a deficit compared. to your peer group. Some people might watch this and be 30 or 40 or 50 and be like, well, shit, I took the wrong advice from the wrong guy. Guess what? You're going to die. It's not going to matter anyways. Big deal. Whatever. The best time to do this was start when you were 10 and get born to an entrepreneurial parent who got you in their small business and invested in all of your education as a homeschooled student and taught you all the ways of the Jedi. But you probably didn't have that. And so the second best time is to start now because let's play out the alternative. How much does it serve you to just say, I guess I have no chance? Okay.

die. There's nothing left for me to do. I will relinquish the remainder of my living days and years because I choose to lose. And that's a choice. And if you want that, that's cool. The idea of quitting simply because you're older, because you didn't do something, everybody doesn't do things that they know they should be doing now. And that's because you're always going to know more in the future than you do in the past. And so it's a faulty premise to say that I'm not going to take action today because I didn't know something in the past. Everyone doesn't know anything in the past. But all you can do is take action with what you know today.

And by taking action, you have learned. And so you actually take one step to making your first payment on ignorance debt through actions, not words. I mean, I think a lot of people know the story of the 30-year-old parista. If you love that, then do it. You know what I mean? Like, I have no judgment on what you do. If you don't love that and you wish you were doing something else, that's what I would

say I have a problem with, which is why are you not doing it? And I think diving into that, which is usually some sort of fear, some sort of anxiety. some sort of label that they believed that isn't true from someone else and just trying to zone in on like, why am I not doing it and taking two steps closer to it, not just like, because I don't know what I'm doing? Well, duh, okay, neither does anyone. What are you doing about that? Just defining it to what actions are I going to take as a result just makes life a lot easier. What's figured out mean? It means that I'm going to read two hours a night on a specific subject until I feel like I can make a decision within 30 days on what I'm going to do. Great. That is something I can do and I can measure whether

I did it or not. you have seasons of earning and you have seasons of learning. I had this kid who reached out, he was 18 years old, said he was going to edit videos for us. When he came in, he said, I want $100,000 a year as an editor, as a starting job. His reasoning was that somebody else had offered him that amount of money. I want to make this statement because I think it's logical and also stupid. If you're optimizing for your earning potential in your 20s, you're missing the fucking point. This individual had the potential to be on a team that has a massively, globally recognized brand in terms of media. And from there, learn how to be way better than they currently are,

and then become a creative director at another company or at one of my portfolio companies. Like, that is the career path. And instead, was comparing that to something that he would make $100,000 a year and be the only person in the department and no one there knew anything about media. And so he wasn't going to learn. He was going to earn. Whereas somebody who got into the big leagues and learned 10 times the skill set, then 10 years later is either starting a multi-million dollar company or hitting up a multi-million dollar division in a billion-dollar company. And the potential is so much wider because 10 years from now, someone says, what's your experience? It's like, well, I worked at a real estate firm and I made their social media content. Who gives a shit?

Whereas if you're like, I worked for one of the biggest media companies out there, everyone will give you the job offer. And that is when you can choose to earn over a learn. But people make the trade too soon because they compare themselves to people on social media and think that the point zero zero zero one percent is the norm. Whenever you choose to earn rather than learn, you're right hooking life and saying I'm no longer going to develop and this is good enough. And so if a hundred thousand dollars a year is actually good enough for your long term goals, then do it. But I would imagine that it probably isn't for what you really want to do long term. And I'm using six figures as a placeholder. It can be whatever number you want.

When you make that decision that you're no longer going to learn, that's when you stop growing your potential to learn more. I say this because that's what I did. I had a white collar consulting job for defense contracting at a top secret clearance. I had everything that looked good on paper, space cyber and intelligence. I had a two to three year path clearly for getting an MBA at an Ivy League school and then decided to drop all of that and start working for $13 an hour at a gym. After I graduated, Magna Cum Laude in three years from Vanderbilt. I know what I'm asking people to do and I'm not asking them to do something that I wasn't willing to do. And I think that I might have even a more extreme version that most people are having to live with.

trying to say like, well, I can't figure out what I want is a really paralyzing place to be that I think a lot of young people are in. It's like, I want to find my passion. But the big misnomer is actually a language issue, which is that people say they want to find their passion rather they want to build it or create it or learn it. And so like I can promise you that if you're good at something, you'll like doing it. And the only way that you get good at something is by doing things that you suck at and doing a lot of it. So let's say you make $50,000 a year. It costs you $950,000 a year not to know how to make a million dollars a year. So how much is that education worth? Answer, the difference. The difference between $1 million and $50,000,

which is $950,000. If you learn how to make a million dollars, the education is worth the difference. It's why education and information are the most valuable things that we can know. Elon has like lost everything and then gained it back. So many of the best entrepreneurs have stories where they lost it all and then gain it back. And so how is it that they can go to zero back to a billion where somebody starting at zero can't get there? Because they didn't. lose the education. They didn't lose the learning. They had a bad role. And sometimes in business, you do make bets on markets and sometimes they don't shape up. But you didn't lose. And a lot of times, you actually gain an experience so that the next bet pays off even bigger. Everyone gets

this wrong. The most expensive thing you ever pay for isn't your car. It isn't your house. It isn't your insurance. It's the information that you don't know but should. I mean, how many things can you think of right now that if you knew 10 years ago would have materially changed your financial outcome, your relational outcome, your physical outcomes, probably a lot. What is the value of that information? Borderline priceless. And so the idea that we wouldn't invest in paying down that debt of ignorance that we owe the universe is just because we don't know who we're paying the check to every month for the things that we don't know, that we don't value it appropriately. The cost of success is the years of feeling like an idiot for things that you should have known by now. All the decisions

that I made up to this point led me to hear and I don't regret my life so I don't regret not knowing. I mean, if I started over, I'd be wealthier than I am now. You know what I mean? I can't go back in time. But if I could go back in time to talk to my 20-year-old self, and it wouldn't change the outcome of my life now because I would never roll that dice, is I would say there's two things that you don't understand that will massively change your life. You'd understand brand and you don't understand product. Because I was obsessive in my 20s on sales and what I would consider fast money. I had fast feedback loops. So I'd get better at sales and then I'd immediately make more sales. I'd get better marketing. Immediately. make more money. And so I had this very fast feedback loop that gave me the misinformation or the false belief that this was the right path. But I was actually just playing the wrong game. Because it's kind of like in the matrix when Neo-Sysomorpeus, so you're saying when I'm fast enough, I'll be able to dodge bullets. And he said, no. I'm saying when you're ready, you won't have to. Me being obsessive about sales and marketing was me trying to get faster and faster in the matrix and not being the one and seeing the code for what it is, which is that if you make a product that's good

enough, people will do the marketing and sales for you. If your brand is strong enough, people will make the association that they want to buy your stuff regardless of how good your copy and your headline and your landing pages and your conversion rate optimization and your media buying are. I kept getting really good at a game that if I knew how to master the big things that mattered would make those skills almost irrelevant. When $100 million offers came out the book, I didn't make it for anything. I made it for me. And it was originally intended to be an internal document. And so I just wanted to make it exceptional. And what happened once I released it is what shocked me the most was that I posted once. And I just said, hey, I wrote this book. Hope you guys like it.

And then we sold out 10 minutes. And I was like, that's weird. The next month, more copies sold. And then the next month, more copies sold. And then the next month, more copies, month after month for two years. And it's still, number one in its category on Amazon. And that was with zero paid marketing, purely off of people telling people about the book. And so when I saw how much leverage that was that that book sells thousands a day, not dollars, thousands of copies a day. I have never marketed anything well enough to sell a thousand customers a day. Now mind you, I've always had more expensive stuff that I've sold, but like I'd never seen that kind of transaction volume. And the only way to get that kind of transaction volume is to have a huge amount of leverage.

The leverage that product unlocked from your, that understanding was that if you make it good enough, and I love this saying, which is there's too big to fail, and I love the other one, which is too good to fail. Mosy Nation real quick, if you are a business owner that has a big old business and wants to get to a much bigger business, going to $50 million plus. We would love to talk to you. And if you like that, we'd like to hear more about it, go to acquisition.com. You can apply anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see if we can help you get there. My headline for $100 million offers makes no sense. No one knows that $100 offers is. And it's just like a picture of $100 bill. It's a big purple book. It actually makes no sense. But the contents of the book were valuable enough. that people were like, just read it. And they said it so many times to so many people. And most people who, when I see the comments and I see the reviews,

they say, I had four different people in the same month tell me in different groups that I should read this book. So I decided to do it, even though it looked hokey. And oh, my God, this thing is unbelievable. And then they tell 20 people or 100 people. That was when I realized how much leverage spending more time up front on building a better product would unlock for me. What I used to do was spend two months building a good product and spent two years

marketing that product with great marketing rather than spending two years on a great product. And then for the rest of my life, not having to spend any dollars or effort on marketing so that it would sell again and again and again because of the quality of the product itself. And so that was the first lesson that my own yourself needed to understand about business. And the level of detail that it takes to go from good to great is so much wider than people think it is. The difference between an eight and a nine is ten times the work. The difference between nine and nine and a half is ten times the work. The difference between 9.5 and 9.75 is another 10 times the work. It's so much more effort. And honestly, when I was younger, I couldn't even comprehend the amount of work that I can do now.

And for me, that amount of work is the amount of unbroken, focused time that I can stick with one task. I did not have that level of focus. I didn't have a strong enough no muscle. I didn't know how to turn down other things that would distract me for long enough. If you can count in terms of hundreds, like, I can promise you, if you put a thousand hours into something, it'll probably be pretty good. And most people spend like 100 hours on something. Or, I mean, that's shit. Most people spend even less the time than that. You start a clock. When you start working, you stop a clock when you stop working. You spend a thousand hours or 2,000 hours on something. There's a level of detail because of the number of exposures you'll get to it. The crispy details

of the product or the service that can only come from looking at that thing when it's cold, looking at a thing when it's hot, looking at it when you're angry, looking at it when you're sad, looking at it when you're inspired, looking at it when you're bored. You see it with different lenses. happens is it just gives you so much more depth and context to whatever you're trying to build, that that's the difference between mediocre products and excellent products, and it just takes time. In an ocean of volume, which there's more commoditized products and services today than ever before, there's outsized returns to being number one. It is an even bigger winner take-all market now than it ever has been because of social media and the ease of letting other people know about stuff.

If you are truly the best, everyone will know. And if everyone knows you are the best, you will have more demand than you can possible deal with. People think that word of mouth is dead when there's literally never been an easier way to go viral in a literal sense from people telling other people about stuff. I said the second lesson was brand. And so I had to look at a company or brand as a learning tool, as what are people going to learn to associate my brand with the tangible and the intangible ideas? There are many people that I associated with when I was younger that I would never associate with today. Even though I would say, well, I don't act that way, I don't live my life the way they live their lives, people would still make that association. If I did nothing but talk with porn stars on my show, people would still make a very different association with me. And so I want to embody certain values that I want my brand to associate with. And anything that is not those things, by default, attracts from it because it dilutes the association. Branding is like creating a garden where pretty much anything but the flower that you're trying to grow there is a weed. if it's a daffodil, even if it's a sunflower, even if the flower itself is fine. Like I said,

I have no issues with porn. I think it's a sunflower, whatever. But if I'm trying to grow roses, then anything that's not a rose doesn't belong. Being so vigilant about defending that garden of association and reputation gives you so much leverage. Because the reason Warren Buffett now can just do deals that no one else can do is because his handshake means more than the U.S. governments. If he says he will pay, we know he will pay. If he says he will be there to ensure your entire city, we know he will. He can do a deal on a one-page agreement for billions of dollars because people trust and they know that his reputation matters more than anything to him. And so trust is leverage for deals. It's leverage for sales. The first experience I had with

having a strong brand was when we were probably a year, year and a half into gym launch. I launched what would become Allen, my software project. And when people heard I had launched a new thing. The clients that I had were sending screenshots of their credit cards to my customer support team saying, I don't know what it was, but if Alex made it, I'll buy it. And so all of the ideas and the obsessions around how I was going to market it and how I was going to position it, the thing that mattered most was what they had already received from me and how much I had delivered on my first promise. And so when I realized that, I was like, all of the sales and marketing stuff gets you one sale. delivering exceptional product and exceptional reputation around your products gets you every other sale

after that. And you go always be able to sell the next thing provided you delivered on the first day. And that's where there's this obsession with marketing because there's always more people to sell to. It's a very, in my opinion, tiring life. You always have to go get new customers. If you make sales to get customers to make sales, you make the customer the goal. And then you get to keep that relationship. And then next year, you still have that customer. If you can, got a customer just to make a sale, you have to go get another customer to make another sale next year. But if you make a sale to create the relationship of the customer, then next year that customer will buy again and the new customer will buy. And the third year, you get the first

two years and the third customer. And then that is how you create a compounding vehicle. And so both of those things, brand and product are actually underlying one concept, now that I'm saying it out loud, which is I didn't understand compounding. I thought that it was normal to have to go out bang doors, call phones, DM, run ads to get customers every single month. And that next month, I'm going to have to get another 20 just to keep the lights on. Rather than having spent more time on my reputation and the quality of my product so that when I sold the first 100, they would never leave again. And then they would send me the next hundred and I wouldn't have to do anything. And then I would be able to fend people off. And then I'd be able to raise my prices and be able to

take people on my terms. But I didn't understand any of that. And part of that is because I wanted money so fast. And building a great product takes longer. putting a great reputation literally never stops until the day you die. Leaning into that lesson, you know, the first book I launched and I think it did two or four thousand copies sold its first month, something like that. You know, the second book that launched two years later sold 250,000 copies in its first month, which for context, the average New York Times bestseller sells between 10 and 100,000 in its first 12 months. And we sold 250 in the first month. The only way that that could happen is if the people who bought the first book buy the second book and everybody they tell also buy it.

And that book still continues to sell at twice the rate of my first book today. Here's how to spot friends that are worth cutting. They only talk about your past, not your future. So if you go and you hang out with your buddies and all they can really reminisce with you on is the things that you did together, but none of them are talking about what they're going to do or what you're going to do, for me, that's a tell-tale sign that they're living in the past. They're not even living in the present.

Their best years are behind them. And for most of us, we want our best years to be ahead of us. And we want somebody who's also looking at the same goal as us, which is growth, which is moving forward, which is making progress. If you are a growth-oriented individual and you feel like you're not sure about your environment or if it's conducive, the easiest limit test is who talks about the future and who talks about the past. Keep the ones who are only talking about the future, cut the ones talking about the best.

The best thing that I ever did was not listen to other people's opinions about my life. They don't want the best version of you. They want the version of you who best serves them. Now, when I first said this, I got flack from a bunch of parents. They're like, I really want the best for my kids. I was like, that's not true. You want a version of your children who serves what you think will make you look the best. Family, I would say more often than not, has a closer alignment with your long-term goals than strangers do.

And so it makes sense that family would have more aligned interests, but not completely aligned interests with you. Because the only person who has a completely aligned interest with you is future you. Keeping that is the limitless test of whose opinion I'm going to listen to, although it's more difficult, has ultimately been very fruitful for me. Because if you're looking at even two parents, you can disprove that concept by saying, okay, well, both parents want different things for me. Of the things that both parents want,

which of the things help each of the parents individually out? Because I can promise you that the thing that one parent wants doesn't hurt them and help the other parent if they disagree. It's usually something that's more aligned with their worldview, their beliefs, or what they will get status from in their community for you doing. And so all of the things I just described have nothing to do with you. So why consider it?

I'll say this up front. hate why questions because who knows why. But I would say that if I had to make a guess on why we care about other people's opinions, it's because we've learned to care about other people's opinions. And when we're children, we learn to orient ourselves to the world through other people telling us what is what. Literally, when you're a kid, you point and then you say, well, it's that. And then they say this. And so you have to listen to other people on the way up. The problem is, at some point, you have to turn it off and say, you know, some of the people I was listening to had no idea what they were saying. But you don't know they have no idea because

you don't have a context to make a judgment. You have to learn to become human, and then you have to learn to become yourself. And I think that at that turning point, you then have to analyze the beliefs that you've been given and then keep the ones that you choose. Most parents are risk averse rather than risk taking for their children. So like we're willing to take more risk for ourselves oftentimes that our parents are willing to take on our behalf. And I think that's normal. They want to keep you alive. There's a lot of evolutionary drive behind that. And so they're playing not to lose, but if you want to play to win, then you have to take different bets. I think a lot of younger people get really confused because they spend a lot of time talking about ideas and very little talking about doing actions. And so if you just define the world by

only things that occur in it and not things that occur in your mind, there's a lot less noise. And so it becomes easier to see the forest trees. Let's say I have an employee and I want to hop on a one-on-one and they said something in a meeting before. And I say, I think the intention behind your statement was that you wanted me to do this. And this is how I was feeling about your statement and this is probably where you were feeling. Everything I just said is a complete waste of time, because all I know is that they said this. And so just focus on the facts. And if you can do that, it actually makes living life a lot easier or navigating life a lot easier, at least it has for me. Because those are the only objective truths. An easy frame for that is like, would it be admitted to a court

as evidence? You saying you were offended is not evidence. John said this to Sally, these words, that's evidence, indisputable. And so just look at the things that are beyond reproach, look at the things that are indisputal, look at the things that are facts that are observable, and the world gets a lot quieter, and you also realize that most people are full of shit, and don't know what they're talking about. I mean, if someone was like, hey, Alex, why did you get into business? I could make up an answer. It just, how do we know it's true? Trying to figure out someone's intention is bullshit. If someone asks me, why did you get into business? I can make up an answer. Anyone can make up an answer. Why do you like making money? Why do you like sales? Why do you

like marketing? Why are you good at this? I can make up any answer. All I know is that these things have occurred. And so we can look at my actions and we can look at the results. The rest of it of which, which had what influence on what? Like, I can't relive my life and I can't run the experiment. And so trying to determine why, like, was it because my mom didn't hug me? Was it because my dad hug me too hard? Who knows? I can give anyone and someone will nod and say, great, because we've trained ourselves to say to answer when someone says, why do you do that? You give them words and they nod and say, though, that's interesting. But like, it doesn't mean it's true. And so I just try and skirt the whole conversation because there's no point. So when someone's like, well, I'm the type of person

who? I'm like, just stop. Then they start using this label to decide whether or why they can or can't do something. I wouldn't be successful with that because I'm a knee freak. Why? Because you take trash out of your car regularly? Why does that have anything to do with whether you could do this or not? I used to think and told people I was bad at math until I was 25. Post college, post consulting job, all of it.

And then I decided that I was not going to be bad at math. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to use a calculator. And so then I started getting better and better at doing math problem. And then lo and behold, when I took the G-MAT, I was like, okay, I have to study twice as hard for the math section. And I did just as well on the math section as I did on my verbal. But my whole life, I had said I was bad at math. And so I didn't study as hard because I was bad at. Everyone who's listening to this has something they say about themselves. They're like, I'm not organized. I'm an early bird. Right. Like, we have these labels we give ourselves. But like, why do we have these labels?

Like, if you needed to wake up early, you'd fuck to wake up early. If you need to stay up late, you stay up late. The labels change our behavior more than we change the labels. I really abhor labels over all because I feel like it limits my action. When I get on podcasts and I have talks and people try and label you'll probably actively see me break the label almost every time because I'm really aware of it. And a lot of people aren't. And I don't think people do it on purpose in a bad way. I just think that they will speak things over you, which is why I hate going home. Because no one speaks shit over you more than your family and the people who knew you in high school. Alex has always had a short temper. You're a hot head. Literally, people from home describe me

that way. I was like, I don't think I'm a hot head. They will say that. And then I feel like I have to really put up my mental, like, defenses to be like, this is not true. Here's the evidence that this is not true. What would a hothead do in these scenarios? That is not the way I behaved, therefore, right? And I have to, I have to basically unwind that shit whenever I go there. And so that is why I've been an advocate of like, if you want to change your behavior, change your environment, because they're not going to reinforce labels that you then also perpetuate in your own mind by the actions you take as a result. And the only reason they want to label is because it's shorthand for other people to understand, not because it's true. They just want to say, he had a bad

child. And so they take, oh, your whole life and they just say, bad. That's not true. There's more new wants to it. I prefer to think of ideals and think of taking steps towards those ideals. And since ideals are not binary of like, he is courageous or he is not courageous, but how courageous is he? Not impatient or patient, but how much? Then I know the values that I want to embody. And then I just take steps towards those every day with the actions I take. And so if I'm deciding, do I want to take this action? I'll say, which action aligns the most with the values that I want to embody? And then I try to do that. So rather than being like, Alex is patient, I'd be like, Alex attempts to act in accordance with the value of patience and sometimes fall short. But tries to start.