The Game with Alex Hormozi - Negative Emotional Motivation | Ep 665

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

"Right thing for the wrong reasons rather than the wrong things for the right reason.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the importance of envy as a driver for success and self-improvement. He identifies envy and jealousy as distinct emotions, with the former being a desire for something someone else has while the latter is the fear of losing something one already possesses to someone else. Alex argues that understanding and acknowledging envy can be empowering and beneficial towards achieving business and personal goals.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:(0:36) - Understanding envy and jealousy(1:36) - Personal experiences with envy and jealousy(2:31) - The adaptive nature of envy(3:22) - The power of naming emotions(4:23) - The impact of motivations on actions(6:02) - The importance of emotion in decision making(6:57) - The freedom of accepting desires(7:57) - Embracing emotions and desiresFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was on December 4, 2020)

If in a group one person or one being, one animal, whatever, brings more to the table, you are now envious of that person. And what it does is it elevates the rest of the group to go and achieve the same, which is good for the collective. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy. What I want to talk to you about today was a conversation that I had, and we were having a conversation

about motivation, and I figured I would share it with you because I think it was of a lot of value. And so I was sharing that recently I had delineated between the feelings of envy and jealousy, and how important it has been for me to be able to first name those emotions so that I could then analyze how I was feeling about them and the actions that I would subsequently take as a result of them. And so I want to at least first cover those and then I'll tell you about our conversation. And so envy is having the desire for something that someone else has that you do not have. So you are lacking and someone else has something that you want and do not have. That is envy.

Jealousy is when you have a threat that somebody is going to take something that you have that they do not have. All right. And so, for example, I'll give you a. an example of each. So envy, I may be envious of a friend of mine. So I was actually talking to a good friend of mine who runs a big weight loss company. And right now, he's doing better than I am. And now I am envious of his success. I am. I can feel it. I'm envious. I got off the phone. And I was like, I am envious of you. Right. On the flip side, if someone comes to talk to Layla, right, it is the fact that they pose the threat of taking attention or her attention that I think

should continuously belong to me that I would feel jealous over. I haven't felt jealousy in a long time, but that is an example. It could also be like with your kids. If you have some other adult in their life starts taking their attention or has more influence over them, you are jealous of the influence that that person is now is threatening your influence over your child. Right. So two examples, they're nuanced, but I think it's important.

And when I was talking about this, I was talking about how I think envy gets a bad one. rap. And I'm not going to go into the spiritual religious side of this or even the happiness side of this because I think envy absolutely does not make you happy. But I do think that envy will make you successful. All right. And so this is where I want to kind of dive into this. Envy is adaptive, right? As human beings, this is actually from our old brain, right? This is animals have this too. They are envious of one another. And it's because if in a group one person or one being, one animal, whatever, brings more to the table, you are now envious of that person. And what it does is it elevates the rest of the group to go and achieve the same, which is good for the collective,

not happier for each of the individuals, but as a pro-survival tool, right? And so for me, understanding this and at least being able to name the emotion rather than saying, I don't like this guy or I am angry at this person, or having this negative feeling that you cannot put words to, instead being able to say, I am envious has been very relieving for me because now I can actually tell those people, hey, I'm envious of you. And for some reason, I think it just creates another level of candor because it's a certain level of vulnerability and saying, you have something that I wish I had, but then you'll notice that the conversation is not defensive on that person's part. Most of the time they're like, well, let me help you. And it's only when we guise our intentions or try and feign, you know,

pretend to be a different way than we are where people also can sense that you're being disingenuous. Like, great job, man, right? When realize deep down and they can tell from your subtle tonality changes and the way you look that you're actually not happy for them, right? And so I think if you can at least say it, then it actually gives you power. In terms of judging your motivations, because obviously you might think that envy is a bad motivation. It is my belief that I would rather deal with people who do good things for bad reasons than

bad reasons for good things. I said the same thing twice, but they do the right thing for the wrong reasons rather than the wrong things for the right reason. All right, I'd rather someone who does the right outcome. And he gave me an example that was really powerful. He said a friend of his was a top Navy SEAL and, you know, one of the best Navy SEALs, he trains Navy SEALs, just a total badass, right? And before that, he was an EMT.

And he talked about his experiences being an EMT is that most people think, EMTs have to be really caring. You want them to, you know, they have to save these people's lives every day. And he said, the Navy SEAL was saying, I was not compassionate at all. I didn't really care that much about the person who was on the table in front of me. But what I did care about was my stats. I cared about the status of being the best. I wanted to have the fastest of the hospital.

I want to have the highest survival rates, highest success rates of the people that were under my care because I cared about myself being the best. And so the question is, if you were the person who was on the table having a heart attack, would you rather have the compassionate EMT, or would you rather have the self-interested EMT, who is doing it for status? Well, if it were me, I'd rather have the guy who wanted to pride himself on being the best in the world and didn't give him care about me at all, because I knew his result was going to be more pro me than the other persons. And so I think that as humans and entrepreneurs, we judge ourselves a lot on our motivations and our intentions.

But I think that if we can take a step back and, A, name the emotion, so that's not this amorphous thing that we can't understand, but then take the next step and say, is this a pro-adaptive emotion? Is this something that's going to help me? Or is this an emotion that's going to drive me to do something that is negative? And I think at least even in naming that, we can increase the time between emotion and action. And the further that time gap, is, in general, the better the quality of the decisions we make because the more rational we are. We're never completely rational because we're emotion-driven beings and we have limbic systems that override things. But the more we can decrease the triggers, the emotional

triggers that cause us to make bad decisions, ultimately the better decisions we make. And so I say all this to say, big picture. First, naming the emotions is important. Second, it creates space so we can make better decisions. Third, we can analyze the decisions and say, is this something that is going to help me in my life or is this something that's going to hurt me? And then as a result of this, we don't have to judge ourselves as strongly

on why we are doing things and rather what is being done. Because candidly, I am a very envious individual and maybe this is me just rationalizing my own negative, you know, emotions, who knows. But at least for me, saying it that way and framing the thought process in that way has helped me feel better about myself and just not, or really just less bad, if that's probably a better way of saying it, and not constantly berating myself for having desires that I think are wrong. And so Dan Sullivan said this, and I'll end with this,

is that when people want something, if you want to make more money, if you want to have a bigger house, you want to have a bigger car, you want to build a podcast studio, whatever, right? He said, wanting is reason enough. Because so many times we ask, but why do we want that? We're probably not going to change the desire. And so letting us, letting ourselves desire things and giving ourselves permission to desire things and myself specifically has been incredibly freeing. And what it's done is giving me a tremendous amount of my attention back that used to

be allocated to analyzing why I'm feeling this way or why this is right or why this is wrong and instead accepting the fact that I want something and that wanting it is okay as long as it is not something that is hurting other people and that is not something that is hurting me. And so anyways, I hope that makes sense. I hope that provided you some value or hopefully maybe some clarity around putting words to your own emotions, the decisions that results from them and whether they are positive or negative and eliminating the judgment from that equation provided it's something that helps