The Game with Alex Hormozi - "New Distractions Kill" - Keynote Speech at Future Flipper (Pt. 2) | Ep 461

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

You have to learn how to say no to the woman in the red dress and focus on what’s really important ahead. Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he presents his keynote at Future Flipper to talk about his definition of “work”, the importance of creating volume and leverage when it comes to output, and the other three ways you will not get leverage. This is part 2 of the keynote speech.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:(0:45) - Choose one, focus; any can succeed with dedication.(3:35) - Resist distractions; be the one saying no.(6:51) - Patience is behavioral, not just about feelings.(15:35) - Unreasonable focus makes failure unlikely; stack the deck.(19:59) - Invest time in enhancing lead magnet, offer; key to success.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

You've read every email. You've seen every report. So if you were coaching you right now, what would you tell you to do? And what's crazy about this is that half the fucking time is not what I'm doing. Take your own advice. If you do that, I promise you'll make more money. 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 wish Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy. So I had a conversation with a different friend. And he had a zillion businesses.

Like a zillion. I get a spreadsheet for how many businesses he had. And they were all bullshit businesses. They don't actually make any money. But he had like a logo on a website and like some VA. You know what I mean? Like, oh, it's a business. And he was believing the fallacy of,

I'm just going to wait to see the thing that takes off and then go out on that. Who here has thought this thought? I get it. I'm going to focus. I'm just going to wait. I'm going to be patient. See which one works out.

and then, because I'm a good statistics guy, I'm going to go with the winning horse, right? But the reality is that any of them can take off. You could have a billion-dollar roofing business, you could have a billion-dollar GC business, you've got a billion-dollar house-building business. But you can't have them all. So you've got to focus. You've got to pick one. And the nice thing is it doesn't really matter which one you pick.

But you do need to pick one. The picking is the thing that grows it. The ability to say no is the thing that grows it. not the thing you pick. It's who you are as a consequence of the decision that changes the outcome, not the vehicle. Does that make sense? So how arrogant is it to think that we can do multiple things at once and compete with someone who's spending all their time on that one thing? It's ridiculous, and yet we still do it. And so this is, I love this little cartoon. This guy, you know, he's got all his spinning plates. And this is, this is me with the red hair,

going to this guy who's hopefully my competitor and handing him more plates to be like, oh, do you see all that shiny optic over there? Here, more plates. Go. I'm just going to do this one thing. It's my favorite thing in the world. Compete against somebody who's doing lots of things. It's very easy to win.

You don't have to do much because you only have to do a tenth of what they do. So this is what focus really looks like. One thing, all in. You can write that down and you can circle it. One thing, all in. So I asked my friend of mine that had the Excel sheet with all these zillions of questions, right? I said, if I had a magic wand and I ended all your side projects except for one, just one, the one that you think has the most opportunity,

the one that's probably making the most money right now that you're not paying attention to because it's boring because it's old could have been doing it a while. He's like, yeah. I was like, do you know what business it is? He's like, yeah. Like, okay. If you ended everything else because I have a magic wand, so I get to make the rules, magic wand, they all disappear. I said, how easy would it be to grow that thing? he just looked at me and he was like really fucking easy

he's like hmm interesting and so he's like but that would be so hard because of insert real reason that no one gives a fuck about no one cares but I have to fire that uh huh but I would have to shut them uh huh but I would have to lay off uh huh all the riches you want are on the other side of a few hard conversations and most people spend the rest of their lives

not having them and being poor and wondering why It's going to suck. It's going to be okay. That was my number three story, the magic wand. Number four, my favorite story. Who here has seen The Matrix? Awesome. You need to become the person who can say no to the woman in the red dress.

The woman in the red dress is the representation of everything that is shiny object and beautiful and wonderful in the world, whatever your flavor of woman in the red dress is. And the thing is, and this is something that I have now learned, painstakingly, is that being able to say no to the woman in the red dress changes at levels. You can say no to the one in the red dress who's a crackhead on the corner, right? $1,000 a month. You're like, I can say no to her. No worries. I got something better, right?

But then the $10,000 month girl, you're like, huh? Okay. Interesting. And if you're making $10,000 a month, it's hard to say no to that girl. But let's say that you're a hardworking, disciplined motherfucker. You get to $100,000 a month. There's a $100,000 a month, girl. That's an opportunity that is much bigger than the one that you said no to before.

And you have to learn to flex the muscle at every level. This is a lesson that I learned the hard way. I started a supplement company when Jim Launch was doing $26 million a year. And rather than say, oh, why don't I just take Jim Launch to $40 next year, I'll start another thing. Jim Launch stayed the same. And then I added another source of revenue that got us to $37. but it was a mistake strategically.

I can tell the story. It sounds great on paper. We sold the company, lots of money, whatever. But it was not the right move. And so I had learned how to say no to a million dollar opportunity, a $5 million, a $10 million, but I hadn't learned how to say no to a $20 million opportunity when I was making $20 million.

And so, like, the woman in the red dress becomes more seductive, more attractive, the better you get. The more status you get, the hotter the girl you attract. Right? And I'm saying this figuratively for entrepreneurs. Does that make sense for everybody who's not into women with red dresses? Okay. Because this is what the woman in the red dress really looks like.

Just ready to smash your shit and distract you and spread you thin so that you can't keep your eye on the ball. And then eventually she spreads you so thin that you don't know how to get out. And it feels like quicks saying. Because as soon as you put out fires here, there's fires here. There's fires here. Fire's here. I need more talent.

You take the best person from over here to fix that. problem, then this thing goes to shit. How do you get out? Got to cut shit. Got to eat your ego. You got to watch your revenue go down so that you can refocus, reconsolate, bring the troops in. I'm saying this because someone here needs to do this, and I wish I'd fucking heard this from somebody else. It would avoid a lot of pain. So how do you become that person who can say no to the woman in the red dress? You do the activities someone with those character traits would do, despite not feeling good about it. So I'll tell you a story that I'll drive this home. So Layla and I were on this walk, not that long ago, and I said, you know, I was like, I'm so impatient. I'm so impatient. I need to be more patient, right? And she was like, I don't think you're impatient. I was like, yeah, I am. I fucking hate this. I want this to be faster. I want everything to be bigger, faster, stronger. She's like, yeah, but you're not changing your behavior. Like, you feel that way. But you haven't done anything that's not aligned with the long term strategic vision. I was like, yeah, but I feel fucking terrible. I want to be like zen about it.

She's like, yeah, but that's not how it works. She's like, patience is about the behaviors we do, not how we feel about behaviors. So who here has heard the quote, courage is not the absence of fear, but it's action despite fear, right? Patience is not feeling impatient and feeling terrible about waiting, about not jumping on these opportunities. It's about not jumping on the opportunities despite feeling like shit about it and wanting to. Loyalty is not necessarily about the fact that your eye doesn't get caught every once in a while, right?

or maybe even feel a desire that you wish you didn't feel. It's about whether you act on him. Because who here would rather have somebody, like I think you already know where I'm going with this, right? In terms of loyalty, how would you rather? You'd rather the person not act on the thought. That is how you gain the trait. And then over time, this is my belief,

if you do that enough times, those feelings go away through exposure therapy. Like you get exposed to this condition over and over again, and eventually you know that you don't die because that's what it feels like. And so whether it's a loyalty issue, an integrity issue, a courage issue, a focus issue, which is the point of this message today, to become that person, you just start acting like the person who has those beliefs and you behave in that way, and then it will stink in.

Women in their address. So, new distractions, kill leverage, and keep you poor. Focus multiplies it. I said three things. Number one, how making money really works. It all comes down to leverage. Number two, why making new stuff is making you poor, which means you have to focus. And number three is why better is leverage.

This is the make money part. Here's a simple approach to growth that we use with our portfolio companies. Better is better than new. Better is leverage. Because remember, leverage is how we get more from what we put in. If you do it better, you get more for what you put in. That is leverage. Examples.

If you have call scripts, if you make content, if you have websites that you're building, if you have follow-up sequences, if you have offers, if you do the current thing, you get what you currently have. If you make it better, you will get more from the activities. You can create leverage in your business by being better. And better comes from boring. Most of us solved an emotional need by quitting whatever we were doing to start to become an entrepreneur. And then we had a positive reinforcement from that behavior. And so then we learn that as a way of life.

but the problem is that the thing that forced you or gave you that emotional, that decrease your action threshold, thus that you would jump into the next thing, is the very thing that will make you jump out of the opportunity that could become your billion dollar thing. Does that make sense? You felt uncomfortable in your job, quit your job, you got rewarded. And so you think, oh, when I quit things, I'll get rewarded. But that's the wrong lesson. It only works once. And then you have to unlearn it. And with each level of entrepreneurship, there are lessons like that that you have to unlearn the thing that's, you have to unlearn the thing that.

got you there. Better comes from boring. It is not exciting to run your 38th split test on a landing page. It does make you more money. It comes from doing all the shit that you know you should be doing but aren't. And so right now, this is an activity. So this is an active part. Imagine a list of all the stuff you know you should be doing but aren't doing right now within your existing business. Like right now, like top of your head, you know there's some shit that you should be doing in your business. I'm going to give you 15 seconds. The reason that stuff is so important is because you already know what you need to do. And we come here, get raw rod, et cetera. But the shit is on your desk at home. That is the work that must be done. It needs doing. And most of us know

what to do and we don't want to confront it because we want to do something more stimulating and exciting that makes us feel alive and your business doesn't give a fuck. Better. is boring and better gets you more for what you put in. Better is leverage. Now, imagine who here has a few businesses. Be really fucking hard to make that list, wouldn't it? There's too much shit. It's too much.

Too much stuff to make the business. Which means becomes impossible. Which means that's why you have to pick one. Because there is so much stuff that has to be done to do one business right. Just do it right. If you do it right, you grow by default is a promise

who here is like I know I should be doing more email follow-up I know I should be calling my leads within five minutes who here thinks that right now okay let me ask a different question and many of you did raise your hand who here calls other leads within five minutes okay like two hands

you will triple your sales triple triple who wants to triple the fucking business triple but that sounds It's boring. Sure it's. Got to implement the CRM, got to get round robin set up, leads got to come in, you got to figure out how call prioritization works between the team. That's boring. Makes you a shitload of money. That's how it works. Who's going to win? Two different businesses. The guys who got the shit dialed. Better gets you more for what you put in. And when you do get home, order it from the amount you have to put in to get the thing done that will result in the most output. And start to take it. them off and you continue to ignore the new things that sound really exciting. And you become the person who's able to do that by pretending to be the person who's able to do that.

Because you already know what to do. So this is a mental model I really like a lot. Who here has ever had a coach or a mentor? Has anyone ever coached or mentored other people? Does anyone feel like they're a better mentor than they are a person who does shit? All the time. And so the thing is, is I asked myself this question. It's actually been one of the like most profound, most helpful questions I've had, which is if I were coaching me, and the beautiful thing about this is that when you coach you, you have no other agenda. You're just trying to help you. And you also have more information than anyone else has. You've been on every conversation. You've read every email. You've seen every report.

So if you were coaching you right now, what would you tell you to do? And what's crazy about this is that half the fucking time is not what I'm doing. coach me much smarter than me, me. Right? Moomo. Okay. Take your own advice. If you do that, I promise you'll make more money.

You're like, ah, but I'm a special snowflake. You're just convincing yourself that you're smarter than you are and giving yourself reasons that reality does not apply to you. It does. And this is just a boss level. You might need to keep going against the snowflake until eventually you figure out that you just got to melt it by being there and hanging in. 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 would like to hear more about it, go to acquisition.com. You can play anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see if we can help you get there.

And so in my entrepreneurial career, there was two periods, very clear definitions of periods of time in my life. The first period was when I was distracted. This is when I did not make money. I had six gyms. I had a launch business where we do gym turnarounds in person. That's where I actually physically was, not at my gyms. I had a dentist, a dental agency. I had a chiropractor agency.

I think I had something else. Lots of fingers, right? And I was 26-ish. And I would love to tell people, oh, I own nine companies, right? I'm poor. But, But it felt really good, struck my ego, not my bank account. So it was only when, Layla, the angel of my life, was like, hey, you know, this one makes us the most money and you spend the least amount of time on it.

That gym once thing actually works. But I have to like, I would have to like sell all those gyms. I'd have to end partnerships. I'd have to let go of people in the agency. And she was like, yeah, or you could just, you know, keep doing what you're doing. It's clearly working. Point taking, you know. And so over the next 90 days, I sold five gyms, shut one down,

shut down both agencies, and got rid of everything. And 12 months later, from that moment, we were doing one and a half million a month from zero. 12 months after that, we were at four and a half million a month. One thing. And so this was the second period. Just focus. It's so much easier to stack the deck in your favor if you just do one thing.

Because when you focus on one thing, you make it unreasonable to fail. If you do one thing for an extended period of time, it becomes unreasonable to suck. If you do it more than anyone else has done it, you'll be better than that. Just is what it is. People I spend the time, they're like, hey, how did you get so good at sales?

It's like, 4,000 fucking sales calls. That's how I did it. That's how I did it. I'd even go through a sales training. I had 4,000 fucking conversations. That's how I did it. And so if you wanted to be the best salesman in the world, then have more sales conversations than anyone else has.

If you want to be the best real estate investor, then do more deals than anyone else has. And the subsequent before that is send out more mailers than anyone else has, have more cold callers than anyone else has. Send more cold DMs than anyone else has. And you'll become the best. And if you put that as the output, the thing that you're looking at,

it becomes unreasonable that you would be not the best, right? Like you're at least going to be top 10. And if who here would be top 10 in real estate and the U.S., did you be okay with that? Right, it wouldn't be bad. And the thing is that everyone fails because they want to move fast. Like, this is the number one issue. So they don't have a solid foundation.

They draw the dotted line, and they think I'm going to try and shortcut it. I'm not going to fix my product. I'm not going to make it really good because I want to go fast because I want to show to my friends that I'm growing every month. I want to show how good I am. The thing is it's a short game. Like how many times it's like it's the the restaurant example is so simple. So many people start a restaurant slap two pieces of Wonderbread together put a slice of bologna in there and then market it like fucking crazy and they're like dude, I don't get why my business isn't growing. I'm like because everyone who has your food literally tells everyone that it fucking sucks and never come back. So there's this invisible hand that works against people. which is who knows about the power of word of mouth, right?

The invisible hand, who here runs ads? Let me ask that question. Who here runs advertisement? Okay. If you run ads and it has become more expensive for you, disproportionate to the increase in CPMs, which is cost for impression or eyeballs, in that period of time that you've been in business,

then it means that you have negative word of mouth. So if you're like, why don't get that many referrals? Oh, are you sure do get a whole bunch of people who you get negative referrals? You get negative sales. You've spent twice. as much as you acquire a customer, because every other customer that you would have acquired was told by someone else not to buy from you.

It's the invisible hand. When you shortcut it, promote, promote, promote, promote, promote. And then flatline, and then dissolve, and then you come up with new shit. Who here has seen the people on the internet doing this game? Over and over and over again. They don't get the product right. They put two pieces of baloney, you know, sandwich together with a baloney slice in the middle, and they call it a product, and then we have ham with one slice in the middle,

and it's still shit. because they don't want to take the 12 months to actually get the fucking product right. But on the long game, 10 years from now, the guy who takes a first year, takes a break even on that year just to get the product right, makes everything easy. But no one can wait 12 months because they can't see the big picture. They keep trying to string three of these little shortcuts together rather than building the foundation. Better is leverage. Better gets you more for what you put in. This is what small businesses look like.

This is what big businesses look like. The amount of activity is actually not that different. It's just a line. It's just all in the same direction. It's all it is. It's really not. I promise you, I've been in both. It's all it is.

There's no magic. It's just aligning. Same input. More output. What boring, but better looks like. I mean, split testing landing pages not once but weekly. Not just one time when you come here, you put the process in place to do it every fucking week.

Split testing emails, not once, but weekly. Making new ads and creative, not when you have to, but before you need them. Role playing with the sales team, not once, but daily. Role playing with customer success. Hey, I want a refund. Hey, I hated this. Hey, it wasn't fast enough. What do they say?

Role play. If you have amazing customer success, they roll play every day, they'll get fucking good, I promise. How exciting is that? Not at all. Not at all. But you know what it does? It makes you more money. Taking 10 more interviews for the same role.

Sucks. Sucks to talk to 10 more people for no reason. But there is a reason, because you're trying to find the one person that's going to give you 10 times the leverage on that time you got back. Think about this. But if you didn't take those interviews,

you hire someone, wait six months, and you have to do the whole thing again, and you lost the six months. That's what Layla was talking about. Take you more time to make your lead magnet better. Make your offer better and better. All these things are boring, but make you more money.

And so this is my promise. is that doing all the un-sixie shit that you aren't doing, but know you should, is the secret to the success. My promise is if you do nothing new, but only what you already know you should be doing that your self-coach tells you to, you will make more money in the next 12 months than you can imagine.

You just got to do it right. So this is actually a text I got yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday. This guy had lost everything, and he had set a goal down for himself, and he said, hey, last day of 2021, set a business goal that I thought was quite honestly unrealistic, impossible to hit. Well, I'm going to surpass it in Q3.

And so the only thing that I told him to do was to commit to the activities. I was like, just do the same thing every day, rain or shine. It was prospect. I was like prospect every day. He's like, and the first few months, he actually had a couple good months and then he slowed down. He's like, how do I stay committed? I was like, because you felt successful for fucking getting an outcome. It's irrelevant for who you are.

Some of you guys have heard this quote, but your work works on you more than you work on it. I was like, you need to become the person who isn't satisfied with whatever that outcome was, but only by the commitment that you made to yourself about the activity that you were going to do. And so whether it was up or it was down, it divorces the actions from the outcome. Not to say that the outcome is not the work, it is. But in terms of who you are, who you are is forged in the repetitive act. And so I just said this last thing. I said, once you feel, whatever, whatever, doesn't matter.

Final point. Who here knows the difference between a 7 out of 10 book and a 9.5 out of 10 book? About 20 times the work, realistically. Who here knows the difference in sales between a 7.5 book and a 9.5 buck? About 1,000 times the sales. And so if you do 20 times the work, you can get 1,000 times the effort. That's a 50x increase per unit of input. It's a lot.

It's worth it. But you do have to do 20 times more work. That is leverage. An opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. So I said I was going to cover three things. I want to make sure I filled my promise. Number one is how making money really works, leverage. Everybody feel good with that?

Does that make sense? All right. Number two, why making new shit is making you poor and why you have to focus. Number three is why better is leverage. Awesome. Output comes from volume times leverage. You must do more and get more from what you do. The way you get more from what you do is you first do everything that you know you should be doing better.

The way you do that is to focus on one thing for a long time without distraction. Anything can become big with time. When you line all actions to a single outcome and you keep working at it, your success will look effortless and obvious from the outside. But you will know that it came from years of saying no to everything except that which mattered most. This is how we grow companies at Acquisition.com through leverage. Most entrepreneurs lack the who, the what, and the how to scale at Acquisition.com. and we recruit the who, we give them the what, and we show them the how.

Once an entrepreneur has all three, the business scales by default. And that's it. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate you.