The Game with Alex Hormozi - "No One Can Outwork Me" - Keynote Speech at Future Flipper (Pt. 1) | Ep 458

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

If you teach something new and they’re not able to tell you about it, that means they didn’t truly learn. 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 ways you will not get leverage. This is part 1 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:(3:38) - "Outwork me" misconceived; Alex defines work as output.(6:52) - Volume and leverage key: Move lever, maximize output.(10:26) - Money's link to time, leverage crucial for earnings.(12:49) - Leverage pitfalls: Uninformed optimism, divided focus explained.(19:14) - Epic tasks require sustained effort, avoiding overestimation of abilities.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

The reason I'm specifically saying this to this audience is that y'all get fooled all the fucking time by passive income. It's not passive. It's less active, but it is not binary. It is not active or passive. It's how active is it? 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. What's up? Thank you guys. I am very honored and stoked to be here. Maximum level Stoke out of from a scale one to Stoke. I'm stoked. I'm really excited. I think it was last night. Who here saw me at Yogurtland last night? Can I get some hands? All right, a couple of you guys. Yeah, I think it was like 10 or 11 of you. So I was at Yoverland, and I had the last two days before this kind of prepared a presentation for today. And after talking to just the few people that I did for about 60 minutes, I woke up this morning and rewrote the entire presentation. So this is brand new. It's just for you guys. And so it's going to be fun money time with Alex. Does that work? Is that cool? All right. So our mission, Layla and I, acquisition.com, is to make real business education available to everyone. That's our goal. That's why we're trying to do. That's why we do the speaking stuff.

That's why we started recording the videos, the podcast and all that stuff is because there are too many problems in the world for one person to solve them. And so rather than hoard the stuff that has been relatively painful for us to learn, I would like to distribute it to you guys. It's very meaningful for me to do this. And so I will be as lighthearted as I can to this, but it's from the heart. I just want everyone to hear just make epic shit and help lots of people doing it. And I think we're the only thing that's going to help. The government's not going to save us.

Other people aren't going to save you. Handouts are going to save you. Like, entrepreneurs are the only things that solve problems. And so anyways, big fan of capitalism. And so let's rock and roll. Moza Nation, anybody here? Awesome. All right. So you guys want to hear something completely insane.

Yes? Okay. You're going to have to hear it anyways. So I was able to take home more in a year than the CEOs of McDonald's, IKEA, Ford, Motorola, and Yahoo combined as a kid in his 20s for over half a decade. There you go. Which resulted in 200. $100 million in portfolio revenue as of today. We crossed $100 million by age 33.

And to be honest, no one's more surprised than I am about this outcome. And so me expressing this will create envy in some people. It will create anger in others, skepticism in most, confusion in old people, and inspire a select few. And so the select few, you are who I'm making this for. Everyone else you can chill. But you are the people that I'm making this So who wants to hear about some stuff that can shortcut their path to material success so they can ponder the purpose of achieving it to begin with? All right. So we're going to cover three things today. This is fresh from this morning right off the press.

Number one, how making money really works. Number two, why new stuff is making you poor. Number three, why better is the way? You're like, that doesn't make sense yet. It will. Said simply, who wants to make lots of money? Who believes that you have to work hard to make money? Who believes that no one can outwork then?

You're going to see where I'm going to go with this. Well, I'm going to attempt to prove you wrong. The reason this is so important is that all of us claim, or I have heard, who here has seen a guru on the internet and say no one can outwork me? Who has heard people say that on podcast, make Instagram posts about it, whatever? It actually drives me fucking bananas. It drives me bananas because it teaches the wrong lesson. So, how can we claim that we work every day, and yet we can't even define the word? So how do you define work?

The science definition is work equals force times distance. Problem with that is that it's not very useful for knowledge workers. Most of us are not actually doing manual labor, not useful. The second way is that you can think about it in terms of inputs of time, right? Like, is that how hard you work? No one cannot work me. I work longer hours. Do you think you're the only person who works 16, 18 hours every day?

Like, go to China. I don't even know if anyone in America can say it. I'm being dead serious. So that's why when I see these things just drive me fucking nuts. So the problem with that is that many people work all the hours they're awake. And if you suggest working more hours, then you're sleeping less. And I don't think that's a good idea for knowledge workers. So why can no one outwork you again?

Right, so everyone's working those hours. So then the next one is like, effort. That's how no one can outwork me. No one's going to try harder than me. So you want participation trophies. Is this how you want your employees to think that they're working hard? I mean, not me. I wouldn't want that.

So if it's not force times distance to define what work is, and if it's not the amount of time we're putting into the work that we do, and it's not the effort that we are expending or how hard we try, then what's work? We have to get clear on it, because if that's what we have to do to make money, then we've got to know what we're actually trying to fucking do. So here's Alex's definition.

Work equals outputs. Fancy image. Outputs equal volume times leverage. In plain speak, number of times you do something, times how much you get out of each time you do it. How do we work faster? Work rate equals that same thing divided by time.

Plain speak, output per minute of time. That is how you work faster. Which means that the hardest working man in the world can be objectively measured. That guy is the hardest guy working in the world. In 2022, we added $140 billion in net worth. For context, that's more than Bill Gates did his entire career in one year. Think about that for a second. And then next year he did the exact same amount again.

FYI, that's $2 billion a week. So output divided by time. There's the time, one year. There's the output. He's the hardest working guy. So who's going to be the 2027 champ? Point of me doing this is that I hope it's somebody here. Who would like to be the 27 champ?

All right, let's rock. So if you want to be it, then please play it. attention, this will help you. So, how can we get more output? Which in the game of business is enterprise value. It's how much shit is worth. Outputs, right? We have this one and now I've got a nice flexi arm. Volume is the number of times we move the leather. I literally made all these images this morning. All right, I'm very, very proud of them. All right. Volume is the number of times you move the lever. The leverage is the length of the lever itself that you're using. The outputs is how much you can lift on the other side. So let's look at a couple examples. You guys can just

shout it when I say, just say high or low. So, high or low? Low. High or low? High or low? High? High or low? Very high. The reason I put this one in here is that at a certain point, it's not about how strong the person is. It all depends on how much leverage you have. That's the point of the slide. Now, high or low? Volume times 1,000, the thing's just as long as the other one. Highest, yes. So now that we understand what work is, you can either do more activity or you can do it with more leverage to get more output. Doing more is capped by time and physical ability. How much you get, aka leverage, is uncapped.

No cap. I learned that. Gen Z, there we go. Now, fun fact, Warren Buffett took home 500 million in dividends last year from Coca-Cola as an owner. The CEO took home 50. He spent less time working on Coca-Cola than the CEO did. So, is he working harder? By the definition that we did? Yes.

More output. We've been playing the game wrong. If you want to outwork your competition, what you really should be doing is out-leveraging them. So who gets more done? We got one person who does 100 calls a day, another person who does 100 calls a day. The guy who has more skill.

One guy makes 100 calls, another guy makes 100 calls. The guy who's better on the phone gets more output. Okay, let's say they're equal skill. They're working eight hours a day, making calls. Oh, I forgot to ask the question. Who gets more work done? There's the answer. The guy that has the automated dialer that keeps his talk time the highest.

Okay. Same skill, same number of hours, and same automated dialer to maximize talk time. Now who gets more work done? The guy who is the best list. Okay. They've got the same list. The same skill, same dialer, eight hours a day. The guy who's calling to the right season and the right time of day.

Who wants to be calling selling shit during December if you're selling physical products? Who wants to sell on Brock Friday? Of course. More leverage. Same work, more output. Okay, let's say all this stuff's equal. What else do we have? Nice.

He actually called it. The guy calling with the better offer. Now we've got the same time of year, same list, same offer, same dialer, equal skill, eight hours a day. now who's going to do it it's got to be equal now right the guy who recorded his pitch and sent it to 10 million people

now to push this even further what if the guy made zero calls and didn't do anything who makes more against the best call on earth the guy who's got a team he's got 15 dudes on the phone

okay how good you are and if you're like well I think I could be 15 you can't be 1,500 okay who you are leverage and that guy made zero calls I have more people calling for me today while I'm on stage. Leverage.

The game is rigged, and you've been playing by rules that do not exist. If you want to make more money, you need to get more for your time. You need more leverage. And this should make sense because we all trade time for money. And I can prove this to you. You spend time every second of your life. You receive money over the time that you are alive. So money divided by time equals rate of output.

We are all paid dollars per hour. The reason I'm specifically saying this to this audience is that y'all get fooled all the fucking time by passive income. It's not passive. It's less active, but it is not binary. It is not active or passive. It's how active is it? So if you make one trade in the stock market,

all the time it took you to analyze the deal and every other deal you decided not to do, and then execute the trade and then raise the money and do all the other stuff, that is all the time that it took you to do that. Now, after that point, you have increasing returns preemptive time. The point I'm making here is that time is the thing.

We all have the same $24 in our wallet. It's about how we allocate them and what we get back for them, how well we trade. Just said that. There you go. Degrees. All that. You guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff, sometimes it can help hit the brain

centers in different ways. You can check on my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free. Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show. So leverage is the difference between what you put in and what you get out. There are fancy definitions for it. This is the best one that I have. And so I said I would cover three things. The first one is how making money really works. The answer to that question is leverage. You make more money by trading your time for more shit, more output. The second is why new stuff is making you poor, and this is especially relevant for everyone here. Part of this, again, was inspired by the conversations I was having last night at Yogurland. So thank you for everybody who shout out for that. This is also how not to get leverage,

and I felt compelled to make this because I hope that some of you identify this, because I would bet that the majority of you are doing this. How not to get leverage. There are five pieces to this that I want to break down today. Number one, uninformed optimism. Number two is a story I'll tell you about a construction buddy of mine. Number three is something called the Magic Wand Story. Number four is Half Bell Bridges.

Number five is the Reddress. You're like, I have no fucking clue that that means you will. So let's start with uninformed optimism. Who here has seen this? This is stages of change, stage of transition. Anyone seen this chart before? Okay, cool. Not a lot of you.

Perfect. So there are five steps, and I remember the first time I saw this, it changed my life. Whenever you're analyzing something new, who here has had a buddy tell you about something that they're doing and they're making a lot of money doing it? And then you immediately feel shitty about what you're doing and then think, I should get out of my opportunity vehicle, go over here and do what they're doing. Who's felt that? Thank you. Everyone has. The reason is because we're at step one, which is uninformed optimism.

You don't know enough about what they're saying. They're just giving you the highlights. They're giving you the Instagram reel. They're not giving you the real. Once you decide to get out of your little vehicle and then go over there, then you tell your buddy, you're like, hey, why am I not making money? He's like, oh, well, there's like a hundred other fucking steps that I didn't talk to you about in the beginning. But like, and it's actually nearly impossible, and I got really lucky that one time.

And now all of a sudden it looks like all the people at your old job are making more money than you. But yeah, let's keep doing it. So you moved to stage two, which is informed pessimism. You are now aware of the shit that is involved to make the money that you want in this new thing. Now you think, okay, this is probably the worst part. But then time elapses and it's still shitty and you still haven't made money yet. It blows more now because you have invested more time and still have zero. So your actual output to time is lowering, which is why it's so painful, which is where people get into the crisis of meaning.

Why the fuck am I doing this? What does money even matter anyways? You know what I'd be happier if I just spend more time with my kids. you change your goal because you encounter difficulty. And so what happens most times is that people then crash and burn. So if you're at the crisis of meaning, this is where most people offshoot, what happens here where that fourth dot there on the bottom, if I were to cross it out and write uninformed optimism again,

that's what most of you do. You find about something cool, informed pessimism, it kind of sucks. Oh, shit, it's way harder than I thought. Uninformed optimism. I'll try something else. And then you do it again and again and again. And the difference between video games and real life where you face the boss and you can't pass the level until you beat the boss is that when you die in the video game,

you restart a few seconds later. In the game of entrepreneurship, you start years later. This is why people don't progress. They keep fighting the same boss that can't learn the same fucking lesson. They keep losing. And I'm saying this because, Some of you, I heard it Yoverland, and I know that that's representative of other people here, you keep fighting the same boss, and the boss is being able to stick with it.

Is getting through, in different charts on this, the crisis of meaning is also called the Valley of Despair, is getting through. From there, you get into informed optimism. You figure out that little thing, you're like, ah, I had to do this one thing, and then this started working. And then, you know what, I found out I could clean the list through this tool I found on the internet, because I joined this forum, and they started doing that. And then all of a sudden, my pickup rates tripled, right? Or my response rates tripled.

Or my throughput on my website went up, whatever it is. And so you have to get through that piece. Then you get to informed optimism, and the number six, you achieve. And then all your friends are like, yo, what are you doing? You're like, oh, I got this thing. And then all of them come, right? That is where most people start something new, over and over and over again, and they don't learn the lesson.

And so this is what their life looks like. over and over and over and over again. Who here has more than one business in the last 24 months? Be honest. Thank you for being honest. I appreciate it. First thing, it's normal. I had nine businesses and I was broke.

So I say this with the pain of experience. I'm not saying this to be on a pulpit. I'm saying it because the faster you can get through it, the faster you will start making money. You have to beat the boss. everyone thinks the grass is greener but the other side still lined with shit. So, like, that's why the grass is so green. There's shit everywhere.

I have a CFO who's been with us for a long time. She went through all of our exits last year. She's probably almost 60. And she says, she's like, it's all shit. Doesn't matter what business it is, they all got shit. She's Southern. And Suzanne's awesome. But it just always reminds me of this is that there's always shit.

And whenever we're starting something new, we encounter something that we didn't know before. And we're like, oh, this makes this shit. And then we think, well, are we going to jump out? No. Well, this is new information. Great. We're more informed. Fantastic. So that is the thing number one that is keeping you poor. Uninformed optimism. Number two is a little story I want to tell you. So I was called up probably two, three years ago by a guy I knew in high school. We hadn't talked in a while. And he said, hey, I've got this roofing business. You know, I want to scale it. I want to go big. I was like, that's awesome, man. And so he was telling me about the roofing business. Tell me about the roofing

business and then all of a sudden he says oh yeah I mean we also do some general contracting work I was like okay uh why don't you grow the roofing business he said why you know don't leave money on the table okay um and then this is going to sink in for some of you guys uh and then and he was like I was like so you've got the roofing you got the GC stuff he's like yeah that's what I'm done he's like he paused for a second it's like well we also kind of flip houses too so we like fix them and flip them. We also do the contracting work, but we fix the roof so we just get huge caught. We're vertically integrated. I was like, dude, you're making less than $3 million bucks a year. You're not fucking vertically integrated. You're distracted. And he was like, how do I scale?

And I was like, just pick one. He's like, what do you mean? I was like, pick one. It's like, why do you think you can't build a billion dollar roofing business? Just doing roofing and just get better at doing roofing? He's like, well, I don't leave money on the table. Who here said they don't leave money on the table. The money you were leaving on the table is the focus that you are not giving to the one thing that matters. And so by the way, this is the self-maids woman list for Forbes. This is Diane Hendricks. She's the number one wealthiest self-made woman, by the way. And she owns, if you can see it there, ABC Supply, which is roofing, not house-loping, not general contracting work. Roofing. Why didn't he build that?

He's smarter than Diane Hendricks. That's why. So this is the list. And this is what I want you to notice about this. This is the Forbes, the top six for women, self-made. Notice the age of the people on there. Ages to the left column. 75, 78, 84, 90, 89, 63.

On the right, notice the source. Roofing, healthcare software, retail and gas stations, trucking, Little Caesar's Pizza, IT. So sexy. The point of this slide is that if you want to build something epic, you have to be able to do the same thing for an extended period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are. Which means if you wanted to not make money, this is what you should do. Number one, do lots of different things.

Number two, do them for short periods of time. Don't stick with it too long because you might see success. Number three, do not get help, okay? Number four, make all the mistakes in your own. It's the best way to do it. Because otherwise if you start learning other people's mistakes, you can move. faster, so don't want to do that. When you make a mistake, do it again. Just repeat it, especially if you're like, I've been here before, do the same thing. Who here knows the definition of learning? I'll tell you. Same condition, different behavior. So if you want to teach someone something and you present them the same condition and they have not changed their

behavior, they have not learned. If you came to this workshop, this weekend with the intention of learning something. Can I get everybody to raise their hand if they had the intention of learning something while they were here? If you go back home and your behavior does not change, you learned nothing, nothing, truly took the money and burned it along with losing the output that you lost in the time of here plus travel. So if that definition has been singed into my mind, because if I want to learn something and I have the same condition that's been presented, I have to ask myself, If I do the same thing again, it means I have not learned. And I don't want to play this boss again.

So if you do want to make money, you can flip it. You do one thing for a very long period of time. You get help from other people. You observe what other people have been doing. You only make the mistake one time if you are going to make them. And you always grow and challenge the beliefs that you had and try and answer the question, what do I believe to be true that is not?

Because ordinary business is done for extraordinary time, create extraordinary results. Compounding is the thing. Like it has to compound. If the vehicle you are in right now does not compound with time, then change the vehicle. Get into something that if you stick with it for an extended period of time, it would be unreasonable that you will be poor.