The Game with Alex Hormozi - The 5 Reasons Your Team Isn’t Following Through | Ep 854

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

In this episode, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares a 5-step framework he calls the STAR system, designed to help leaders and entrepreneurs solve underperformance issues without creating defensiveness, conflict, or confusion.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 and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Wanna scale your business? Click here.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition Mentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap

All right, so let's face it, getting other people to do what you want is arguably the most important skill, because if you have that one skill, it unlocks every other skill that every other person potentially has. The problem is, other people don't always do what you want them to do. So I'm going to share a five-step framework that I call the star system that you can use whether you're a business owner or you work within a business to influence other people. So let's dive into it. What's going to everyone? Welcome back to the game, where we talk about making Mo Money so that we can eventually. question the meaning of life to begin with. And today I've got a fun little star system, very tactical. Fundamentally, the thing that separates your business's growth from happening is

people doing stuff that you want them to do. And I have a little five-star system that has worked very well for me to have very direct conversations that in no way feel direct and have really, really helped a ton. And I would show this framework to every one of the people who works for you so that they know what you're going to be going through. And then it just becomes almost like a, it's just a, it's almost like an unspoken language of performance management. And so when you walk through all five of these, you can remember them very easily. And you can run through it in five seconds with a teammate who's not performing the way you want to. So with that being said, enjoy. So I want to read you a real exchange I had with an employee that wasn't performing the way I wanted

to. I said, hey, what are you doing today? And then he gave me his little rundown. And I said, I asked because I haven't felt like I've seen a lot of production from you compared to what I think you're capable of. So I'm curious whether it's not knowing what to do, that I want you to do it, how to do it, or that something's preventing you. Or if you're not motivated to be above. And by framing it that way, it completely shifts the whole vibe of the conversation. And by adding the piece, and I think this is really key in terms of how it was framed, it's just like compared to what I believe you're capable of. So I'm basically weaving in a compliment saying,

I think you're capable of more. I think your potential is significantly higher. Rather than saying, hey, you suck. I'm actually saying, hey, I think you're awesome. And I think your performance, which is separate from you as a human being, is below what I believe you're capable of. So what do we think the gap is? Is that you know that, how, what, when,

or you're not, or something's blocking you or you're not motivated. help me help you and from this perspective both of you are basically attacking the problem on the same side of the table trying to figure out how to get the person to their potential which both of you were aligned to have happened and i'm telling you it's just like imagine if i'd started that being like hey man you're uh you're you're you're at your your you're subpar right now you're under expectations like that sounds pretty bad right and that everyone's going to be defensive they're going to be thinking it's attack on their character when it couldn't be further from the truth and so having little frameworks like this have just like made life so much easier for getting people back

to where you want to be. So let's paint the scene. You say, hey, Kyle, I need you to make me that TPS report by Monday. Okay, fine. You said that. Monday comes, Kyle doesn't have the TPS report. What do you do? Now, normally you could be like, I could yell at Kyle. You'd be like, what the hell, Kyle, whatever, right? But the thing is, there's a lot of people don't confront people who work for them because they're afraid of pissing them off because they're afraid of losing influence like hey if i bring it up i don't want things to be weird and so being able to have these kind of confrontational conversations and having a framework around it has made it so much easier for me to have really good conversations that don't in any way attack the other person all right and so thinking through this

framework is how i do it and so i'm going to make this really simple because it has to be simple or as you never going to use it all right and so it's called a star because there's five points to the star and there's really a five points that you work through when you're figuring out why they didn't do something. And so the first thing is, hey, Kyle, and I set this frame. So the people work from you already know that I have this room. So I don't think you need to keep this a secret. I mean, listen, there's only five reasons someone doesn't do anything. It's either number one. You didn't know that I wanted you to do it. So did you know that I wanted you to get me that TPS report? And he might be like, oh, I thought we were just talking. Now, you might hear that, they think, wow, Kyle, what an insignificant or what an arrogant ass, right?

No, but like, let's be real for a second. Like, you probably don't follow up on a lot of stuff that you tell people to do. And what do you think people learn? They learn that if you don't follow up, it's like, oh, it probably wasn't that important to him. Because, like, you probably, maybe as an entrepreneur, have a lot of ideas. And if someone actually acted on every single thing that you said, they would have a mountain of stuff. They wouldn't even be able to do their normal job, right? And so they kind of just, like, wait for you to maybe cool off on the idea for a

second. And if you mention it two, three, four, five times, they're like, okay, this is something I actually have to do. Right. And so the solution for the that problem is you write it. All right. And so one of the things that we have internal acquisition.com is if it isn't written, it never happened. Right. So if you just have a verbal conversation that exists, IRL, just in the air, it doesn't ever matter because no one has proof of it. You don't have proof of it. They don't remember it. You remember it differently than them. And so this is why crystallizing those experiences so important. because then you can point back to it. That way everyone's on the same page.

Hey, I thought you said you want me to send you the KPIs by Monday. It's like, no, I said the TPS report. It's like, oh, well, here's the KPIs. It's like, that's not what I asked for. But how do we know? Maybe you did say KPI, youth or like, how many times have you said something, thought you said something different? It happens all the time, right?

And so, number one, figure out, set the frame that these are the five reasons and be like, hey, Kyle, you didn't do it. There's five reasons someone doesn't do anything. So did you not know that I wanted you to do it? If it says, I didn't know. then you're like, great, problem solved. I'm going to write it down next time. Here you go.

I'm going to write down for you right now. And if you want, I'm going to memorialize this with an email and send it to you. That way, we have a timestamp and everything. But what if he's like, oh, no, I knew that you wanted me to do it. It's like, oh, well, then did you not know how to do it? So once it was like, okay, Kyle, did you not know that? I wanted to do it. They might be like, okay, yeah, I did know that.

But then did you not know what I wanted you to do? because he did send me something. Okay, what's the that versus the what? Let me explain. So two things don't always mean the same things. And it's like, what does that even mean? Well, you want to define what you're asking someone to do in terms of behavior or outcomes. So if I wanted that TPS report, right?

Now, that's a really simple example. I would probably be like, when I say, like, give me that. I was like, does that mean it's going to be printed out? Does that mean I want it printing around my desk? Does that mean it's an email? Does that mean it's going to be like verbally given to me? Is it going to mean it's a presentation in what format? And the thing is just like, you might hear this and be like, oh, that sounds like such a pain.

But it's like, it probably takes like two or three extra minutes for you to be like very clear. And then someone's going to take that two or three extra minutes and then save themselves like two or three extra hours. And so it's high leverage. Like clarity is high leverage work. Right. And so like I would say that if this is something that makes you feel comfortable, you need to break that habit. real and let me explain why. How do you think AI works? Why do you think prompt engineering is such a high leverage skill right now? Because the problem is no one even knows how to communicate. Like you have

this ultimate being or whatever you want to call it, right? You've got this thing of ultimate intelligence that can do things incredibly quickly, has access to the world's information. And yet you can't get AI to do stuff for you. It's not because AI's dumb. It's because you don't want to talk to AI. And if you can't talk to AI, you can't talk to a human. Right? AI honestly has more context and more tries a ways to figure out what you're trying to say because we communicate it like monkeys, right? The thing is, we're communicating with other monkeys. We've got to be as crystal clear as humanly possible. Now, what's interesting is that the bigger the organization gets, the more this banana phone issue becomes a problem. And so this little five system, the star system,

I run through it in my head all the time, right? Did they not know that I wanted them to do it? Did I not know what I wanted them to do, which I defined in terms of behaviors or outcomes. and I need this thing on my desk by Monday printed out with that nice paper. Or it's I need you to, when someone says this, say this instead next time, right? Not be less of a dick or, you know, stop harassing Courtney. It's like, well, what does harassing Courtney look like? He obviously isn't trying to harass Courtney. She might describe his behavior as harassing.

He might describe his behavior as being cordial. So now what happens? Until you actually break down the behavior that they are both labeling differently, he's saying, hey, I said good morning to her. She's saying, hey, he's hitting on me. And you're like, well, what the hell? Like, what's going on? But until you figure out, wait, Courtney, when you say he's hitting on you, what exactly

did he do? It was just like, we always, like, smiles at me in waves when he comes in. It's like, I don't think he's hitting on you, Courtney. I think he's being polite. Right? And you might, on the flip side, it's like, what do you think hitting on you is? It's like, he always squeezes my ass when he walks by. It's like, well, that's a fucking problem.

Right. And so, like, let's be clear here. Mike, you shouldn't squeeze anybody's ass. let alone a girl's all right on the flip side like you go what I'm saying here but like if we say he's hitting on me or be less creepy no one knows what it means because one person thinks they're trying to do something like no one wakes up and says I want to be creepy today no one does that creepy people act in ways that they don't think is creepy and so by telling them to stop be creepy they don't know what the fuck that means that's the problem and this is why we have to describe this might be one of the

best explanations I've given of this. This, like, this is the problem. And this is why so many people behave in ways that they don't want to, not because they don't want to do a good job, but because they don't know what doing a good job looks like because that hasn't been taught to them. And so, you just got to tell them. Right. And so, number one, they didn't know that they want to do it. If they did know that, you're like, hey, you know, be nice to Courtney. He did, he grabbed Courtney's ass rather than saying, hello, right? He didn't know what to do. Right. So if he did know those two things, well, what's the third thing that could be the issue. Okay, well, they do that. They want to the TPS report and they knew how to deliver it. Okay, they knew that. I wanted the TPS report and they

knew exactly what it was. Well, then why didn't, why didn't happen? Well, did they know how to do it? So I told you to do that, but I was like, honestly, you asked me to, but I don't know how to put a TPS report together. I'm like, wait, I didn't, like, you didn't get that in onboarding? It's like, honestly, no. It's like, oh, okay. Well, the solution to this is training. And all you do, by the way, if you're like, man, and I can, like, this drives me absolutely insane is that I will hear people say, you know, these things aren't trainable. Everything is trainable. How do you think a baby learns how to do anything? How do you think humans learn things to begin with? It's just that some things are more trainable, take longer to train than others. And it's not even that a specific thing takes longer to train. It's just that that term has more skills underneath of it that ladder up to. the larger thing. Meaning, if I say be kind, be kind has like 500 behaviors underneath of it.

And so, yeah, it's harder to train aptitude than attitude because attitude is 500 behaviors. Abtitude might be 20. And so, yes, it is easier to train this than that, but it's not that something isn't trainable. And this is why specificity is so important. And so what we have to do is like, okay, if you don't know how to do it, what part do you not know how to turn on a computer? Do you not know how to turn on the internet? Do you not know how to send an email? Do you know how to use Excel? No, I know how to use all this stuff. Okay. Boom. Underneath that, do you not know where the data is that you need to extract this from? No, I know where the data is. Okay, got it. Then, then once you have the data, do you not know how to format it? Yeah, I don't know how to format it.

Got it. So now instead of being like, oh, this guy's an idiot, it's just like he knew how to do eight of the nine steps. You just couldn't do the last step. So now I could say, cool, let me show you how to format it. Done. And from here on now, when I ask you for a TPS report, this is what I'm looking for. Make sense? Yes. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting,

you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you, so it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you enter the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap. Now, let me give you a little pro-tip. The higher, the general skill and competence of the individual, the greater the expertise of the person

in the domain, the more vague you can be with your directions. All right, so let me me explain. So if someone comes to me and says, hey, I've got this product, this new marker, and it writes upside down and it's Invisible Inc. It's amazing. Alex, can you build a business around this? I could just say yes, because I have all the other skills it takes to build the business. Now, if you go to somebody who might be lesser skilled, you might have just say like,

hey, can you make a marketing campaign around this? Now, that person probably might not be able to, like, set up the energy structure or tax-efficient manner or be able to source the materials or be able to, you know, set up, HR practices and all this other stuff. But like, they could do the marketing campaign and you might be able to go to a good marketer and say, hey, can you run a good marketing campaign? They say, sure. Now, if you go to a junior marketer, you'd be like, hey, can you run a marketing campaign?

They'd be like, uh, it's like, okay, can you write some emails about this? Right, we just keep chunking it down. And so the more skilled the person, the vaguer the instructions can be, the less skilled the person, the more specific it has to be. And for anything around trading, I talk about this length, but basically document, demonstrate, duplicate, which means that I do it in front of you, I write it down, I do it in front of you, you do it in front of me, and then sign it. That's how it works, right?

So we create the list is me doing it. I observe myself or someone observes me doing it, puts the list down. I then do that list in front of the person. They do that list in front of me, and then we have a great day. Right. And so with the TPS report, I say, hey, here are the steps for formatting. I'm going to write them down. And then I'm going to do those steps in front of them.

and then I'm saying, hey, let's do a second TPS report for next week. We can do it together. They do it in front of me following the exact same steps I wrote down. They did it. Skill is transferred. And now next time I ask for the TPS report, it'll be on time. You guys are amazing. I can't believe you guys keep sharing this.

It's like it's going nuts right now. We've had record once back to back. And it's all because of you. And so I just want to thank you guys so much again for sharing the podcast. It's why I keep doing this. And yeah, so if you can text it to a friend or an enemy. Slack it to maybe a work rival or slack it to a work friend. That works as well. Or share this on the gram to the many strangers who follow you so that they too can grow

enlightened by business principles. Or just share it because you feel like it. Anyways, love you all and enjoy the rest of the podcast. All right. So slight recap. First, we figure out if they knew even that we wanted them to do it. Second, we made sure that they knew what we wanted them to do. And the third, it's like, okay, if they know those two, then do they even know how to do it? Now, if they do, then did they know, and this is a big one which happens all the time, is did they know when I wanted it done by? And this sounds so silly, but the reality is that the solution for this is deadlines, right? And so let me, but it's not just deadlines. So I'm going to, I'm going to give you a little, little 201 version of this.

if I say hey Kyle when can you get me the TPS reports by he might say Monday now a boss or leader or whatever who doesn't pay as much attention might just say sure that sounds good I like to push on this and I say cool how long do you think it will take you in order to get the TPS report done the actual work itself not from now until you can deliver it but how long will the work take and usually someone will say something like I don't know probably like like two hours. I'd be like, okay, well, it's Wednesday and it's two o'clock. What are you doing between now and four o'clock? Now, if they have something that's more important, then they can be like, well, I was to have to finish this thing by tomorrow, and then I've got this other thing that I'm going to do, and then that should take a full day. And then after that, I've got this thing. And then after that, I was planning on working on over the weekend so I could get it to you by Monday. That I'd be like, okay, that makes sense. Now, if I look at all those other things, I might find out a couple of things. Number one is maybe they don't have all these other things, in which case, we'll do this now.

And maybe they do have all these other things, but this thing is more important, in which case, do it now. And so the thing is, is that by consistently asking when they can do it, how long it will take, and then what else they have going on, allows you to have a way better idea of everyone else's workload in real time whenever asking people. And also, it just makes you way better boss, in my opinion, because if people are like, oh, I've got these, you're like, oh, no, finish that. That's more important. Do that first. After this, we'll do, we'll do my thing. And this is kind of, I would say, a pervasive mindset that I have that's, I'll write it down because I think it's cool. But basically, end of day is better than end of week. I want end of day to be my default. I want everyone's default in my life to be end of day. And think about how impactful this is.

If you just assume whenever you ask for anything that it should be done by end of day, your organization will move at seven times the speed. Like some organizations like their default is end of month, end of week. It's like an end of month organization will literally work at one 30th the pace of an end of day organization. And you might think, oh my God, that's crazy. But do you think that some companies grow 30 times faster than others? Hell yeah, there are.

And this is why the rich get richer and the poor get poor. and there's the great divide between the doers and the everyone else. It's because you really can outwork someone a thousand times. You really can't. I can put out a thousand times more constant than you. I really can't. I can do that. We can work that,

but we can't work a thousand times faster than you. If it takes you 90 days to get something done and we get it done in two hours, we worked a thousand times faster than you. It's crazy. And so then it shouldn't be as big of a surprise that some people out-earn other people by a thousand times. And so I'm saying this because I'm trying to transfer this to you

so that you can go get rich and do whatever you want, because I'm going to die, and no one's going to go fuck anyways long term. And so, like, you might as well do something useful. Yeah, and what's interesting about the star system is that it actually creates stars. Because if you tell somebody and they are clear, because you wrote it down, they know that they should do it. They understand the what that must be done accurately. They understand how to do the thing, because you've done it with them before. They know how to do it your way and you've taught and you've broken it down. and then they'll be able to do it faster because they've absolute clarity on this point.

And this is what starts to really move an organization. And so the other pro tip is that Jeff Bezos has an amazing one-pager that I tweeted about not that long ago. And it was almost like the theme of the month for me. But he basically takes Richard, an excerpt from Richard Dawkins talking about biology that basically biology fights against this environment to stand out, right? On a long enough time rising, once something dies, it basically merges with its environment. Like, it becomes inseparable. On a long off time horizon, like, you just become dirt.

Like, literally you become the same thing. And the thing is, is that it takes energy, a tremendous amount of energy to stand out to be different. And the thing is that the world will try to pull you down. It will pull you into mediocrity. And the same thing happens within companies. Like, the trend line is regression towards the mean. That exists for a reason. You have to basically be willing to be so potent as a person that a drop of you and to

an ocean of clear water turns the entire clear water the same color as you. And fundamentally, that is what disseminating culture is from a leadership perspective. Like, that is how great organizations are built. And so you have to hold the fucking line. And so that means that this always happens. That means that like every time I'm on a meeting if we're driving something, the key word is that we're driving it. Like I was actually talking to one of my leaders from the company earlier today and last week

about this. And I was like, I want you to replace the word leader and I want you to switch it with driver in your mind. I was like, because that's what I need. I need people who drive. And it's not like you're a slave driver. The point is that you're driving things to get done. It's like, hey, where is that?

Like, how can we do it faster? What else can I pull off your plate? Right? Which I'm already, I'm already giving you a little bit of pre-framing for the fifth and maybe the most important part of the star, which is if someone knows that, they need to do it. They know what they're supposed to do. They know how to do it.

They know what is Dubai. What's the last thing that could stop them? And I'm going to take motivation out of this. and I'll tell you why. But the last thing that could stop them is circumstances. Now, what does that mean? It means something else. So if I ask you do all that stuff, but you're like, but dude, you asked me to do 10 other things. So something else got in the way, an obstacle. Something is blocking them. Right. If I ask the best chef in the world, hey, can you make me an omelet? You know how to make an omelet. Or so, you know, what an omelet is. You know how to make it.

And I want you to make it for me right now. That guy might not do it. I'd be like, why didn't you make me nominally. It might be like, I don't have any eggs. What do what do we want me to do? I don't be eggs. Right. And to the same degree, in a real business setting, it might be like, I don't have the RAM on my laptop to be able to process this size file and edit this thing on time. I have to get this other thing or I have to move to this other place and that's going to take time. Right. Like, there's some things that sometimes block people. Now, the reason this is so important, and this is the one, I'll tell you right now, we go through the other four first because as soon as you mentioned this fifth one, everyone blames this one. Why? Because it's not that. Right? And so

people's egos are protected when they say, oh, I've got this other thing. I got this other work. I got this. I don't have eggs. I don't have a Wi-Fi. I don't have a blah, blah, blah. Now, this is where, this is where the real leadership start comes, comes in. Because this is where we say, like, well, how hard would it have been for you to go get eggs? It's been three days. Like, how hard was it to get eggs? Uh, well, the Wi-Fi was slow. Was there any way to get faster Wi-Fi? And so this is where I start to make judgments on someone's agency, their ability to solve problems on their own. Because the thing that we always want to tease out long term is this. Why?

Right? Because that's the big motivation question. Because you'd assume why didn't someone do it? Because they weren't motivated. The thing is, is that I can't, me asking someone, hey, were you not motivated to do this? No one's going to say this. I'm just being real. It's not going to happen.

Right? And so we ask these other questions. The first four are what I would consider very standard business practices. But here's the thing that's really clever with this. Is that by asking the first four, you basically give many opportunities for it to not be attack on the person. When you have the circumstances, one, it also has realistic, you know, options where it might not be the person's fault.

They might actually have too much stuff on their plate. But this is where the nuance comes in, where you get to judge, are those circumstances is really the things that blocked you? Or are you actually not trying? Now with the, hey, I just need an omelet by next Monday on my desk and the person gets you next Monday and says, I didn't have any eggs. What are we talking about here? I mean, you're technically correct. If you have no eggs, you can't make an omelette. But do you lack the other skills of acquiring eggs? If you do, then we ask the larger question is, I know I could train you on how to get eggs. But is it worth the hassle. Like, I could train you on how to use a computer, but is it worth the time? And so this is why,

this is my fundamental belief about training in general, which is that everything is trainable. It's just not everything's worth training. Some things you expect to have someone have batteries included. And that's why there are requisites for jobs. That's why when you go to school, you have to take English 101 before you take English 201, right? Notwithstanding the fact that it's all retarded, but let's just like pretend it's useful. Well, English is useful. But let's, you get my point. All right. So the reason this is such a powerful frame is that if someone comes back and says something like, well, I didn't think that was my job. Well, then they probably shouldn't do anything else in your company either. Right. Because fundamentally, like, what creates motivation? So motivation is the opposite of deprivation. But somebody who motivates other people is able to temporarily increase the value of an outcome. Fundamentally, that's what motivation is. And if you think about that, that's also what persuasion is. That's also what sales is.

And so there's a lot of words that fundamentally mean the same thing. If I motivate you to buy, that's what a salesman does. If I motivate you to move, I motivate you to change your behavior. I, for a short period of time, change the relative value of an outcome, which then changes your behavior. So if I talk to you and talk about your weight and you haven't done anything about losing weight in a very long time, but in a short period of time, I changed the relative value to you about what it might be like to lose weight or, said differently,

the pain associated with losing weight, you might have always wanted to lose weight, but didn't realize it could be easier, right? Or you might realize it's hard, but I realize, I help explain even more value. Like, hey, I don't know if you knew this, but you'll live 10 years longer, statistically, if you lose 50 pounds. Then all of a sudden, you said your daughter's about to get married, don't you want to see your kids? Right. So my mother, side note, the only reason she lost weight was because the doctor told her

that she wasn't going to see my grandkids. And that was the thing. Try to lose weight her whole life. 30 fucking years. Try to lose weight. Couldn't do it. That was, that was the line, right? He was able to motivate her because that was the one thing for her.

And so sometimes we have to think to ourselves, okay, what other things are we playing with that we can change the relative value of either decreasing the pain or increasing the carrot, right? You know, decreasing the stick or increasing the carrot associated with getting the stick. You know what I'm saying. I'll give you an example. So sometimes a salesperson will get tired of selling because it's the same conversation over and over again. And they will say they'll get bored.

but there's a huge amount of time between the first time you get bored in sales and when you're exceptional in sales. And so, explaining that in and of itself to a salesperson is that your ability to maintain focus is itself a skill that needs to be developed in order for you to become world class,

which is what you said you wanted. And so sometimes just reframing their current struggle as a skill deficiency on their way to getting what they ultimately want is one of the most motivating things that you can do to help someone do the thing that they ultimately probably want to do too they just haven't been motivated to and so we knock out all of the peripheral things they didn't know what we wanted they didn't know what it was they didn't know how to do it they didn't know when we wanted to do it by they had something that blocked them but not really and so the main one

is that we can get to the motivation but if some people just fundamentally don't have enough motivation around this thing sometimes they just don't need to work for you and that's okay there's tons of other companies that will employ mediocre people. It just doesn't have to be yours. And if I can, if I can give you a fun one, because some of you guys have employed people that you know shouldn't be working for you. It's your, it's your sister. It's your sister's husband. It's your cousin. And you think yourself, man, if I, if I let them go, no one's going to hire them. It's like, yeah, no one would hire them. And somehow you think it's a good idea that you continue to employ them. That feels max silly, silly, silly, silly, silly game. S tier, S tier, S tier silly.

Now, let me give you a little bonus reframe on this. If you have, if you're trying to look at your business as a business owner, right, from a strategic perspective, there's a lot of things that you could do, right? But we have to ask ourselves, what are the things that are the most important for us to do? By when would it be the most meaningful? Now, here's where it gets really interesting. You more often than not are going to have how issues. You're not going to know how to do it. And reframing the things that you know you need to do as questions that you don't know the answer to is so much more valuable than there's no who can sell like me.

I don't know how to get someone to sell like me. No one can market like I can. I don't know how to find somebody who can market like I can. That's solvable. No one can is a statement that you can do anything with. And so what I would really, really push back on is my kind of like leaving thought that might be the most powerful thing in this video. Be incredibly wary about the statements that you make that you believe are facts. Because those statements exist as truth only in your mind.

And so basically your reality will be influenced by the laws that you choose to create and live by. And so if you want to bend your own reality, you have to be able to change the laws that exist. And so in the matrix, it's like every system is built on rules, right? Some rules you can bend, others you can break. And the thing is, is that wouldn't you want to build a business in a world that had the fused rules possible? And then what's interesting to me is that the amount of conversations that I have with business owners who tell me rules that limit their business, like, oh, we can't charge

more than that because no one else does. That sounds like a terrible reason. we can't pay people that much. Why? Because it's not industry standard. Okay. Well, everybody in your industry makes no money. So why would we do what they're doing? Like, the biggest gift that I can give you is that the vast majority of business owners are broke. The vast majority. The average business owner makes like $50,000 a year. Right? I'm not saying that's broke. It would be clear. But for many people, the aspirations of being a business owner come with significantly higher goals than that reality. And if that's true, then the vast majority business owner are wildly underperforming their aspirations.

And a big part of that is because they model people like them. Most business owners look around, they see what everyone else is doing and say, oh, I'll do that, and I'll do it a little bit better for a little bit less. But then every other person does that too, until eventually you can't do any more for any less. And so many of these businesses function as essentially non-profit organizations, where the person's barely above water, selling a largely commoditized service at a commoditized price

with no differentiation in the marketplace whatsoever. That's a game where if you choose to play like everyone else, you will lose. And so, I would encourage you to, if everyone's doing something, it's a great reason not to do it. If anything, that alone would be,

that would be a reason not to do it. At least it's different, right? At least you have an angle. You have something that's different. Well, if everyone else is paying this, maybe if I pay more, I'll be able to suck up the top 10%. Right? One of the things that people will talk about Henry Ford is Henry Ford paid people

better than his competitors so that he could scoop up the entirety of the talent at his plants. He's the one who invented like the manufacturing line. It's like, yeah, he did. He also paid people better than anyone else so that you could get the top talent. People thought of him as the guy who was just automating humans out. It's like, no, he actually ended up paying the best people to work for him. But he did something other people weren't. He did something that other people didn't. And so I would walk through this star system so that you can also think about your own business. in the same frame. Why aren't you doing what you know you need to be doing? Do you not know that it needs to be done? Do you don't know what it is? Do you don't know how to do it? You don't

know when it would be meaningful that it's being done by? Or do you have something that is blocking you? And do you have something that's blocking you? Is it more important than that thing? And if the answer is no, then stop doing it and do the thing and stuff. And if you're struggling to be motivated, if you need to look at yourself in the mirror, and I don't know what you'd say yourself in the mirror, but like you could look at yourself in the mirror, it eventually actually just do it because the look at yourself in the mirror is not going to change anything anyways. But, you know, maybe you look good. Maybe that'll get your motive. All right. Love you all. Rock and roll. And use the Star System next time of a hard conversation. Hey, real quick, did you not know that I

wanted you to do it? Did you not know what I wanted to do? Did you not know what I wanted you to do it by Tuesday? Or was there something blocking you? There was something blocking you. Is it reasonable that blocked you for that long? No. Okay. What's the issue? Or you know what? You're right. That did block you. Do that first and then do this after.