The Game with Alex Hormozi - The Benefits of Having Nothing to Lose (with Chris Williamson) - Pt.1 - Apr. ‘23 | Ep 551

Episode Date: June 17, 2023

“If you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world and it persists, you have to admit to yourself that it's got nothing to do with your capabilities…” Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson to discuss various topics including changing your environment to improve your life, the importance of gamifying content creation, and the benefits of eliminating downside to increase action. They also touch on the concept of shame existing in the shadows and how confronting specific fears and limiting beliefs can lead to personal growth. This is part 1 of the interview.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.Check out the episode on Chris Williamson’s YouTube Channel!Subscribe to Chris’ show Modern Wisdom here - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPnTimestamps:(1:46) - Nimble people see disadvantages as nothing to lose.(7:53) - Consistency is key; don't focus on the endgame.(18:24) - Identify why you don't like something and make changes.(26:14) - Celebrate small wins to build the evidence of success.(37:47) - Embrace the difficulties to feel better.(44:28) - Stop ignoring the truth; criticism can be valuable.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

You wanted this thing. You expected to be hard. Reality now matches conditions. So our expectations now match conditions. This is what hard feels like. And then all of a sudden, it's like they got permission to feel shitty. And by getting permission to feel shitty, they stop feeling a shitty because they're like, this is just my new world. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer and how to keep them longer and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. One of my favorite things to do is to scrape through people's twitters that are aphorists and come up with little pithy statements and then break them down.

So I want to go through some of the things that I've learned from you over the last year or so. Go into those. And then there's some talking points that I don't think I've heard you speak about before as well. I want to get on to. Beautiful. So the first one is so many lives would transform overnight if they realized my life sucks. I have nothing going for me. Really means I have nothing to lose.

And that makes you a very dangerous person. So in any kind of game position, so like in business, right, every position has advantages and disadvantages. And a lot of people look at the really big guys and they're like, man, they, they're like, they're looking at me like, must be easy for Alex, right? And I remember when we had Jim launch and we had a very big company, I would tell the guys who are coming up. I was like, if you're trying to compete against me, I was like, you have advantages. I was like, if you're on a sales call, you're like, listen, you're just a number to Alex. You're never going to talk to Alex, right? Here with me, you're going to get my attention. I'm the one, right? I was like,

that's how you're going to throw stones at me. I was like, but on the flip side, if it's me marketing to the masses, I'm going to be like, this kid's in his mom's basement. He has no idea what he's doing. He's been in business for 12 months. And of course he has no idea. Like, wouldn't you want somebody who has thousands of success stories behind it because we've made a system? Like, both sides have advantages. And so what happens is people are in this small position where they're more nimble. They can give more personalized attention to people, et cetera. And they see it as a pure disadvantage. And so you can flip the fact that you have nothing going for you with you have nothing to lose. And that means that you can take lots of risks very quickly and end up

in the exact same position you are, which is nothing. And so if you eliminate downside, it should decrease your action threshold, meaning you should be able to do more things faster rather than do fewer things because you don't have a great life or things going for you. And so I think if people flip that, a lot more people would take action because you should be able to do more. Because they actually realize the advantage of their position. Jack Butcher says you get rich by taking lots of risk with small amounts of money and you stay rich by taking small amounts of risk with lots of money. Yes.

I wholeheartedly agree. I didn't know that was his quote. He may have repurposed it. There's something called Churchillian drift. Do you know what that is? No. So it's a phenomenon. Everything's Churchill at the core.

It's the opposite. It's that quotes that weren't said by Churchill often get like erroneously attributed to him. It's like all quotes lead back. to Churchill, even though they didn't. And Socrates. Yeah, it's like, it's like, I think the Churchill once said that you'd get rich by making large amounts. It's like, no, he fucking, but there's another one as well that a good friend James

Smith talked about, which is, if you're succeeding at a job that you hate, imagine how good you'd be at a job that you loved. And that's kind of the same, this person is starting from essentially zero. How much fucking worse can it get? Right. It's the downside. If you can eliminate someone's downside for action, it's like, then. the bias, it should bias you towards taking action.

Why is it that people in that case, if they do have nothing to lose, still feel like they have lots to lose? Because I think most of the times, so this, I think this is really important, is that they have nothing objectively to lose. And so everything that they feel like they have to lose is purely made up in their mind. It's stories they tell themselves about what other people are going to think about them when those people aren't even think about them to begin with, right? but like that's where they live all of their lives or live out all of the potential downside

is in the mere reflection of what other people will think about them in the future should they fail. And I think that is the like if we were if we're trying to get real and I'm like talking to somebody like well I mean because I know that if I actually had somebody in front of me, they'd start squirming right if I said the first thing. Right. Like you have nothing to lose. And then because then they do have something to lose and I just have to name it for them and be like,

okay, who's the person in your mind? Who's the voice? It's like blah, blah. Six questions deep. It's my uncle. Okay, why? Like, let me state it this way. Will your belief that you're going to be viewed as a failure by your uncle be the sole reason that you live the rest of your life below your potential and regret everything that you don't do because of Uncle Tom? That's the wrong one. Uncle Harry. When you say it like that, all of a sudden they're like, I don't want to let Uncle Harry have that kind of power. And then all of a sudden it breaks and then they like get free of it. And so I think it's getting really specific. and really narrow on the because people say it's society it's other people it's like it's usually

one or two voices and if you can get really specific on whose voice it is then you can name it and then like i think i'm a big believer in like shame only exists in the shadows which is like once you put it in the light you look at it and you're like my mom that was really it like when i really think about it's because it's not even just my mom it's my mom in this circumstance when i come back home for thanksgiving i just am so afraid of the comment that she's going to make it's like well what if we confront that okay, your mom, you sit down at Thanksgiving dinner and you haven't made money yet and you quit your job. Now what? Is that better than you spending the next 60 years hating her or resenting her for the fact that she held you back? And then it's like when you give the real scenario, they're like, well, shit. And then like this weight comes off and they're like, fuck, I guess I should do this. And you're like, yeah.

Shame on the existence in the shadows is nice. I like that. And it definitely is cleansing to just be like, look, look, here it is. And you realize just how irrational it is. Because we don't want to look at it. Yeah. Because it's in the shadow. And we put it in the shadows. of how it makes us feel about ourselves, in my opinion. And so it's so scary, we avoid it. We avoid it. We avoid it. But it's like, I think the faster you can kind of build that muscle of like, huh, I've got this hesitation. What is the real reason?

Because logically, I can do that whole thing. Cool, you have nothing to lose. You're poor. Great. Zero. Right. Okay. But then what is it that I do have something to lose?

It's relational capital. It's status within my tiny micro community. That doesn't matter. But like my perceived status. Okay. Name the names. and but by pulling it out from the shadows it all but like that confrontation from here to here

is I think where all the fear is because it's embarrassing to be like it's my mom the other perfect thing or great realization I think for anybody that's starting out and is feeling self-conscious about what other people are going to think is when you're starting out by design there are so few people looking at you that even if you do fail no one fucking sees right so this is something we realized when we were running nightclubs that we would try and launch a new event around fresh as week in September

and we would have this great idea and everything would be, everything would be about flamingos or everything would be, it would be a smart night on a Tuesday so people could go out after they've been to sports club or whatever it was.

And then it would flop, right? And we'd do 150 people and all of the guys that work for us would be stood outside looking destitute and upset and they go, oh, it's so embarrassing. You keep the tables there so it looks like there's more room.

Oh, dude, we had so many tricks. We'd pump the room full of smoke. We would pad the back off so that everyone had to go to the front. We get the DJ to play music, all sorts of shit. But all of the boys would be like, fuck, this makes us look so bad. Everyone's going to think that we're shit.

I was like, no, no, no, no. 150 people are going to think that we're shit. Like the advantage of running a shit business that doesn't reach many people is that not many people saw your shit business. And that's when you're starting out. People that are concerned about becoming a content creator. I'm worried about starting a podcast because what if everyone sees how shit my podcast is? It's like, dude, no one's going to see your shit podcast.

It took me three and a half years to get even an appreciable amount of people listening to this show and it was effort three times a week no one cares when you start so you can be liberated from that as well and it's just objection handling objection handling objection handling all the way down I think a lot I think a couple frames that are just different frames around content making sense we're on the topic um that helped me was one is seeing it as practice rather than the game so like when we're doing a podcast if you start it's like hey we're going to do a podcast I'm going to post it's practice for me getting better for future may rather than like I am like this is the main game it's like no the game is like no the game is

the whole thing. And this is just like, we're still in preseason. Like these, these scores, these touchdowns don't even matter yet. Right. Now, you can say yet, even though like I can still feel like I'm preseason. But I think from a mental framework, it actually decreases the stakes associated with doing it. And I think that's been helpful for me, especially it was in the earlier days. The other one was kind of the equal opposite of this problem, which is not wanting to start because no one's watching because it feels like you're doing all this work. What's the point? And so I actually, the little mental trick that I had was, um, One, I track lots of stuff.

And the more ways you track, the more ways you can win. And so it's a little thing that I found out. So, like, if you track 100 sets, then you only need one of them to go up so you feel like you made some progress. So that's like an easy one. And the second thing around the tracking is that I would look at like the biggest possible number. So a lot of times you can see like the impressions of, you know, a post that you make.

Even if you only got like 16 likes, I got like 100 impressions. And I thought to myself, I was like, well, if there was a room of 100 people, I'd be stoked. Like, that would be awesome, especially in the early days. I was like, that would be, I would totally feel like that was worthwhile. And so taking those little impression numbers and pretending that they were like micro events that I was making the work or the content for, all of a sudden made it feel worth it for me. And so the combination of I can have a small room and I'm really impacting, like when I got a view that has like 13 views on it, you know, for like a video in the early days, I'd be like, well, shoot, I made this video and 13 people saw

as like a small room. Like, that works. But looking at it, at both absolute growth and relative growth. So it's like, okay, well, I went from 10 followers this month to 15 followers this month. It's like, well, you can say that you only gain five followers. I was like, or you can say that you gained by, you went up by 50%. And that was exciting. And so then I, because I'm an Excel projection guy, I'll like, okay, well, if I do this every month, and the team knows this because I project everything out, I'm like, if we do this, because I'll predict where we're going to be in like 12 months and we usually hit it. Very. Really? Very. But how do you account for the unforeseen 5 million play video that comes in? Well, that's my padding. Right.

So, like, I'll project out with no white swan events. You know what I mean where something good happens. Yep. But just if we keep doing what we're currently doing at this trajectory, we compound at 13% a month. Yep. That's what it is right now. So 13% monthly, and that's just on one of the platforms run. And so I can just see what we're going to be at six months. And that's exciting. So James Smith gamifies it in the same way. Oh, does he? Yeah. Absolutely exactly the same way. And he always says that it's just like playing levels on a computer game. And this month, wow, like I got another XP point or whatever. And I think that's very important because social media and the fact that it is associated with status,

even though everybody says, oh, you know, it doesn't really matter and blah, blah, it does. Like, it's very hard for us to remove the human hierarchy from what is evidently just quantified fucking status, right, on a screen. And what he did was he removed himself a lot existentially from that by saying, it's not a comment on my worth as a person. it's not a comment on whether I'm going to be loved or accepted by the world. It's me putting some stuff out. And wow, we won this month. And this month, maybe we didn't win.

Why didn't we win? Or go back. The same way as if someone beats you at FIFA, unless you're like a pro FIFA player or whatever. But again, with that, what's the difference between the amateur FIFA player and the pro FIFA player? The pro has put his existential connection to his content and the success of it. There's so many little things on this that I want to go into. One of them is that, so Dr. Cash, he's my closest friend. he's like a behavioral whatever, loves studying why humans do things.

And so people who are most successful a lot of times with their, it's not that they necessarily have more wellpower. They find ways to, they find other ways to reward themselves. And so he's like, the more skills you have, the more ways you have to reward yourself. And so somebody who somebody can extend how long their time horizon is because they do gamify it. So people who don't have the skills of figuring out ways to reward themselves in the meantime can't make it the whole way. But that's like when you're doing cardio and you're like, okay, it's five, you know,

it's five times five to get out of here, right? You create micro games within the longer game to keep yourself going. And the thing is, I've seen that across verticals. So like if you look at, so Travis Mash is an Olympic lifter, Olympic lifting coach out of North Carolina. And he has this really cool way of getting lifters to PR every workout. So have a personal record every workout. And what he does is he have them map every single set and rep range for every single lift at every weight. And so what happens is all you have to do is go through your book of 200 lifts and every single weight.

And you can always find one that you did a year ago. Oh my God. This is my 8 rep max PB on good mornings. Yes. And you're like, well, I can hit nine on this or I can add five pounds to it. And so every workout they win. Yeah. And so they get excited because they get rewarded every workout.

And so that's why it's like the more ways you track, the more ways you can win. And then I think that those little micro wins can keep you going over the long game that you have to just keep playing. One of the other associated tweets that you did was if your life sucks, the easiest thing is to change your environment. Oh, yeah. This is something that I saw moving from a very good life in the UK to now as excellent of a life as I can imagine in Austin. And I'd met about a million people throughout my time as a club promoter and had a handful of friends.

And I was like, fuck, like I feel like my people met to friend conversion should be higher than this. I feel like the funnel is very wide and like the conversions are very low to use. your terminology. Yeah. And they moved out to Austin and it's like I have more friends than people I've met, which is just fucking insane. So definitely changing your environment. What are the ways, given that not everybody could move to Austin? What other ways would you say if your life sucks, the easiest thing is to change your environment? What other ways could someone do that? I mean, the environment is, I mean, like, you know, this is a, I'm in a tangent and I'm going to come back.

So if you've ever heard somebody say like, man, I hate Cincinnati. Cincinnati sucks, right? Or they go some city and like they go there for two days and they make a judgment across the entire city, right? But it's like, okay, let's go really deep. You ate at three restaurants and you saw seven total people in Cincinnati. Does Cincinnati suck or do the two restaurants that you went to or the seven people that you were with? Not, are they not that cool?

Well, it's so easy to just move like two miles down the street. It's the same reason people do staycations. It's like you don't even need to change cities. You can be in the same city and still change the environment. Like just moving out of your mom's basement. You know what I mean? And just going into. another place with four guys can change the environment. And so like that's the the thing that to me

was so telling on this was so heroin addiction. Super addicting. I put it that way. And when a bunch of soldiers came back from Vietnam, they had been addicted. I don't know if you've heard of this, right? Twenty-five percent of soldiers who went to Vietnam tried heroin. It was like an insane statistic. And in the U.S., 90 percent of heroin addicts who go to clinics relapse. So they have a 10 percent long-term success rate. Tough. The stats are completely reversed from people who got addicted or did heroin in Vietnam and then came back to the U.S., which then you could make the, you could draw the line, which is it's better to change your environment than to even do anything else, because what happens is you eliminate all the triggers and cues that are associated with

habit that you're trying to destroy. Do you see that the American government was absolutely concerned that there was going to be an epidemic? Yeah. They were adamant that all of these soldiers were going to come home and it were going to be these veterans that were all addicted to heroin. Wild. And there are, for sure, but proportion, so much proportion less than their quote should be. Because the problem with the current system of, and like, for anyone who's listening, you can still extrapolate the principle or the concept. People are in the environment that they're addicted. They change environments and they go to a clinic. They change the environment. They change their behavior. And then they go back to the same environment and their behavior

changes yet again to match the environment. And so it's like if you want to change your actions, the easiest thing you can do is just change the environment. Because if you can do that, a lot of times, a lot of the negative things you have, you just don't get triggered. You don't get the cue for the behavior. It just gets extinguished. So the way that I've worked this into my home working setup

is I think I have six or seven different places that I can work at. And I do different tasks at each one of them. So I've got a place I'm writing a book. I've got a place that I write my book. That's first thing in the morning. I've got a place that I do my emails at. That's a recumbent desk bike, which is fucking unbelievable, dude.

Zone 2, 180 minutes a week of Zone 2 cardio, 180 minutes a week of emails with Zone 2 cardio. Place outside, I've got my studio record inside, we've got two living rooms with different houses that I can go into. And I'm like different spots for each one. And if I'm in this vibe, I'm over here and everything's a bit, go for a walk, come back, move somewhere else. Now I'm in a different mode.

Totally. And I'm actually, so it works in the equal opposite too. If you want to start something, right? So what we were talking about was extinguishing bad habits by changing the environment by eliminating the queue. But on the flip side, But if you want to start a habit, like for me, one of my quote famous ones is like, I want to put sunscreen on. It's like this time.

It's like one habit that's like 80, 20. Why do you need to put sunscreen on so much? Because, oh, not so much. If you do like, it's like kind of like walking. Like if you just walk once a day and if like if everyone just did that, like you add 10 years to everyone's like it's like what are the few things? It's like baby aspirin walk. Like if you do that crushing it. From a like skin cancer prevention A and then B just like less wrinkled out.

Alex future, sun tan lotion or SPF stuff is like the 80-20 of that, instead of having a zillion other things. So I was like, okay, I don't like it. I realize the reason I don't like is I don't like oil on my hands. Sounds so stupid. But like, that's enough punishment for me doing it that I stopped doing it.

And so I had to overcome two things. One was that. I hate the oil on my hands. And the second is that I don't remember. So I put one thing of sunscreen at each of my watering holes. So I get queued because I see it as soon as I sit down. So I eat lunch at the same table. I work at the same table and I'm in my nightstand.

There's the three places that I spend my time. And so I have one in each of the three places. And then the type of sunscreen I have is that I have one that's dispensed through a thing. So I don't actually have to touch it. So it's like, do I know why? It's like if you can identify why you don't like doing something, then you can isolate why am I being punished for this behavior and think, okay, is their way I can fix it.

And the other is how can I cue myself on a more regular basis by changing my environment rather than setting an alarm with my phone where if it goes off right now in the little podcast, I'm not going to pull out suntan lotion. or I'd have to carry everything with me, which I would never do, right? That would punish me far more than just not putting it on to begin with. And so just thinking through both of those things. Anyways, that has been really helpful for me in starting and queuing myself to do new behaviors that I want to do and then also stopping behaviors that I don't want to do.

Very nice. Most distractions come dressed as easy opportunities. Oh, yeah. This is interesting because as people begin to accumulate the success that they say that they want, this becomes an increasingly big problem. Yeah. I think it was Andy Grove who said this. Probably Churchill.

Yes, there we are. Chalk another one up for Winston. It might have been Packard. I think it would actually be Hula Packard. It might be one of those guys. He said that businesses die of indigestion, not starvation. And so they overeat, they're not starving. It's the entrepreneur that, and this is like you get back to human behavior,

which almost all roads lead back to it. but the entrepreneurs get reinforced for changing direction because nothing work, nothing work, nothing work, nothing work. You change that direction, something clicks. And so what happens is you learn a lesson from that. You're like, oh, so if I change direction, good things happen. But that's not the right lesson, which is one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is making sure that we learn the right lesson from the from the instance or the circumstance.

It's like, I hired a sales guy. He did a bad job. All sales guys suck. Not the right lesson, right? But that's actually something that is pervasive in even the internet community of like lessons that people, they'll tell the story and then they'll say the lesson. But sometimes the less, all we know is the facts of what happened, not necessarily the thing you took from it. Anyways, I was making a point. Churchill, starvation, easy opportunities. So the higher up in business you get, the more attractive, the opportunities that you have to learn to say no to.

And this has been really hard for me because at every level, like I thought, great, I have, I can check the box on distractions. I've learned to say no to $10,000 opportunities. But then when you're, when you're making $100,000, then you have to be able to say no to $100,000 opportunities. And the thing is, I call it the woman in the red dress. But the woman in the red dress, have you heard this like this little analogy I have? No.

Okay. This is like one of my favorite analogies. So in the Matrix, Morpheus takes him through a training program to teach him one thing about agents. And so they're walking down the street and there's all these people going and going. and he says, were you listening to me or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? And he says, look again, it looks back. And the woman in the red dress who walked by is an agent pointing a gun in his head. And I see distractions the same way, which is that the better you become, the more attractive

the woman in the red dress is. And so you can say no to a six, but what about a seven? About a 12. Exactly. What about hypothetical thousand, right? Like, that's really what it becomes because there is no limit on the upside. And so that's why having some of the soft stuff of like, this is the vision. This is what we're trying to do.

And there's a hundred other things I could do. But each of the cost of those things is the one thing that matters most. And I think that one of the things that Layla's been so good at helping me with. And I think a lot of my success earlier on was propelled by the fact that like when I met Layla, I had a chiropractor agency. I had a dental agency. I had five gym locations. I had a gym launch business where we did turnarounds. I had all of those things going on and there was no CEO besides me.

I CEO of all of them because I didn't understand how this stuff worked. And I also made no actually, I mean, I made money from all of them but no income. Like everything was just enough to break even and it was nine spinning plates. And it was because like I was so opportunistic and it's very classic new entrepreneur to just say yes to everything. And Warren Buffett said that the difference between really successful people, people and the most successful people, this is me paraphrasing, is that the most successful people saying no to almost everything. And I've tried to take that because it's so hard. And I think that a lot of the, you know, it's so simple and so hard, which a lot of success habits are, which is like,

if you do the same thing for a very long period of time, I think this is Neil, uh, shoot Shane. I can't remember the name, but I'll, I'll say that. Yeah, it's Churchill again. Um, he said, success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time. Um, I think, uh, I'm time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are. And I just love that quote. Why do you not need to convince yourself that you're smarter than you are doing the same thing? I think it's because you think you can handle both. And so you're like, oh, I got this. Okay, because if you did think that you were smarter than you are, you would then start to take on more stuff. So a quote from John Maxwell, which I absolutely adore that says, you cannot overestimate

the unimportance of practically everything, which is just fucking perfect. And it's the cool, it was, so Greg McEwen's essentialism is one of my top five books of all times. time. And it's for this precise reason that it's an antidote to the type A fallout, right? I can do it all. I will do it all. Watch me suffer and bear this burden. And you go like, look, you can do the hard work thing, right? You can you can do that. But the working hard and being spread thin are two different dynamics. And one of the one of the like interesting idea I've been playing around it a little bit recently is periodizing work. So in the same way as your weightlifting coach We'll have the guys doing his submax for 90 days He is building up for 90 days He is comp prep, he is blah blah blah blah blah Whatever it is mobility

That's a much easy way to Blend what we're talking about here Maybe a little bit earlier I think you need to specialize more As you get bigger and bigger Because the distractions are going to be even greater Speciality, how so? So if you are the CEO of your company

And then someone comes in with You've got so much more downstream from you that if you get distracted, the repercussions, the ramifications of becoming distracted are magnified even more. What do you think about that? Do you agree? I think the specialist piece is the piece that threw me, because I always feel like the higher up you go, the more generalist you become. In terms of skill set, but not in terms of projects or in terms of projects. Specialized in projects, generalized in skills. There we are. Yeah. Yes. I like that. Hey, 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. The first step to achieving a massive dream is conquering tiny impulses. I think it's exactly what we were talking about earlier.

It's like if you like I got a, there's a tweet that I made. Actually, you were the one who made it go viral, right? which was... When you quoted me quoting you to David Goggins. It's just this endless human centipede of fucking homozy quotes going around the internet. It was really Churchill who said it first. It was Churchill, thank you. But it's like you don't, you don't build confidence by shouting affirmations in the mirror,

but by stacking... Having an undeniable stack of proof that you are who you say you are. Thank you. That's the quote yourself down. Thank you there. I'll quote you to you, which is a new. a new low. So that, right?

Yeah. A lot of people were like, no, but what if you don't have any successes? Like, how do you get started? And I still think that the quote is 100% valid, is that they don't realize the validity of the smaller things that they have done up to that point. And so it's being able to transfer your successes of like, okay, like, did you get dressed this morning?

Like, did you get in front of the computer? Like, you have evidence. smaller evidence, but you have enough evidence to make the claim that you can do this. And then you do that enough times that you have enough evidence to make a claim that you can do this and support it. And I think that's where the big outcomes come from lots of constrained tiny impulses of saying like, you know what, I'm going to get this tiny victory. And I know how to say no to that. I know to say no to heroin today or whatever. Yep. That would be a hard one, you know. Lodger impulse. Probably larger. But that's the idea. It's just stacking as many of those

pieces of evidence that give you proof that you are who you say you are. that you have done what you say you can do. Yeah, it's the challenge of action or belief first is something that I've been playing around with so much. And my friend James, he wrote a book, The Sea Word, like confidence. It was a book about how to be confident, right? And I do feel like a big footnote summary could have been that quote from you. Proof.

And the problem is, this is something that I've seen as well. A good example coming from a world where I was successful in business before I was successful personally. I have a skill set now. And my capacity within this particular skill set and the performance of what that does are intrinsically linked, right? There's almost a linear relationship

as I become better at networking with guests, with recording, with doing all the other things, the show increases. When I run a business, there were so many degrees of freedom between my inputs to the business and the success of the business that someone with like malignant imposter syndrome

could always explain away how things had gone well. So I would say, oh, it's because we timed the market, right? Oh, it was because of like this member of staff that we brought in. I mean, I trained him, but really, he would have been great without me or whatever. And self-doubt can sort of wheedle its way in in very sort of nefarious ways when you do that. Then switching to something where you have a relatively undeniable stack of proof, even undeniable to the part of you that wants to deny proof, right, which is that imposter syndrome. After a little while, it's just a crushing weight that you, I call it imposter adaptation. So, you know, if you continue to disprove your

imposter syndrome in the real world and it persists, you have to admit to yourself that it's got nothing to do with your capabilities and everything to do with your addiction to feeling like an imposter. This is just a trend of how you think about the world. You're looking for competent, you have competence without confidence, which is a lack of belief. And confidence without competence is self-delusion, right? So you need to have this balance between the two. But people when say, well, surely self-belief becomes before action. I'm like, well, not particularly, not if that's not your nature. I don't think, like, you're asking for delusion there.

And it is significantly easier for you to think, I am a fitness person if you just went to the gym and did 10 push-ups, then I am a fitness person when I go to the gym tomorrow and do 10 push-ups. Like, where's the show me, spit and sawdust, where's the fucking reality of this, you know? I agree. Good. Opportunities only look like. opportunities in the review mirror, today they look like risk. How does someone get around this,

this asymmetry between the fact that in retrospect, it seemed totally obvious. And yet, the thing that you're looking at right now, looking forward, you go, that might not be obvious in retrospect again. It's tough because a lot of the big wins, like Uber's the classic example, right? Like, let's start a business where strangers pick up girls who are 16, you know what I mean, and drive them to their friend's houses. Like, that sounds like a terrible idea, right? Like, it just, it, but in retrospect, you're like, no, it'll be totally fine because there's going to be a mutual rating system and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

Taking out the fact that there are people who've been captured and whatever. Anyway, we'll put that to the side, right? And the thing is, like, just because we're on the investing side, what we found is that there are always reasons to say no to a deal. You can always find reasons to say no, because there's nothing that's risk-free. Even treasuries have risk. the U.S. economy could collapse and treasuries could be worth nothing. Like, and you could create a really compelling argument.

Lots of influencers spent a lot of time doing that, right? Is it likely? Maybe. I don't know, but it's probably less likely than a bank failing because if the U.S. fails, all the banks by default are also failing. So which one of, you know, which of these is greater risk? So then it gets, then you start comparing risks rather than trying to eliminate risks. And so if we're looking at opportunities, that's why like risk adjusted return is one of the things

that a lot of investors look at, which is like, is there a way that I can appropriately adjust this risk to normalize different opportunities. And I think that that single skill set is one of, if not the most important skill sets as an entrepreneur, because fundamentally it's betting. Like, that's what we're doing. We're making bets. Every day, we bet with our time, we bet with our money with the limited constraints we have or limited resources we have against unlimited opportunities. Because that's the hard part is that there's unlimited women in the red dress. Now, there's some fours and there's some sixes and there's some eights, but you have to both rate the girl, right? The opportunity.

And then also how crazy is she, right? Or whatever, you know, whatever risk factor you want to, you know, associate with this. Is she going to stab me in my sleep? I don't know. I don't know. Right. So she has a crazy ex-boyfriend. I don't know about it.

But like the way that we, because I just tied up this chapter in the book that's coming out, is when we're organizing opportunities that we're going to pursue with a business, we look at what are the ones that we have the absolute highest likelihood of success that we need no new skills and no new effort. if we can do that or the least amount of new effort and no new skills, that would be the first thing we're going to do. And then once we take off all the ones that take basically no effort and no extra skills, we're like, okay, which ones take more effort and still no skills? And then once we do that, then we're like, okay, now we can start learning a new skill.

And of the different skills that we could learn, which of these is going to give us the highest leverage, as in most output for the least amount of input. And that's pretty much how we tick down which of these opportunities we want to pursue because those have the lowest likelihood of not happening. Does this work in the personal? world as well. Totally. That is an investor that isn't in business that's just thinking about life opportunities.

Do I want to learn to sell sedan so cold? I think that the investor frame is simply people who have been scored and quantified on their ability to make decisions. And so I think that we can learn a ton from how investors make decisions overall. It's like why Ray Dalio's book Principles became like a bestseller, even though 99.9% of people who are reading the book aren't even investors or definitely not investors at his level. But the principles of good decision making are just quantified and we have a scoreboard for these guys being excellent decision makers. Whereas most other people, you don't have a real

scoreboard so we can't tell how valid is their advice. And I think that's what makes taking advice from really world-class investors who've been doing it for decades as a great source of information because we can validate that they have a stack of undeniable proof that they are who they say they are. Very nice. Okay, so this was not Churchill this time. So this was, So this is something that I've actually relied on a little bit myself. Whenever I get to a low point where I think, why do I even bother? I just remind myself,

this is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win. And this relates to another one, which is a reminder for the gladiators in the arena who feel beat up and scarred with no hope in sight, building a business is hard. Hard feels shitty. This is what hard feels like.

And this is why most people can't do it, but you can. This is what hard feels like is so fucking nice to lean on. It is so nice to lean on. Take me through that low point stuff. There's actually a story. I'm going to little goosebumps telling it.

So I was way back in my day, like you, a party promoter, but I was in a fraternity. So I was president of the fraternity. And this was my first semester being president. And so you have a pledge class. You get two pledge classes as a president. You get a fall and a spring. And that's your tenure.

And then another president comes in. And what we knew, and this would be really interesting for the audience from a human behavior perspective, is that like clockwork, every time we'd start a new pledge class within 14 days, 10 to 14, it was like clockwork. They would all get together and they'd revolt. And they'd say, we don't want to do it anymore. This isn't what we signed up for.

This is way fucking harder than we thought it was going to be. Like, we thought we were just going to party with you guys. Like, that's what we expected, which also shows you how long it takes people to adapt or acclimate to a very, a significantly more difficult situation, right? I'll tell you what happens after and then I'll tell you what happened in between. after we have this kind of talk that we had, and I'll tell you how I explained it when I was president, all of a sudden, it all vanishes because their expectations of reality have been completely reset. We break reality.

Like in the first 10 to 14 days, it's so painful for them because it's such a contrast from what you're just doing. Not the fun stuff. What's not fun? Oh, my God. I mean, they can't drink, can't talk to girls. The only people they could talk to are brothers or each other, and we're mean to them. So they could really only talk to each other. And the whole point here is that we're trying to get them close together.

Because there's a bunch of dudes who don't know each other from different parts of the campus, right? And then we have to get them in eight to 12 weeks to leave as one unit of people who know everything about one another, that trust one another, that know everything about the other people in the house. So it's like, how do you do that? Well, there's only X amount of communication you can have every day. So let's cut out anybody who's not us. Okay. And then if we really want them to be close together, we'll also reinforce that we're mean. But part of what they had to do is they'd to learn everything about everyone else in the house.

And so every pledge has to do something that would impress a brother. And then they get a signature from the brother being like, I approve of you. And you have to get every single brother's signature by the time you're done. Right. And so that's where each of those side quests become as insane as you might imagine. Right. And there's lots of, you know, there was lots of hazing back in the day, which is not fun. And, you know, a lot of sleepless nights and things like that.

And you go from like parting with girls, feeling like your top of the world, all these brothers feeding you drinks, be like, you're awesome, dude, to then like the next day. And this is literally how it happens. is how like the break in reality happens. We do this huge party to like launch the new class. And the next morning they all wake up. They're all like, they all sleep at the house because that's one of the requirements. And they're all hung over. It got their ties like vomit in the corner, whatever. And we're like, great. Clean it up. And they're like, what? Because up to this point, they haven't cleaned after a party because all they did is got to party, see the girls, and then leave. But then all of a sudden, they're like mopping bottom in the corner. And they're hung over.

And they feel terrible. And they're like, what the fuck? This is what I signed up for. right so anyways two weeks of this they get together and they wanted me to meet them and this always happens because they want to meet on their their turf and I'm like all right guys what's up and so it's just me all right and my vice president and like 25 guys so there's like a you know there's like a size comparison of like just animalistically there's way more of them than there is of me and so I just asked them a couple questions I was like who here before pledging started was like I want to be a part of this house the guys are like you know me okay I'm like okay got But who here thought it was going to be easy?

Who here thought it would be hard? They raised their hands. I'm like, guys, this is what hard feels like. And all of a sudden, there's just like this big exhale in the room. They're like, expectations get reset. This is normal. You wanted this thing. You expected to be hard.

Reality now matches conditions. So our expectations now match conditions. This is what hard. feels like. And then all of a sudden it's like they got permission to feel shitty. And by getting permission to feel shitty, they stop feeling a shitty because they're like, this is just my new world. And so then you know, you're like, listen, you give eight weeks, you're going to get three and a half years. Other people are going to drive you around late at night. Other people are going to clean after you. Like, it's a good investment. Right. And that, it was a good deal. Like you give one

semester and you get the rest of them to just do whatever you want. Um, but that concept, like that quote on both of those came from that experience of having someone tell me, This is what hard feels like. This is where most people stop and this is why they don't win. It's also another beautiful bit of motivation. And given that I spent a little bit of time with Goggins and Cam Haines, two guys. I was telling you about this before. You said, must be nice as we walked in.

So Cameron Haines, Bowhunter extraordinaire, lives in Oregon. And he has behind the power rack in his garage where he lifts, he has, must be nice, written. And I was like, why have you got that put up on that? And he was like, it's because everyone says, must be nice to be you cam. Must be nice to be sponsored by Hoyt and all of these like top level bow things and go on Rogan. He was, uh, there was a video that went super viral of Goggins losing his shit after John Jones won last weekend. Uh, and the guy that he's hugging his camp. So it's like, it must be nice for you to be backstage at UFC.

Must be nice for this. And I've seen what that guy does. And that guy picks up a rock that weighs about 80 pounds. And it's got the word poser written on the front of it because people call him a poser. And he carries it up a hill. that is maybe like a thousand foot of elevation, mile and a half high with no fanfare at the end, no finish line,

doesn't post it on social media unless the teams there filming it with someone else, and then carries it back down, puts it in the boot of his raptor, drives away. And he just does that because he needs to remind himself that he's doing the stuff that is hard. And this is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win, combined with this is what hard feels like,

justifies things being hard. Now, I do worry, and I find this in myself sometimes as well, that you can be so good at dealing with suffering that you can actually push yourself a little bit too far. And you go, I'm starting to bear more burden than I can basically take on. And the art of not burning out is something that I think a lot of people, if this resonates with you, the art of not burning out is something that you really, really need to be able to feel. And like, realizing what happens when you just start to glance off the bottom side of it and go, okay, I'm just going to, ease off the gas a little. I'd need to take this afternoon to go sauna and get some sunshine and chill out and get some food and then I can put my foot back on maybe a little bit tomorrow and we'll temper it.

But it justifies the fact that I use this stat all the time. 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the 90% of the 10% that do, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcasts, you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history. That's what hard feels like. And that's not even hard. It's just consistent.

Fuck me. It's less than half a year. Yeah. Insane. I hear stats like that and I just think, man, it is so easy to win. Like that, I mean, like when I hear that, that's exactly what I think. I'm just like, man, for everyone who's, like, struggling to win, it's like you, like, most of the pain that people experience is purely in their own minds.

And so to your point, I think there's an interesting one between like burnout versus hard. And so, like, for me, burnout is when my. I would define it as my output per unit of time decreases. So I can see that that's measurable, right? Now, like, I can say, like, number of pages that I edit are the quality of the content that I create, like, my output per time. Like, the team knows when I, like, when I'm like, six hours, seven hours into recording something, they're like, I literally start, like, slumping.

You're like, like, physically, I just start, like, slumping. And I, like, my cadence isn't as, like, I'm just not as sharp, right? There's that versus emotional burnout, which I think. people mislabel as burnout when really it's just like they don't know how to reframe reality. And so what it really is is they got a comment on a post that bugged them. And like, again, it's like pulling it from the shadows. It's like, no, this stuff doesn't work. It's like, hold on. What's the one voice that actually is coming through? What is the real thing? Well, there is this comment. Okay. Great. It's embarrassing to even have to say that. But when you say it,

then you admit it and all of a sudden you put it in the light and the shame kind of starts to evaporate. Because then you can name it and be like, is this comet better than my, bigger than my future? Is this comet bigger than me? And one of the things that I, that has helped me was saying like, what's true about this? Are you familiar with Byron Katie? Do you know her? I've heard her name. Yeah, the work.

She does the work. And one of the first questions that she asks you is, is it true? How do you know that it can be true? Yeah. And so it's like the same thing. Bring it from the shadows, right? Into the light. Okay.

You have this sense. There's no shit. It's like a fucking smell. It's like, maybe something's a bit, maybe something's, maybe I might be like a piece of shit. Maybe I'm not competent. Maybe I'm not whatever. Yeah. Okay.

That's. And the next one is like, what if we confront it and say like, what if they're right? Now what? Because a lot of, I think a lot of effort gets put into trying to deny reality, right? Like there's this clip that I shared from Tom Billy. And he was talking about how he gets made fun of his ears being big. Right. And I think it's a really good clip because his point that he was making, because it's such a visual, easy example for people.

people to understand. He's like, is that, it's true. I do have big years. And. And so that's, that's like the, if they're like, you have no right to be making content. Are they right? Okay. And. Yeah. I'm still going to do it anyways. Because the thing is like, one of the things that I had earlier out in my career was like, I didn't think I was a really good person. Like I was like, I'm not a good person. Yeah. Like some people like, yeah, I just had that. Right. And I had a history. You know, whatever. And one of the things that gave me a lot of respite or relief from that kind of thought process was like, comma, that's okay, because I can still do the things that create success and not deserve it and still get it. And that actually felt very powerful for me because it was like,

I don't have to deserve to success. I can still just do the stuff that gets it. It's like you don't have to, you don't have to deserve the girl, but you can still do the things that get her. And do you deserve it when you have her? I don't know. Who knows? I hate the word deserve it to begin with, right? Yes. But like that concept, because also I could segue into like gratitude around like if you think you deserve it, then you don't, you don't enjoy it. But that has been super powerful for me, which is like, what if they're right? And? Because a lot of people just trying to, they spend so much effort trying to fight the fact that the comments might be right. This might have been a fucking terrible thumbnail. You know what? This might have been a boring video. This, this post might

have been regurgitated content. This post might have been inspired too closely by someone else's post, right? What if they're right? And does it make me a piece of shit? What if it does? And you end up getting down to base, which is pretty much nothing. All that there is is actions. All that there is is what you're going to do in response to this. You know what another brilliant add addition to this that you kind of mentioned, which is the fact that this is what hard feels like most people get to this stage and they decide to stop and now the bar is set so low. Goggins said this in the episode with me and it gave me chills when he said it. He was like, it's so easy to be successful nowadays because people are weak.

Everybody's week. Dana White says it as well. I tell my kids it is so easy. If you are even a like weekend savage, you will run these kids over. And for every single person, excuse me, chills again, for every single person that like to castigate the very padded victimhood mentality of the modern world. Okay, cool. Like you can rail against people that say that the world is against them,

even though it's not and et cetera, et cetera. How does that inform the way that you should operate in the world? Right. Well, okay. What you're saying is everybody else is fallible, weak, fragile in some way or another. How does that inform the way that you act? The way that you should act is, holy shit, If I have even a modicum of resilience, this makes the market environment for me so much easier.

Whether I want to get the go, buy the house, become successful in whatever domain I choose to, the bar is set solo. Yeah. This, if we're going tweets, this segues into one of my favorite ones, which is you stay in poverty until you learn the first lesson of poverty, which is two words, my fault. And so when I was younger, I was really angry at my parents like many people are, right? Justified or not, it doesn't really matter. I was very angry and I blamed them for the woes of my life. And I realized when I was 19 that these people that I hated, I was giving all the power over the fact that I wasn't the person I wanted to be.

And I was like, well, it's their fault. And the idea that I had actually given these people that I hated power. over my success was ultimately something that made me feel sick to my stomach and was what allowed me to point the finger of blame inwards and say my fault. And then at least take ownership over the fact that like, and like, sure, maybe your dad didn't hug you enough or maybe your mom wasn't present or whatever it is. Right. It's like, and like I said this the other day and it'll probably piss off a lot of your audience. So, you know, we can put our soft ear phones on. Um, like, if you you were, if you, if you, if you suffered from racial inequality, if you suffered from gender

inequality, if you suffered from being born in Bangladesh, if you were sexually abused your entire life, you would be completely justified in the fact that you are not achieving the things that other people who didn't have those disadvantages have achieved. And I say this as a white guy who was born in America to a doctor father. I understand that. But at the same degree, you have the opportunity that Chris nor I have, which is that you can be an inspiration of people who just who went through the same thing and succeeded comma despite those circumstances. Because I can promise that there is somebody who has had it worse and has done it better. And I think that that one single point of proof, and like there's a global point of proof

that you can look for for sure, but like you can be that very local point of proof in your community or sub community. And I think as soon as we shed that, that's like I just, I'm a big fan of power follows the blame finger. So like wherever you point the blame fingers or the power follows. And so it's like if you point it's, if you pointed at the government, government has the power. If you pointed at your spouse and say like, it's their fault that I'm not in shape. It's their fault. They never let me do anything.

It's like, well, you're giving them all the power. And so it's like until you're like, it's my fault, it's also becomes my responsibility. What is? What if it's not your fault? It doesn't matter. And like I can't run marathons because I lost my leg at birth. And either you can just never try or you put the metal thing on. and you do it anyways.