The Game with Alex Hormozi - The Millionaire Morning Routine | Ep 441

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Is your routine really productive for you? Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the question that many people keep asking him: his “Millionaire Morning Routine”. He talks about how this routine should actually be done in reverse, the implications of having this kind of morning routine, and why understanding productivity and leverage is important when creating your own routine.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(0:59) - Define productivity; focus on least effective routines, avoid perfection.(2:51) - Critique of "Millionaire Morning Routine"; commitment over routine specifics.(5:10) - Emphasize outcome thinking; leverage tasks based on effectiveness.(7:26) - Entrepreneurship: Consistently trading time; prioritize high-leverage tasks.(10:38) - Remember to assess task productivity, evaluate leverage, and do the work.(14:23) - Maximize personal work time; ensure focus on the right tasks.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

One of the highest leverage opportunities that exist is finding people to help you do stuff, which is the first level of leverage. The next level of leverage is to compress other people's time as units of money that you raise from them giving you money to then go allocate on your own, which is capital. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building Acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us

to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy. What's the billionaire morning routine? What's the millionaire morning routine? A lot of people ask these questions. If you look on YouTube, you look on Instagram, you look on TikTok, it's some of the number one performing content is so-and-so's morning routine, XYZ's morning routine, the five things so-and-so does the moment he wakes up, right?

And it's because everyone's curious. The question is why? And I think if we can dive a couple levels deeper, it's because they don't know the question to ask. Okay? So they think that there's some magic pill or some super five-step thing that's going to somehow get them to do the work. And so the issue is we have to define what productivity even means, right? What is what is productivity? Productivity is getting more done per unit

of time. That's what it is. Right. And so what's interesting is that people approach the problem of the fact that they're not getting enough done per unit of time and they think that I should add more things that are not getting things done to become more productive per unit at time. Well, that doesn't make sense, right? Why do people not think that way? Because people don't define the terms that they use. So again, productivity, more shit done per unit of time. And so their solution to that is add more stuff that's not getting work done. Huh. Doesn't make a lot of sense.

So if we were to try and think of like the perfect morning routine, right, we should think about the reverse of that, which is what's the worst morning routine. All right? So how could I create a morning routine that would make me the least effective, all right? Get the least amount of stuff done. One, I'll make it long as humanly possible. All right. Number one.

Number two, I'd have a long. lots of steps and processes involved, so that I could use up lots of mental energy before I could even start working. All right, so lots of time, lots of mental energy. Number three is that I would become very, very reliant on that thing. So if I don't get this one thing in, then it means I cannot work. Right.

So I'd also increase how fragile I am and dependent I am on this superstitious process that I've invented or created in my life. And the reason that I made that side quest on this is that I saw this, there's this viral video, which is like, You have to make your bed in order to become a millionaire. It starts with the small things. And the problem with that is that we're separating fact from psychology, okay? Which is, if I make making my bed mean that I'm going to do the things that I said I'm going to do,

then it's super productive because it means that I'm going to do the things I said I'm going to do. But it's not the making the bed. That's the thing that's important. It's the fact that I'm committed to doing the things that I said I'm going to do. That's the point. And so what happens is gurus will get on this superstition around these things that they do, but not describe the meaning that they've ascribed to the thing. That's the important part.

And so whenever the easiest way to disprove something is to say, let me find an instance where this doesn't exist and I still have the outcome. That's how you disprove something in like science, right? And so if there's a millionaire morning routine, then it would have to be the same thing that all millionaires do. They would all have to have it in common in order afford it to be not just descriptive, but an explanation. A description is, this happened. Here's all the shit that happened around it.

Did it mean that all the things happened around it? Are the reason it happened? No, we're just describing it. But if we explain it as in it's a causal rather than a correlate, those few things are the things that drive the impact. So what do all millionaires have in common? They have a million dollars. Okay, that's causal, right? You got to have a million bucks or something worth a million dollars.

in order to be a millionaire? Check. Fantastic. What else do you have? Well, you have to wake up early. I can tell you right now, plenty of millionaires, don't wake up early. All right. Plenty of billionaires to wake up early. What else do you have to have? Well, you have to have seven streams of income. Well, all I have to do is find one person who doesn't have seven streams of income to show you that's not true. Okay? That's gone. What else we got? You have to dollar cost average into the S&P 500 for your entire life, and that's how you become a millionaire. Are there millionaires who don't have that? Absolutely. That one's gone. You have to invest in real estate. All wealth, 90% of millionaires are invested in real estate. Maybe, but did they become millionaires because they invest in real estate? Or did they become

millionaires and then then choose to invest in real estate just as a hard asset to diversify their portfolio? Hmm. Sequence. All right. So do you have to do real estate in order to become millionaire? No. And in fact, many millionaires don't do that. They just invest in it later. You have to be in software. You have to be in Web 3 if you want to be rich. Well, I'll all I'll have do is find a lawn care guy who's making $10 million a year. By the way, buddy doing $70 million a year with janitorial services for big buildings. Boring as shit. Right? So both of those just prove that. And I can keep going with this and hopefully you understand the spirit of the video, which is that I want to communicate a thinking process around outcomes because most people spend

most of their time doing shit that doesn't matter. And so when we're about to do something, people are more effective. People who move faster in life don't actually move faster. They get more done per unit of time. The definition of leverage is you get more output per unit of input. So if I do a little bit and I get a lot, I have a lot of leverage. If I do a little bit and I do a lot and I get a little bit out, then I have low leverage. And so when you are becoming more productive, all it is is the act of doing less to get more. That's it. So when you hear leverage, Hear the fancy words. That's what it means. And so if you look at that as the lens through which all opportunities and all tasks that you do are measured through what is the degree of leverage that I have in this task, how much do I put in versus how much it get out? And if you're like, well, how do I measure the what I put in? The easiest base unit is time. All right?

So as much as people are like, there's passive income. You were alive. There's time that expires during that period of time. And money comes to you over that period of time, which means that you simply have some things that you get more money per period of time. and less money per period of time. That's it. The real estate guys were like, this is totally passive. Sure. How many deals did you look at? How many brokers did you negotiate with? How many deals like how did you get all the financing set up, whatever? All of that, that sure sounds like work. And it is. So they had a more compressed period of time of working, but they still had active work

over a period of time and then return from that. Even if you just make, you buy a bond on the internet, and it takes you five seconds, just the act of deciding which wanted to buy, login, figuring out and making the purchase is work. And so it's only a question from a leverage perspective of units in, which is time, units out, which is money, if that's what we're choosing to use as our metric, time to money. Moza Nation, real quick, if you are a business owner that has a big old business and wants to get to a much bigger business, going to $50, $100 million plus, we would love to talk to you. And if you like that, we would like to hear more about it. Go to acquisition.com. You can play anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see if we can help you get there.

So when we're thinking about what tasks to do, what are the tasks that get us the most output? And I will tell you right now, at the very end of this video, I'll give you my morning routine. All right, I'll give you everything that I do between when I wake up and when I work. All right? Stay to the end for that because you're going to love it. You order your tasks in order of the leverage that they have. And so, for example, I could make sales calls if I were a business owner. That is going to be a one-to-one input of like, I do this effort and I get sales out of it.

Now, with that same level of effort, if I could go recruit a salesperson, which would take me a finite period of time, and then that person replaces that, my ongoing support for that person is going to be two, three hours a week. So I gain back 20 hours a week of prospecting in exchange for two to three hours a week plus money, right? And so the act of entrepreneurship is simply consistently making these trades of what can I buy my time back with. You never completely buy it back. You just get fractions and fractions down. Even to the point where you had an entire company leading to one person, and that person talks to you. So you've compressed all of the communication cycles of all of these things to one person and you still have the communication cycle, right? You still are going to talk to people. And so you never eliminate, it's just reduction. So these things exist on continuums.

They're not binaries. That's why there is no such thing as active versus passive. It's just how active is it versus how passive is it. How passive is it is how much leverage do I have in the opportunity? What's the discrepancy between how much time I put in and how much money I get out? Okay. Which is why one of the highest leverage opportunities

that exist is finding people to help you do stuff, which is the first level of leverage. The next level of leverage is to compress other people's time, right, as units of money that you raise from them giving you money to then go allocate on your own, which is capital. And then the two permissionless versions, this is from Naval Robicont, is social media. You can take something one time, like this video, and millions of people can see it. I do the effort one time. The output is very high, right? The same degree with code or software, I can build a thing one time, and then the incremental unit

of each person using it after I take the time to build it decreases, which is why automation in business is a high leverage activity. So if you can take five hours one day to automate something that now only takes you 10 minutes for the rest of your life per week, then you gain back five hours per week. You get 250 hours a year back. Great return, right? And so I'll tell you a wrong example of this is that we, in prestige labs, we had my finance team was like, hey, we have this manual entry thing. It takes us two hours a week of manual like code entry or whatever to get it done. I was like, okay. They're like, so we want to build this like software patch from the dev team because we had a development team to solve this for us. And I was like, okay, so we scoped it out. And the dev team said it would take them 10 days to do this, to build this patch. And the cost for the deaf team is 3,000 a day. Okay. So it's going to cost $30,000 to replace two hours a week, so 100 hours a year of somebody who was making $25 an hour. So let's do the math. So it's going to cost $2,500 of man hour. So it's going to cost $2,500 of man hour. for me to get this manual work done versus spending $30,000 to get the software patch,

not including any upkeep that that's going to probably have on a consistent basis anyways, but the $30,000 patch. So it would take me 10 years to get a return on this. Does that make sense? Not really. And this was the finance department, but they were thinking like individuals, not like business owners. And so if you think about ordering your day that way,

it's just a question of what am I trading my time for? And so what I want to wrap this up with is just a quick thing, is one, when people give you their advice for how to become productive, think, is this adding things that are not work to my calendar? Number one. Number two is of the work that I am doing, how much leverage am I getting from that work? So I can multiply even further the work that I do. And so the fundamental equation of productivity of how much output you get is a function of how much you do, multiply by how much leverage you have on the stuff you do. That's it. And so if we're defining those things as the equation for productivity, then the perfect morning routine should be one

that maximizes the volume of work you do and the leverage that you create from the volume. And so for me, that looks like waking up, having a cup of coffee, and getting to work. And then ordering my day in the order in which I have the highest leverage activities to the lowest leverage activities. That's it. And so, if you're thinking about what is the most productive way to get things done, you have to do the work rather than avoiding doing the work, and think of elimination as the ultimate productivity hack, because anything that is not work is fundamentally not work. So you are not doing any volume, and no matter how much leverage it is, if it's still multiplying a zero, it doesn't matter. And so you get the leverage by ordering and prioritizing the things the right

way of when you are working, and then you maximize the amount. of work that you do. And for me, I drink a cup of coffee because I like it and I have time with my wife. And for me, that's leverage on my marriage. I had this guy reach out to me and he's like, dude, I got this coach. He's got me doing like morning walks and red lights on it. And I do a cold plunge and I do my gratitude journal. He's like, by the time I'm done my morning routine, it's like 11 a.m. He was like, eight to a little later. It's like eight to 11. He's like, three hours of my day. It's gone. And I was like, do you think you'd be more productive? If you just prospect it, it was a small business owner. I was like for three hours a day,

do you think you'd make more money than that? It's like, yeah, probably. And I was like, doesn't sound very productive then. So a lot of people inherit these things that they're hearing on the internet because realistically it just procrastinates them from doing the work. And so it just gives them an excuse of mental masturbation or feeling like they're productive. But if you define productivity as units work times leverage, right? The amount of work you do per unit of time, you probably would stop doing a lot of the things that you're doing that aren't work. There's work to be done. And the question is, how quickly can I begin that work? That's it. That is the point. That is like, and eventually, like, the perfect routine would be you wake up and you immediately

work because you've trained yourself to be able to do it. And so the challenge that I want to issue to everyone is if you are one of these people who has a 90-minute morning routine before you start working, try waking up and walking straight over to begin work. Don't even check your phone. Walk over and get straight over to beginning your work and watch how much shit you get done. So the job of the CEO or the job of the entrepreneur is to do two things. First is to properly identify the constraint of the business, which is why is this business bottleneck? And every business has a single constraint. Okay? Like there's always, because business is a pipeline. So if I'm blowing traffic or water through a pipe, there's going to be the narrowest part of the pipe.

The narrowest part of the pipe will be the bottleneck. The moment I open up that bottleneck, it will then find another bottleneck, which will be the next restriction port or the next constraint. The job of the CEO is to identify properly what the constraint is. Step. one. Step two, solve the constraint. That is the job of the CEO. So you have to have the discernment to see the whole system and then properly identify, which is what takes time. Now, the problem is that most people don't know what the fuck they're doing. And so they reinforce parts of the pipe that are not the bottleneck. So it's like if you've got this narrow part of the pipe here, they're just adding more flow on this side and that's not the constraint. And so to be productive,

first you want to maximize your personal amount of time that you're working. Cool. Got that done. But now we want to make sure that we're working on the right stuff. And so the leverage is occurred where the percentage of our work goes towards deb bottlenecking the constraint as fast as possible and getting to the next constraint and then deb bottlenecking that constraint. And once you have deb bottlenecked an entire acquisition system, so it's like you know how to get demand, you know how to convert demand, you know how to deliver demand, you know how to acquire talent. All those things, then business is stable. What do you do? Increase the front end again. Because now the bottleneck is the fact that you don't have enough traffic coming in. So you increase that. And around and around you go.

You always say, can I do more? Can I do more? Can I do more? Can I do more?