The Game with Alex Hormozi - The Role of Hard Work & Embracing Uncertainty (on Leveling Up with Eric Siu) Pt. 2 - Aug ‘23 | Ep 618

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

“If you build one amazing product that people will consistently buy and tell their friends about You don't have to work again.” Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) he guests on Leveling Up with Eric Siu to discuss resource allocation, talent acquisition, and prioritizing quality over quantity, while also exploring effective advertising and customer engagement. Additionally, the conversation touches on the significance of discipline and regimen in maintaining health and fitness. This is part 2 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.Follow Eric Siu on:➤ Instagram | Twitter / X | Spotify | Apple➤ Check out full episode on YouTube!Timestamps:(1:53) - Power of the Written Word(4:30) - Journey of Writing a Book(8:02) - The Concept of Legacy(12:45) - Importance of Focus(28:37) - Power of Hard Work(33:30) - Difference Between a Good Book and a Great Book(35:46) - Challenges of Writing a Comprehensive Book(39:48) - The Role of Talent in Business Success(47:17) - Importance of Fitness and Diet in Personal Life(56:47) - The Role of Patience and Embracing Uncertainty in LifeFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Work does expand to the amount of time that you allow it. But I deem work done when there's nothing else that I can do to make it better. There's nothing else that I know of that I can make this better. 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. As you were talking, I was just for whatever reason I just started thinking about your Twitter workflow, which I think is probably the most interesting to you

because you're right or right. The only one that I'm directly posting. You take it to poop while you're doing it? Or like what do you? No, actually. Where do these thoughts come from? So there are two places. One is I wake up with them.

So I usually wake up with like three or four tweets in my head and I won't usually even get out of bed until I put them in. That is nuts. And so yeah, so like you'll see all like a lot of my tweets are front loaded for the day because that's super refined too. I think Twitter, low key, is the single greatest tool. for learning how to write.

Yeah. Because it forces you to have word concision and you get immediate feedback. And so you like... Don't mean hits feels so good. But like just the feedback on the language. You know what I mean? You get to learn really quickly

and it's based on your words. So I think there are like there are two things that have improved my writing more than anything. Hemingway, the app and Twitter. Like the two things that have improved my writing the most. Use Hemingway to tweet? No, no, no. But like when I wrote like when I write the book,

that has helped me and Twitter. Got it. But you said so the, So the second place that I do it is when things come up naturally during the day. And so I'll say something on a meeting. And like literally like the team would be like, that's a tweet. And then I'll just, I'll just fire it off. But there's no, there's no cadence.

There's no ghostwriters. There's no, like, you'll also see two days in row where I won't tweet at all. So like it's just whatever. And some days I'll tweet like 11 times. Yeah. Like it's just if I'm in the zone. Makes sense. I think there's a lot of wisdom.

I think there's a lot of beauty in the written word. And if you can articulate yourself that way, then it's like your next level. Well, dude, I had a guy, a really, a really successful tech entrepreneur. So he had had two unicorn exits. So like really successful hit me up on Twitter. And we hopped on a Zoom call. And he was like, dude, so what's your Twitter strategy? Are you like in one of these engagement groups?

And I was like, no. And he's like, oh, dude, I won't tell anybody. Like just like what's the like what's the playbook? And I was like, I tweet shit as I think of it. Yeah. Yeah. He just like, he asked like three or four times. Like he just wouldn't believe it.

I'm like, that's what it is. And you'll notice because the tweets are usually like themed because it's just like top of mind. So if I'm feeling, because usually I'm tweeting to myself and that's what people don't get. Like my tweets are me trying to bang myself in the head and be like, dude, be fucking patient or like relax. Like, you know, whatever it is.

Or like, you don't need to care about this person's opinion. And so like they're so violent because I'm in the moment of discomfort and I write that to myself to get over the moment and move on with my day. Dude, that's so fast. It's like, what we'll tell you. talk about in your 80-year-old self-mentoring you, but it's, it's weird how we use it and, like, you use it to beat yourself, beat yourself up. Or no, no, sorry, I use it to beat

myself up sometimes, right? You're talking to yourself just like, it's like reminders for yourself, right? And Gary is like to motivate people, right? So it's just interesting. But, okay, so how does now the first book that you released, $100 million offers, you sold what? How many copies? I think it's about $500,000. That's a lot, right? Like, what? I saw like, like, 12,000 positive five-star reviews. That's cross 16. 16,000. Okay, that's crazy.

I just saw it. That's why I was it. No advertising. By the way, let me just rewind for a second. The guy that got on a Zoom call with you, he wouldn't believe it. It's like, when your shit's so good, you don't need to game the system. That is already the game. Too good to fail.

You know what I mean? That's the line. Too good to fail. I had a roommate of mine who said that. I was like, because this is way back when I had my gyms. And I only had one gym, so like way back in the day. And he had an online business. So it was like way early, decade ago, right?

Yeah. And I was like, so what's your strategy? And he was doing like blogging SEO stuff back then. And he said that statement to me. And he was like, I don't do anything else. He's like, I just make sure that my articles are so exceptional that people share them. And he would spend two weeks on one article, but then they would crush and get shared all over the place. And now he has a business probably worth like 60, 70 million now.

Wow. And we were just like roommates in a house, like just right. Great. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. So back to the book. So you did the first one.

What did you, I mean, it's a labor of love first. Anybody that's written a book before, you know it's a labor of love. And plus use you like 10x, 20x just to make sure it's damn good. First book was amazing, right? What made you so quickly want to go to the next one? And what are you looking to get out of it? Man, writing books is like such not a good use of time. As much like, it's like, it's something, it's honestly like a guilty pleasure.

It takes too much of my time and I enjoy it because a lot of people don't know this about my background, but I was the vice editor of the newspaper. I was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine. I got a writing scholarship going into college. Like, I've been writing a long time and I enjoy writing. And so this is the only thing that I get to marry my two loves where I love writing and I love business. And so it's my chief form of expression. That's why Twitter is kind of like a microcosm of that.

But the point of $100 million leads was to answer one question. And the first one, $100 million offers, answered the question, what do I sell? Leads answers the question, who do I sell it to? And so most people, once they have something to sell, they're like, okay, now what? And this book pretty much walks you through how to get your, I mean, basically this book can get most people to a few million dollars here. That, I mean, that's it. And so I see this, like the books are my absolute long game because the amount of guys that

I see every single day that stop me, like when we're walking. who were like, dude, I'm 21. I've got my thing. I'm doing, you know, 70 grand a month. And you're on my vision board. As soon as I cross a million dollars in profit, like, I'm hitting you up. And so like there are so many of those guys right now

who are like incubating that I know in three years, five years, 10 years are going to hit that. And I just want to be the first person they call. Right. And that's it. And like that's a long, it's my longest game. Like the books are my absolute, which is why I spend so much time on them

because if they're not going to be good enough to still be referred to and sold in a decade, there's no point in me writing it today. Like, the book launch money? Like, it cost me more money to put the event on than I'm probably going to make from the book. Right. You know what I mean?

And the media team, my losing money media team. Losing money media team. No, you guys are awesome. Writing a book to make money off a book is possibly the worst monetization vehicle of all time. It's a physical product. You have a 16-week lead time. You have to manage.

inventory counts, you make no money on it. You have to sell it on a platform that takes 80% of the money, or you have to go to a publisher that also takes 80% of the money. Like, there's no winning from a money, like, the percentage of, like, the offers is top, top 100, audible books still on Amazon two years later, and top 1,000 physical books. Wow. There's, there's like 60, there's, I think, 60 million titles. There's six or 60 million. That's a big difference, obviously, but a lot of books on Amazon. on. And so it's a 0.0001% book. And like it does, I mean, it makes money, but like, it makes less than any of my portfolio companies to give like a reference of scale. Yeah. I mean, you're not retiring from. Right. No. I mean,

if I spent no money, you know what I mean? Any of the companies we have makes more money in the book. Right. Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, but it's still, it's like it lives on forever. And that's cool. And I think that's like the, like if I were to die tomorrow, the thing I'd be most proud of is the books. because I knew that that would be the thing that would outlive me the longest. Yeah. Which is interesting. We'll come back to the book in a second,

but I think you talked about how you don't believe in the concept of legacy. Yeah. Kind of is your legacy. In the formal sense. Yeah, I don't believe in individual legacy. Yeah. I do.

Yeah. So like, I don't believe in your name being passed on for thousands of generations. I mean, like, to prove the point, do you know what your great, great, great grandfather's name was? Probably not. Right. And so like, that's not even that many generations,

back. And so to have like the ego and the thinking that like your progeny are, and even if you somehow became king of the world and you did have that, they wouldn't know who you were. You would just be like another historical figure that they could then trace their bloodline back to. And then if you do the math on how related you are to them, like if you go, you know, 0.5 to the 8th, I mean, you're not related. You're just another human. And to that degree, then it, then relation generalizes to all of humanity. And then you just become a humanitarian, in which case, I am a pro legacy from that perspective, and I think that the ultimate legacy is education because all of us here are sitting here in a house full of inventions that other people that

we don't know invented and made our lives better. And that, I think, is like the ultimate legacy for humanity is that we just fall and someone picks up the baton where we left off and carries it. But like, I think the ultimate wasted life is one where you learn lessons and pass it on to no one and force someone to quite truly reinvent the wheel. You know, Naval has, so the book he recommends the most is the, I think it's the beginning of infinity or something like that. Yeah, David Deutsch or whatever. I read it.

So this dude, and it's like a super dense read, but I haven't completed it. But this guy's like, you know, what is wealth? And wealth is knowledge. To your point, you just said it's education, right? Like, that is the thing that continues to compound beyond you and me. It lasts beyond money. And like that is what should matter. Like, how do we make people wealthy?

We educate them. And if you think about the reverse of that, too, if you had a lot of money and you gave it to someone, how would you guarantee that they lose the money? You have them completely uneducated and completely ignorant. And so there's a, there's, I think it's Sanskrit.

It's a super old like ism. But it says, if you have a bad son, there's no point in saving money. If you have a good son, there's no point in saving money. Because if you have a good son, he'll take care of himself.

If you've a bad son, he's going to squander everything you have, which basically means that at no point, does it ever matter what you accumulate? Because either you passed on education, in which case they never need you to begin with, or you pass on no education and they're going to lose everything you had.

That's so good. But this is the thing. You look at all the wealthy people. They can't help themselves. They have to give it to your kids. And we don't have kids yet, right? But I suspect if we have kids, right? It's just like you probably end up giving it to the kids, right?

Well, I think I really like thinking of like, I mean, and I'll probably be different when I have children, but I don't know how different. People would be surprised. If I wanted to create a human that had certain character traits, I would then think, okay, what are the experiences someone has to go through to have that happen? And I would try and reverse engineer as many of those as I could. And like having Uber wealth throughout your entire life and having a guaranteed ease of eating and living and whatever is a great way to guarantee, not guarantee, is a great way to increase the likelihood that someone does not turn out good. And so I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life after they're 20 with a bunch of people I didn't like.

And so I would rather have them suffer to become the types of people that I'd want to spend the rest of my life with. I'm with you, man. It's, I mean, let's rewind to our childhoods real quick. Because for me, Tiger Mom, right? It's difficult. You're never good enough, right? Yeah. I think similar kind of story for you, do you want to talk about maybe how your childhood shaped you into who you are?

Because I feel like there's part of me that's really compassionate, but then there's the other side that's really tough on yourself and sometimes tough on other people too. Yeah. Well, as a quick side note on this, I think a lot, because, I've had this question in different forms on a couple podcasts about like the struggle growing up, et cetera and how that creates success now. But I really think it's people suffer during childhood. Some people are successful and some people aren't. Like there's just as many people are not even way more people who have terrible

childhoods and then don't do anything out of it. True. And so I don't, to point back to a terrible childhood and say, not that I had a terrible childhood, but like to tough times and say that that is why I am here. here, the why is really difficult and I don't think anyone can answer the question. I just know that I do these things because I've been reinforced for doing them. And so that's like the only rule or law of humanity that I see is that you're the rewarded or punished for doing the things that you've done. And you either avoid things you've been punished for in the past, and you keep doing

things you're rewarded for. And so like I keep working harder and hard on things because my minimum standard continues to rise because the more I raise that minimum standard, the better the things that I have are and the more reinforced I am for working hard on the things that I work on. Which brings me to a quote over here, most people keep fighting the same boss, but the boss is being able to stick with it. Yeah. And you had to learn that the hard way, right? Yeah. Yeah. Here, I'll give you another one over here. I'll give you your, moziesms. Is that a thing? Mozyisms? To do something epic, you have to convince yourself to do the same thing for a long period of time without telling yourself that you're smarter than you are. This talk that you did, I think the talk, I'm paraphrasing here,

is how you're, this will change how you think about money or something like that, right? But this talk was really about focus at the end of the day. And you went to yogurt land and decided that you had to redo your talk and focus to talk on focus. What happened there? Yeah, and all these guys who were coming up to, so I got, so I was supposed to speak at this event, and I'd already finished the presentation. And part of the reason that I don't speak very much is because on stages, one, I don't like how people use my face to promote because again, associations I don't want. But also because it means to just give this to everybody else, like, A lot of people will promote with my face and then people will buy whatever the person who's at the event is selling.

And I have no association or anything. And I have no way to, I don't have the time to do the due diligence and figuring the person out. So like, if I speak somewhere, it's not because I'm endorsing the person. But that being said, I went to the yogurt land and like eight or nine people were in the area for the next day. And they sat around us and I spent like 60 minutes talking to all these guys. And it became really clear that all of them were distracted. They were all doing multiple things, trying to, like they subscribe to the single fallacy that I think is number one in new entrepreneurs, which is the, I'll see which one works. Yeah.

And the reality is that any of them could work, but the only one that will work is the one that you work on. And so you have to commit to one of them because it's just, it's arrogant to think that you going 25% in on four things is because you are competing in a real marketplace against somebody. else that's in that space and to think that your 25% is going to do anything against someone's 100%. It's just arrogant. And so, um, and one of the definitions of commitment that I like a lot is the elimination of alternatives. And so if you want to be committed to something, then you have to eliminate alternatives. And some people use, uh, you know, dicadere, which is the Latin root of decide, which just means to kill off, which is like, what are we killing off? And I think, um, it's kind of like pruning a tree. Uh, and when I realize that it's like, you, there's only so much nutrients in the

soil, there only so many minutes in the day, so much literal attention and focus that you can allocate. And if anyone's ever worked on one project for a long period of time, you realize that you start peeling back layers and getting a depth of understanding that you can never get when you're on the surface level looking at multiple things. You're barely being reactive and setting out fires. You can never make progress and like drive. And I think that like this is a Warren Buffett quote to give the goat his due. He said the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really because people say no to almost everything. And I think that that's, it's just taking me a very long time to learn that.

And I continue to repeat it in my tweets because it's still just as hard for me now as it was then. It's because the thing is that the opportunities I have to say no to now are things that I would have given my left nut for, you know, a decade ago. And so it's just, it's continued, like the bar has continued to rise on what I have to say no to. And it's hard the whole way through. And one of the big unlocks for me has been judging. myself based on my actions and not my feelings, meaning I can feel impatient, but still do the patient thing. So I might still want this to go faster and be upset that is not going faster. As long as they don't act on that impulse, I can still be a patient person. And so to the same degree

with focus, I might be interested in love jamming with the guys on like, what if we did this? What if we did that? What if we did that? But as long as I don't say, all right, buy the URL, let's get the bank got set up. Let's go. As long as I don't do that, then like, we're We're still focused on the one thing that matters most. It must be tough because you're trying to educate people on the pain that you've been through, right? Again, being punched in the gut, nine things, right? But still, like, I don't know about you, but in my early 20s, I remember, like, yeah, focus, focus. And I would read, you know, Warren Buffett, Steve, not Steve Judd, Warren Buffett, you know, Bill Gates, yeah, the one thing is focused, right?

Like, you know. And but then it's like, no, no, no, but like, I'm better. I'm smarter than that, right? You have that quote in here. It's like thinking that you're smart than you are. So I feel like it's as much as we try to teach people, sometimes it's like they just need to get punched themselves. I think there's the difference between knowing that and knowing how.

So like going through an experience, unfortunately, teaches you in a different way than knowing that something happens. Or like, I know, I know that this works this way. But if I said, like, I know how a business works. But it's like, but you know what to do, but you've never done it. And so until you've actually. done it, you think you know what to do until you go through it. And so I think that's like that experiential knowledge, which is honestly, I think the base of the content, what makes the difference

between Ken McElroy's and hopefully our content, which is like people can see a depth of understanding that comes from experience. One of my favorite quotes from L.H. Hardwick is, no man within experience is ever at the mercy of a man with an opinion. Right. And until someone's done it, all they have is an opinion. And if you have done it? They are irrelevant. Like someone's like, well, it doesn't work that way. I'm like, have you done it? And they're like, no. And I'm like, your opinion does not matter. Dude, I just remember two, three years ago, one of the guys that was leading my marketing team, he's like, so we'd have this engagement tool called 155 and you could just, here's how the

week went. You know, here's what I'm learning right now. And every week, it's like watching Hormozie videos, watching Hormozie videos. And this is when you had, this is when you were just like maybe 20,000 subscribers or whatever, right? But it was because of the depth of the content that you have where it was just so good. And then I started watching it. And it's like, then it's like all the thumbnails on YouTube

started the recommendations started becoming you. I was like, holy shit. And that's how you started to compound, right? Because it's good stuff. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah. It's, I think it's being really honest with yourself about, you know, we have the investors circle of competence, right?

I think there's a content circle of competence that you have to know, if it's not in this circle, I shouldn't talk about it. And that's not because of brand. And that's not because of any of the fancy stuff. It's just because you don't know it. And like anything that you have to add that's outside of the circle of competence will often be a generalization that you heard from someone else. And if it's a generalization from someone else, then that's their opinion and not yours.

And so we want first principles, first experience type content. And so n equals one, right? Or one of zero content, as we say. And that's the litmus test. It's like, is it in that, is it something we know from experience? And I had this video, I think the long that I had right before, this was my explanation of how to get to 10 million plus a month. And I talked about it was like, and I think this is how we get to 100 million a month. I don't know that because I haven't

been there yet. But this is my current plan of how to get there. And somebody commented something I can remember what it was. But it's something like, well, you have no idea. I can coach you on it, like whatever. But the thing is, it, I will only talk about retrospect. Like, I will only talk about things that I have done because I can speak confidently on them. And if someone's, says gym launch wasn't a company it doesn't bother me because it's it's like saying like you didn't have oatmeal for breakfast I'm like I mean I did so okay and that's that's what in my opinion has allowed me to not suffer from the the many inevitable comments whatever you get from the masses of people who don't know you because if someone says hey Alex you're short I know that's

not true and so it doesn't it doesn't hit me the only ones that hurt are the ones that you feel like have an element of truth. And so if there's an element of truth, it means that I probably stepped out of my circle of competence. And I think getting stung outside of my circle has really taught me, at least for me to stay in my world of like, these are the few things that I know, and that is what I'll talk about. You know, interestingly enough, speaking of circle of competence, I think there's also a circle of competence when it comes to content creation. Like, you should stick to the format that you understand initially before expanding out, right? And so I really enjoy this, but maybe I'm not the best at, you know,

telling long-form stories or something like that, right? So I think it's like really do whatever works for you. Play your cards. Yeah. Yeah. So going back to the book, you got this big launch strategy happening right now. It's like the Super Bowl. Like, what can you tell us about that?

What's going on? How much you spend? Yeah, let's go. Tons about it. So $100 million offers the first book. The goal with every book was to be a meta book, meaning I wanted to use the book to demonstrate the ideas in the book as proof. that the idea has worked.

And so 100 million offers, how to make offers so good people feel stupid saying no, was supposed to in and of itself be an offer so good people feel stupid saying no. And so I made the book $2 on Kindle and I added in a course that most people would sell for one to $5,000 on top of it and made it for free on my site,

not behind an opt-in-wall, just made it for free for everyone with downloads and everything. And the idea was, if it is good enough, people will share it. And that's more or less what ended up happening. And so with $100 million leads, the meta concept is not about the offer. The meta concept within leads is advertising and how to get leads. And so the 24 months that I did post the offers book was all towards the leads book. And so the last 24 months was, well, if I'm going to talk about how to build an

audience, then I have to build an audience. If I'm going to talk about how to run paid ads, I have to run paid ads. If I'm going to talk about having affiliates, I have to have affiliates. And so there's eight methods of advertising that I talk about in the book. And I use all eight specifically to promote the book to prove that all eight methods work. And so when we go live at the event, I will break down, here was our affiliate strategy. This is how many affiliates we had. This is how many of you are here from affiliates. This is our paid paid ad strategy.

These are the scripts I use, which is directly from this page. This is the landing page I use, which is directly from this page. and it got this many of you guys here. I got this much content, which is how many we put out over this period of time. This is the resulting impressions. This is how many of you hear from that.

And so I wanted to just give proof that these concept worked 10 years ago and they work today and they'll work in 100 years because people won't change. The platforms will, but the principles remain the same. So I mean, you're basically showing, hey, I'm showing you this in the book

and I'm meta, this is how it works, right? By the way, for the affiliates, what are they getting out of this? I mean, it's a $2 book like, well, what's in it for them? Yeah. And actually, the Kindle on this one is $10. Because the point was not to be an offer.

The point was to be a leads thing. Got it. Right. And the next book will be a meta concept on that. So every book will have its own unique thing. Anyways. So with the affiliates, I think of affiliates in kind of two tiers. Now, when I make a true affiliate strategy for a business, there's usually three.

There's usually first level, which is the base level that everybody starts at. There's the next level, which is an activation point level, which is whatever activation point is for you and your business, you make that. the next kicker for their income or whatever the benefit is. And then you have your like top producer level. And so those are usually the best three. And we paid a gazillion dollars to consultants who just only set up affiliate structures. And that's what they use.

They're like always three. These are the three. And there you go. There's a nugget for you. Let me save you 100 grand. That's how you set up affiliate setups. With this book, I have two levels. If you don't have a massive audience, bring 10 friends.

That's it. So bring 10, 10 people from your company, bring your family. your family, bring your cousins, whatever it is. Bring 10 people, and I'll give you two chapters that I'm not releasing with the book. Okay. So that's the benefit for that level. For the top level, those are many people who have audiences, right, who have email lists, have subscribers, et cetera. And so for them, I wanted to be more competitive. And so for them at the top 10, I'm going to do an AMA live with their audience with them and they can ask whatever they want. And the reason I chose that specific benefit for them was that if I said, hey, I'm giving a Lamborghini,

guinea or I'm giving a car to the top 10 people, right? If they go to their audience and say, hey, attend this thing so I can win this car, that's them extracting goodwill from the audience. And I don't want them to do that for me. And so I was like, how can I also use the concepts that I preach for them? And so I made it at AMA so that their audience clicking their affiliate link benefits their audience. Because if I click Johnny's link and we win, then we get the time to do the AMA. And so he doesn't, Johnny, or whoever the affiliate is, doesn't extract goodwill or withdraw goodwill from their audience by promoting my thing. And so that way, I wanted it to be an easy thing for people to promote. So it would just be a net benefit. So it didn't have to work

into their promotion calendar or be like, like how, what kind of split in my, because there's no financial incentive for the for this. And I also did that because operationally, you know, 12,000 to 99s is a pain. And so it was easier to do it that way. Interesting. And these people are to promote too because of all the goodwill that you've built up and I think that's really interesting important for people to understand and probably brand association yeah like if for sure like real like that was the thing that I I'm still consistently learning and am impressed by how branding works yeah but yeah I think that was also an element of it so and the AMAs that you're doing you're

doing basically 10 separate MNAs yeah a MAs a 10 separate ones so it's totally like their audience yeah and so yeah that's and I don't do a lot of these yeah by percentage of requests. And so for many of them, this is like the only shot that they'll probably have to do that. And so I wanted to make it cool and awesome. Got it. How many hours do you think you put into this launch?

How much do you think you spent so far? I've spent a million bucks in cash on the event. So far, probably more, honestly. Yeah, it's been probably more. And then, so right now we have like 400 and 5 or 10,000 people registered. for the event, which is pretty nuts. It's like seven NFL stadiums. Dude, I imagine attendance rate has to be pretty high, too.

I hope so. Well, you know, this is the first time that we've done anything like this big. So, yeah, we've spent that much money. And then from a time perspective, this has been, if you include the writing of the book, I mean, I've got 2,000 hours into this. So if we don't include writing the book, the presentation that I'm giving, I've spent, I've probably put 200 hours into it. Wow. Okay.

So I will do the work. And so I made the presentation. And now I feel like I have the process down. So I will share this with you. So I'm a big fan of outworking yourself out. Right. You're never nervous if you're fully prepared. And so I don't want to be nervous for this thing. And if anything, I just want to be excited about it, which I am. But the way I approached it was I made the first version of the presentation. And then I presented it and I recorded it. And then I watched the recording with the deck up. And I pause it when every time there's a mess up and I fix the deck and I play, fix, play fix. And then once I have the new fixed one, I go top to bottom in my head. And then I go top to bottom, record it out loud. Pause, fix, pause, fix, pause, fix.

And so right now I do that. I do one full cycle of that every day. And I started preparing for that three weeks out. I don't know if people are, maybe they are seeing this, but from my observation here is you just mentioned, I will do the work. And I think one of your other quotes was like the work needs doing, right? But then you tie it in with really not even a 10x effort, but to me it seems like a hundred X effort. Just people aren't willing to go that far. Right. But what's interesting is that like if you work a hundred times harder, you can sometimes get like a million times the payoff. And so like the top end of work still has disproportionate payoffs. And so I don't even, I don't even like there are diminishing returns, but there's a point where you we actually get outsized returns for the effort. Because like if you think about it from like an Olympic racing perspective, like if I work, you know, 10 times more than everybody else does, but I get gold and the next guy gets silver,

the difference between gold and silver and running is everything, even though it's the 10th of a second. And so from an absolute perspective, there's diminishing returns. But from a relative perspective, I think you have exponential returns from being the best. From being number, the difference number one and number two can be, you know, like Uber and Lyft.

Like the difference is 10x, the size. And so I have now been reinforced enough times of how much more work is required to do something excellent that now I understand it. And I think the one thing that has continued to level up over time for me, and this is also for the audience, is that like you don't even know how much you can work. Like you think you know how much you can work until you like really, really work. And like with this presentation, I was like, I will not be the reason this is not good. What do you think you change your perspective, like flipped you into working 100 X-Rex-Rex-Rex?

harder. I think just my standards have gone up. Like I looked at the first presentation I ever gave and it's like it's embarrassing. It's really embarrassing. I think it has like 19 slides with like four bullets on each slide. And I remember thinking, man, I spend a lot of time on this and a lot of time to me back then was like I spent a day on it. Like a full day, like eight hours. Yeah. And still me right now. Yeah. And and I think that a little moniker that I have is just count in hundreds. is like how many hundreds of hours did you spend on something? Because when you start counting in hundreds, like the depth of understanding of something goes to such a large degree.

And it's like if I were to tell someone to edit a video, right, like a short clip, and I said, hey, edit this clip in 30 minutes, right, and give it back to me. And I was like, and they give it back to me. I'm like, okay, I'm not going to edit it yet. If I give you another 30 minutes, could you make it better? And they're usually like, I can make it better another 30. So I give it back to them like, give it back to me another 30. gives it back to me another 30.

And I say, okay, if I give you two more hours, do you think you'd make it better? There's a point to this. Yep. He's like, yeah, I think I'd make it better. It comes back to me. I say, okay, what if I gave you two weeks? Like, well, then I would totally approach it differently. I'd probably restructure the whole thing.

Because the amount of time, sure, work does expand to the amount of time that you allow it. Right. But I deem work done when there is nothing else that I can do to make it better. that there's nothing else that I know of that I can make this better. And that was the point that I got back with the book. I did 19 drafts. I did four full rewrites. And the last version that has gone out when I read it front to back so many times now.

Like there was like, I can't take anything else out and I can't add anything to it. And I can't make anything clear. And I've written this whole thing in a third grade reading level and I added 106 hand-drawn images into this. There's nothing else I can do. And if it does not succeed, that's fine. Yeah. But it will not be for lack of effort.

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. Let me ask you this, then what would be considered success for this book lunch? It'll be successful at the moment I step on stage. I genuinely believe this. Like, truly, I'll have one by the time that it happens because I know

what I feel like when I walk on stage and I have done everything in my power everything, not some of the things or most of the things, but there is nothing else that I can conceive of to make this better.

And then at that point, then the chips will fall where they are and I will control the controllables. And so that's, that has helped me get through like some of the anxieties and things like that that happened earlier on in my career around these types of things. But the whole, like the reason I have the outwork yourself to out, like give yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.

Like, if I say that I will, I will do my job, then I will not make, I will make sure that I have done everything in my power, which also means, and this is the underlying thing is that means I can't do a lot of stuff. And that's the, that's the real cost of excellence is all the things that you want to try that you can't do because excellence has a huge price tag associated with it, which is how much time you have to put into one thing. Totally. And you actually gave this example. When it comes to writing a world-class book, I think the analogy you shared was like, you know, there's the difference between like a 7.5 star and a 9.5 star book or whatever it is. It's like 100x more work. Right? What was the analogy? Yeah. I mean, it's exactly that. Like to go from a, you know, like from a 5 to a 7 is like twice the work. To go from a 7 to a 9 is like 100 times the work. It's so much more work. It's an asymptote when it comes to work in excellence. Power loss. But. But the difference between a nine and a half book and a 9.9 book on Amazon is the difference between you having one book that you can retire on for the rest of your life. Like the offers book in sales, I think does around $300,000 a month, which is crazy. As a book. As a book. That's your take, right? Huh? That's your take. No, that's not my take. That's sales. That's revenue, right? Then Amazon has his way with it. It takes the vast majority of it. But point being is like, for the vast

I think it is about a million bucks a year. Yeah. Great. But for the vast majority people, like, that I think is actually kind of encouraging. It's like you can put an unbelievable amount of work into one thing and make it so good that it will pay you for the rest of your life. Like you don't, like you could work a job, you could have a career, you could do all these things.

But like if you build one amazing product that people will consistently buy and tell their friends about, you don't have to work yet. And I think they're like understanding that I've now applied. And honestly, the offers book was the first. probably the biggest real life example I had where I could control every variable. Like in a business you can't control every variable. But even in like a tech product,

I'm not the coder or whatever. I was like, I can code every page of this. I did the drawings. I did the audible. I wrote the words. I designed the cover. Like everything. And so I can make sure that it's excellent

from my perspective. And then hopefully the audience will agree. I love it. And that acquisition.com slash leads, is that going to be an evergreen page or is it going to disappear at some point? Oh, I mean, it'll always rerout to probably something about the books. So, yeah, Acquisition.com, forth slash leads.

Got it. Let me ask you this. I think for $100 million offers, that book is very lindy. And what I mean by that for the audience is that, you know, it's that, like, how to win friends and influence people. It's been around for over 100 years. It's going to be around for another 100 years. I think your book is written that way for that one.

I think leads might be a little more difficult because you might be talking about, no, no. You've written at Lindy. Dude, that's why it was so hard. There you go. Think about, I mean, like, I had, so, so to give context, leads has been probably 10 times the work of offers like and it was because I had to rewrite it so many times and and thinking about what topics I was going to get into and what topics I wasn't going to

get into and then how at what level do I chunk up or chunk down from tactics around advertising right so explaining the concepts like I call it the core four but there's only four things you can do to let other people know about your stuff you can mess with people one-on-one who you know so it's warm reachouts. You can message people one-on-one who you don't know. That's cold reach-outs. You can post one to many to people who know you, which is posting content.

And you can post one to many to people who don't know you, which is running paid ads. That's it. That's all you can do. There's nothing else. And if you're not doing those things, then people won't find out about yourself. And so the platforms change.

The principles remain the same. And so that was the, but like I had to cover platforms, media, formats, placements, targeting, cold emails, cold calls, DMs, like there were so many things that I had to cover in one book, I will probably never bite off so much again in terms of narrowing the scope of the book. But now that I did for this, it really, the problem set that this book answers is literally just one step in the funnel,

which is a lead is a person that you can contact. That is the definition of it, as I define it. An engaged lead is a person you can contact who has shown interested in the stuff you sell. And the entire point of this book is to get someone from a person you can contact to get them engaged. Got it. That is it. That is the whole problem of the entire book. And then like, and that's it. And it self-destructs. It's self-destructs. You got offers, you got leads. Can you talk about the next one? It's three. I won't share the name yet. Yeah. But it's green. It's green. It's green. It's green. It'll be a green. Purple, purple. Wait, blue, purple, wait, blue, purple, okay, got it got, got, got. Just for the audience to know, it's typically when you write a book, it's usually five to seven drafts, right? And when I, my editor first told me that, it's like, come on, I'll be done in one draft, right? No, it's seven on my end.

You did 19. That's way more. And it sounds like you rewrote a couple times, too. Four four rewrites, like end-to-end rewrites. That's crazy. I think I just give up. It was really hard. But the work needs doing.

And I'll tell you what my editor said when I would get to these points where I would just like throw up my hands and be like, dude, I don't, I don't need to make the money. I don't, like, whatever, you know. You're close to giving up a couple times. Oh, for sure. I mean, like, you know, everybody has. bad days. Yeah. And he said, he gave me this visual that like, just like seared into my mind. He was like, there's a 17 year old kid in Pakistan who has a goat who's going to be sleeping with this book under

his pillow. He's like, do it for him. Wow. And I was like, all right. That's good. So we get back. And we, and we, you know, I was like, dude, they can figure this part out. And he's like, no, they can't. Yeah. He's like, you'll sell the book no matter what. He's like, but they won't get it. And then so then it's like back to the drawing board. How can I rethink through this framework so that and make it easy and then make the visual match, the words, and make it under third grade. And all the way through was tough. Dude, I mean, that just goes to show you, too, because earlier you talked about your mission around the education piece, right? And sometimes no matter how strong your mission is, you'll start to waver a little bit, right?

And you need heroes like your editor to come and recalibrate. Yeah. Yeah. This one's interesting. So the guy I had lunch with today, we had been in these masterminds before. And in our mid-20s or so, it's like, yeah, tactics. You need a dopamine hit straight. Oh, that feels good, right?

Split test. Yeah, split test. You know, there's this new channel over here. You got to talk to this person. But then as we get older, it's like, no, no, no. It's not about the tactics. It's just about hiring good people, right? Like, is there anything you want to, I mean, I thought it would be good to chat about with you here.

Because after they read the books, sure, they'll pick up the strategies, the tactics. But really, it wants to get a certain level. It's like, I mean, it's all about who. You know, I mean, there's that the type was that book, Who Not How? Yeah. I mean, it kind of summarizes the entire concept in the title. I think you and I've had this discussion, but you can sit in on a group of entrepreneurs,

listen to the discussion for 60 seconds, and know how much money they make within a rough estimate. Or what level of the business that they're working, if they're employees, like where they sit on the org chart, because of what level of conversation they're having. And so at the highest level, you're talking about allocation of resources. It's all it is.

It's just capital and human allocation. Yeah. And one level maybe below that would be human capital, human capital, which is how are we going to attract talent, how are we going to train talent, how we're going to get compounding returns on talent. Because, you know, I like the saying, but you're just one great higher way from all of the money that you want. But the thing is, is that I think the catch of that ism is that you have to become the type of person that that person wants to work for. Totally. And that's the hard part. Yeah, that's like, sure. Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, of course. What's his name? Tim Cook, right of Apple. He could, he could probably grow your business, but he wouldn't work for you. And so, like, that has been always at the forefront of Layla and I's mind. And that's part of what we do with the brand stuff, which is we want the brand to stand for things that, because we're, we're just as aggressively advertising. At a tactical level, we're more aggressively advertising from a transactions perspective for the talent we put in portfolio companies. So we place talent, I mean, a few times a week.

I mean, we have three, four leadership positions a week that we fill. in our portfolio companies compared to how many deals we do at the portfolio level. And that's the highest return on capital that we have is buy someone, and I say buy, just in the capital term, buy talent for 200,000 a year,

make $20 million a year. Yeah, no right. Great trade, right? And one of the big misnomeras, I think one of the biggest mistake entrepreneurs, like myself included when I was earlier on, is that I didn't understand

the difference between A and B talent. You can pay a talent 30% above market and get 10x the output. And like there's no sense in ever paying below market in my opinion because you just don't get you can get so much more for the

extra premium that you pay that it's one of the best, it's like the best bet in Vegas. You know what I mean? The best trade you can make is that premium to bring the right person in that's 10 times more effective.

Have you heard of the Keith Roboy? He has this expression about barrels versus bullets. So the concept here, this guy was I think he was like a CEO of square or block, whatever you want to call it, his high up at PayPal.

But anyway, so what he said was like, look, in an organization, you need barrels, these are going to be the ones that you give them a problem or like something, and they'll just solve it, right? And then the bullets, like,

they will do what you tell them do, but you should always hire a barrel whenever you meet a barrel. And that's kind of what you're saying here. And to me, like, I love playing poker, right? Like, I'm a gambler at heart.

But in like, in business, it's like unfair. It's like, Do you make this hire? It's like, upside is unlimited. Well, I mean, it's got to the point now where we will, like, we interview, we basically have open interviews. So if we see someone who's incredibly talented, we will hire them without really having

a clear position for them yet. And like, I'm saying that's a bit, that's if we have an incredibly talented person. Like we had someone recently who was an exceptional sales director, a huge experience, was an ex-CEO, like all this great stuff, great value fit. and one of our portfolio companies we were about to make the recommendation that you should take this person and they were like, we don't think we want to do it.

And so we hopped in the phone and we're like, you're wrong. Like we have a lot more context on this. You should do it. And it ended up somebody from like there outside and said you shouldn't do it and that person had no context. And they were like, we actually wanted to hire

them but we didn't trust ourselves. Which by the way, huge part for entrepreneurs is like you make one bat hire and then you think, I can't hire people. Like you're going to make mistakes. It's part of the game. You get better and better at pattern recognition. And so this person had talent.

It was clear. And so we were like, just so you know, we're hiring him no matter what. And so we're either going to put him in your company or putting him with somebody else. They were like, okay, yeah, yeah, no, no, we want him. And so it's like, I think that's the level of talent is like you should feel FOMO when you're talking to the person. And here's the other litmus test that I love. I got this from Leila. If you were not learning on the interview from the candidate about the thing that they're supposed to take over, you shouldn't hire them.

because it means that you know more than them, which means that you're required for them to be successful, which means that they need you, and you don't get leverage. Yeah. Dude, that's way better. So I used to use this Larry Page proxy. So he would just get bored on all these interviews, right?

You know, one of the founders of Google. And he would be like, yeah, so like, tell me about something you're passionate about. Okay, great, you're going to teach me for seven minutes. So he can learn something. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you think about from a chunked up example, an organization grows if the cumulative knowledge base of the company grows.

And so if you bring somebody in who you have their entire complete knowledge set about whatever the subject matter is, then the organization doesn't grow. Just as simple as that. And if you were the smartest person in your business, then it means that the business will be capped by your brain. If you have four other people who have huge trench knowledge, Then I see it as this like, in my head, I see it as this Christmas tree where like if you have four like this, the peak goes way above because you have this wider, wider top. So the peak is way, way higher.

Whereas if you're the single brain at the top, the peak is the top of your head. Yeah. That's like how I visualize. Very small Christmas tree. Yeah, very small Christmas tree. Exactly. Dude. No presents.

That's good. So actually, we have a couple minutes left here, but the Layla conversation is going to be really focused on talent acquisition because that that is the game. So anyway. She's a G on it. You're just savage. I mean, speaking of savages. So, A, yes, both of your savages in a good way, obviously. But B, when you find this talent, right, like, I tell people, I tell my staff, it's like, dude, you know.

And if you have that feeling, that little gut feeling, you pull the trigger. You don't wait that long. Yeah, because the next person in the interview with Ohio. Yeah, totally. So you'll do it on the spot sometimes. We don't do, I mean, we still follow a process, but we do 24-hour turnarounds to move things forward. There you go, yeah. But usually your turnaround's like completely.

We try and do everything one day apart. We always try to do that. We have really good metrics around HR. Our cost to fill is way below industry average. Our time to fill roles is like 22 days versus industry average is much higher. Our two-sided fit at 90 days, which is one of our key metrics, is that the person above the person and the person both say that it was a perfect match 90 days later. Two-sided fit.

I like that. You guys came out with that one too? Well, director of HR did. And that was because she came from Audax, a private equity firm. and so she was director of people there. And so on the interview, she was teaching, she gave all these metrics that I didn't, like, time to fill. And I was like, why have I never tracked this?

Like, that's so smart. And she's like, what's the cost to fill? And here I am thinking, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm this big metrics guy. I know the cost of our customer, CPM, CPA, all these things. And she was like, oh, you don't know what your cost to fill was. And I was like, wow, like such an idiot myself. And so that's why, like, that's why you need really smart people around you because, like, I learn from from her all the time.

you should feel like an idiot when you're talking to high caliber prospects. About their subject. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Cool. You know, so I'm going to go back to a story here because we have a guest question here.

But we were eating lunch one time and your order was, give me four chicken breasts. Tell us about the, I've seen the video you have with the ice cream and all that. How is your diet? Like, what is the question here from my buddy is, what is Alex's fitness routine aside from what he has said? And I was a diet as well.

Yeah. Like right now I haven't worked out in like three or four weeks, which is not as common for me. But I go through seasons. I would say like I didn't miss more than a week of working out for like 16 years. Wow. And then I, in my old age, you know, I'm crossing 19 years of training now. So I've like, for everyone who's like the entrepreneurs who like all of a sudden decide to like start getting into fitness and then they start lecturing people when they've only been doing working out for like two years. I read the book and the article and I know the guy who wrote it and I know how he makes

his money and you're not seeing the whole truth but that's okay uh which article are you from oh I'm just saying like in general in general like whatever that thing is that you're like really obsessed about right now it's because you understand it very like I'm all keto I'm intermittent fasting I do high carb you know high carb or I only do vegan or I like whatever make believe thing you have like there's a few things that matter and everything else is just preference you know what I mean and so I don't know if this is a novelism but like if you can't do it for a decade don't do it a day. And so there's definitely been seasons would all train harder. But overall, I do resistance training because it's the number one thing for longevity, maintaining bone mass, et cetera. And then from

a health perspective, it just comes down to calorie intake from a body aesthetics and then making sure that you have the vitamins that you need in micronutrients. But like for most people in the developed world, we don't normally have vitamin deficiencies and we usually don't have mineral deficiencies. again, that clinic that you go to where they do the blood work and they can have you chew on something and then spit it out and it does pink and then you take a supplement and then it's blue. You have to understand that these are also businesses. I come from the health and fitness world. Like there's games behind these things. And so I try to keep things as simple as possible. I eat two pounds of me today. That's how I get my 200 grams of protein in. That is very easy for me to do.

And then I have dessert in excess of my calories to hit my goal. If I want to lose weight, I eat less dessert. If I want to maintain weight, I eat the same amount. If I want to gain weight, I'll add other calories to my other meals that have meat in them. So rather than just meat, I'll have meat and pasta, meat and rice, whatever. But training has been progressive overload on resistance training, meaning weights and machines and plate loaded machines for almost two decades. Is there anything else?

I think you probably, my guess here is that you started out and then you tried all the things. It's like, no, let's just simplify it to these and these work. do you do anything around anything else that's strange like preventative health care people like oh yeah the MRI scans all this type of stuff I don't maybe I will later but right now I don't I've um I focused I mean all the things that I just mentioned so like I did kettlebell only training I did barefoot training I did exclusively swim sprint training um I've done high intensity interval training I've done um like all strong man style training I was a competitive power lifter for five years um and now people would probably consider me more like a bodybuilder ask in terms of

training style and aesthetics. And so like I have done a lot of different styles of training. And when it comes to diet, I did the warrior diet when you ate one big meal at night. I've done intermittent fasting. I've done alternate day fasting. I've done, I've done keto. I've done all the opposite of keto. So like high carbs, super low fat, high protein. I've done zone. I've like I have done them and it was because in my first decade of fitness, you hop on all of these trains because part of it is like you want to experiment you want to learn you want to see how you react and part of it is because you believe the magic right there's something different but there's a few fundamental truths and they all come down to physics which is just like

law of thermodynamics like there's a certain amount of energy that you consume and if you have less than that you will lose fat period it will get taken from energy stores like well what about starvation mode and things like that like there was a minnesota starvation study where they star people for like months no food and the biggest decrement they saw in basal metabolic rate was 30%. And so that means that when you're truly starving, your BMR goes to 70%, which, I mean, is significant, but it's also not like, like the women that I used to, you know, have at my gym, like I think I'm in starvation mode. I was like, I think you just snack. You know, like, I was like, if you want to see starvation mode, go to Africa. Like, none of them have cellulite

because they are starving. Like, you know, we use these words, but like in order to truly get that level of decrement and decrease in your, you know, BMR, You have to really be restricting for a very long period of time. And most people don't even track what they eat. And so like if you don't track what you eat, it's kind of like the guy with the opinion. Like I don't, I don't care. Like you don't even have data. And the thing with any of these diets or at least approaches is you have a certain calorie

intake that you maintain your body weight at. The thing that fudges this is that people are very bad at measuring what they take in, like what they eat. and there, but that's even, that's still easier than measuring what your output is because you have non-exercise activity that really, so like if I'm, if I'm bobbing my foot or I'm chewing more gum or I'm taking the stairs more, I'm cleaning the house, like those few hundred calories a day over a week or over a month add up a lot. And so usually what happens is when you get older, your metabolism doesn't necessarily decrease nearly as much as people's activity decreases.

And so they think that their metabolism is really slow, but it's like when you were 20, you were in two rec leagues and you had to walk cross campus at college and you were walking three miles a day and you'd even notice it, right, with a backpack on. That was like 25 pounds, right? Like it was rucking now, but like you just had a backpack as you were a student. And so it's just like we have these perspective ships that have to happen, but there's a few things that happen. Progressive overload, meaning you lift more weight over time works. That builds muscle, right? Protein increase builds and maintains muscle. Hormones, build and maintain muscle. Calorie surpluses help maintain anabolic states.

Calorie deficits, you lose tissue. You go into catabolic states, period. That's it. The rest of it is preference. Look, I think this all wraps well together because the reason I bring this up to is because you simplified it. And just like business, it comes down to people, right?

A lot of blocking and tackling. Same thing with the health stuff, too. It's like, there's a lot of distractions. Oh, there's this new diet over here. Oh, should we like cold plunge or should we like infrared sauna? Like should we, I don't know, blue light blocking, whatever, right? But it just comes down to the simple stuff.

And I talk about this just for context. So this is for you guys. You can add it back in. This is purely from the perspective of aesthetics. If you want to maintain a certain amount of body mass with a certain percentage of fat and certain percentage of muscle, those are the only things that matter. The other stuff, it gets into, you know, magic

and all the stuff that I don't partake in. And what's interesting is like, I don't talk about fitness much. And it's mostly because I am so, I mean, it's been 20 years. So like I'm, I've been in, I've been knowing about fitness for longer than I've known about business for a context. And so I also did that professionally for a very long time. And a lot of like the YouTube world and like the influencer world or people that follow me don't know. Like they see that I'm quote jacked. But like I wrote the plans that 4,000 gyms use.

Like you've probably used my stuff. and so, you know, people are like, oh, this guy has such great thinking, but then if I make a comment about food, then everyone feels entitled to an opinion because they have a body. Right. Yeah, yeah. Right. So they, but like they, how many people have you helped change like their physiques? Probably not many. And you probably can't even change your own.

So like it's kind of like in business where like no one wealthier than you will take shots at you. Yep. No guy who's ever been more jacked than me has ever said anything negative to me. about fitness stuff. It's only like laptop warriors and whatnot. And so like, again, my level of care is so much more passionate about helping people make money to like sustain their families and whatnot. And I don't have a lot of passion anymore around fitness.

And maybe it's been two decades and maybe that's why. But yeah, to me it's the equation's been simplified. And the thing is that business, I remember this. There was a moment when I stopped reading Teenation. And my dude, that's not where I got my source of content. But I'm just saying, teen nation. It was like back in, I mean, back in like the early two. thousands okay there's like all these articles for like lifting and nutrition and stuff and I

remember there was a day when I was like I think I get it like I I human bodies haven't changed and so I I have a sufficient amount of knowledge to do all the things that I need to do and to help other people do what they need to do and so my consumption of new stuff dropped dramatically because everything at this point is such a small increment in terms of changes in physique and performance and all that stuff that like sleeping well eating your protein and working out are still so big compared to everything else

that it just doesn't matter and the reason I think I got into business and I've stayed and I think I will continue to be interested in business whereas my love of fitness started to wane is because business changes all the time

so like bodies haven't changed but business and the market changes all the time and I think that's why I love. Best game ever all right last question for you your coach is 80 year old Alex if not mistaken

what are some things that 80 year old Alex Alex has told you recently. Sometimes you have to give time time. I mean, most of the themes of my 85-year-old self, like if there was like a handful of themes that our conversations lead toward, one is like, this doesn't matter.

Like it's going to work out either way. And since it's like basically just zoom out. So that's probably one. A second theme is just around patience, which is like, I think you just need to stay busy. I don't think you need to do anything about this. So that's the second one. I think redefining problems is not problems.

Like my undefeated heavyweight champion of the world's solution is decide something isn't a problem. Okay. I like that. Like how do I solve this? It's like, what if I just decided it wasn't a problem to begin with and kept living my life? And that a lot of times when you're 85, I feel like you have more of that perspective. It's like, that's just not. I'm just not going to decide that's not a problem.

Yeah. No fuck's given. Right. And so I would say those are three. But dude, patience is by far. biggest one. And I'll give the fourth, embracing uncertainty. Because I, and many of us, want a guarantee from a world that doesn't give them. It's like, I want to know that this is going to work, which is such a fallacious thought at the onset, because if I actually knew beyond a

shadow of a doubt that something would happen, I would lose all interest because then it would be boring. It's like having the cheat codes and playing a video game. It's good for like five seconds, and then you realize it's not a challenge at all. And, and it's not a challenge at all. And so, like, I have this desire that if it actually were met, would be the ultimate undoing of my desire. So it's just a complete smokescreen that I've made up in my head. And so my 85-year-old self just, I would see, like, most of the time, it just points. It doesn't have to say anything. He's just like, you know, like, yeah.

But it's crazy, though, how powerful it is because I don't have, like, if I had a therapist or a coach or something, I'd have to spend 90% of my time trying to give context to the problem that I know the answer to. And I'm just not doing it. Like, we give significantly better advice to other people than we adhere to ourselves. That's the paradox you're talking about. Solomon's paradox. Yeah. Yeah.

And so if we can harness our own ability to give better advice with the absolute context that we have on our situation and the aligned incentives that we have, that no one else can have as aligned incentives for us as we are, then I think it unlocks another level of quote coaching that's been tremendously helpful for me. And I would say that I haven't, like my sessions with Solomon, even though it's me, but I just call it Solomon, in my head. Sometimes they're really long and sometimes they're short because sometimes like things are working and I'm good. And so I kind of see it as like the therapist or the performance coach that is on demand.

Like if I need him, he's there and I have a blocked hour in my calendar every Monday. It's the first thing I do every Monday is having my time with Solomon. But it's rare that I take the full hour. It's usually between five minutes and 30 minutes is usually what. Are you sitting around and you walk in? Oh, no, I'm at my computer. So I actually do a chat back and forth and I go from him to me, him to me, him to me. And I type out all the responses because I think even typing out what my question is,

even like many problems, if you can probably ask the right question, that's 90% of the solution, is asking the right question or precisely stating the problem you're trying to solve. And so that process helps me solve most of the issues that come up that aren't really issues to be in one. I love it. Well, I know we can go on forever, but we're going to end it right here. So what is the best way for people to find the book? And I mean, just Google Alex Ramozy, right? How do you find the book?

Yeah, you can go to Amazon. But if you want to go to Acquisition.com forward slash leads, and we also have training and courses and other materials that are all free, no opt-in on the site at Acquisition.com. And if you are a company and you have an EBIT of a million, $2 million, $5 million, $8 million, hit us up. We're always looking for great founders who are looking for growth partners. because that's what our day job is. All right. I love it.

Alex, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for that.