The Game with Alex Hormozi - Turning Adversity in Victory | Ep 677

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

"If you want the things that everyone else doesn't have, you have to act in ways that everyone else doesn't act in." Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the idea of overcoming difficult situations and becoming a champion rather than letting those situations make you weaker. He emphasizes the importance of the story that we choose to tell ourselves and its impact on our ability to overcome adversity.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:(0:44) - The mindset of champions(2:09) - When personal issues impact work(3:38) - The power of perception(9:09) - Unconditional love and the harsh reality of conditions(10:30) - Crafting your story(12:49) - Using adversity as fuel to winFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was on August 13, 2019)

No one gives a shit. No one cares. And so if you accept that and realize that your excuse of what happened is irrelevant to the outcome that you want, then you can kind of in some way get peace about the fact that, cool, what story are people going to tell about this situation? 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 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 an Enjoy. It's going on on everyone. Today, I've, I had, like, this is kind of a culmination of like three or four things that I'm just kind of putting together. And I think it's going to turn out well. But it kind of stemmed from just just a few different, you know, small, minor situations that kind of bubbled into this overarching concept, which is like, if shit happens, do you overcome shit or do you become shit? And what I mean by that is that, like, a lot of times there's a saying, like, bad things happen in threes. I don't know if you've ever heard that. Bad things happen in threes. I actually think there's a lot of truth to the saying.

And I don't think it's because of some karmic force or some universal force of threes that sends negative things your way, but because people become shit when shit happens to them. And so if you look at like champions, and so like I like using that term because I just love the word champion. But champions are unreasonable in how they bounce back from failure and how they bounce back from shit happening, right? Adrian Peterson tore his ACL, which is an end, you know, a career ending injury for just about everyone. and then comes back and almost sets the record for the NFL in rushing it, right? You know, Lance Armstrong gets testicular cancer and then all of a sudden wins, you know, the Toronto France a bunch of times, right? And so it's because like those guys have the mindset of champions, which is there are most

people where it would be reasonable for them to have shit happen, to get cancer, to blow your ACL, to have your business partner leave, to have your trainer leave with customers, whatever it is, right, for you, and then to have your life go to shit. And so recently we had, I had, there was a team member of ours who had just had a bunch of personal things happen to him in his normal life, right? And the problem was, is that after that happened, it affected his work. And then his performance started the slip. And so then we had to let him go. And so the difficult, and I can think, I'm thinking about his perception of life in the universe and the world. And because he acted in a completely reasonable way. He was completely

distraught. He was extremely upset. It bubbled into his work. It bubbled into his life. I'm sure if he had a girlfriend or maybe he doesn't have a girlfriend. I don't know. Like, I'm sure it affected that relationship too. And maybe she will then see him and say like, man, you're not the way you used to be anymore. You're always negative. You're always down on yourself. And then she breaks up with him. And it's like, oh, my God, within the span of a couple weeks, I had, you know, this horrible thing happened. And then I got fired from my job. And then my girlfriend broke up with me. But the reality is that they're all connected, right? And so the saying, like, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is not true

because for most people, what doesn't kill them makes them weaker, right? It just injures them even more and more and more. And you look at the people who are at the end of their life versus the beginning of their life, and what ends up happening is they just look beat up and used, right? Because they didn't, they let these situations that happen to them in their life beat the strength out of them rather than beat the strength into them. Right. And so I think that's the fundamental difference that happens between like champions,

right? It's like, do you let the world, do you let life beat the strength out of you or beat it into you? And for me, a lot of it is the story that we choose to tell ourselves. And so, like, and I, I'm probably sadistic in this way, but like, if something really bad happens, I get this weird amount of excitement because I am excited about the story that I'm going to be able to tell based on this low and how I overcame. And so there are people who get broken up with and then gain 30 pounds and become hermits and live inside, which is a completely reasonable human response. But it doesn't make you a champion. It makes you reasonable. It makes you normal. It makes you like everyone else. And so if you want the things that everyone else doesn't have, you have to act in

ways that everyone else doesn't act in, which means you have an unreasonable response to trauma, an unreasonable response to pain. And it's that not only are you as good as you were before, but you're better. You double down. You say, I'm not going to let this thing affect this. And and to go over and above, I'm going to sink myself into this next thing and go all in on that to make it a positive instead of a negative. And so within the psychology world, they call it supplementing, which means basically taking transferring energy from like a negative to a positive. So that's where, let's say somebody who's an addict, right, will quit their addiction, but then they will throw themselves into an addiction of fitness, right? Which if you're if you're comparing cocaine or heroin addiction to working out a lot, it's a much better addiction, right? And so it's called some of the meaning.

So they're taking their, the thing that used to help them cope with stress that was a negative was a tractor and then puts it into something that was positive because we all cope. Right. Like that happens no matter what, independent of who you are, if you have any trauma, you will cope. It's just how do you cope? How do you cope with shit? Like, do you let that become the impetus, the story of how you're not going to lose, how you're going to win no matter what the circumstances are, right? If your partner leaves you and takes 50% of the business, are you going to let that be the story? of why you failed.

Because then you can tell everyone when you failed, hey, my partner took out my business and then my business failed and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And everyone will be like, oh, poor you. Like, and they would be right in saying that. And you would be reasonable in having that be a reason that you went out of business, right? But at the end it doesn't matter because what matters is who wins in the end. That's it.

Right. And so one of the, and this is what I'm going to circle to is what was going to be a commentary. But I think it wraps so well into this is that everyone, perceives pain the same. And what I mean by that is what one rich girl who gets brought up in a spoiled household when her dad doesn't show up to her, you know, her ballet performance, it could be a 10 out of 10 trauma for her, right? And then on the flip side, you hear someone who's raised on the other side of the train tracks, who was just happy that her dad remembered her name, right? Or was just happy

that your dad showed up once every month, right? And you can see this juxtaposition. And externally, we want to give an absolute judgment on how much pain did they really experience. But humans don't work that way. 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. They don't work in absolute sense. It's in relative scales.

And for that person, the pain may have been the same. It may have even been higher for the ballet girl because expectations are the things that yield pain when they're not met. If you look at suicide rates between ethnicities, there are a propensity of suicides among very high earning, very what would be considered successful, like white and Asian like ethnicities. There's a higher suicide rate, right? Higher SCS, higher socioeconomic status.

So to say that you, like, to trying to track from someone's pain because of the absolute thing that happened to them is irrelevant and doesn't actually address the fact that pain is pain to everyone. And so for you, in your circumstance, your 10 out of 10 pain is the same as everyone else is. And so the question is, how do you react to your 10 out of 10 pain? And how you react is going to predicate whether you become a champion or not. And that's it. And I think for me, the biggest coping mechanism that has been useful in times that have been hard is what story do I want to tell? What story do I want told about me in these situations? When I was slipping on the floor at the first gym, it was really hard for me.

Right. It was very hard. But I kept thinking, I'm going to be able to say I came from this, right? I'm going to be able to say I came from this to go to go. right and so it's it's just like when you have the the husband who cheats on you or the wife who cheats on you or the person who breaks up with you or whatever it is there's there is the reasonable thing to do which is to fail which is to suck and that's what most people do and that's why things happen that are bad in strings of things right they they get broken up with then they lose their job and then they

then they you know all of these other things happen but because they let one thing affect everything rather than letting one thing make them stronger right and so at the end of all of this, I guess I kind of just wanted to say that the market doesn't care, right? Your your coworker doesn't care. Your lover, your boyfriend, your wife, on some level, doesn't care. And what I mean by that is that like, it's not in a like bash humanity way, but like people are self-serving.

The reason a lot of times people end up together is because the way that you make them feel about themselves. That's the difference. Most people a lot of times feel like, well, I, unconditionally love X, Y, Z. A lot of parents like, I unconditionally love my child. No, you know. You say you did. But you really don't. If they, if they came and they burned down your house and started just going into all of the things that you hate in the world, it became a criminal. And basically, so far beyond that people would say it was reasonable for you to give up on them. Most people would, right? Most people would. There are, there's, in my opinion, there's no such thing in the human world of unconditional. There are conditions. It's just, we're able to push further. for family, but it doesn't mean it's unconditional. And so to the same degree, the people you work with, your clients, your business partners, whatever it is, have conditions.

And so despite the fact that you might be right, and you can tell your friends and you can tell your mom and you're like, you wouldn't believe all the stuff that happens. And she's like, oh, honey, I'm so sorry for you. No one gives a shit. No one cares. And so if you accept that and realize that your excuse of what happened is irrelevant to the outcome that you want, then you can kind of in some way get. piece about the fact that, cool, what story are people going to tell about this situation?

Because when you have that low, you have the potential to have a higher high. I'm going to say this in a different way. When you have that horrible thing happened to you, there are two stories that can be told, right? If there's the guy that nothing happens to and then he's successful, the story is not nearly as compelling, not nearly as inspiring, right, as status producing, as a story where someone lost it and then despite that succeeded anyway through grit and tenacity, which big secret, everyone was at the top, succeeded despite that because bad shit happens

to everyone, right? It rains on, those it like, you know, fortune reigns on the good and the bad either. I'm totally butchering that, but you get what I'm saying here. And so the question is, once it happens, do you want the story to be A, he succeeded or she succeeded despite those horrible things that happened to her or him? Or do you want the story to be she or he failed? And it's reasonable. Like, oh, poor them. I can't believe all that stuff happened to them. Boo-hoo. And then they just move on with their day because no one cares. And at the end of the day, the goal that you have is going to be on the other side of the story that you were

going to not only have told about you, but that you will be telling yourself. And so that that story is going to be the thing that when you do achieve the mountain top, you will be able to look at people with certainty and conviction about not being concerned about the future because you know what you have gone through in the past. And most people have gone through shit in their past, we all have, that should give you strength to face what's coming.

And so use that when you have shit that happens to you. If you have the partner that leaves, think to yourself, was this harder than my dad beating me every day, right? I'm not saying my dad. My dad never touched me. But I'm saying the point is, Everyone has that story, right?

And ask yourself, is it harder than that? No, I overcame anyways. Right. So I can do this too. And this is the story that I choose to tell. And I'm going to double down harder than I ever did and use this as fuel to win harder. And that is what separates the champions from the knot. And that's why most people aren't champions because they crack under pressure.

And the next thing that happens is bad. Next thing that happens at bad. And then everyone says, poor you, it's so reasonable that you fit. So my, the inspirational tone for the message is just that shit's going to happen. And it's just a question of what story you want to tell about it and whether you're going to use that to make you stronger or let it make you weaker.