The Game with Alex Hormozi - Unrealistic Expectations of Education | Ep 273

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Am I closer or further away from my goal? Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares his thoughts on how expectations of education can be the root of many people’s failures in life, how we can keep ourselves grounded whenever we project absurd expectations, and the “winning formula” to improve your outlook.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:(1:20) - Change happiness by expecting less(2:49) - Issue with binary outcome in learning and goals(5:50) - Toxic belief: making money after graduation(7:44) - Does a non-priority align with your ultimate goal?(12:06) - Ask if expectations are reasonable and can be loweredFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

I think that expectations are literally the thing that will destroy your life or will make your life. 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. What's going on, everyone? I hope you're having a phenomenal weekend, restful time. This podcast is dedicated to all of the younger entrepreneurs out there. So this is a little departure from the normal business owner,

but I think that you'll still find value in it if you know any younger entrepreneurs or you have you know, teenagers or kids or, you know, college, you know, college-aged people slash maybe even people in their 20s 30s, right, who are getting into business. And so maybe you left your job and you're getting into business now, whatever, right? This would apply to you. And it's regarding expectations. And I think that expectations are literally the thing that will destroy your life or will make your life.

And many of us, I think many people in general have, you know, figured out and many world religions have figured this out, which is, you know, the secret to happiness is halves over wants, which is, let's say you have, you know, have one thing and you want nothing, you will be infinitely happy. The problem is where you might have a million things, but you want two million things and you will not be happy, right? And so you can simply change how happy you are by expecting less. And so one of the things that I specifically wanted to address today was the expectations around education. And the reason this is a really meaningful topic for me is that I think I've talked to you

about my neighbor. And watching him go through the crazy expectations that he has as a young person that's been really valuable for me because I've also seen a lot of those characteristics that he has in myself just add zeros to it, but it's still fundamentally the same thing. And that's what's been, it's been meaningful for me. And so anyways. I have tried to frame things. So if you are trying to learn things, which is going to be the first step to any kind of

entrepreneurial endeavor, is I like to liken everything to a bridge because I think it's a simple visual. So imagine where you are on one side of this valley, right, is where you are. And where you want to go is on the other side of this big valley, right? And you have a bridge that goes across the two sides. Now, the problem is that people will buy things, they will buy courses, they will buy mentorships, they'll buy workshops, they'll buy seminars, they'll buy events, they'll buy whatever, right?

In an effort on some level to get over this bridge, right, of where they are to where they want to go. And it could be from zero to $100,000 a year, it could be from a million dollars a month to $2 million a month, it could be from $100 million a year to a billion a year. Whatever it is, there's a bridge, right? And along that bridge are bricks. And I like to liken each skill as a brick on the way to where you're trying to go. And the problem with the expectations of somebody who's trying to learn a skill or achieve a goal

is that they have a binary outcome. I either achieved it or I did not. I either am making $100,000 or I am not. And the problem is it can be incredibly frustrating because if you have a binary outcome, then it's very easy to get a zero out of one, right? where the reality is most things exist on a continuum. So this is the difference between a psychological binary and the biological continuum, which is I'll give you a couple of examples.

So it's not are you diabetic or you not diabetic, it's how diabetic are you? It's not are you smart or are you dumb, but it's how smart are you, right? And so we like to psychologically bucket things into yes, knows because it's simpler for us, but it misses actual reality, right? And this can be especially dangerous as we're trying to acquire new skills. And so the reason I liken this, and I think it's so dangerous in education, because that's what we're doing, right? If we're trying to educate ourselves, we're trying to acquire skills, is that we think as we're trying to get across this bridge that, let's say you buy a course on copywriting, right? And so you're on one side of the bridge, you buy a course on

copywriting, and then you still aren't a millionaire. Wow, right? The problem is, you may have put another brick on your bridge. You may be closer to where you were to getting to the other side of the bridge. You just haven't achieved it yet. And so this is one of the issues that I also see just in general. It's so funny because in the, I'll say, quote, guru world, you know, people will take on a coach. That coach will move them forward, you know, to a certain degree.

And then they'll take another coach, and that coach will move them forward to a certain degree, and so forth and so on. And then the thing is that they're like, I'm working with so-and-so. So I used to work with that person, they suck, right? But the problem, and I used to do this, right? And this is why I think it's so ridiculous. Is that, like, if you were looking at your schooling, right? And you had a third grade math teacher,

and then later you had a calculus teacher, you wouldn't be like, screw that third grade math teacher. The stuff that I'm learning from this guy is so much, you know, more advanced, whatever, right? And I've had a lot of our clients say that about their franchises that they work with and things like that. And I just, it drives me nuts because it's, it's stupid, you know, it's for lack of it's stupid. Because a lot of times you need, you need step one to get to step two, right? And you don't have to, and it's because people have psychological issues, but like, they can't, they can't say I've learned from all of these people, right? And it doesn't decrease your status to say I've learned from many teachers. Look at all the richest people in the world. They say, like, I've had multiple mentors. I've had so many people help me out over the years. And I think if you can shift that perspective, it will be incredibly valuable for you. But one of the other things, that's so poisonous about, especially in the, like, the quote, make money world, is that if we,

if everyone in the world viewed college, because I think about this a lot, I'm like, why is it that people will spend $200,000, four years of their lives, study, you know, Aztec literature of the 1700s and get to the end and not in any way be upset about the fact that they're not making money when they graduated. They can't even get a job. Like, why is that? And the only reason that I can come up with is that they didn't expect to, right? And so that's it. Like, that's the difference is that people come in, and part of that is because the marketing messaging and the sales

and all that kind of stuff. So don't get me wrong. Like, the reason that, you know, the big academic powerhouse has been able to stay there, well, one is because they got the government to get on board and give away free money, so that's obviously one part of it. But the other part of it is that when people are coming in, they expect nothing. Like, nothing, literally.

They're not expecting anything. They expect to get a checkmark next to the name that says, you have a diploma, congratulations, right? And so if my request of everyone, and I've requested this of myself, is that when I go into trying to learn something, that I do not give myself a binary outcome of, did this work or did not work,

but instead give myself the question, am I closer or further away from my goal? And I think that has been tremendously helpful. I've spent, I mean, recently, I spent $50,000 on I think eight hours with someone. It was different than the Grant Cardone one that I did.

That was four hours for 120,000 if you're curious. And honestly, I got enough value in the first hour that I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do with the next three calls. With Grant, it was really good.

But the point is, with the other one that I did, it was actually to have assistance on a higher level project that I was working on. And about halfway through, I realized that it was not a priority for me.

And so I could either say this got me, you know, I'm not going to be like, hey, screw this guy, right? Or anything like that. It was just for me, if I can get the perspective that something is not a priority, that is valuable in and of itself. And so does that take me closer or further to my ultimate goal? Closer. 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'd like to hear more about it.

Go to acquisition.com. You can apply anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see. if we can help you get there. Why would I be satisfied? And so shifting our education expectations to, is this another brick on the bridge to where I'm trying to go, or instead of, excuse me, instead of, am I at my destination or not?

And I think that this is probably one of the biggest things that you can do, or it's been useful for me. And this is what I've tried to shift my neighbor's perspective for himself on, which is it's kind of alignment with that kind of investor mindset, which is if I were to look over a five-year time horizon and I were to continue to acquire skills like this, and I put more and more bricks on my bridge, by the end of that period,

would I be better or worse off? And likely it'd be better, but you will be worse off if you keep trying to build a new bridge, right? And that's why when you jump from opportunity to opportunity, a lot of times you can never get to where you're trying to go because you take two steps of progress and say, oh, I'm not there, binary outcome,

therefore I will start something else. and it's only after failing three, four, five, six things that on the seventh thing, you had enough acquired skills from your first six failures that you are actually able to make it all the way across the bridge. And that's what's kind of interesting about this is that like there are plenty of people who, you know, have come to us and immediately start making a lot of money, right?

And then they're like, oh my God, Jim Watch is awesome. And the thing is that like, we don't honestly deserve all the credit because you probably, like some of these people may have gone through three, four, five courses that they believe failed them, when in reality there may be 38 skill sets that they need to create their business, you know, core skills, and they may have acquired 24 of them from other people, and we just happen to be able to get them the last 14 that gets them all the way across, but because they have a binary outcome expectation, they then attribute all the credit to us, and I don't think that's fair, you know, to themselves in terms of their mental space, but also

to everyone else that they've worked with, right? And so I think thinking about it this way has been really helpful. And especially, and this is, again, I mentioned the franchisor one earlier, but I'm going to say it again. I can't tell you the amount of facilities specifically that worked with the franchisor and then said, you know, started working with us, started making more money and we're like, I hate my franchisor, you got, you know, like, screw them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is that many times, they wouldn't have even survived long enough without the the fundamental bricks that have been laid by the franchisor with their business model. There's so many fundamentals that they may not even been aware of and mistakes that they would

have made that were avoided because the franchisor got them 70% of the way across the bridge, right? And we just got them the last 30, right? And so another perspective on this as well is that let's say you've got two people who both have all 38 bricks on this bridge, right? On the path of your opportunity vehicle you're trying to pursue. pursue to get to the other side. Now let's say both of them have all 38 bricks. But with your learning style and their teaching style, you're only able to absorb 25 of the first guys. It's

kind of the same thing, right? It's like for some reason, maybe the first person you worked with taught you at a cell, but it didn't absorb or it wasn't real for you. And then later on in your life, it was able to be real for you. And then you attribute your success. to the second person when in reality, the first person helped you along the way. And so this has just been really valuable for me from a shift in perspective in my overall happiness, but also just in thinking about outcomes and what do I believe is reasonable. And I think I've been asking myself this question much more frequently, which is do I believe my expectations are reasonable?

And is there a way that I can lower them? and there's difference between lowering your expectations of the performance you want of people. I believe you should be absolutely intolerant of people who do not want to be world-class at something. Or you should be intolerant of any lack of effort. But if you can maintain absolute intolerance to anything but excellence, but then also decrease your expectations of the outcome, then that is going to be a winning formula. So increase expectations on activity and actions,

decrease expectations on outcomes, and I think that that is a formula for business success just as haves over wants is a formula for happiness in life. And so anyways, I figured I would share that with you. Just quick recap of takeaways. Try not to think about things, or at least for me, this has been valuable. I have shifted to going from binary, is this good, is this bad, to how good is it? And instead of thinking this is what it needs to happen is, A, first, is that a reasonable expectation? and B, can I lower it?

And B, and C, can I raise my expectations of the activities that I would be willing to take to make my very low expectation so believably reasonable to achieve that I should hopefully surpass it? And so I think when we go into expectations around education and skill acquisition and thinking about things on the continuum

of am I closer or further from my goal as a result of this decision, many times we will think much more faith. about our experience and be significantly less frustrated with what might be perceived as a momentary quote setback, which isn't even a setback, it's only a setback because we think it is, rather than I am 22 of my 38 steps along the way, and I just need to continue to identify which are the bricks that I am missing to get me to my goal, which is ultimately the role, which is why so many billionaires, et cetera, talk about having good mentors, because they can look at your skill set, they can look at your bridge and say,

this is what's missing, this is what you need. is that when it's sometimes that last brick, it's that one thing that you need that you didn't see and then all of a sudden you attribute all your success to that person when in reality it was because you spent four years building the other bricks. So anyways, hope that was valuable before you. Hope that made sense. Keep being awesome and having a happy and productive life. All right. Lots of love. Stay real. Bye.