The Game with Alex Hormozi - Why I Don't Follow My Feelings | Ep 408

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

How do you redefine the terms? Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares with us why he chooses to not follow his own feelings, beliefs vs. assumptions, and how your mindset is heavily tied with your emotions that can influence the way you perceive and live life itself.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:(0:28) - The utility of observable actions over feelings in business(2:56) - The flexibility of beliefs and assumptions in shaping identity(4:18) - Embracing the spectrum of human emotion for a liberated existence(6:45) - The role of emotions in personal and professional life(8:16) - Redefining terms for mental wellness and acceptanceFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

If you can expose someone to a stimuli and get a consistent outcome, a lot of marketers and salespeople like to talk about the internal thoughts that someone's had. Like, first they need awareness, and then they need blah, blah, and then they need, and so they're basically just make up, they reverse engineer fictitious steps of someone's mental thought process when they have no evidence to support what someone's thinking at all. 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. I don't find it useful because it's not useful. Like, what are the things that are useful? Are the things that are observable that we can drive action towards that we create an outcome? And then we have a feedback loop. And so if we have those things, then we can move the variables and get closer to where we're trying to go. And the feelings, although I recognize that they exist, they're not helpful in trying to edit what our activities are.

I would say there are days that I feel like less energized or things like that for sure or not about like the big picture of like, I don't believe that this cause is not worthy. But I do think a lot of people have that too, where they're like, what I'm doing is meaningless, right? And then I get into, I think everything's meaningless. And then we can just create whatever meaning, you know, we choose to because if we don't believe in a capital M meaning, which a lot of people disagree with, that's fine. But if you don't believe in a capital N meaning, I think that's very freeing because then you can create little M meaning for whatever you want. And so if you believe you can then choose to to architect your own life in whatever ways that you deem meaningful and make the activities you do

aligned with that meaning. The difference between capital M meaning and little M meaning, and this is kind of like the basis of nihilism, which people have like a very negative viewpoint around, which I'm not entirely sure about why. But like capital and meaning means that like, this is the meaning of life, period, like for everyone, this is the meaning of life. Whereas if we say that there is no single agreed upon meaning of life and then people say, well, then that is your big meaning of life. And I'm like, yes, you're right. I believe that there is no meaning. That is the meaning that I believe. And they're like, well, then that is the capital. Then sure, that's my capital and meaning is that there is no meaning. meaning. What's the implication of that? It means now that we have meaning-making machines in our brain,

and so we get to create and destroy meaning as we see fit. And so if we choose an activity and we deem that goal meaningful because we think it's more interesting or it energizes us, then we can ascribe meaning to that and do more of it. And what's nice about not having capital M meaning is that that can shift, right? That might be good for a season, and then it can shift. I will say that the downside of not having capital M meaning, which I consider to be religion off the shelf, is that it's more difficult because you have no one who's saying, here's the big box of rules, you can read it, and then that way you don't have to make the decisions about it. But I think it's more difficult, but in ultimately more rewarding if you have reasoning behind why you believe what you believe.

Because then you have to independently come up with your own conclusions about those things. It also makes it malleable so that if you get new data or new evidence, then you can change your mind, which a lot of people, again, have difficulty with. But like, if you change the information, then it would make sense that if it materially changes the outcome that the way that you, the way that you, you believe about something should change. And I think a lot of people identify with their beliefs as a part of themselves rather than as what I prefer to call them, which is assumptions. Because they work the same way. What's the difference in belief and an assumption? Not a lot, right? The only difference is just what we call the word. And so assumptions are based on things that we've observed and then we

assume something as a result. And so I would say the beliefs are just assumptions. And but when you call them that, they become less tied to your identity. If you have an assumption, you don't say, you challenged my assumption. It's like, well, yeah, you challenged my assumption. It's like, well, yeah, challenge my assumption. Oh, that's great. I was assuming this. It must be this. And then they become much more flexible. And then we don't tie our egos into them. And I think ultimately it serves more people better in the long run. I feel passionately about my viewpoint of the world, mostly because I struggled and I was in so much pain for such a long period of time. I'm only sharing this, despite the fact that I get attacked for sharing this, because there are people who this does

resonate with. Real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words so we can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I ask to do is you can just leave a review. It'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. When there is no required meaning, then a lot of language changes.

changes, which is should, must, need, have to, like all of these things no longer exist because there is no capital M meaning. So I don't should have to, must need to anything. And so a lot of the expectations that we bury ourselves into that weigh us down are just implied shoulds, have to's musts. And so if all of those disappeared, then in a lot of ways it's very liberating. And so for me, in business, it allows me to take actions even though I know that I shouldn't or must not or other people would judge me for not doing it the way that they thought I should do it because there are no rules, which is why that was the preface to the book. It's like, there are no rules. We can live our life whatever way we want to live it. And that's okay. I read a YouTube comment

the other day. It's like, hey, you know, you talk a lot about being sad and like, however you've been able to X, Y, and Z, and I don't identify with being a sad person. I think I have been sad in the past, but I also don't think that there's a problem with being sad. And so I think that there's just so much power and acceptance. So, like, so many people make themselves miserable because they think that they shouldn't be who they are and they shouldn't feel how they feel. And so much of the medication that gets prescribed right now is because someone's like, oh, I'm anxious. And why do we feel like someone shouldn't be anxious? They are human. Why do we feel like we shouldn't feel sad? We are human. Why do we feel like we shouldn't feel frustrated or angry? We are human.

And so I think it's one of the most, like, interesting things or phenomena where if you have a line, which is the normal human existence and you have points above the line and points below the line, you have the median, right? Or you have the middle point. And people want to not feel the things below the line. And then we ascribe or label the things below the line is bad and things above the line is good when all of it is. And so I think that if we just accept that and accept ourselves

and accept the feelings that we experience as things that we experience like rain and weather and sunshine, it's not like rain is bad, not like sunshine's good. It just is. Not like happiness is good or happiness is bad or sadness is bad or sadness is good. We just label it that way. And I think the labels create more suffering than anything that we ever actually experience. So when you're sad, do you try to not be sad? No.

I actually don't think about it much. I think a lot of people spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out how they feel because they want to then judge or label themselves as I'm doing well or not well. Like a lot of effort goes into telling you like, how do I feel about this? I mean, my follow-up question be like, why do you care? Why does it matter? And that's why when you asked way long ago about like, how much do you think feelings matter? I don't think they matter at all.

Like, what would the case for feelings mattering be? Then why do you believe they exist? It's a good question. And it gets really interesting because it's like how I experience a feeling that I label in my head is sadness. Is it the same way you experience the thing that you let? It's like seeing green and I see green and you see green. What if all of our greens are different, right? I mean, it gets very interesting like that.

But I think that I experienced something. And if we were to just measure it based on like brain activity and like heart rate, I would say that I become aroused in the literal sense from, experiencing what I would deem as emotions. And so if we were to describe it or define the term in that way, I think I experience emotions. And so, I mean, I'm fairly confident I experience emotions. If we were to try and measure it that way, then that's how I would say, yes, I do experience them. But the question is just like, how important are they? And then it would be like, for what? If it's for accomplishment, not very important. For fitness, not very important. You know,

if we're saying, how important is emotion for love, which is another emotion, right? It becomes like amorphous trying to go to amorphous, but then you say, okay, well, if we're defining love by what I'm willing to endure to continue to keep something, then how important is it? Well, it depends on how much I've conditioned myself to accept this thing. So, like, if I want to stay married, it's probably far more effective to condition someone to stay married because that is the external consequence of a good marriage as you stay together, right? I'm just saying, like, we're just purely measuring from external circumstances. And so I think trying to measure and define things is what I actually geek out on and I really enjoy. I think most people get bored

it's years when I talk about this stuff. So I don't talk about it much. But that's the stuff that like when we keep peeling back layers of like, why do you think you're able to get out of, you know, a difficult place in your life? Or why do you think you were able to go through these things? A lot of it is because I believe that I will redefine terms. And so we'll have some instance or something that I should do and I will redefine it or I'll say I don't should. I can just accept it. And that's why the biggest refrain that I have in my head for like my own mental illness is just like, and that's okay, period. Like, I don't want to go to that thing.

That's okay.