The Game with Alex Hormozi - Why I Work | Ep 351

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

The hard work itself is the goal. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the journey he went through when he wasn’t doing anything for almost a year and what got him out of that rut in his life.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: (2:33) - Wither without challenge. Assess "Why do I work?"(4:20) - Hard work worth doing. Focus on the present.(7:07) - Seek opportunity to work hard. Make work the goal.(9:30) - Praise ourselves based on hard work. Empowerment in work.(13:41) - Negative motivation is not true "work".Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

At this point in my life, I have enough passive investments that I make multiple million dollars a year without doing much. 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. And over the last nine months, I struggled mightily with this fact. And it was because I had completely reared myself from the portfolio of businesses that we own, which do about $85 million a year in revenue. What I want to talk about today is kind of what that nine to 12 month journey was for me, kind of living in pseudo retirement and the single thing that has gotten me out of it because I was candidly, you know, pretty depressed.

And I couldn't find a way out because I kept looking for the next goal post, right? The second championship ring because the desire was that that ring would somehow make the first one more valuable. And, you know, at the time of this making, you know, We've now crossed about a nine-figure net worth. I'm 32. My wife's 29. And I truly, it's hard for people to conceptualize this, but like I really don't need anything. Like I need nothing.

And as much as that has been the goal for a long time was to need nothing. It also introduces a new variable of needing nothing, which means that there is nothing for me to do. And so what I want to walk through is the kind of single phrase that I've been repeating. to myself over and over again and has become the chorus in my mental dialogue to myself. And it's around work. And so what I realized after pseudo-retiring and not really being involved in the businesses and having them continue to grow and continue to pump out cash flow is that, you know, the first thing that God gave Adam, and I'm not religious, but I think that there's power in this story. The first thing that God gave Adam was not Eve. It was a

job. It was work to do. And as humans, we wither without adequate challenge. We are formed against something else, right? The hotter of the fire, the heart of the steel. And so as a person who desires to continually grow, I had removed the challenges in my life and felt stagnated or stagnant as a result of no challenge. And so, I had to re-examine a lot of different pieces of my life, which is why do I work? And up to this point, the reason that I worked was for the outcome. It was for me to build up my net worth, to create financial freedom, to be able to have all the time to do the things I wanted to do. But in so doing, I removed the things that I actually wanted to do, which was challenges, which was work that I found meaningful with stakes that are real.

And so the single chorus that I continue to re-back to, and I'll show you the background on my phone, is hard work. That's it. And I love this proverb in the Bible. I can't remember which one it is. I can't remember. I want to say 14-3. But it's our work works on us more than we work on it. That's a loose paraphrasing.

But that's how I like saying it. Is that your work works on you more than you work on it. And so if I have the desire to grow, I must work. work. And the goal cannot be to stop working. That is what most people say. And I think it's because the word work still has terrible connotations in society. The amount of people who are like, man, you won't have to work ever again. Like, dear God, that sounds horrible. I just lived it. I never want to do it again. But hard work is work worth doing. The fact that it's hard makes it worth it. When you look back and when I look back at the times that I enjoyed most in our

entrepreneurial journey was the struggle, was the times of lacking, was the times where the stakes were high and we had to perform anyways, not because of the outside circumstances, because of what it told me about myself. We do not have values until they are tested. You cannot say you are loyal until you have a way to cheat on your spouse and know that no one will catch you. You cannot be honest until you have the ability to steal money and know that you will not be caught and then choose not to do it anyways. And so to the same degree, I cannot grow unless I have something to match the ability to conquer that I have now. Right? I have to match. I can't, I can't hang up my my suit, right? My arms, my weapons, just yet. And so what's interesting is that as I've

shifted my course to this thing, what a lot of people, when I share it, say, oh, yeah, because if you work hard, all the other things will follow. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You're missing it. And I had to correct this in my own head because that's how I started it. If I do the hard to work, the things will follow. And that's the common thing. Like, it's all about the process, not perfection. It's not about the outcome. It's about the journey. Like, Everyone says this shit, right? But deep down, they still want the outcome. And I'm telling you that removing the outcome truly has been the most liberating thing I've ever done.

And I can't begin to tell you the joy that I am feeling in being truly present because the work is the goal. The work is the goal. Like doing a good job is the goal. And so when I find myself at the gym, sometimes I would write, you know, I did eight reps when it was really seven and a half. And I'm like, why? The hard work is the goal. If I went up or I went down from last week, it's irrelevant. How hard I chose to work is the goal.

When I'm editing a paragraph from my next book, I'm like, oh, that's pretty good. And I'm like, you know it can be better. And then I remember, hard work is the goal. And so then I dive back in. when I'm tired and I don't really feel like giving Layla the emotional energy to be the husband that I know I should be or that rather I would like to be. I remember the chorus. Hard work is the goal. And so it gives me this renewed energy to not only be better, but to be present. And so I have the opportunity to work hard. And that's really the thing is that now I'm seeking opportunities to work hard. because the work is the goal.

And so right now, everyone's trying to shy away. Society's trying to tell us you shouldn't work. It's all about passive. It's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But work is the goal. And when you make work the goal, it allows the process itself to be meditated. It allows the process to get you into flow.

And for most of us, flow is some of the best feelings that we can have in our experience because we truly are in the moment. And so we do not work or try our best so that. We do not work hard. So then. We work hard, period. Because hard work is who we are.

Hey guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon. It's called $100 million offers at over 8,000 five-star reviews. It has almost a perfect sport. You can get it for 99 cents on Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing that book. And it's my biggest gift to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more.

And ultimately make more dollars to that later on in your business career, I can potentially partner with you. So that's my give. Go check it out. Amazon and back to the show. And this has been a credo that I have, I'm just beginning to internalize. And it has, it is giving me more presence than I've ever had. and it's amazing. And I know that I will fall short of hard work,

but I will be damned if I do not try in the present moment to work hard. And when I die, if all anyone says is that motherfucker worked hard, I don't know what else I would want anyone to say. Because the outcome is irrelevant. There's luck. There's outside circumstances, right? there's plenty of things that can affect how well you do. But if we can appraise our success based on how hard we worked and the work itself,

and only you know if you could have done better and if you chose not to. And I'm telling you the more times I recite this chorus in the present moment where I have the opportunity to finish and know that based on the standards of others, it's excellent. but not on my own. It takes you this, it takes the power back from the world and brings it in. Because I'm not allowing them to tell me how well I did. I'm not allowing chance or luck or chaos or circumstance or outcome to dictate how well I did. I know because the thing is that that stuff is irrelevant.

it. The only actual thing that we can control is the work we do now, the hard work. The work that we know that energy, by the way, side note, your ability to work itself is improvable. You can increase your capacity to work and to work hard and to work well by working hard and working well. And so the more work I do, the more work I become capable of. And it's fucking awesome. And so I'm telling you that I was so, so driven by first the outcomes that I wanted to have to impress other people. And then I would say the second kind of phase or season in my life was creating outcomes that would impress me. And I feel like the thing that I'm transitioning towards, which this last 12 months, has helped me make this transition.

And I'm sharing this with you because I have I have I've been to what most people consider the mountaintop, right? We cross a nine figure net worth. Mind you, I'm 2,000 times poorer than Jeff Bezos, but I'm still probably well through than the guys on Instagram. We're flexing, right? I've been to the mountaintop and I can tell you that there's nothing there. Nothing.

You feel nothing. So the same way you feel right now, truly, about the amount of money. or the amount of outcomes that you have supposedly achieved up to this point, everybody's achieved something. These things will be no more meaningful to you. The second ring does not somehow make the first more meaningful. Moving the goalpost does not make the thing more meaningful, which transitioned me to the third chapter, right?

The third season for me, which is that the hard work itself is the goal. And that's it. And when I look at my wife and I think, oh, I'm just going to say hi rather than saying, hey sweetie what's going on how can I help right if just like it doesn't like it's just mental energy of just trying harder just and then once I try hard over and over and over again that will become the new baseline and then I'll be able to try harder still and so it's been this repeated chorus in my mind when I'm at the gym when I'm talking to Layla when I'm working on a project when I'm making these videos try and work hard work

hard, hard work is the goal. And it feels amazing. Because there's nothing else. Because at the end of my life at least, if I look back and I had two lives, one life where I achieved everything that everybody thought, I would know that I would feel the same way I do now, which is not empty, but just nothing.

I feel the same as I did when I had $10 million, same as I felt when I had $1 million. same as I thought when I had a hundred thousand dollars. I felt the same. But if I look back and I can see that consistently, over time, I worked to the limit of my capacity to work, true and honest to myself. And so like I said at the very beginning of this,

you only have the value if you have the opportunity to not exercise it and do it anyways. So you cannot be loyal unless you have the opportunity to cheat and not get caught, and then you don't do it. That is when you have the gift of knowing and having evidence that you have loyalty. And so if I desire the character trait of hard work and work ethic, then the only way that I will be able to have that is to do work and know that I could work and stop and everyone else would be satisfied and I would have no negative status.

ramifications because most of us work to the point where we would have we reverse the negative status ramifications that the outcome of the work delivers all right so you do stuff just enough that your boss says it's good you do stuff just good enough that your clients think it's good but that means that you have the opportunity to work harder to work better to make it for its own sake for the sake of the work and chose not to and so therefore you cannot say we're claim that you know how to work hard. You work just enough to escape the social negative consequences. You are just loyal enough to not cheat on your wife because you know you get caught and the negative consequences outweigh it. You are just honest enough that you won't steal because you

don't want to get caught. And if you are only truly motivated by the negative consequence, then you do not have the value. And so the value that I am trying to grow in myself is the ability to work. And the beautiful thing about this is that I get to test this every fucking day, is that I can have work that is good enough that people will see it and think that's good stuff. And I would know that it wasn't as good as I could have made it. But I get that opportunity again tomorrow to try and raise the bar. And that is what I am focused on in this season. And so I love you all.

Mosy Nation, appreciate you. keep being amazing and I'll see you guys the next video. Bye.