The Game with Alex Hormozi - Why Winners Say No | Ep 988

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Book Your Spot at the Live Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas     The early stages of business growth require exploration. However, progressive scaling requires isolation, focus, and ruthless prioritization. In today’s episode, Alex explains why the best opportunities come after doing the work, why winners separate themselves by saying no, and how speed in decision-making creates an unfair advantage. In this episode 00:00 Networking: exploration versus exploitation 02:40 Use work ethic to upgrade your circle  04:34 Money loves speed: decide faster 07:37 Adopting a “decide now” culture More Value: Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube    Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle   Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured  Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/  Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi    Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training   DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

So I made my first million when I was 26. A decade later, my portfolio company is generated last year over $250 million in aggregate revenue. And I'm 36 now. And so in this video, I'm going to give you the rural world advice that I wish someone had told me much earlier. Stop networking. All right. Now, this is a really, really important point. Now, it's not that I even have some big problem with networking overall.

That's actually not my point. It's more that there are seasons of life, right? In the beginning, you're in exploration. I grab this from Naval and I really love it. Later on, you get into exploitation. which is where you go all in. Right? And so the thing is,

is that in the beginning, you're tasting lots of stuff. You're trying to figure out what you are good at or have some proclivity towards. When you have that proclivity, then it becomes very clear. Now is the time to cut everything else

so that we can focus and go deep. Right? So you go broad in the beginning so that you can figure out what you to go deep on. The broad period that you're in is never the period where you're going to make money.

Like, this is the part you have to get. And I'd say from the beginning of when I started until I really graduated from it was about five. years. It's less of a binary and more of a continuum. In the beginning, you taste lots of stuff. And then you just have to, because in the beginning, you have to say yes to things. You have to say yes, because you're so bad. You're so scared, you never want to say yes. But you learn to say yes a little bit.

And then you say yes more. And then you say yes more. And then very quickly, you learn to say yes and get overwhelmed. And so the only way out of this yes trap is you have to start practicing to say no. And if you're like, wait a second, that means that I have to change what I do. Welcome to entrepreneurship. Like you have to learn. You have to evolve. You have to grow. So let me give you a very tactical example. So if you're debating between going to a networking event, right, or like a lunch with some dude who's like, hey, we should collaborate, we should synergize, we should maybe trade ideas. Let me pick your brain, whatever, right? And if you're picking between any of those things and working, choose the work. Because when the work works out, the people will still be there to take your call. But if you never do the work, no amount of networking will get the work done for you. And the bonus or negative bonus here is that if you don't get the work done, they're not going to take your call in the future. And so they're willing to take the call to date with whatever, small amount of success that you have, but if you lose that success because you get distracted, they're not going to take the call in the future. That door will be open, I promise, and not only will that door be open, a hundred other doors will open for you if you win. During the season,

losers congregate, winners isolate. If everyone was supposed to win, they would have made podiums bigger. The top of the mountain isn't supposed to fit a lot of people. It's normal. The air is harder to breathe. And the thing is, if all of this seems antithetical or different than what you've heard or what other people around you are experiencing, ask yourself, is that, do those people have the lives you want? A great way to make a mistake is to ask someone else's idea about your idea who has no idea. When you make this transition from going from the exploration period to the exploitation phase, you go from many looser connections to a very few tight ones. I tend to be very transactional as a person, but I think we all are and some people are just open about it. Everybody

on some level does some sort of math in their head of like the person, this person in my life, I get more benefits than I have costs. But the thing is that if you want to raise the standard of your life, you have to raise the standard of the people who you surround yourself with. Because the fastest way to change your life is to change who you're friends with. Because that reference group is ultimately going to be what you compare yourself to. And so if you change who you compare yourself to, all of a sudden, you will create deprivation around the difference between where they're at and where you're at. The only way that people let you into circles that you don't deserve to be in is work ethic. There is no other way.

It is the universal currency of respect across cultures, across time periods, across cohorts, across generations. An old man will respect a young man who hustles. And they will always be willing to give time to somebody who they think will execute. Like, that was my secret. And it still is my secret. Like, I never with people who are, you know, I punch above my weight class in terms of the people that I'm connected with because they know that I'll do the work. And so they don't feel like they're wasting their time by helping.

Because the thing is, a lot of people are actually very happy to help you. What they aren't happy to do is waste their time, help. helping you when you actually don't help yourself. And so I've shed friends at every season of my life and my close circle has always been very small, like very small. The thing is that I think of my life in kind of seasons, right? And so you're going to have friends for this season and maybe you keep them for life, but maybe you don't. And I think giving yourself permission to say like, that was that season and they were amazing friends for the objectives that I had then. And then my objectives change. It's not really fair to them to say, hey, I'm completely changing all the things that I'm doing. You have to still be

friends with me. It might not make sense for them. And so, not keeping this expectation over them has helped me kind of like free myself of that so that I can reinvest the time that I have and friends that I think will help me get to where I'm trying to go next. Okay, so if we're taking these big bets and we're following something that we're good at rather than that we're passionate about and we're not going to get distracted, we're doubling down on one thing and we're turning off these other things that in the beginning we were exploring the little lunches, the little networking it because we know that if we just succeeded this one thing, all of those doors will be open. What do we do to make money?

So let me give you a money rule. Money loves speed. And this will relate back to the asymmetric bets. By the time you have all the information, the opportunity is gone. Sometimes you just have to make your bet. And it's almost always faster to make a decision, then make a mistake and then correct that mistake than it is to painstakingly deliberate on the decision. If you know how long it would take you to fix something, if you're wrong, then just make your best bet because you can always fix it later. And so said differently, if it takes you five minutes to decide and then 10 minutes to fix something, don't take two hours to decide because you can just do it. And if you're right, you immediately are moving forward five minutes later. And if you're wrong, you're moving forward 15 minutes later. But either way, it's going to take you less time than trying to assume that you're going to know everything because you're just not. You have to get a grip with uncertainty. Like, uncertainty is the job. Like if you want certainty, don't try and go after your dreams. Because the thing is is that the only way to go after certain dream is to go after an old dream. And if you go after a certain dream, and if you go after a certain dream, an old dream that's already happened, you're trying to fulfill something that will not happen again. And so you're either going to do the work or you're going to sit around wishing you've done the work. And one of the things that took me a very long time to understand was that the things that dragged me down were not the things that I thought they were.

Because the heaviest things in life aren't iron or gold, but they're unmade decisions. They're the things that weigh us down. They take up all of our attention, all of our brain power. And so right now, there's probably a handful of decisions that you know you need to make that you're just not. If you want to feel yourself go so much fast than you ever have, just decide. So few decisions in life actually are irreversible. Even the ones that people pretend are irreversible. What if I, should I buy this car?

Should I buy this car? You can buy it and then flip it. It's not like you can't sell it again, right? And so the real cost of the decision is the delta between what I could buy for or what I could sell for. Okay. Well, how much does it cost me waiting six months to do this? Probably a lot. And if I need that car to, you know, or trucks so that I can like go to job sites or

pick up clients or whatever it is, then like, I am losing all of the time that I'm waiting to decide. And I'm telling you, where people slow down is that the decision process more than at the doing process. Doing usually takes very little time. It's the deciding that people, that bogs people down in quagmire, right? They just get stuck. They feel like they're trudging through mud because they just hit these walls and all of a sudden there's no action because they're just thinking. They're planning. And I think I had to get comfortable with the idea that there are so many variables that I do not know, that I just have to get comfortable with the idea that I just should test and learn and I'll learn way faster than if I try and deliberate. And that has happened more

times in my life than I'd say that approach has served me with bigger and bigger decisions in life. Like I have, I've made monster mistakes, but the bigger mistake that I would have made is just not being able to make decisions to begin with. And so you can move through life at seven times the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're going to make a decision from the end of the week to the end of the day. And if you want to move even faster than that, you can decide at the end of the hour. And if you move any faster than that, I guess we could do. Decide now. And so sometimes like my team has seen me do this. Well, we're like, okay, so, you know, we've got to, we got to make this decision. And people are always like, yeah,

let's kick that to next, you know, meeting or let's circle back. Let's, let's go offline for that. It's like, no, let's confront. Let's just choose. Let's pick. Which vendor we're going with? Which website design do we like? What headline are we going to use? What's the ad hook that we're going to go with? Just pick. That's why all of this. stuff comes down to bets. If you want to have a future that you want, you have to get comfortable with risk.