The Game with Alex Hormozi - Why You Should Stay Poor to Succeed | Ep 502

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Take advice from poor people on how to be rich! Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the 28 ways to stay poor and how these ways can help drive more success for you.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:(0:41) - What is “Inversion Thinking” anyway?(1:36) - Ways #1-9 - Start tomorrow, blame your circumstances...(5:30) - Ways #10-18 - Tolerate mediocrity, prioritize looking rich over being rich...(13:02) - Ways #19-28 - Repeat your mistakes, assume you are always right...(21:45) - The power of inversion thinking when it comes to taking advice from poor peopleFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was May 10, 2022)

You have to prioritize being rich, which means spending less because you were not valuing the opinion of other people over your own, which because you respect your own approval more than that of other people. You have to be willing to die to the opinion of others rather than dying to the opinion of yourself. 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'm going to talk to you about the 28 ways to stay poor. And the reason I'm framing it that way is because Charlie Munger, my personal hero, had a seminal talk that he gave multiple times on how to live a miserable life.

And the reason he gives it that way is that he believes in a process called inversion thinking, which is where you solve problems in reverse. So, for example, if you want to have a good marriage, rather than asking the question, how do I have a good marriage? You ask the question, how would it destroy my marriage? And then you list out all the ways to destroy your marriage, and then you do the exact opposite of that. And what's interesting is that our brains are much better at finding problems than they are at finding solutions. And so what we do is we harness this innate ability that we have to find the problems. And then after finding every possible problem we can imagine, every threat imaginable, which evolutionarily were designed to look for, then flip that in reverse to find our solutions.

All right. And this is a process of thinking that I've applied to business. I've applied it to marriage. I've applied to a lot of different aspects of my life. And I would encourage you to do it as well. I'll talk to about the 28 ways to stay poor. All right. And if you don't know how I am, my name is Oxramosi.

I own acquisition.com. It's a portfolio of companies that deserve $100 million a year and I have nothing to sell you. I make these videos because I have a lot of fun doing it and I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy making them for you. All right. So the first and best way to stay poor is to start tomorrow. So whatever it is that you want to do, whether it's losing weight, saving money, starting that business, whatever it is to start tomorrow. All right? So that's the best thing you can do to stay poor is to start tomorrow. Okay. The next one is to read lots of books and then do nothing. All right? Because it's one of the, you know, lots of people talk about reading books and I see people all the time that I've seen for years in the exact same

position posting every, oh yeah, I'm reading 52 books this year. That's my commitment. Instead of reading 52 books, maybe just read one book and actually do something about it. Crazy. I know. Number three, take advice from poor people on how to be rich. All right? So think about that for a second. A lot of us surround ourselves, or at least I did when I was starting out, surround ourselves with people who are very poor, and we listen to their advice on how to be rich, and they have no idea what they are doing. And we also listen to their judgment on why our idea is stupid, even though they are poor. So what would they know, right? So number three, take advice on poor people on how to be rich. Number four, this is a big one. Pick a spouse who will make you feel guilty for working.

So you have your dreams. You have these things you want to pursue, but this person is saying you shouldn't do that. You need to be doing X, Y, and Z, blah, blah, blah, blah. blah, and then you feel like you need to compromise your dreams for that person. The problem is that you put your power of your destiny in their hands and you're asking for permission instead of support, right? Because at the end of the day, if you don't accomplish your dreams and you did it because of them, who do you think you're going to resent? Right. So you owe to yourself and you owe to your marriage to, hey, pick people who are going to support you in your dreams, even if they don't necessarily agree, right? But more easily, not put your power on somebody else. Number five, fail once,

quit forever. All right? So as soon as you do actually start to decide doing something, you fail immediately and say, oh, I guess this isn't for me. I guess success isn't for me. I guess business isn't for me. I guess sales isn't for me. I guess whatever the thing is isn't for me because you failed once. But it's because we have an incorrect view of failure, right? Because failure is a necessary part and the things is you learn from failure. And so it's either you win or you learn, right? But that is the fifth thing you want to do if you want to stay poor forever. Number six is think that the world is fair. So a lot of us, especially me earlier on, like, I would complain. I'd be like, that's not fair. This is fair. It shouldn't be

this way. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the thing is, is that all that complaining that I did did nothing at all whatsoever. Did nothing. And so the thing is, there's no activity that comes from blaming your circumstances, which just so happens to be the seventh one of how to stay poor is blame your circumstances and complain, all right? Complaining about things that you cannot control. And the thing is, is like, these sound so obvious. But think about these. in reverse again. So if the contrary of thinking the world is fair, is assume the world is unfair, and then act accordingly. Instead of blaming your circumstances, you thank your circumstances for who you are and what they gave you, right? You are who you are because of the shit that you

have gone through it. There's a saying, your message. And I think it's a very, it's a very beautiful saying, because how sad would it be to wish to have a life of ease and comfort? Because strong character is built through hard times. And so if we want to have strong character, we basically must have a hard life for periods of time or for seasons. And so we can't lament the thing that creates the outcome. You can't lament the heat and the beating of the hammer to strengthen the steel, right? They go hand in hand. And so we just have to accept them for what they are. And as for complaining, I think you can just accept and move on, right? So number nine, I covered three there. Number nine, expect the government to save you. All right? That's a great way to stay point.

expect the government to save you, or even say expect other people to save you. And the reality is, no one's going to save you except for you. And a lot of times, many people have spent their entire lives waiting around for someone to save them and still stayed poor. Number 10, value the opinion of others over your own. It's an excellent way to stay poor, all right? You think everyone else's opinions matter more than yours. And I'll give you a secret that it took me, you know, making a lot of money to then realize, which is you were successful the moment you say you are.

crazy, right? Like you are successful, the moment that you decide you are successful. There are people who are billionaires who don't feel like they are successful and there are people who have almost no money and absolutely think that they're an amazing success. And the thing is that they are both right. It's our choice, right? And I can promise you that if you try and give yourself a number, you will just move the goalpost. I promise you that from the depth of my soul, you will move the number and make something else the new goal. And once that, once I am rich, then whatever, right? But it's a when than fallacy. It doesn't, it's not true. So you can accept and you can become successful today, because if you look at yourself compared to people in a much worse off scenario, they would love to

have your life. And so you just need to decide for yourself if you are successful. The thing is success is a process rather than an outcome. And so you can be successful in that you are living your values of pursuit. That can mean success if you choose to define that way. So number 11 way to stay poor. Avoid discomfort. A lot of us, you know, we have new things. You have to take risks. You have to learn things. And it's uncomfortable because you will suck. Of course you will suck. It's normal to suck. But people avoid discomfort because they don't want to go through that. And it's so silly. The discomfort that they're feeling is the judgment they impose upon themselves about not being good at something they've never done before. How insane is that? Very. And that's why humans are also

kind of insane. When you think about the things that we do and the things that we think, right? And so, great way to stay poor is to avoid discomfort of all kinds, right? You also guarantee the number one discomfort, which is that you don't accomplish what you want in your life. 12, how to stay poor, tolerate mediocrity from yourself and others. All right, so as you start to grow, if you're growing, you know, a small business, or even in the workplace, if you tolerate mediocrity from others, you will beget more mediocrity and people over time will just degrade and get worse and worse over time, rather than the reverse of that of thinking like, I will only tolerate excellent. and anything below that is intolerable.

If you think about the best leaders and the best CEOs, the most successful people of all time, they have this innate trait, right? For lack of better term, they're ballbusters, right? They hold a standard that, and here's the catch, that they themselves stay above, which means you must raise your own standards so that you can model what it looks like

for other people around you to hold themselves, right? The best, like most people need to be let, most people need a model, and they can see that, right? And you're leading by example. And so, best thing to do to stay poor, tolerate mediocrity from yourself and others. 13. How to stay poor. Make promises, break promises.

So you make promises to yourself, make promises to other people, and you destroy your reputation with other people. And that's a terrible thing. And it takes a long time to fix that. But the one that's the hardest one to fix is the reputation you have with yourself, right? You make promises to yourself and you break promises to yourself. Because the thing is that you're the only one who's holding you accountable. And I think a different version of happiness, in my opinion, is respect for oneself. And I think your own respect is the hardest to earn because you know how hard

you could have pushed. You know if you could have gone for an extra mile. You could have showed up to the gym more times. You could have eaten better. You could have made more cold calls. You could have done more reachouts. You could have made more content. You could have actually left a nice note for somebody on your team when you were too tired to do so. You could have over delivered on the product. You could have made a better version of that video and you decided to put it up anyways, even though you knew it wasn't as good as it could of it. And so you make promises to yourself and then you break promises to yourself and you lose respect in the process. It's an excellent way to stay poor. Number 14, wait for perfect conditions. All right. This is a great one. Great way to stay poor. It's one of my favorites. You've got to wait for

everything to be perfectly aligned for you to be successful. And here's the secret. There are never going to be perfect conditions. And here's what's even crazier. If you need perfect conditions to be successful. The moment the conditions change, you will stop being successful. So you might as well start when the conditions are their absolute worst because it means that they will only get better from there. And if you can prove success when things get bad, when they get bad again, which is guaranteed, you will still remain successful because you have learned how to do it in this time, in this circumstance. Make sense? Great reason. Do not wait for perfect conditions. 15. Prioritized looking rich over being rich. This is a classic one of poor focus.

in general, right? I get the loving amount of troll comments that I get it from the fact that I'm in my mama's basement and wearing a wifebeater and wearing a nose strip, right, must mean that I am poor. Of course, right? Because you confuse looking rich with being rich, right? Just silly. You can just Google my name and just put private equity at gym launch and American Pacific Group and you can see what we sold to our businesses for. All right. So the point is, the point is you have to prioritize being rich, which means spending less for a long period of time because you were not value. the opinion of other people over your own, which because you respect your own approval more than that of other people. You have to be willing to die to the opinion of others rather than dying

to the opinion of yourself. And I mean that. It's real shit. Stop trying to look rich. Be willing to look poor. All right. And I know that's contrary to like dress the part and all that stuff. But like the thing is, is like, you've got to be real to you or you'll be real to no one. That's a promise. All right. Number 16. Avoid working on what matter is. most. This is a great way to stay poor, is that you work all day long, you're busy, you're full of activity, you're doing stuff, and nothing important moves forward. Because the nature of speed is not about activity. The people who are the riches in the world aren't doing the most stuff, right? They're doing the right stuff. And they're making sure, better stated, making sure the right

stuff gets done in general, whether or not it's them or someone else. All right. And so it's looking at the many things that you can or could do and picking the very few that are the ones that move the needle the most. And typically, they're the ones that you do not want to do and you are procrastinating on. And you can probably eliminate all the stuff that give you the mental masturbation of getting stuff done without actually moving the ball forward towards your goals. So it's a great way to stay poor. It's just keep doing stuff that does not matter. 17. Say you're going going to do something and then don't do it. This is just like making and breaking promises to others and self, but this one is actually just like that. So take that. 18, this is a really good one.

Great way to stay poor is do what everyone else is doing, right? Because if you're doing what everyone else is doing, most people are not in the 1%. If you want to be in the 1%, you can't do what 99% of people are doing, which is hard for people, which is why you can't value their opinions, because again, talking to poor people about how to get rich is a great way to stay poor, right? They have no idea. And so you can't look for their approval on what you are doing or model what everyone else is doing because everyone else is poor. Why model them?

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 asked you do is you can just leave a review, but 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 with someone else. Right? Think about. Number 19, do your best, not what it takes. Because the reality is a lot of times your best may suck. And what is required is what is required. And that may be beyond you, which means you must become better so that your best is beyond what is required.

Because the number of people who say, well, I tried my best, The universe doesn't give a shit. The marketplace doesn't give a shit. Your boss doesn't give a shit. What they care about is what is required. And so what you have to do is figure out what is required. And then if you are incapable of doing it, be better. And do it for long enough that would be unreasonable for you not to be good.

And then your best will surpass what is required. And you will become better in the process. But if you don't do that, it's an excellent way to stay poor. It's just keep doing your best and giving yourself a palming back and say, I tried. 20. Talk more. Do less. Post about your goals, post about your affirmations, spend all day doing routines and stuff of getting prepared to work and actually do very little. All right. It's a great way. This is one of the favorite ones, especially in the internet community, people love talking about how much they're working rather than actually getting shit done. So I would advise you to,

rather than spend all this time preparing to work and creating superstitions and routines around the things that you think you should do in order to maybe potentially get something done. Start with doing because sometimes doing just needs done. 21. Start something new today. Start something new tomorrow. Repeat. Great way to stay poor. Do stuff. Try something. Try something else. Try something else. Try something else. Always leave half-built bridges. You never complete anything you start. Just keep starting new things because it's exciting and it's new. And you have what is called uninformed. optimism because as soon as you jump into the new thing, you realize that it will take work. And the things that were awesome about it also have downsides, which is the work that is required

to be good. And as soon as you realize that it is work, you go through the change cycle. You go uninformed optimism to informed pessimism. And then you go through the value of despair. And this is where everyone then jumps to the next opportunity, right? And they just do this forever. And they just never achieve what they want. So it's an excellent way to stay busy and poor. All right? Just keep trying new stuff and never see anything through. Okay. Number 22, believe what other people think about you more than what you think about you. All right. It's a great way to stay poor. I think it's just, it's easily stated there, so I'm not going to belabor the point. But that's what you need to do to stay poor. Just keep believing what everyone else thinks about you and not what you think about you. All right. Excellent way to do it.

Number 23, way to stay poor. Make a mistake. Then, wait, repeat the mistake. Do it. Do it. it again and again and again and again. And you've probably seen people who stay stuck in their life like this. Like they keep dating the same person. They keep making the same business mistake. They keep getting the same bad partnerships, whatever, right? Or they keep trying to do something that stopped working and they keep doing it over and over again because they think that for some reason that's going to work somehow. Or they just don't have the wherewithal to realize they keep making the same mistake. And so if you keep doing the same stuff, you're going to keep getting the same outcomes, right? Like, we kind of know this. But the thing is, is that people still do it.

it's like, well, whatever you're doing right now has gotten you to being poor. So don't do that, right? And when I say poor, poor can be whatever you want it to be. You could be a billionaire and be poor. It might be whatever that amount is, it's not as much as you want it to be, right? Which, of course, gets into the deep things of like maybe you should decide not to want it to begin with. And then whatever, we won't get into that. Number 24, be replaceable.

All right? This is a great way to stay poor because if, and I heard this from Navarroa kind, I like it a lot, which is if you can get a degree to do the job, job, you're never going to be unwealthy doing it because everyone can do it, right? And so you have to be able to learn things that other people can't do, right, and that therein makes you irreplaceable or less replaceable, right? The very least, less replaceable. You don't want to be replaceable by a marketplace of people lined up behind you ready to take your job and do it for less, all right? Because they're also poor. And they are willing to do it for less, which is a terrible way to do business. It's also an excellent

way to stay poor, though. Do what everyone else is doing, do it for less, unless you have an operational strategy, which is like Walmart and whatever. And that's probably not you right now. So number 25, way to stay poor. Find something that works. Dear God, find something that works and then stop doing it. Think about it. How many of you have needed to make money last minute? You had to pay payroll. You had to pay taxes. You had to be some bill unexpected, you know, surgery, iPhone, whatever, right? Some bill comes up and you need to pay for it. And you find a way to make money. Because if you're watching this video, you're still alive, right? So you found a way to, you found a way to you found a way to pay for it. What did you do there when you needed to make money?

You heard something messed up? You were willing to make money and you had the ability to make money when it was for someone else and not for yourself. Think about that. You had the ability. You knew what to do and you just chose not to do it. You stopped doing it as soon as you paid someone else's bills because you were willing to pay other people's bills and not your own. Interesting. Which leads me to one of the most sure tweets I had recently, which is most people know what to do to achieve their goals. Most people do know what to do. People are like, I don't know. know how to lose weight. I'm like, yeah, you do. Stop eating shit and move. You know how to do that. You want to make money? Start making calls. Start reaching out to people. Start promoting the thing that

you were trying to sell. I mean, not complicated. I got this thing. Do you want to try it? No, cool. Talk to somebody else. Got this thing. You want to try it. No, cool. Call somebody else. Right. It's not, it's not a complex. It's not complicated. But people just don't do it. It's because they're not willing to do it. Right. And so, excellent thing to do. Find something that works. So a lot of you do know something that works. And then stop doing. number 26 we're rounding off we got two more hire dumb people excellent way to stay poor and have a bad business all right really really highly recommend it's also really good for if you have a job too if you have the ability to hire people hire dumb people it's just it's just a great way to make

your life miserable there's very few ways that are better than this one like if you just want to be surrounded by dumb people just hire people you don't rid you know what I mean and you'll you'll feel good but you'll be poor and so don't do that number 27 is a huge one that I see all the time for staying poor and it's a really good strategy it might be one of the top ones on this list assume you are always right how many people here right you're watching this know someone who always just think they're right and they're not successful and they get advice from somebody who might be successful or more successful than them and they're like no that's not going to work for x-bine z right because they assume they're always right

they know they assume they know everything well if you know everything then why aren't you achieving what you want. And I will tell you this. From the people that I've met who have been far ahead of me, they have a voracious desire to learn and a voracious interest in learning from anyone and every single possible source they can. And those people have the humility to say that everyone knows something that they don't know. And so in that way they can learn of them, which is, I think, an Emerson quote. If you cannot learn, then what's the point? Right. It's the same thing as the saying, he who chooses not to read is no further ahead than the men who cannot read, right?

And so it's like, the man who chooses not to learn from others is no dissimilar from the person who is disabled from learning from others, right? So you give yourself zero advantages. Like there's no way that you can learn from other people if you think you're always right. And I know this sounds fucking obvious, but a lot of you guys do this.

Why? Like, you'd rather be right than be rich. And it's silly, but it's an excellent way to stay poor. So that's why it's number 27. And then the last one, and this is the simplest of the economics around it, and I'm just going to drive this baby home, is make money, period. Spend more than you make. And the beautiful part about this is that it doesn't matter how much you make.

If you spend more than it, you can be poor, which is why this is such a great one. It's a great way to stay poor. It doesn't matter how much you increase your income. Just spend more than you made, right? Go into debt. Adjust your lifestyle to your life. to your new income at all times, or rather above your income, so that you can always stay poor no matter how much money you make.

It's just an awesome way to stay poor. So I highly recommend doing that. And honestly, the more you can do it, the more you can outspend your income, the poorer you will be. And so, again, highly recommend it. And it sounds silly, but you know how few people, like right now, I think it's like the bottom 50% of America, like, doesn't have any savings. And what's crazy is that, like, you can control.

Like, these things are controllable. Like you can always downgrade your lifestyle. But the thing is you care more about the opinions of others than you do about your own, right? You care more about looking rich than being rich, right? All these things. And that's why all of these things go together. And so to wrap this up, the reason that inversion thinking is so powerful is that we can use our brain to find threats more easily than we can find solutions. And so if we think about your business career, where you think about your marriage or you think about your body or you think about whatever it is, your money goals, think about the ways to destroy it.

I just gave you 28 different ways that you can be poor, right? when you reverse them and you make those the rules for living that you have, then what happens is you succeed by accident because you avoid the pitfalls. Because the thing is, if you don't make many mistakes, you succeed without trying because all you're doing is just focusing on just not making these stupid mistakes that most people do. Right? If we were to reverse these, and this is what I'm going to hit this with hard, enjoy. We're hitting it right now. Start today. Read books. Do the stuff that's in the books. Take advice from rich people on how to be rich. Pick a spouse who makes you

feel awesome about working. Fail once, try again. Think the world is unfair and act accordingly. Never blame your circumstances. Thank your circumstances for making you who you are. Instead of complaining, do something. Expect no one to save you except for yourself. Value your opinion over those of other people. Seek out discomfort. Tolerate nothing but excellence. Make promises. Keep promises. Wait for the worst conditions. Wait for imperfect conditions. And act anyways on what you want, right? Avoid working on the stuff that doesn't matter. Work on the things that matter most. Ignore the rest. Say you're going to do something and then do it. Do what no one else is doing. Do your best and make it above what it takes to be successful. Talk less, do more.

Start something new today and keep at it until you are good. Do it so long that it would be unreasonable for you to be bad. Don't believe what other people think about you more than what you think about yourself. Be irreplaceable. Find something that works and don't stop doing it. Keep doing it until you're bored out of your mind because you're so good at doing that thing that worked. All right? Hire smart people. Assume that you were always wrong and be willing to learn and make money and spend less than you make. And that is the 28 rules of poverty flipped on its head and you can make your own conclusions about where that'll take you. I love you, Mosey Nation, keep being awesome, and I'll see you guys the next video. Bye.