The Game with Alex Hormozi
If You’re Ambitious But Inconsistent, Please Listen to This | Ep 978
16 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What should I do if I feel unfulfilled in my career?
This is for the young man who stopped me on the street of Rodeo Drive and said that he had made $80,000 doing sales and he stopped because he was no longer passionate about it. And you asked me, what should I do with my life? And I didn't have time to answer you when I was walking, but I wanted to give you a longer answer right now.
You said you stopped because you didn't think sales was your passion.
what really got me thinking about that is that i actually was in your position i had a management consulting job i saved up 50 000 from that job and then i said i'm not passionate about this i'm gonna go do something that i am passionate about which at the time was fitness and for those of you who are new to my channel i took fitness and went full cycle all the way to a 46 million dollar exit
But I wanted to give you the steps in between there and tell you how I actually ended up today because fitness is still a passion of mine. So then why don't I do it as my business? I was a consultant, right? I did the same thing and I was miserable. And so then I started the free training project, which was like a nonprofit where I just did people's workouts for them.
And I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I figured maybe I could do this for profit. Like, wouldn't that be the dream? Never work another day in my life. And what was interesting is that as more and more customers came in, I started to get tired of actually making so many programs. And so then I was like, maybe if I just like start a gym, that's the real deal, right?
And so then I signed a lease, put all the money I had into getting this gym going. And it was the hardest thing that I've ever done. I came into it thinking that i've been training like star athletes, right?
But I wasn't I actually found out I was Trading lots of moms who wanted to lose weight and didn't really care that much about fitness And even in the few moments where I had just maybe one person that shared an inkling of interest in fitness to the degree that I was It still got kind of boring because I ended up having to do the same thing over and over and over again and so
The difficult part with that specific part of my passion journey is that I couldn't get out of it because I already signed a lease, right? I had to just keep going. The reason I'm making this is because
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Chapter 2: How did Alex Hormozi transition from consulting to fitness?
Your passions and your interests are often incredibly narrow and addiction is a narrowing of things that bring you joy. Fulfillment is a broadening of them. Fast forward, so then I scale up the gyms and then I started doing turnarounds flying across the country, filling up other people's gyms because I really got good at marketing and sales. Then I licensed that model, 6,000 locations.
I started a supplement company, sell through that distribution base. And then I sold all of that to private equity at $46.2 million valuation. And the reason that I find this so interesting is that today I still love fitness and I don't talk about it because I actually don't want it to mix with my life in a weird way. Like it's this kind of like holy grail for me. And I have an amazing HQ job.
And so then it begs the question, wait a second. Why don't you do your passion? Because if you did your passion, you wouldn't work another day in your life. And it's just a very simplistic and inaccurate view of the world. There's only one way that you will truly be able to only do your passion. It means that you would...
only do this very narrow thing right for me at the time was training more advanced athletes who liked powerlifting and had the same work capacity and schedule as me who were willing to pay me tons of money to do it right in order to get those people you have to do a lot of stuff that is not that to get them the vast majority of your time will not be anything that you're passionate about and if that's the case even when you're pursuing your passion and i'm saying this is someone who's gone full cycle with this
I now have a gym that has no memberships and it is not for profit. And I'm saying this, that it is okay to make money doing one thing and be passionate about another. And I recently filmed something where I was showing my home gym to Coop from Garage Gym Reviews. Shout out to Coop, great guy. If you're into home gyms, check out his channel, not affiliated.
And he asked if I would invest in an equipment business. And the answer is yes, but not because it's a passion. I do have a deep interest and I know a lot about it. But like think about what it really means to own an equipment company. I got to source metals. I'm not really passionate about that. I got to figure out logistics. Not really passionate about that.
I'm going to probably have to go reach out to different influencers and get them to start using my pieces and sending it out to them and getting feedback. Not really a passion. But all of those things are required to build this business around the thing that I'm passionate about. And so the reason I'm making this is that most of the shit sucks, even if it starts as something you love.
The passion is a very bad judgment filter. Everything within a business, especially if you're the owner, will suck because business is a funneling mechanism of the hardest and worst problems related to the thing that you supposedly love. Elon Musk talks about this where he says,
There are problems that are too hard for anyone else to solve or problems that are too painful that no one else either can't solve or they don't want to solve it. And so you have this idea, I'm going to pursue what I'm passionate about. I'm going to paint paintings all day. But even then, quickly, you're going to be outpaced by the amount of paintings that you can probably produce.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Alex face when starting his gym?
I started the software company. Sold all of it to private equity. I did the whole thing. And what do I have today? A gym that has no members. And I love it. But it's not what I make money on. And I say this because you are fooling yourself. You're using the excuse of passion to disguise your inability to tolerate hardness.
And so a huge amount of success really comes down to just executing day in and day out and solving problems intelligently and making decisions that are harder short term and easier long term. And sitting in the discomfort of unsolved problems that aren't the biggest problems of the day. That is how you grow a business. And so your passion likely won't get you very far.
Chris Rock has a great saying. He says, follow your dreams if they're hiring. And so you have to embrace how much it will suck and put yourself in no-fail situations. A big part of why I even think I was able to stick with the gym business after realizing that I no longer spent almost any of my time doing the thing I was passionate about was because I couldn't get out of the lease.
And all my net worth was in there. And so there was nothing else I could do. And so I had to make it work. And so your proficiencies will take you much further than your passions. Imagine this. I used to think about this a lot. Imagine farmers thousands of years ago, right? They probably weren't passionate about rice or corn or soybeans or but they felt a duty and a pride in providing.
And I think that we need to bring that back. The idea that a man can do his duty and feel good for a job well done, knowing that you did an honest day's work and that you left everything that you had in the field. You have nothing left in the tank. And real quick, I spent 200 hours this year just making this one project for you, which is the $100 million scaling roadmap. And I broke up
the stages of business into 10 stages. And you can identify where you're at by simply just putting in your business information. You go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, and it'll spit out this custom report that tells you what the constraints are at that current level and what you need to do to graduate and get to the next level. This is our gift to you, absolutely free.
On the thank you page, you can book a call with our team and we'd love to help you figure that out and ideally get past it. And so let me tell you a story. A friend of mine was a personal trainer, then thought that like high-end cookies was an interesting market. And so he started a high-end baker, it was even higher than Crumble is, and knocked it out of the park, crushed it.
And I remember asking him, I was like, sir, are you like really passionate about cookies? He like laughed, he was like, no. And I was like, wait, then why would you do this? And he was like, because I'm passionate about being excellent. And that was such a powerful reframe for me that I have taken with me for the rest of my life.
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Chapter 4: Why is passion not enough to succeed in business?
Do I love business? I think I have grown to love business because I've gotten good at it. And so when I heard him say that, for me, it was like the ultimate unlock of like, that is what I'm passionate about. I'm passionate about my values and I will let my values show through in how I do business rather than saying that the business and what I do every day must be the thing.
Every goal worth pursuing has so much pain between where you are and where you want to go that you try to say, I only want to do the thing I'm passionate about is a weak excuse. It will not get you through it. And so to go back to that young man who had his $80,000 savings, he had barely scratched the surface of his potential in sales. There's so much more to the game than that.
And the lesson he probably needed was learning to be consistent after something gets boring. Because that is where people fall off, is where it gets boring, not even hard. It's where you do the same thing over and over and over again. And you want to go nuts because you're like, I can't read the script again. I can't make yet another ad.
Before this today, I just did ad recordings where I read hooks that we know converted with body copy that we know converted so that we could say, hey, if you're a business owner and you're looking to scale up for next year, come to one of our workshops. This year, if we include the book launch, I've made somewhere in the neighborhood of probably 5,000 ads this year.
I started making ads 14 years ago. Every single week, I would record the ads so I could run ads to get customers. I could pay my rent. I could pay payroll. I could pay the insurance. I could pay for the equipment that got broken. I could pay for the new boom box because they were complaining that mine wasn't good enough. I say this because I wasn't like, oh, I'm so passionate about making ads.
I'm so like, no, but I do want to do a good job. And I think that's something we can strive to go through where we can translate the difficulty into a reinforcing event. Let me explain this. This is important. We will do the things that we reinforced for doing. Now, many people conflate that idea with we will do the things that we were rewarded for.
No, we will do the things that we are reinforced for doing. Let me explain. If I said, I have to shock you, you would probably say, this is a punishing event, okay? What if I then said, your family, your wife, kids, are on the other side of the wall. Every shock that you take, they don't have to take. Are you gonna take another shock? Yes, why? Because it's a reinforcing event.
So that's how something negative can still be something positive. Let's flip it differently. If I sit for every one of these shocks, you get a million dollars. You'd probably be pretty down to take some shocks, right? Interestingly though, your willingness to take shocks over time would go down because the reinforcing event would need more variety. Kind of fun.
Anyways, point is, I think the unlock is not trying to pursue your passions. but to be compassionate about the difficulty of the pursuit in who you become
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Chapter 5: How can frustration tolerance impact business success?
And if you can stop saying other people or thinking about this vagueness of it and get really specific and say, what's the name of the person? Whose actual voice am I hearing? If you then just get to ask the question, is this person's opinion of how I live my life going to be the most important thing that I spend the next 80 years listening to?
If the answer is yes, then I mean, more power to you. But I don't know about you, I wouldn't want the one voice that I'm listening to for the rest of my life be some random dude that I worked with, or my uncle that said something, or my dad, or my mom, or your sister, whatever. Because the only real voice that you actually have to listen to that's not made up is yours.
You need frustration tolerance. Sitting in the unknown with the confidence that you will continue to try because it is solvable even though you don't know how to solve it yet. It just comes down to that. It comes down to knocking on more doors. It comes down to trying to build the webpage again when there's a bug and it doesn't work.
It comes down to spending money on ads even though it doesn't give you any ROI. Saving up your money and doing it again. It comes to posting another video even though you got negative comments or people are like, maybe you should try something else. Hey, they're just doing it because they care about you. They're doing it because they want the best for you.
They don't want you to pursue this path and it's, you know, you're really not meant for it, right? Of course you're not fucking meant for it. You just started. Of course you're not good. How do you think anyone gets good? You suck for a long time and you get a little bit better until you suck so little that you're actually good. And that sucking period, slow down, takes a long time.
It takes a long time to get through that. And that is frustration tolerance. How many times can you do the same thing without reward, without reinforcement and keep going? That is the hard part because it's very difficult to observe that. We just had somebody who started on our YouTube team And he said, it's a different thing. He's like, I've watched all your videos. I've seen all your stuff.
He said, it's a different energy being here at 4 a.m. and then seeing you at 4 a.m. here. And then being here on Sunday at 4 and seeing you at 4 and seeing that every single day. And to be clear, I'm not always there at 4. I'm there at 4, sometimes 5, sometimes 6. But every single day, seeing that, he was like,
it really shifted my perspective in terms of like, he's like, you're where you're at now and you're still working like this. I bring this up to say that like, it is far more politically correct and convenient for me when someone asks, what's your advice to somebody starting out is to say, follow your passion. And it's because no one will fight you.
And because you can't say I was smarter than most people. That's not correct. Can't say that. You can't say I had advantages that were given to me. That's not going to really fly super well. I mean, it'll be okay. You can't say I was just pure luck. Can't say that. And so they default to something that everyone just let move on with your life.
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