The Game with Alex Hormozi
It Took Me 14 Years to Realize What I’ll Tell You in 70 Minutes | Ep 974
04 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What tactical advice did Alex share with 100 business owners?
Recently, I sat down with 100 business owners where I shared tactical advice that I've learned from the past decade of business. So everything from sales to marketing to hiring to productivity and even mindset. And so I'm going to compress a decade of business knowledge that I've learned into lessons that you can use right now.
Starting with number one, you're not disciplined if you like the thing you're doing. So I'll give you an example. So I used to work in the fitness industry and I had lots of fitness business owners who'd say like, I'm so disciplined because they're like, I work out at 5 a.m. every day. I never skip my meals or my workouts or whatever.
But the reality was I would then ask that same business owner, hey, hey, how have you been doing with working your leads? You know, I haven't been working them as hard as I should, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I would then look at them and say, you're not disciplined because you only are consistent with the things you like.
Discipline is about being able to be consistent with things you don't like.
Chapter 2: How can discipline be misunderstood in entrepreneurship?
So here's me going into more depth explaining that exact concept. Do you consider yourself disciplined? With things I like. Right, so that's not disciplined. Right. And so I bring this up because I obviously have talked to trainers and engine owners for a long time. So I know how to. Yeah.
I say this because I saw a lot of people in the community that I ran be like, you know, I'd see them posting every day like, God, I have discipline up at 5 a.m. Like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'd be like, you never work your fucking leads, bro. Like, what are you talking about? You like lifting. You like boxing. That is not hard.
It's like I it takes no discipline for me to hang out with Layla. Zero. Zero. Right. And so because some people don't like hanging out with their wives doesn't mean I have discipline because I do like hanging out with my wife. It just means that they have a shittier life. Right. And so for you, it's like you have to this might be a muscle that you haven't used. Like you happen to like boxing.
And so you did more of it. And people said, can you help me? And you said, sure. If you want to get to where you want to go, your frustration tolerance, meaning your ability to do things that you don't want to do without an immediate reward for an extended period of time, is going to have to get stronger. And the good news is that that's a skill. It's not a trait. You can learn it.
Which means you do 10 outreaches tomorrow and you're like, this sucked. Nothing happened. And you say, great, tomorrow I will do 20. And then you do 30 and then you do 50 and then you do 100 and you keep going. But I promise you, if you do the rule of 100, which is in that book, You do a rule of 100 and you do that for 100 straight days, your business will grow. Yeah, for sure.
And what's crazy is that people actually fully commit to it. And then like way before day 100, they're like, holy cow, my whole business has changed. But like... You have to commit to it. You have to go all in on it. And I say it's four hours a day. This leads me to business lesson number two. Most already know what to do, but simply don't do it. And the main question is why?
Well, number one, because of an inability to delay gratification. Number two, because they don't fully know how to do something. This is the most common reason in more successful business owners. And a business owner asked me this exact question. When all the information is available, why are entrepreneurs still stuck? And so this is what I told him.
I'd say at the most basic level, it's because of an inability to delay gratification. And so if we just think about like, why do humans do things in general? It's because they've been rewarded more for doing what they're currently doing rather than changing what they're doing. And I think that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that like more of what you're currently doing is safe.
And so people, once they find another point of equilibrium, it's very difficult for them to break out of that. Even if they're quote, like mentally, like I really wish I could scale. They want to want to scale, but what they really want is to do what they're currently doing, which is why they're doing it. And so I think being able to clearly articulate also like the action.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of frustration tolerance in business growth?
And so sometimes people hear the word, oh, you just need to do outreach. But that is a bundled term that has a hundred things underneath of it, which is like, how do I warm up a domain? How do I set, you know, what's an opener? How do I integrate my, you know, Klaviyo with my whatever, right? Like, how do I integrate these tools? And so there's a hundred hows underneath of it.
And they'll usually get stuck on one of the hows and being unwilling to try because it's so frustrating of like... I think what makes entrepreneurship feel slow is that you can try to learn something for a day and not have an outcome and then have to come back to it tomorrow.
And figuring things out is by nature a wandering activity, which means that if you knew how to figure it out, then you wouldn't have to figure it out because you'd already know it. And so people deal really poorly with uncertainty. And so...
Entrepreneurship, a lot of it is just the ability to tolerate uncertainty, which feels very painful the entire time you're in the uncertain period, which is what I honestly think a lot of the pain of entrepreneurship is wondering whether the investment you're currently making today, the thing you know you're going to lose, the money, the time, the effort, the sweat, is going to actually pay off to the thing that you hope is going to happen and you don't know when it's going to happen.
And so it's almost like if you run a marathon, you know, it ends at 26 miles or 0.2. I don't know for you runners. But like for entrepreneurship, it's just someone saying run. And like, I'll tell you when to stop. And even if you like just that idea almost sounds torturous of like just run. It's like, well, how long? It's like run. It's like, but what if my lungs start hurting?
Run, keep running. And I think that's what makes a lot of entrepreneurship painful. And then the idea of even me saying this, some of you guys probably had your hearts. Right. Even the idea of not knowing when something is going to end or in other words, when you're going to figure it out. A lot of people just don't want to start that race. And so they know what they're currently doing.
And they get more rewarded for talking about scaling, for talking about their goals than they do for pursuing them, which involves a lot of uncertainty, pain, and frustration. So this leads me to the next lesson where I want to talk about one of the most important mindset slash skills that you need to train yourself on if you want to grow as a person and your business.
And at least that's what's helped for me. And that's actually self-awareness. So I go deep on it right now. The hardest thing for people is judgment, which is like, how do I... How do I know to listen to this guy versus that guy? Right. That's the hard part, because you will see conflicting advice.
And if you were to ask two people who are both wealthy what someone should do, if you were to ask the Indian question, which someone focus on, English might not be the first answer from Richard Branson. I don't know. Maybe it is. It also doesn't mean that his advice is wrong if it were different than mine, right? Maybe his advice is more right. No idea.
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Chapter 4: Why is self-awareness crucial for entrepreneurs?
And so fundamentally, big picture, if you will sell something that is not scalable, then you want to sell with the absolute highest gross margins to the people who can afford that ticket, which makes sense to sell to people who have lots of money to get the money from them. On the other hand, there's tons and boatloads of people who have very little to no money.
And so if you're going to serve those people, whatever price you charge, if it's even moderate, it's going to be a huge percentage of their income or their savings, which makes them very needy, very hard to serve. And so the only way to serve that customer is develop a product that is truly scalable, truly unlimited scale. And that is when you serve the people who have small ticket things.
Let me give you more context on the thinking process. I prefer, I think it's a higher, you maximize the likelihood of you making more money. If you are a service provider to go upmarket and sell to people who have more money, and then eventually you can create a business that can retain customers that has almost zero incremental cost of adding additional customer.
And then in that instance, you absolutely can sell to the masses. Amazon sells to the masses, right? There's not one saying Amazon is bad business. It's exceptional business, right? But they also had to raise $680 billion of capital in order to build it.
And so what happens is entrepreneurs who are undercapitalized and underskilled think, okay, I'll just serve the masses with this thing, but I don't have the capital and I don't have the skill in order to actually scale it. That's the issue.
And so for the vast majority of, quote, unscalable businesses or less scalable businesses that require humans, that's where I prefer to say, okay, well, if you're going to do the same work, you might as well pay 10 times as much. Great, because there is an audience of people that would pay you 10 times more because they just don't know you exist.
The reason that it's so tough to service the bottom end of the market is that for them, the small amount of money is a huge percentage of their income or their savings. And so they will have the expectations of someone who gives you their life savings. And so there's almost nothing that can satisfy.
And so you will drain your reputation and you will drain the morale of your team because there will never be something that is enough. And also those tend to be the types of people who want you to promise everything in order to get your $10, right? And I prefer not to live my life that way.
I prefer to say you will get, I would prefer to set my expectations at zero and then you'd have to be pleasantly surprised rather than promise the world and never be able to fulfill. Now, the next sales concept I want to talk about is one of the most common mistakes I see entrepreneurs make.
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