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 and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Wanna scale your business? Click here.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition Mentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap
Chapter 1: What unique approach does Alex Hormozi offer for goal setting?
So a lot of you guys are setting goals. You know, we're coming on the new year. And so as somebody who has set many goals in my life and achieved at least some of them, I figured I would maybe give you a different take than you might consistently hear across social media.
So this will not be your mama's, you know, smart goals, you know, specific, measurable, actionable, something, timely, whatever they are. Not that at all. I actually, I think I'll give you how I've thought about goals. And for some of you, maybe it'll be useful. And for those of you who it isn't useful, I apologize. So big thing number one is
I think that people think about goal setting the wrong way. The first issue I see with goal setting has to do with time. There's the time to begin and the time to achieve. I think there's actually fallacies and misconceptions along both of those components of it. Let's start with starting. So around beginning the goal, a lot of times people have goals.
Chapter 2: What are the common misconceptions about starting goals?
There's typically two times a year that goals occur and they typically are anniversaries. So there's anniversary for everybody, which is a new year. And then there's your personal anniversary, which is a birthday. And so most people make their biggest goals around when they turn a certain age or the world turns a certain age, right? And so...
What's interesting about that is that I think you become more aware of it, but I have always taken the belief, and I remember thinking about this, is that I used to set a lot of goals when I was younger and I would not get started on them. And one day I realized that if the benefit of the goal that I have is not good enough in the immediate moment today to begin working on it,
then it will be the same immediate benefit in a month. It'll just be today, a month from now. And so fundamentally, I have to be able to start working on the goal or the benefit of working on the goal must exceed my action threshold today or it will never happen.
Chapter 3: Why should you start working on your goals immediately?
And so I think even just walking through that logic for yourself, pretty much from that point going forward, if I have a goal, I begin immediately working on it the moment it becomes clear that it is a priority. And so I would like, right now, if you have a New Year's resolution goal, start now, right? Like actually start on the 30th, you know, start on the 31st even. Just start a little ahead.
And I'll just say like, the more you do this, the more you'll start noticing that you're in October and you're like, man, I really wanna do this next year. It's like, well, if it's gonna make sense for you next year, it'll make sense today. So then just start doing it now. And so, like, why would you not want to enjoy the benefits sooner? Think about it.
Like, why would you not want to begin the process to get you closer to your benefits today so you can get those benefits that much faster? Right. And if there is and this is the key part. If. the benefits are not good enough to begin working on them, you either need to change the dynamics of how you want to achieve the goal so that you can remove latency.
So is there a way that I can pull up some element of reward from this goal that makes it beneficial for me to work on it today? Or is maybe this goal just like the equivalent of a complaint? which is, it'd be nice, it'd be nice to have a six pack, but if the benefit of beginning that work today is not worth it for you, it's not gonna be worth it in a month.
Chapter 4: How do you determine which goals to prioritize?
And so the reality is you're not going to be able to achieve all your goals because it takes five seconds to set a goal and sometimes five years to achieve it. And so your goal to achievement ratio is always going to be you're going to have more goals than you have achieved. And so it's normal. And so I think that what can be helpful is deciding which goals you are not going to do.
What fires am I going to let burn? I have wanted to start working out. Well, I've also wanted to start doing these other things. Well, which of these goals is most important? Because goals have a cost, which is the second element of time that I think goals have misconceptions around, which is that you, everybody here who's listening to this or watching this has the same time, right?
We all have the same 24 hours, right? Everyone's heard that. What's interesting though, is that people will set goals but they will not remove anything from their calendar. So you're saying, I have 24 hours. I'm going to achieve these four things. These four things will probably take me an extra four hours a day in order to accomplish. And I'm going to add that into my existing 24 hour schedule.
So I will do 28 hours worth of work in 24. And then of course you're shocked when it doesn't end up happening. And so what I would recommend doing is not only listing out the goal, number one. Number two, listing out the approximate time you think it will take. And then number three, multiplying that by three and creating a sacrifice for that goal.
Chapter 5: What is the relationship between time and goal achievement?
that is equivalent to three times the time duration of what you believe it will be. And I can't remember what razor it is, but there's some razor that's like everything takes three times longer than you think it will. And even knowing this razor doesn't change the fact that it will take three times longer than you think it will. Elon Musk talks about it, but
The reason that I say this way is that you think that the goal will take you this long. There was somebody in who's a friend of mine in March and I was making fun of him for being fat. It's fine. We're guys. I can do it. He's my friend. And if he's not your friend and you don't know who he is, then get over it. All right. Anyways. So I was poking him about being pudgy.
Now, he's in the fitness world. So I had double reason to do that. Right. It'd be like a dentist having bad teeth. Like I had to poke him a little bit. I'm like, hey, man, you're trying to help people lose weight and you look like you barely work out. Right. And so, of course, you know, we were we were joking around, but he took it seriously.
And so he said, my goal is to get a six pack by the end of this year. And I said, you're not going to do it. And he was like, what do you mean? Why don't you believe me? I was like, no, no. It's like you're too far away. You're not going to do it. You can't do it. Like it's it's it's super unlikely. And so as the months kept going forward, I was like, where's my six pack? Where's my six pack?
Where's my six pack? Yeah, I'm a great friend. And I will say being real, he said, I always appreciate the fact that you're real with me. And that actually ended up helping him change. I define good friends as people who make us better. All right. Not as people who are nice to us. Anyways. So here we are, December 30th. He does not have a six pack, but he's way closer.
But the big thing is that it took him significantly longer than he expected. And he's a professional in this space. And so I say this again to say that your goal that you have will probably take three times longer than you think it will. Now you have how long you want it to take, how long you think it's going to take, and then how long it will actually take. Right.
And they actually take because like on some level, you know that what you hope happens versus what you think will happen are two different things. Right. Well, the thing will happen is still one third less than will actually happen. All right. And so I say this to set expectations properly in terms of the time commitment required to achieve almost any goal worth achieving.
And so there's a third component, which I'll get into, but I'm going to I'm going to hammer to the second because I think it's important. I. I love the thought that achieving goals is like doing or practicing magic. Now, I don't believe in magic, but if you watch any magic movie, almost all of them have a price to magic, right? There's like magic isn't free. You have to sacrifice some life.
You have to crumple a flower in your hand so that you can do the thing, whatever it is, right? And if you don't, it like takes it out of your flesh or some crazy stuff, right? But the point is, is that I see goal achievement much the same way. You can't practice magic and just get magic for free. You can't just get goals for free. All goals have price tags.
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Chapter 6: How important is it to assess the cost of your goals?
I also want to be a gazillionaire. I also want to be a monk, right? Like there's all these things that you want to do, but there's huge price tags that were just saying like, yeah, yeah. You know what? I'll have, I'll take them all. I'll take them all. But you can't take them all without running up the bill, right?
And so a lot of you guys are putting things on your platter, but when you're getting to the checkout line, you're like, oh, I don't have enough money for this, right? And so the first kind of realization that I think is worth having is what's your budget? What's your goal budget? How much time and money do you actually have available to dedicate to achieving the goal you have? Things super real.
And I also don't think it's likely that you'll conquer multiple domains in the same year. I remember the first year I wanted to get a six pack. I got a six pack. That was like my whole year and I got a six pack. And then maintaining is a lot easier. Maintaining that, I maintained a six pack the rest of my life. But maintaining it is much easier than achieving it.
Learning how to do business and making your first dollar and making sales and marketing and scaling, all of those things, really tough. Once you know how to advertise and learn how to sell and learn how to deliver something, it's easier to maintain your business level and you're maintaining your current level of income versus growing it. All right.
And that's why a lot of people also stay there, to be fair. But right now, I think if you're real with yourself, this would be the exercise, like probably the first tactical exercise that I would give you as you're going into the new year is, what are the goals? How long do I want it to take? How long do I think it'll take? Multiply that by three. These are the value.
These are the things I want on the shelf, things at the buffet. And then the other side has to be our budget, which is you look at everything you spend your time on. There's two big investments that you can make that are usually pretty well documented. The first is your money. Look at your credit card statement. What you vote with your dollars is what you care about.
You can say you care about these things. How you spend your money is how you actually care. And a lot of you might be surprised
care about being healthy but you spend a huge percentage of your income on cheap food fast food whatever else right you care about you care about your personal development but you spend a huge amount of your time and energy on junk consumption on netflix on social media you're just consuming junk right care about this brain but you're feeding the junk all day right
And so you're going to have all of the things you currently spend your money, you currently spend your time on. Now the well-documented part has two components to it. Documented in terms of like your devices, almost all the devices we have nowadays have like screen recordings. They tell you how your time will split up. If you don't have them, they're free apps that you can get online.
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Chapter 7: What strategies can help you replace bad habits for better goal achievement?
We think like we're very good at deceiving people, but these things are the facts, right? Like what you spend your time, what you spend your money on, how you consume your attention. That's your budget, right? And so we have our goals. That's what we want. And we have our budget. And so when you look at all of your expenses, right?
Now we have to look at which ones of these am I willing to give up? Number one. And then secondly, and this is the one that's ugly, which ones of these am I likely to give up? Now, I would recommend it's easier to swap things. So for example, if you're like, you know, I watch a lot of Netflix and I wish I didn't. Well, I'll tell you something that worked really well for me.
I just listen to audio books before I go to bed rather than watching TV. It's a very easy swap in terms of habit, but I sleep better. I'm not looking at a screen. I could use my imagination. I can read nonfiction if I want to. I can read fiction. And so just a very small, little, small tweak, little tweak. And so it's much harder to stop something than it is to replace something.
All right, and so if you think about this in terms of human behavior, right, you have a reinforcing stimulus. You have something that rewards you for doing it. That's why you keep doing it, right? That's why, for example, in a relationship, and people may disagree with me, and that's amazing. Isn't it cool to be in a free country where we can disagree?
I have the belief that if you're in a relationship, it doesn't matter how long it is, if you get out of that relationship, you're going to have a reinforcing stimulus that's going to be gone, whether you broke up them or they broke up you. Either way, there's going to be some positive aspect of your life that's gone.
And so people are like, well, you need to spend time to heal and trauma, whatever. You have to get over that person. What that translates into behavior is you need to find an alternative reinforcing stimulus. And so there's basically two ways to think about it. One is that you can find something in your environment so you can start gardening, you can start working out more.
You find something else that is a positive reinforcement that takes up the place of this person. Now, if you spend a very long time being single after that, you find hobbies, you find friends, you find other things that fill that gap, right? The alternative is that you just find another person. Now, people don't like that, but also the same people who don't like that, this happens all the time.
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Chapter 8: How do you balance multiple goals effectively?
You're like, why is that not good? Like, what czar of how to live decrees that this is not good? To get over one person, you just date somebody else afterwards.
right now some people are like well there's rebounders well i just think that that's just the likelihood of regression to the mean you think the likelihood that you're just the next person you date is going to be the one is probably the same likelihood of you dating anybody after that person that's going to be the one and so there's this misconception around rebounding when in reality it's like now rebounding maybe you low your bar for getting some reinforcement right if you want to get really technical on it but in terms of the likelihood that this person is going to be the one
I mean, I got out of a really long relationship, met Layla and was like, hey, I'm not into anything serious and here we are, right? And so I bring this up to say like, I just don't think a lot of these things are planned. Now, zooming back out to goals. We have the stuff we want, we have what it's gonna cost, we have what we're willing to give up and what we're likely to give up.
So I would start with the things that you are likely to give up that you're like, I think I want to get rid of these things and I believe I can get rid of these things. Now, then you have to look at that value list, that goal list and think, okay, of these, which is the most important?
Which of these will bring me closest or furthest along on my path, closest to the ideal version of me that I want? Now, some of you may have the question of like, well, should I prioritize a health goal or should I prioritize a relationship goal? Should I prioritize a monetary goal? I think that's honest. Like some choices in life you just have to make. Like I'll say it differently.
If you prioritize your monetary goal and let's say you achieve it, right? Well, prioritizing the monetary goal might help you with your relationship goal because you can go on better dates. You can attract better people, whatever, right? You can dress nicer. You can, if you're a girl, you can inject your face with all this stuff, whatever, you know, like whatever it is. Okay.
You have more resources. That's not a bad thing. If you prioritize relationships and love, maybe at the end of the year, you don't have the monetary thing yet and you don't have the health thing yet, but you actually found somebody who's really improved your subjective well-being.
And right now, by the way, if you didn't know this, the strongest correlation by a mile for subjective well-being, how happy you are, how content you are with your life, has to do with the strength of your relationship with your significant other. It's a 0.71 correlation. Nothing else is even close, like not even close. And so you might get to the end of the year and be like, this was a W, right?
Now let's say the third path. Let's say that you get to the end of the year and you have your six pack. You're in way better shape. You look good. You feel good. You have way more energy. Well, what do you think that's going to do? It's probably going to attract better mates. It's going to help you do better in business.
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