Want to scale your business? Click here.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.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 is the main topic of this episode?
And so I think what a lot of people need to do is figure out the games they need to play in the meantime. And so experts at things don't really have more impulse control. I think it's a fallacy. They figure out more ways to win in the meantime.
Chapter 2: How did Danny and Alex's relationship develop?
So grateful and honored for you to join me today because we spent so much time together. So it's only right that we actually sit across from each other face to face.
Just for the audience sake, how have we spent time together, Danny?
Dude, so many podcasts, so many YouTube videos, like a disgusting amount. I'm like, are you kidding? I've spent so much time with you because you're such an incredible communicator, because you are able to have 10 years of knowledge into a three-second clip. I'm just like, what is going on? And so I'm learning so much about business, about communication, about life, all from you. So-
Thank you so much for being you. And that's why we spend so much time together, because I continually get value from the things you say.
Well, I will do my very best to continue that trend, even though that is big shoes to fill.
Well, I mean, it was so funny because one guy, I remember just not being able to talk to one guy because he's like, oh, Alex Ramosi, I don't get any value from him. I'm like, all right, well, we're just not going to be friends. So that's, yeah, that's... But this interview is about you, not my spending time with you.
And that is, I would love to start with a psychology assignment you had at 19 years old when you had to pick someone who had a psychological disorder and tell the story of how they went down that path. Will you tell that story, please? Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What lesson did Alex learn from his psychology assignment?
Yeah, sure. So I, like many young men, had lots of angst and felt like the world was not fair and that I had not gotten what I, quote, deserved and that I thought that my parents could have done a better job of parenting me in general. And I resented them for that.
um and so i had an intro to psychology course and the assignment was as you said pick somebody who had any pathology that we had cut you know studied over the whole semester and then write the story from their perspective of how that pathology might have developed right and um what happened through the course of going through that assignment was not what i expected uh because as i went through and i picked my mother and she's you know she's been public about
suffering from, you know, depression and ADD and things like that. That I picked that and in kind of inhabiting her shoes as an immigrant who came here not speaking the language and having, you know, a Serbian father who is very authoritative, rightfully so. We're talking 1950s. You know what I mean? Just different times. And
what her upbringing must have been like and having a split life between being an American at school and, you know, getting beat up for not being able to speak because back then it was almost, uh, expected and, and normalized to beat up the foreigners, um, to, to, you know, then being the, the first person to, you know, first female class at Hopkins, um, to be in that, um, as a doctor.
And so thinking about that trajectory, I all of a sudden realized the amount of pressures that she had put on externally, that other people had put on her externally throughout her whole life. And what happened was I felt like I understood. And Blaise Pascal, who's Pascal's triangle, some people remember him, he was a mathematician and also a theologian.
He had this quote that I love, which is, to understand is to forgive. And I believe that you cannot both hate someone and understand them at the same time. And so like, if I am very angry with someone, it's become a check for me where I'm like, oh, I must not understand something.
Like there's something about them or something about their experience that has made me not understand why they do what they do. And then you have the secondary statement of most people, if you were born with the same genetics and live the same life as that person, you would see the world the same way as they do.
And so carried within that is this very jarring idea that what if our viewpoint of the world is something that someone else hates? entirely. And in their mind, we are wrong. But in their mind, like hard to even really get into that and like empathize with someone else's point of view to that degree.
But me going through that process has actually been one that I've repeated multiple times in my life when I was extremely angry with someone. And it's usually around loyalty or betrayals or things like that that happened to all humans. But when I started writing narratives around how someone experienced life
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Chapter 4: How can understanding others improve relationships?
And so that's how that little intro to psychology assignment both changed my life with my mother, but then also helped me unpack anger driven situations that I had with other close people throughout the rest of my life.
It's really interesting that your normal reaction to her wasn't the same and thus her reaction was different to you breaking down. Because it almost reminds me of how Layla, your wife, sometimes acts when you get angry. She meets it with love.
And then you're like, oh, I see what this is, which is very fascinating to speak to human beings and our nature of when we meet fear with love in some respect, like the fear dissipates. So cool to like make that realization.
I think it's just very hard to step out of the emotion in the moment and sidestep it and try and get outside or above whatever analogy you want to try and say like, okay. What do I not understand? And then it becomes a question to solve rather than a person to attack.
Do you have any other examples, frameworks, mental models that help you do that in a quicker way?
I mean, with something that's like super deep, like anger, stuff like that, I mean, that was years and years. I think it takes more work to do that. But in terms of frames around... decreasing the stakes of a situation, I have lots of them. So like, for example, one of them is You know, if you zoom out far enough, you realize that you can't even see the earth.
And so when I'm really upset about like Wi-Fi or something, I'm like, OK, maybe this isn't as big of a deal. You know, and if you if you go back, you know, let's go back 20 years. Like what thing really bothered me 20 years ago? I probably can't even tell you what really bothered me 20 years ago. And so I can probably expect that what's bothering me today, I'll feel the same way 20 years from now.
And so if it's not going to matter, then it probably shouldn't matter now. And a different frame would be like, okay, well, look at the ancient accents. And when I say that, I mean like the Romans, the Babylonians, the Sumerians. And in 5,000 years, we will be the ancient Americans.
And we'll look back on this and we probably won't remember maybe even just the leaders' names, let alone the day-to-day strifes that we deal with. And again, if it's not going to matter then, then it's not going to matter now or shouldn't matter now. Another one is the frame of the veteran, which I like a lot, which I got from Dr. Kashi, which is
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Chapter 5: What are some mental models for managing anger?
It's beautiful What I love so much about what you talk about is like there's a surrender there to the moment, whatever it is, but that doesn't negate hard work either. And a huge part of who you are and what you present is like, you just need to do more reps for the thing. So it's like, maybe you want it to be your way, just do more of the thing.
And so, I mean, I think the best example to me that really hit it home was with the flyers on the cars. So could you tell that story for people who might not know? Sure.
Yeah. So I had a mentor way back when I was starting my gyms and he was like, yeah, we do flyers. That's how we get customers. I was like, okay, so I'll do some of those. He said, you should try that. So, you know, print out 300 flyers and, you know, advertising was expensive and I was broke. And so 300 was the appropriate amount of advertising that I could stomach.
And so we put out 300 flyers and I waited. And then the next day I got a call. I was real excited. And as soon as I pick up the phone, I was like, Oh, hey, it's like I got one of your flyers. I was so excited. And he says, yeah, you dinged my Mercedes. And I just immediately panicked and hung up the phone. Thankfully, he never called back. But that was the only call I got from my 300 flyers.
And so I called the mentor back and I was like, hey, you you told me to do that. Think, you know, a decade plus ago and way more entitlement. I was like, hey, you told me this was going to work. Right. And and he didn't even respond to that. He was like, well, how many how many did you put out for your test size? And I was like, what do you mean by test size?
He's like, well, what was the first batch that you tested on so that you could then scale it? And I was like, well, I mean, I put out 300 in total. And he just started laughing. And I was like, why? I'm like, I'm having this very serious moment. You know what I mean? I was like, what are you laughing at? He's like, hard to know if anything works with 300. He's like, well, we test with 5000.
He's like, and then if we get a half a percent back, he's like, then we're OK. One percent. I'm scaling to the moon. One and a half. He's like, I'm singing, singing praises. He's like, if you had a half percent on that, he's like, you'd get one and a half people. He's like, and that's tough to see with 300. Can't really know if anything's work. And I remember thinking that moment like.
I might've been doing the right thing, but I was not doing nearly enough of it. And I think that there's a lot of early on. And like, I think that story can apply to a lot of things to early entrepreneurship. It's like, we can get disheartened by our first month of making content that we haven't made money yet from it. But it's like, not that you're doing the wrong thing.
You just might not have been doing it either a long enough or enough of it, which time is really just also a proxy for doing enough of it. And so I, and I, I think what a lot of people don't get, myself included, when I was earlier starting is people don't get the amount of volume that it takes to be successful, right? Like, actually, I'll tell you, I had a different conversation the other day.
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Chapter 6: How does the volume of work affect success?
Because at that point, there was nothing else that I could think of that I could do to improve it. So most people will ship something and be like, well, because I'll give you the editing example. So someone says, this video, I just edited it. And I say, cool. If I give you two more hours, what would you do? And they'd be like, well, I'd probably do this better. I'd probably do this better.
I'd probably do this better. I'd be like, OK, do that. Come back. Come back in two hours. Be like, OK, if I give you two more hours, what would you do? Well, I would probably do this, this, and this. Okay, cool. They come back. Now here's the trick one. If I give you 20 hours, what would you do?
Well, shit, I would probably restructure the story entirely to make it really flow, not just like the surface level edits, but I'd really structure, like really just rearrange the entire thing to make it like way better. Okay, do that. And then that clip gets a million views. And so it's like, there's sure there's duct tape and there's lipstick that you can put on stuff, but like,
Why go from version 18 to version 19, right? Because probably version 18, given the audience I've had, would probably still be a bestseller, right? But in my opinion, the difference between great and world-class is so much more effort on the front end, but so much more output on the back end. Meaning I could spend half as much time on this book. Right.
And I'd probably sell close to the amount of books that I'll probably sell, like from the event and all that stuff. Like people will buy it. Right. But it's the second wave that won't happen. It's people will say this book was good. But they won't be they won't it won't blow their minds. Right. Because it'll have just been like enough stuff that wasn't totally broken down all the way.
The hard work of digesting a concept that takes four days to break down one paragraph. Like my team laughed about this. Actually, my CEO of Jim Lodge, I sent him there's a there's a. there's one page in the book that's special. I'll just, I'll just leave it at that. All right. And I, and I sent him a draft of that page and I read it to him out loud.
And offhandedly I was like, yeah, I've put, I've spent the last 20 hours on this over the last two days on this one page. And he didn't say anything about it, but he then made a clip about that because, because to me, that's how long it took me to write every page. If you do the math, like I spent 10 hours basically on every single page in the book. And so for him, he was like,
Thank you for resetting my minimum standard. And so a lot of times, I think if you looked at the book and what it'll probably do afterwards, it seems significantly, and Michelangelo, this is, he used to say, my buddy Michelangelo, he said, if people saw how much work I put into my art, they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is.
And so a lot of the exceptionalism is that people see the output, not the input. And so people said, if I said, hey, I spent 2000 hours on this book, maybe it's not that exceptional when you think about it like that. Right. But it is exceptional compared to people who put 50 or 100.
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Chapter 7: Why is hard work crucial for exceptional results?
We've probably heard it, but I'll say for your audience, there is a study. There's probably a lot of studies been done on this, but you can become proficient in any skill in about 20 hours. So playing the piano, riding a bike, whatever, 20 hours of concentrated effort gets you proficient. It's the largest gain in skill improvement is 20 hours of concentrated effort.
The problem is, is that people will wait a decade to start the first hour. And so you'd be amazed at how much progress you can make if you cut down the time between when you acknowledge the work and when you start doing the work. And I think that over time in my career, what has happened is just that my delay between when I realize I need to do something and when I start doing it has just shrunk.
So that I can get to the gain and proficiency that much faster. And then if you think about that over 10 years, right? Where one guy does nothing and then he starts. And another guy does 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours. By the end of that decade, they're not even recognizable. They're not even the same stratosphere.
Yeah. When you think about a good writer or a great writer, an unstoppable writer, what comes to mind and what separates the amazing writers versus everyone else other than the work? Saying the work, people put 2,000 hours into a book. What makes for an unstoppable, incredible writer?
I don't think there is something else. I'll qualify this, which is that the work needs feedback. So you gain proficiency with expert eyes giving you feedback on the work you do. Because if I, I'll give you the content example. If I post a short every day for 10 years and I don't change what I'm doing and I just post the same thing, I might not make any progress.
And I know people who've been doing, who've done, made content for 10 years and they have the same size following, right? Because they don't learn, they don't improve. Like, I'm going to rewind real quick on this. Is that... The work is required for you, not for the output. Somebody who naturally gets it on the first try, who really just understands it. And this is an easy example.
If Mr. Beast's account got canceled tomorrow, He can start another one and get it to millions and millions of followers because he has the skill. And so it's not that the output requires him to go work for five years in order to build the following. His skill required him to work for five years to get the skill. But then the output does the work after that.
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Chapter 8: How does one determine when a project is ready?
And so like the time delay that people talk about, like myself included, when I'm trying like this is where nuance of advice comes in. Right. Where it's like I tell people, hey, I want you to do 100 reps every day. I don't want you to do the same 100 reps every day. I want you to get better with all the reps. And if you haven't looked at the end of the day and said, what could I do better?
How could I improve? And if you don't have somebody on the outside eyes being like, hey, you stumbled here on this call or hey, when they said this, let's drill this. Let's let's do this a couple of times. That's how you get better. Right. So you have to be willing to do the work and get the feedback to improve. Like the work works on you more than you work on it.
And I think that's the piece that people miss. Like my prescription, like of doctor money, of working is for the person's skills, not because I care about the fact that you made 10,000 phone calls. I care about the fact that you got better 10,000 times.
How many sales calls do you think you've been on in your life?
I've closed over 4,000. Oh my God.
So what? At what close rate?
Well, mine were in person. Before the days of the telephone, not really. Almost all my sales were in person, but from a volume perspective.
Do you think that is a major contributor for why you are such a good communicator? An incredible communicator, I would say?
I think it's part of it. I think it's part of it. But, you know, it's funny. A friend of mine saw some of my old gym lunch content and they were like, dude, have you like taking speech lessons? They're like, I saw an interview with you like in your garage and you were like, oh, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
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