The Game with Alex Hormozi
You’re Not Behind: How To Become Dangerous At Anything You Do | Ep 981
23 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How can you learn anything very fast?
I'm going to show you how to learn anything very fast. And this is the exact process that I use to learn stuff for the past 14 years in business. And more recently, I just broke the Guinness World Record fastest selling nonfiction book, which generated $106 million in sales in less than three days.
So if you see everyone who's moving ahead of you faster than you, and you hate that everyone's moving ahead faster than you, you might not be as smart as you think you are. Now, that has good news and bad news. The bad news is you might not be as smart as you think you are. The good news is it's under control to change and you can do it quickly.
So this is the process that I'm going to walk through on how to learn anything fast. So number one is, that was pretty, I see that. That was pretty good. Hold on. We'll use the original one. That was pretty good. Okay. So number one is we have to understand what learning is. All right. So what is learning? So learning is same condition, new behavior.
That means you do something different in the same exact situation. So if I go... knock, knock, and then open the door and you say, hi, this is Alex. And then I say, close the door. Next time, I want you to say, welcome to Starbucks. So then I go, knock, knock, they open the door and they say, welcome to Starbucks. Same condition, knock, knock, new behavior, welcome to Starbucks, right?
To the same degree, if I go knock, knock after saying that and the person says anything besides welcome to Starbucks, that person is a little dumber than the person who got it on the first shot. The number of times it takes you to change your behavior in the same condition is a dictation of how intelligent you are. Because learning is same condition of behavior. Intelligence is speed of learning.
Intelligence is a rate. It's a question of speed. If you think about how you describe somebody, like he's quick, he picks things up fast. So for you, there's a couple ways to think about this. Way one is, oh, he picks things up in terms of it takes fewer iterations for that person to change their behavior. That's good.
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Chapter 2: What is the process of learning according to Alex Hormozi?
But guess what else you can do if you're somebody who didn't have that level of call it intellect. Let's say it does take you more iterations. Guess what you do? You can change how quickly you do them. So some people might take three iterations to get something right, but they delay the iterations once a week, another week, another week.
If you say, I'm going to lock in and I'm going to do seven iterations because I'm twice as dumb as they are, but I'm going to do them all in one day because I'm going to not let any light in my room and I'm just going to lock in, then guess what? you are smarter than them because you change your behavior faster than they did on a timeline basis rather than an iteration basis.
So there's two vectors you can think of here. And this is important to me to realize this Because I, so I went to Vanderbilt, fancy school. I think it's like top five or seven, whatever, in the US right now. And when I was there, I felt like I had below average intelligence of the people who were in the room. And so I was like, how am I gonna be able to beat these guys?
And so I just said, oh, okay, I'll just work from the time I wake up until 9 p.m. every day. So that's what I did. From nine to nine, I was in the library unless I was in class. or I was in the cafeteria or the gym. Those are the only things I did. I ate, I studied, and I worked out from 9 to 9. That was it. That was all I did.
And once I realized that, I was able to move forward a lot faster than other people, even though I felt like they had intellectual capacity superior to me. They might have been able to learn things in three iterations, but I was able to do my 10 iterations faster than they were able to do their three. And so fundamentally, learning is same condition, new behavior. Now, what is a skill?
People have said this a lot. A skill is a chain of adapted behaviors, all right? That means you learn multiple things, same condition, new behavior, same condition, new behavior, same condition, new behavior. When you chain those together, that is a skill. So thing one, understand what learning is.
Number two, deconstruct the skill. So what does this mean? So skills are typically chunked up or chunked down.
So basketball, so people are like, he is good at basketball. They're saying he has many skills that relates to this thing. Now within basketball, you've got dribbling, you've got shooting, you've got passing, right? These are sub skills underneath of basketball. To the same degree in business, you'd be good at business versus good at marketing, good at sales, but good at
product, hiring, all of these are sub skills underneath of those larger skills. Now, if we were to go even deeper than that, we also have generalizable skills across domains. So if I have great hand-eye coordination, I might be better or learn something faster, like I will learn how to shoot faster, but I'll also learn how to play ping pong faster. I'll also learn how to serve a tennis
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Chapter 3: What defines intelligence in the context of learning?
Learning in and of itself is a skill. Like your ability to learn, your ability to figure it out, right? And so back to this little example I have here. Many of you want to learn more stuff. But because you have not broken down the thing you want to learn, you stare at the screen and keep searching, hoping that you are going to get some recipe.
But the recipe is that you have to keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller constituent parts so that you can get it into an understandable unit that you can change your behavior within. So I say this, but that then leads to point number three. I know, right? A little bit of open loops, keep it spicy. Which is that we have to define success.
Now, this is a bit of a trite term, but fundamentally, this is what it is. Success of the skill. And so, we would need to identify the specific behaviors and actions that demonstrate mastery of each sub-skill. So, we want to get clear on what good looks like in practice. What does this actually mean? Okay? So... If I said, I wanna get good at foul shots, all right?
So foul shots probably have different parts associated with it. There's probably going to be, I have to measure the distance, and I could probably say, what percentage of my shots did I hit within the box, okay? What percentage of the shots did I get within the, what percentage of them did I get in altogether, right?
And then within that, I could probably say, how many times did I finish my follow through? And like, I don't know anything about basketball. But I would be like, okay, am I finishing above my head? Because that's where I want the follow-through to be. And where is my shoulder position? Am I twisted? Am I straight up? Am I scored with the basket? How many times did I do this?
And so you might hear this and be like, wow, this sounds overly complex. It's like, well, welcome to winning. right? We have to break things down and you have to think about yourself in some ways like a child because our ability to learn gets worse over time, right?
We are less plastic, but our skill at learning, so rather our horsepower of learning is worse, but our skills at learning can get better, all right? So how do we reconcile this? If our skills get better, then it means that we are better at being specific about the thing that we need to change. right?
And if you are not specific about those things, you will wonder for a long time why you are not getting good. So you have to quantify to the highest degree possible. And to be clear, you'll start quantifying things in the beginning, and then you'll get better at describing them. But if you do not track, you do not care, period, on anything. In any skill worth learning, if you aren't tracking it,
you already demonstrate that you don't care because there's no way for you to know if you're getting better. 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.
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Chapter 4: How do you deconstruct a skill effectively?
Transferring skills, teaching is a different skill than doing. And so it's difficult because when we, this is why, if I could probably transfer something that has been helpful for me, is that I struggled socially earlier. And so I had to observe, like, why are they cool and I am not.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying I am now, but I'm saying that for them, I was like, these guys do something different than me because their outcomes are certainly different than mine are. But it's that observational muscle, which is like, I have to just only describe the world, but what I can see.
And when you do that, it becomes significantly easier to break things down because you say like, because the reason this is important is because that's the only medium through which you can communicate. And so all of the rest of the hullabaloo doesn't transmit the physical plane. Now, for those of you who believe in all of the other hullabaloo, I'm with you. Let's go. Let's go manifestation.
But manifest on your own time and just focus on doing the behaviors that increase the probability of these good outcomes occurring. Now, when you're doing it for yourself, unless we've observed the top 1%, top 10% and said, okay, I'm going to observe the things they do, and I'm going to replicate them to the best of my ability, you will suck.
And it's probably because you have not observed all of the things they do. And so you don't have complete context to every single one of those micro steps that they did that made it good. Because if you look at a good reel and a bad reel, like on Instagram, for example, let's say you want to get better at making reels.
you might not have the awareness, the perspective from which to make a judgment, the observational skill to delineate why this is different than this. But you can say that this sucks and this doesn't. It's a great first step, right? Now, if you can't even say why does this suck versus this one, we don't know. And we don't know why it sucks.
We know that it sucks because of the algorithm and because of the views and because of the likes. Right. And so we just like fundamentally all we're doing is replicating skills that we can observe in other people. And once we replicate them at some point, you will start to learn from first party data, meaning you will start to learn from yourself. What do I mean by that?
So some of you guys may have seen the interview that I did with Amjad and Replit, the CEO, the founder of Replit. We talked about how learning works. AI has to get trained on data. We have to clean data and say good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, over and over again. Once AI can learn in the real world, the feedback loops are significantly faster. And so it's first party data.
It drove in the road here and then all of a sudden someone clunked and it got feedback and it went back in the lane, right? And so at a certain point, you'll stop relying as much on modeling all the people who are doing better than you at the thing. And then you will start to do a tremendous amount of volume. And then from your volume, you will look at your, so let's say this is the volume we did.
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Chapter 5: What does it mean to define success in skill acquisition?
And so I think that luck, as much as you could say, man, that guy's lucky. Think about how unlucky they are because they never had the opportunity to go through the gauntlet that you get to go through to become the person you're going to become. And I think that's something. I'll rest my case on that. I think I'll wrap on that. So, hope you guys dug that. That's how we learn anything.
At least that's how I learn shit.