How To Move 10x Faster In Life - Alex Hormozi (4K)

Chris Williamson 0:00 Today, we're gonna go through as many of your lessons as we can-

Alex Hormozi 0:03 Okay.

Chris Williamson 0:03 ... in about three hours, and we're gonna see what we can get through. First one, "A friendly reminder that in three generations everyone who knew us will be dead, including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted all along. Imagine that someone you know achieves every dream and hits every goal they have. Years later, they get old and die. Two years after that. How much do you care? About as much as everyone else will if you accomplish your goals and dreams. Do it for you."

Alex Hormozi 0:30 (sighs) So I think about death all the time because it's- it's probably the central theme. It's probably the thing that I think the most about, and I think that influences how I see time, and also how I think- how it- how it influences agency, like, what actions I'm willing to take despite the judgment of others. And so, a lot of times, and it might be because I have more insecurity than everyone, that I think, like, "Man, I wanna do this thing," and then I hear all these other voices of reasons why I shouldn't do it or why somebody else will say, like, "That's bad," or "You're bad," or, like, "That's wrong," whatever. And so I think I've had to come up with a lot of these devices to get around my own insecurities to take action despite those insecurities. And the biggest one that I think about is that it doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I don't achieve all of the goals. In three generations, I'll be forgotten, and the only people who were naysaying a- a- against me will also be dead. And so then it's like, just do it for me, and then when I wake up every day, there's only one voice I have to listen to.

Chris Williamson 1:33 But that means that you need to be able to work out what to do from first principles. You now no longer have societal norms or assistants or role models or archetypes or expectations, and that's also difficult in a different way.

Alex Hormozi 1:48 (sighs) I think that the more you flex whatever that muscle is, of like independent thinking, the more it becomes the default way that you think. And then everyone else's actions just start looking more and more insane to you.

Chris Williamson 2:01 What like? What's an example of that that you can think of?

Alex Hormozi 2:03 I mean, shoot, just the most basic ones of, like, living the life that you don't want, not wearing what you wanna wear, not dating who you wanna date, um, not living where you wanna live. Like, you're living at home, and you wanna move, and your parents say no, and you don't make the move. Or you're dating a girl because y- she's socially accepted, you know, by your friend group. She's safe, but, like, there's always some distance in between you, but you're like, "I don't wanna risk it," right? Or, like, you're in the- the job and every day you go there, and you're like, "I mean, it's okay." And the idea of just living an okay life just sounds so terrifying to me, that the freedom to fail over and over again is still more fulfilling to me. At least it feels like it's real than walking through kind of on autopilot. And so I think that's a lot of the choices that other people make that seem insane to me now but didn't ins- didn't seem insane to me a decade ago. You know what I mean? I think it's just, like, as you practice taking more agency, taking more responsibility for the decisions, then you just get better and better at it, and then it just seems more and more ridiculous. You're like, you're like, "I just can't quit my job." And you're like, "Why?" Like, no, physically, why? Like, why can't you quit your job? Like, (gasps) like, you know what I mean? They start hyperventilating, and it's like, "You could- could you move in with your parents? Could you move in with a friend? Could you split rent?" "I mean, I could, but, I mean, other people who are gonna die in 100 years would think what?" And one of my favorite ones is, um... And I say this all the time to Layla, like, whenever we're getting to some sort of, like, mini complaint. It's like, "You know if you zoom out far enough you can't see the Earth?" So we're talking about, like, "Oh, man, they're gonna mess up this order on this vendors," blah, blah, blah. I was like, "You know if you zoom out far enough you can't see the Earth?" It's just like- it just puts everything immediately into perspective of how ridiculous some of the things that we're concerned about are.

Chris Williamson 3:46 Shan Puri's got this thing where he says, "Don't follow what most people do because you don't want the results that most people get. The average person is obese, likely to be divorced, and has less than 1K in the bank. It feels safe to do what everyone else is doing, but it's actually a terrible decision."

Alex Hormozi 4:01 It's like the best way to guarantee to not have the life that you want is to do what everyone else is doing. Unless you want what everyone else has with no one- which no one does. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 4:11 (laughs) Yeah, it's, um... Being able to think for yourself and- and treating it like a muscle, I think, is a smart way to consider it, because in the beginning it's really, really hard.

Alex Hormozi 4:21 Totally.

Chris Williamson 4:21 You've been resting on societal norms and the way you've dealt with past trauma and your parents' expectations and what all of your friends do and what's accepted and all of this stuff for so long, that when it first comes to you needing to step on that muscle, it's like trying to move your ears. Like, all humans have got muscles that can-

Alex Hormozi 4:38 Oh.

Chris Williamson 4:38 ... move their ears, but because no one works it as a child they just atrophy away.

Alex Hormozi 4:43 For sure.

Chris Williamson 4:44 Uh, and this is the ear muscle of personal growth.

Alex Hormozi 4:53 I think I had a lot of practice with it because I had a... So, like, a lot of people have many voices that they hear that they feel are judging them, right? They have their friends. They have their uncle. They have their siblings. They have their cousins, coworkers, whatever. I think I had just one voice that I heard really loudly, and I was try- I was- I was talking to one of our- one of our employees the other day, and I was trying to put it in perspective, younger guy. And I was like, "I... Imagine how much you care about your mother's opinion and your father's opinion and your sib- and all of those other people." I was like, "And now imagine that there's literally only one," because I had no siblings. I basically had no mother. I had just a father, and so, like, his approval was literally everything. And he disapproved of the path that I wanted to take in my life. And so I think a lot of these mental faculties or these little frameworks or these -isms just came from, like, "How can I combat this incredibly booming voice in the background?" Because, like, when I look at what I was doing at the time, like, I was a consultant. I, you know, I graduated in three years. I took the consulting job. I did all the things. But the craziest thing was that the moment that my father was most proud of me and he approved of my life the most was when I was the saddest-And so that's when I was like, "Maybe his approval isn't the right way to feel good about life." And so that, that started basically the six-month journey of, from when I decided that I wanted to change my life till when I changed it. And I think that, like, as you become more able or more potent or higher agency, that timeline between when you decide you wanna do something and when you actually do it just continues to compress, right? Like now if I wanna change something, I'm like, "Let's change it." Like done. I, like, I, we walk out of the things like, "We're never gonna do that podcast again," or, "I don't wanna talk to this person again," or whatever it is, right? Whereas before, it's like, "Okay, I have to, I have to sleep on it. I have to really think about it." And like, "How am I gonna s-" It's like, I, why do I care about how I'm gonna say it? This is what it is, done. And it's just like and that timeline is compressed, but the hardest one for me... Like the first one was by far the hardest and every one since then. The nice thing is that no matter how difficult your circumstance is, if you have, like the bigger the wall that you have to get through is, as soon as you get past that one big wall, you then can use that wall as the evidence for why you can jump over the next wall because that will be the biggest one. And so, like, after I did quit my job and left my house and, and left Baltimore and didn't tell my dad until I was across the country 'cause I was so afraid. Like, people think of me as like some big alpha whatever, dude. I was like, I was such... I was so afraid of my father's disapproval that I didn't tell him until I physically left the state. Like, like, I'm not, like... (laughs) Think about that. Like I wasn't even just one state over, I was like five states over and then I was like, "Hey, by the way, I'm going to California." And he was like, "Well, let's... Come over, we'll talk about it." And I was like, "I'm in Ohio."

Chris Williamson 7:26 Already in.

Alex Hormozi 7:27 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:28 Already gone.

Alex Hormozi 7:28 And then he's, you know, then obviously he had a different reaction, right? But like, but then after that it was like, "What do I have to do now?" It's like, "Oh, I gotta, I gotta sell strangers." And I was like, "I told my dad I didn't want to do what he wanted. How hard could this be?" And so like it, it then becomes this one huge proof point. So the bigger the, the dragon is that you have to slay, the more evidence you have that you can slay the next dragon. And I think that is... If there's ever been a, a good point for why getting over the one first hard one is so hard is that it will then give you the reinforcement that you can do whatever you need to do next.

Chris Williamson 7:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:00 The life you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations and you're living a life you hate because you're too afraid to have them.

Alex Hormozi 8:09 I think about that a lot because like whenever I feel anxious or insecure or angry or sad, I'm like, "What conversation do I need to have that I'm not having?" And so then, and usually if I just think for not that long, I'm like, "This is the conversation I've been putting off." And then, you know, I'm not the, the, the, the poster child of mental health. And so, um, I'll just call myself a pansy for not having the conversation. And then, and then I just have it. And so again, I think it's like I need to have this conversation and the time between when I have it versus, or when I, when I know I need to have it, when I actually have it, just 'cause continues to compress. And if you've ever had like a, a breakup or a employee firing, one of the, or a quitting if you're an employee, like these things that you dread, I dunno if you notice it, but like the day you do it, the moment after you do it, I'm like, "How many other conversations can I have?"

Chris Williamson 8:58 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 8:58 Like I wanna be like... I'm like, "Who else do I need to talk to?"

Chris Williamson 9:00 You're on a killing spree.

Alex Hormozi 9:01 Yeah, totally, 'cause the day-

Chris Williamson 9:02 Become a serial killer for awkward conversations.

Alex Hormozi 9:05 When I... So, like the next series of hard conversations that I had after I, I left home was actually like years later. So I had, I had multiple partners in mul- I said I had a, I had a partner in one of my gyms. I had a partner in four other gyms. I had a, a partner in a chiro and dental marketing agency. And all of them relied on me to make money. And so all of their livelihoods were still dependent on me, but I was splitting everything and it was just, it was, it was horrible for me at the time. And so I remember when I, I ended up getting in a DUI and, you know, I talked to a, uh, a performance coach or whatever, and he was like, "Your stress and these conversations could literally kill you." He's like, "They almost did." So I, I got in a head-on collision at 60 miles an hour and I walked away. No injuries. Um, but it was like my wake-up call, but not to stop drinking. It was my wake-up call that I needed to have these conversations. And that's what I was avoiding when I was drinking. It wasn't the alcohol. It was, what were the things that I'm avoiding that I'm using alcohol to get away from? And so, um, the next day I had the first conversation with the first partner and it was horrible. But the moment I was done, I was like, "I gotta call the other guy." And I called the other one, I was like, "This is how it is." A- and, and the thing is, is I had this backstop of my death of like, "You almost just died because you wouldn't have this conversation." And so then it just gave me this courage to just be like, pfft, like and whatever the reaction was, I was like, "I'd rather be alive." I think that was it. And so it's, it's weird though because death has been this really recurring theme in my life that, like, the same thing happened when I was e-... Like the only thing that gave me enough balls to stand up to my dad, to be fair, from a distance from the car when I was driving halfway-

Chris Williamson 10:41 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 10:41 ... across the country. Like let's not make my, let's not make me into too big of a hero here. Um, was the idea that like I started thinking like every day I was like, "I hope I don't wake up." You know what I mean? Um, and that was the, that was, that was the thing where I was like, "This is a big enough problem that like if you don't wanna wake up, then..."

Chris Williamson 10:58 What have you got to lose?

Alex Hormozi 11:00 Exactly. And that was it. And I was like, "I have nothing to lose." And that was when, that was when... I think in the last podcast we talked about this where it's like, if everybody who, who's like at the bottom and feels like they have nothing going for them, reframe that as, "I have nothing going for me, which also means that I have nothing to lose by taking action," it makes you a much more dangerous person. And I think that was the flip that I've had repeatedly shown to me in my life that allowed me to take the step that I was afraid to take.

Chris Williamson 11:33 Have I told you about the region beta paradox?

Alex Hormozi 11:35 No.

Chris Williamson 11:35 Have you seen that one?

Alex Hormozi 11:35 No. Uh-uh.

Chris Williamson 11:36 Okay, so this is interesting. So, uh, imagine that you had to go a mile or less, and if you did-

Alex Hormozi 11:42 A mile?

Chris Williamson 11:42 A mile.

Alex Hormozi 11:43 Okay.

Chris Williamson 11:43 If you had to travel a mile or less, you would walk it.

Alex Hormozi 11:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:48 And if you had to go more than a mile, you would drive it.

Alex Hormozi 11:50 Okay.

Chris Williamson 11:51 So paradoxically, you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile.

Alex Hormozi 11:54 Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 11:56 If you follow that rule, the important insight here is that if you only take action...... when things cross a certain threshold of badness-

Alex Hormozi 12:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 12:04 ... sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things.

Alex Hormozi 12:06 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:07 So, if you look around and you see that people are stuck in region beta, this zone of comfortable-

Alex Hormozi 12:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 12:12 ... complacency, right? I- It's the guy that sticks in his just okay job because his boss isn't too much of a dick, but the pay isn't that good and he's not really that passionate. But y- y- it's all right, whatever-

Alex Hormozi 12:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:20 ... whatever. The person that stays in the acceptable relationship, they're not that fired up, but they're not really in love and their partner's not really g- got much alignment with their interests. Or the person that stays in a crappy apartment and there's a bit of mold in the ceiling but it's cheap and it's in a good area of town or whatever. All of these people would be better off if their situations were worse-

Alex Hormozi 12:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:40 ... because it would give them the activation energy to kick-

Alex Hormozi 12:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:42 ... them out of the bottom, and their only regret would be not doing it sooner.

Alex Hormozi 12:48 Dude, I love that. When I... So it's funny, because if I look back on the instances that were the most painful in my life, every single one of them without fail has created a disproportionate gain, right? Like the most painful thing early on was, for me, was quitting my job and leaving, you know, leaving my dad basically. And then that created the, you know, my first, my first business and the gyms and all of that stuff. Um, you know, getting into the DUI, the head-on collision, um, and, like that whole situation got me out of all of these failed partnerships that I wasn't willing to do. But in the m- in the moment, I was like, "I'm such a failure. Like I suck at everything." But that gave me the springboard. When I lost everything the first time (laughs) after that-

Chris Williamson 13:35 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 13:37 ... um, that then gave me like, the idea that I needed to change the business model around, right? And that's what switched me into the licensing model, right? So like each of these ti- And then that became, you know, the, the first real fortune.

Chris Williamson 13:48 You know this is k- this is kind of like alchemy.

Alex Hormozi 13:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:51 Like turning something which is worse than useless-

Alex Hormozi 13:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:55 ... into something that's as precious and useful as possible.

Alex Hormozi 13:58 You know, I'm, I'm sure you know the parable of the, you know, the man and his son and he like buys his son a horse and then it falls and he breaks the leg and then they're like, "Oh, it's so sad." And then the army comes and the sun doesn't die. And then it's like, "Oh, this is how great," right? And so it's one of those really interesting ones where like whatever negative situation, and this is probably good for the audience, but like if you think back to all the negative situations you had, like the really, really bad ones, when you expand the time horizon, most times they become net wins. And so then it just means that like if you're in a really tough time right now, you just gotta wait. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:29 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 14:29 And then you get, and then you'll get your reference point back on all the things that changed as a re- result. Because most times when shit is bad, it can't get worse. So then you feel like, "Well, it can't get worse than this." And then your action threshold decreases and you take and you do all the things you know you should have done anyways. And so it's like we have this big stack of should dos and we just wait until it's two miles.

Chris Williamson 14:47 Yep.

Alex Hormozi 14:48 And then you just, you're like, you just-

Chris Williamson 14:49 I'm getting in the car.

Alex Hormozi 14:50 Like the firing conversation and you're like, "Well, I just fired one person," or like, "I just ended one partnership," or, "I just broke up with one girl," or whatever it is. And you're like, "Who else do I need to talk to today?" Right? Like, ch- ch- ch- ch- ch- ch- and then in like a per- per- like you have these rapid periods of growth that happen and then you have-

Chris Williamson 15:03 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 15:03 ... the next web of comfort because it's way better than you were before.

Chris Williamson 15:07 Yep.

Alex Hormozi 15:07 And I think it's... I wonder, this, um, this is more just like an open thought, but like, I wonder how long like more successful people stay in that next plateau. Like, I wonder if their threshold for-

Chris Williamson 15:19 Action stays low.

Alex Hormozi 15:20 Yeah. They're immed- like, all, like, I'm getting comfor- like how quickly they get comfortable into like, "I need to change, I need to get better."

Chris Williamson 15:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:28 Next one. The heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions. The reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you're not making them.

Alex Hormozi 15:40 It's a good quote (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 15:42 You said it. You said it.

Alex Hormozi 15:51 I think a lot of times the decisions that we make are predicated on the, on the conversations we need to have. Because usually like the... And what's interesting is like, you can define commitment by eliminating alternatives. So if you are committed, you've eliminated alternative actions, right? Like you can say, "I'm committed," but until you eliminate other options, you're not committed.

Chris Williamson 16:10 There's always a get out of jail free card.

Alex Hormozi 16:11 Right. And so, a lot of people make decisions to end relationships, to quit their job, to start the new thing, but they don't become committed to the decision until they f- remove the other options and then you're forced to take action on it. And so I think actually defining those two dif- two different things. Now you could define, you know, decision as to kill off, like decedere from Latin. But from a, from an e- from a colloquial thing, I think there are two different instances. It's like, "I need to change this," and then I do change it. Um, and the making the decision is when it becomes a commitment.

Chris Williamson 16:44 Why are unmade decisions so heavy?

Alex Hormozi 16:47 I think, at least for me, it's because I have this hamster wheel on the m- back of my mind where I keep playing out different scenarios. And so I keep thinking like, "Well, maybe, maybe I need to change what I'm currently doing. Maybe, maybe if I just rethought..." Like, 'cause I'm, I'm a big frame guy, so I'm like, "Maybe I just need to be thinking about this differently, right? Maybe if I zoom all the way out, the earth doesn't exist so maybe this doesn't matter. Maybe I'm just making a problem that doesn't exist. Maybe the best action I should take is nothing, right?" Like I, you know, I reframe all those things. Um, but usually, it's just because I'm afraid of something and then that's why I'm not making the decision. And I think once I name and put a face and it's usually not even a thing that I'm afraid of, it's one person's judgment I'm afraid of. And then when I name the person, then it becomes, then it becomes real. Instead of being this amorphous, like people, society, judgment, it's like Tom. I'm like, "Do I really care what Tom thinks? I guess so. It seems like I'm not making this big change in my life because of Tom."

Chris Williamson 17:37 Looks like Tom's more in control of my life than I am.

Alex Hormozi 17:39 Dude. So I remember this when I was 19 years old, I was super angry. Like all 19-year-old men, right? That's the, the standard default, right? I was angry at both my parents for w- because I was 19, right? And I remember blaming them for everything. Blaming them for my life, blaming them for not being a better person. I literally blamed them for being a bad person (laughs) . And I remember realizing that when I blamed them...... that I gave them control over my life. And then the idea that the people that I hated the most at the time were the ones who actually were controlling me was the thing that most sickened me, to then actually flip my narrative to actually taking control. Like, that was the one thought process. Like, my mother, I'm giving her control over my romantic rela- like, my mother controls this? Fuck that. I was like, no. And so like, just the idea that somebody who I (laughs) I was disgusted by at the time, um, had that much power is what gave me the power to start taking action.

Chris Williamson 18:39 See, this hamster wheel thing-

Alex Hormozi 18:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:41 ... that continues to distract you, I've got this concept called anxiety cost.

Alex Hormozi 18:45 Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 18:45 So, kind of like opportunity cost.

Alex Hormozi 18:47 Ooh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:47 Um, when you have an unmade decision, every single second that you spend thinking about the unmade decision could have been gotten back had you just made the decision.

Alex Hormozi 19:00 Oh yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:01 And realizing that it- it's- it's a justification for eating frogs earlier in the day. I need to answer that email. The longer that you wait until you answer that email, the more times you will think the thought, "I need to answer that email."

Alex Hormozi 19:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:15 And if we assume that what truly, truly matters in life is the time and the attention that we spend within that time, your time is being captured and your attention is being captured by a thought that could've been gotten rid of had you just done it, had you just had the conversation, broken up with the relationship-

Alex Hormozi 19:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:31 ... left the job, told the father, whatever, d- done your stretches, cleaned your teeth, had a shower, whatever it is that you needed to do. All of that anxiety cost could've been gotten rid of had you just gone and done it.

Alex Hormozi 19:47 You can move through life at seven times the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're gonna make a decision from end of week to end of day. So think about how that stacks up. So it's like, let's say that there were four decisions that you needed to make. If the normal person takes a week to make the decision, and then their mind moves on to the next thing that they have anxiety for and start making that decision and decide another week, decide another week, decide another week, it's a month to make those four decisions. Whereas the- the super, the superman that takes one decision, day one, one dec- second decision, day two, third decision, day three, fourth decision, day four, they aren't even finished the week yet and they're where the other person is at the end of the month. And like, that speed of decision making, like not paying the attention cost, the opportunity cost of your time, I think that's really profound in terms of how quickly people move through life, in terms of achieving the goals that they set out. Because people are like, "How did that, how is that guy so young and he's achieved X, Y, and Z?" It's like well, what takes you a month to make a decision, we make in an hour. And then the next hour, I make another decision that takes a year next month. And so like, that's how you can go 30 times or 100 times faster than- than the quote, "average person" who's overweight, has $1,000 in their bank account, you know, and is gonna die at 70.

Chris Williamson 21:00 Can you just go back to before you made that first decision-

Alex Hormozi 21:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:05 ... with your dad? Because you've mentioned it, you know, people might look at your, I would say ruthlessness, at least in some regards with decision making, you know-

Alex Hormozi 21:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:14 ... hiring and firing and making these business decisions-

Alex Hormozi 21:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:16 ... and there's all of these great stories about, and I had this thing and I realized that partner wasn't right, so I got rid of that business.

Alex Hormozi 21:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:21 And you know, that's the sort of thing that would tear most people up for-

Alex Hormozi 21:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:24 ... six months, 18 months, maybe forever.

Alex Hormozi 21:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:27 And to look at that degree of cutthroat-ness or at least, um, decisiveness, I think is almost unfathomable for a lot of people. Are you a representative avatar? Is pre-leaving Baltimore Alex a representative avatar for the average person?

Alex Hormozi 21:47 I think so. I mean, I was high achieving. You know, I still, I mean like, I did well in school, I tried hard. I did those things. But in terms of my risk tolerance, and my fear of failure, and my insecurities, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if anything, real talk, I'll bet you that I have more insecurities than most people, because those insecurities are what drove me to do well in those things, not because I cared about school, but because I cared about what other people thought about me.

Chris Williamson 22:09 Yeah. Yeah, I um, I've spoken to hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of high performers. On balance, people are driven way more by fear of insufficiency than they are for s- with some well-balanced, perfect desire to just maximize their greatness in life. Like, the activation energy for almost everybody is, "I'm scared I might be a piece of shit."

Alex Hormozi 22:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 22:34 What... Hang on. Oh God, I might be a piece of shit. I genuinely might be a piece of shit. I need to go and do something so outrageous that I- I can't be a piece of shit. I, there- there's no way that it could happen. I might be a coward. Oh my God, what- what can I do to stop myself from being a coward? That's the activation energy.

Alex Hormozi 22:52 It's funny, 'cause if you regress fear to its most basic form, it's death. And death is the greatest motivator. And like, you can prove it in a simple example. It's like if I all of a sudden go up to anybody on the street and I put a gun to their head and I say, you know, point a gun at their head and I say, "Go do this thing," they'll go do it. But if I say, "You can have anything you want if you do this," they're willing to go 10 times harder with a gun in their face to not die. And so if you take fear and regress it all the way down to its basis form, like that's what the insecurity is. Like, if they- they think I won't be enough, and if they don't think I won't be enough, then this won't happen. If this won't happen, this won't happen, I'll be alone and I'll be dead.

Chris Williamson 23:28 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 23:28 Right, like if you just regress it all the way down, like that's all it is.

Chris Williamson 23:30 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 23:30 And so like, the biggest achievers in life, I think, have- have most directly tied them not doing whatever it is that they want to do to death. Whether they're consciously aware of it or not. And then that's what motivates them harder.

Chris Williamson 23:44 We'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute, but first, I need to tell you about LMNT. LMNT is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a healthy alternative to sugary electrolyte drinks and it's how I've started my morning every single day for over three years. You do not need to have coffee first thing in the morning 'cause your adenosine system, that caffeine acts on, isn't even active, but your adrenal system is, and salt acts on your adrenal system. LMNT contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium that helps to regulate appetite, curb cravings, and improve your brain function. But best of all, tastes phenomenal. This orange salt is unbelievable in a cold glass of water first thing in the morning. And they have a no BS, no questions asked refund policy. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back, and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it.Head to DrinkLMNT.com/modernwisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box. That's DrinkLMNT.com/modernwisdom. You're not afraid of failing.

Chris Williamson 24:46 You're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail. But if you're afraid of that, imagine what they think of you when you aren't even trying. Oh, yeah, they aren't. (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 24:57 (laughs) I'm such a dick sometimes. Um... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:01 Does it, is it, is it strange to hear your-

Alex Hormozi 25:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:03 ... like, angry toilet tweets read back to you now in the cold, harsh light of day?

Alex Hormozi 25:11 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:11 (laughs) God, that was a particularly difficult poo I was cracking right there.

Alex Hormozi 25:15 (laughs) You know, real talk, the, the tweets that I have, people don't know this, but the tweets are notes to self.

Chris Williamson 25:21 Yep.

Alex Hormozi 25:21 So they're just directed at me so that I can look back on them and like be reminders of like, "Hey, don't, don't do that." And so, like, I think to myself, "Man, I'm afraid of doing this," and I'm like, "No I'm not. I'm afraid of what this person's gonna think about me." Because if I were to be able to fail in quiet, in complete isolation, then I wouldn't care. And then I think, "Well, what if I, (laughs) what if I, what if I don't succeed in public? What would they think then?" Nothing. Right? They don't think about me at all. And so obviously that comes from the perspective of, uh, seeking to gain approval and attention from others anyways. So it's like, listen, if you're insecure, which everybody is, let's be real, um, you might as well use the insecurity to get something out of it, right? Like, one of my, one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is, like, use what you've got. And so a lot of people think that they need to fix their conditions in, in order to get, like, the perfect conditions before they start. But the perfect condition is whatever one you're in, because it gives you whatever assets you have, that's the cards that you're dealt, and so it's you just play the hand. And a lot of people have great cards. It's like, "Man, I'm so afraid of..." It's like, use it. It's like, "I have nothing." Well, it makes you very dangerous, 'cause you have nothing to lose. Right? Like, one of the, um, really interesting things about... I think about it from a business perspective, but it probably applies to everything, is that there's always an advantage and a disadvantage from every position, right? So, like, I remember when... I mean, Gym Launch is still a big company and still continues to grow, but in the gym licensing space, there's not many people who can compete with us there, right? And I would talk to guys who were in the space. You know, I would talk, you know, talking at a conference, whatever. And, you know, younger guys would be like, "Well, I wanna, I wanna be in this space too, and it's not fair because, you know, you have this big advantage." And I was like, "You have a way bigger advantage than I do." And I was like, "'Cause if I were in your position, I would go to every single gym owner and be like, 'Pfft, you don't wanna be with Gym Launch, you don't wanna be with Alex, you're just a number to him. Like, you're never gonna talk to him. Like, you're just a cog in the wheel there. With me, you're gonna get my personalized attention. There it's just some employee down the chain that's following some process,' right?" I was like, "But on the flip side, if I'm talking to that same gym owner, then I'm gonna say, 'You don't wanna talk to Jimmy, he lives in his mom basement. He has no proof that he's good at what he's, what he's at.'"

Chris Williamson 27:14 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 27:14 The reason that we're number one in this space is 'cause we've done it so many times and we have a system that we know that if you go on this side, you will get this result on the outside. I was like, "There's always a position and there's always an advantage." I was like, "You just have to play the one you've got. And most people just look at what everyone else's advantage is, and don't think, 'Which one do I have?'"

Chris Williamson 27:29 When you're talking about i- it's not you that's afraid of failing-

Alex Hormozi 27:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:33 ... you're afraid of other people's opinions about-

Alex Hormozi 27:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:34 ... why you're going to fail. Like, the reason I think that cynicism is so popular on the internet is that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.

Alex Hormozi 27:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:46 That's fundamental. It's sour grapes at an existential level, right?

Alex Hormozi 27:51 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 27:51 It is a cynicism safety blanket. It is protecting you from ever having to feel the downside of anything. I will assure-

Alex Hormozi 28:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:00 ... my own failure in private so that I never have to face my failure in public.

Alex Hormozi 28:07 It's kind of like investing. Like, everyone's afraid of losing money when they invest, but the only guaranteed investment that doesn't work is never investing to begin with. And so it's like they take the long failure rather than the short one. Right? I mean, it's what it is, right? You just fail long. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:24 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 28:24 And they're like, "I prefer that." Um, but that's, I mean, that's... Yeah. I- It's, it's like you and I are going back and forth on trying to figure out how many different ways can I say that either the people that you're worried about judgment are gonna die, or that you're gonna die. Or that even if you do achieve the thing, they won't care anyways. Or if you don't do anything, they won't think about you to begin with, and don't you wanna be thought about to begin with? Like, don't you want some level of significance? I just... You're gonna die. And I think, like... I was, I was very grateful that so... One of my biggest inspirations or whatever, you know, influences when I was in Baltimore was I would have lunch with my grandfather three times a week. So he was 90. Old guy. So I would go to the nursing home and we'd have lunch three days a week. And listening to him talk about the regrets that he had in life, it's so much more painful to watch someone who has no options left. Like, he's gonna die. I mean, he's gonna die tomorrow. And he died a couple years later. I mean, like, it was... And he, he lost all his mental faculties, you know, almost sadly. Basically when I sto- when I left Baltimore, one of the sad parts is I was one of the only people that kind of, like, kept him lucid, you know what I mean? And after that, no one really, no one really visited him, no one really did anything. And so I think he, he just r- rolled downhill. I think the lunches might've been the only thing that he looked forward to. And, um, seeing someone old with no options and nothing but regret... Now, not that he had everything to regret. He had things that he did really well, and I took those things from him. Um... It... He would, he would repeat the same lessons. You know, like, every lunch, this'd be where a lot of older people kind of repeat a few key lessons. And everything that he had... He flew during, you know, he fled during the, um, during the World, World War II. Uh, you know, he fled from the Germans and all that stuff 'cause he had a, a Jewish-sounding last name. Um, he wasn't, but he... It was enough that he was fleeing, right? Um, and he always used to say, he's like, "You have two hands and one brain." He's like, "Use them." And that was always his thing that he said to me. And, um...I think, just like when- when I- when- think about the things that he was going up against, compared to the things that we're going up against now, it just made me feel like, all right, like this is not as big of a deal as I really think it is. I don't have Germans at the- at my door, you know?

Chris Williamson 30:46 What were the regrets that he had?

Alex Hormozi 30:47 Him?

Chris Williamson 30:48 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 30:50 He would've spent... I mean, again, there's deathbed regrets and then there's real-life regrets, but there's- there's things that he would've done differently in terms of the business, there's things he would've done differently with his wife, he had- he got divorced, um, that, you know... Uh, he would've done things very differently with his kids, so my mother, um, and her sisters. Um, which actually talking to him about how he raised my mother helped me in some way forgive her for some of the things that I felt were wrongdoings that she had done to me. And so it's funny because... You know, one of my favorite quotes from Blaise Pascal is, "To understand is to forgive." And like when you- when you... I think there's another saying that I like a lot which is, "It's really hard to hate close up." It's like if you really see someone and you see all the things that they went through and the things that they- that happened to them to become who they are, then you understand them and then you understand why they did X, Y and Z. Because if we don't understand, we assume that it's because they're just evil people, and most people aren't that way. They're this way because they've been reinforced or punished for doing something like that in the past. And especially for her, she was reinforced for acting a certain way over and over and over again to the point that it was- it was core to her character. And so when that got put on me, I was like, "I hate you. You're terrible. You're evil." Like, blah. But like when I looked at it on a much longer time horizon of like, she was four years old when she came here, she couldn't speak English, she got beat up as a kid, like all these things, I'm like, "You know what? Maybe give her a little grace." You know? And I remember when- when I came back, and it was right around that same time where I realized I was giving this person all this power, she yelled at me for something when I came back home from college my freshman year. And it was a standard fight, you know. Like here's the button that I press to get into the normal fight that we get into. Um, I just remember she hit the button and I just like wasn't that upset. And I- it's like I felt nothing. She like hit the button, she like hit it again harder, and I was like... And I just remember looking at her and being like, "I get it. I'm sorry." Like, "You had a tough, tough life." And then she just broke down and, you know, started crying because it was like she felt understood. And I think, um... I know that was a roundabout way of getting back to regrets, but he regretted how he had raised her. But his- through his regrets, I got to see why she was the way she was, and then it defused the bomb that was between me and her.

Chris Williamson 32:57 Did I tell you that story Douglas Murray told me about regrets from

Chris Williamson 33:00 Christopher Hitchens?

Alex Hormozi 33:01 Mmm-mmm.

Chris Williamson 33:01 Brilliant. So, Christopher Hitchens, one of the new atheists, uh, was... sat in some British pub with Douglas Murray when Douglas is young. And that, you know, you can imagine it's some musty Chesterfield sofa, he's probably got a cigarette in his mouth and a-

Alex Hormozi 33:19 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:19 ... glass of scotch or something. And, uh, Douglas is vacillating between these two different choices that he needs to make, and he is, um, complaining, lamenting the fact that, "I have this thing, but I have this thing, and if I do this thing, I can't do this thing. And- and- and what- what do I do?" And apparently Hitch like sat back and, "Douglas, in life we must choose our regrets."

Alex Hormozi 33:46 Mmm.

Chris Williamson 33:48 And I was like, "Fuck."

Alex Hormozi 33:50 There you go.

Chris Williamson 33:51 So I'm three Manhattans deep in Douglas Murray's apartment in Manhattan at 2:00 in the morning, and he sneaks off to the toilet. And I quickly write this down because I know that my like half-cut-

Alex Hormozi 34:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:03 ... alcohol brain isn't gonna remember it.

Alex Hormozi 34:05 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:05 So I note it down, because that was all the trigger that I needed.

Alex Hormozi 34:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:08 Which is also a good argument for noting things down. And I reflected, I misreflected on that for a year. I must have thought about it for a year. "In life we must choose our regrets." What the fuck does that mean? Okay, first off, in an existence where opportunity cost is baked in because you don't get to split test life, and by doing a thing you can't do a different thing... I have the choice between going to the gym and going to the theme park, if I go to the gym therefore I can't go to the theme park. Even if the decision of going to the gym was the right call, I will always have the open loop of, "Yeah, but what if I'd gone to the theme park?" You can't ever know.

Alex Hormozi 34:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:40 Right? Okay, so that means that fundamentally regrets are baked in to our existence. And I'd always thought that the reason I had a regret was due to some suboptimal decision-

Alex Hormozi 34:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:54 ... I'd made. If only-

Alex Hormozi 34:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:55 ... I'd made this decision better I could have ameliorated the regret. Okay, so regrets are an unavoidable part of being a human, and they're a byproduct of opportunity cost which you can't get away from. But what does it mean that you have to choose your regrets? Okay. Well, if regrets are inevitable, if they're going to happen no matter what, an easy way to look at a decision is rather than, "Which do I want to do?" "Which regret could I live with?"

Alex Hormozi 35:22 Mmm.

Chris Williamson 35:23 Because there are certain regrets that you can't bear living with. Now, you can bear living with them, but they're going to be worse than other ones.

Alex Hormozi 35:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:30 So what is the difference between I need to have a difficult decision, I- I need to have a difficult conversation with my boss about leaving to go and do this thing, or I need to... That's the regret, that's one regret, of the sitting down-

Alex Hormozi 35:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:41 ... and seeing them face to face and telling them that you're going to leave their small mom-and-pop business and you're the main salesperson-

Alex Hormozi 35:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:46 ... and it's gonna be terrible and they're gonna cry and you're gonna feel like a piece of shit.

Alex Hormozi 35:49 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:50 That's one regret. Another regret is looking back at a decade that you waste in a job that you fucking hate.

Alex Hormozi 35:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:56 So in life you have to choose your regrets.

Alex Hormozi 35:59 I love that as a decision making frame because it also jumpstarts our fear engine. Because rather than saying like, "What do I want?" It's, "What do I w- what do I hate least?" And so we get to run... So then you get to use your run-away-from engine rather than your go-towards-to engine.

Chris Williamson 36:17 (laughing) Yeah-

Alex Hormozi 36:17 Right?

Chris Williamson 36:17 ... the mouse and the cheese again.

Alex Hormozi 36:18 Yeah. And w- was it you who was telling me that, uh-

Chris Williamson 36:21 Yeah, with the cat?

Alex Hormozi 36:21 Y- yeah, I mean...

Chris Williamson 36:22 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 36:24 So, uh, I'm just gonna butcher what you told me. Um, but why don't you just share the, like how much...

Chris Williamson 36:29 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 36:29 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:29 This was on our last episode, so-

Alex Hormozi 36:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:31 ... this is the sequel for the people that were listening.

Alex Hormozi 36:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:33 Um, Jordan Peterson talks about the study where they starve a rat and they put it into a tube.... they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and there's a spring attached to the rat's tail so they can work out how hard it's pulling. How hard it's pulling is a proxy for desi- for how much it wants it. And you'd think this rat is starving, it's gonna pull as hard as it can. So it, they waft the smell of cheese in and it runs towards it and whatever. They do another iteration of the study. This time, they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the smell of a cat in from behind.

Alex Hormozi 37:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:00 It pulls harder.

Alex Hormozi 37:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:02 Why? Because not only in life do you want to run towards something you want, but you want to run away from something that you fear. And this ties into your, the three most common traits of-

Alex Hormozi 37:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:11 ... very successful people. Superiority complex-

Alex Hormozi 37:14 Yep.

Chris Williamson 37:14 ... uh, massive crippling insufficiency-

Alex Hormozi 37:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:16 ... and impulse control.

Alex Hormozi 37:17 Yep.

Chris Williamson 37:18 So superiority complex, I can achieve this thing.

Alex Hormozi 37:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:21 That's the cheese. Um, crippling sense of insufficiency, I fear the cat. Impulse control, I'm in a tube-

Alex Hormozi 37:27 I'm in a tunnel. Yep.

Chris Williamson 37:28 ... there's only one direction that I can go, I don't need to make a choice.

Alex Hormozi 37:30 Yep. (inhales deeply) I love this a lot as a frame for, for, for decision making, because that... Like, think about the decision that we were just talking about, right? So it's like, I'm, I'm the sales guy and I stay and, like, if you were to frame it in upsides, it's like upside is I keep these friends, right? Um, and, but I wanna leave so that I can start this business, right? Those are the upsides. But when you think about it in terms of like, I waste a decade of my life not living the life I want, to me, I mean, even when I say it, it sounds more motivating. Even though it's the exact same thing, it's like losing $100 versus gaining $100, pe- people have three times higher loss aversion. And so it's like, if you can't get yourself to do something, think about it from the perspective of what you have to lose rather than what you have to gain.

Chris Williamson 38:19 You've got a quote that I love, "My biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and thinking I wasn't good enough." What's that mean?

Alex Hormozi 38:26 (inhales deeply) And I'll define good enough is I could have tried harder. Like, I wanna leave everything on the field. And one of the things that has helped me a lot, I mean, in the quote that went unbelievably viral (laughs) , um...

Chris Williamson 38:43 Do you want me to do it again? Do I need to do it again?

Alex Hormozi 38:46 (laughs) You don't gain confidence by saying, shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by stack- giving yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork your self-doubt. And again, a lot of the tweets that I have are notes to self. Because like, like I have a, you know, I have a big presentation coming up. We got 500,000 people who are registered for this book launch, um, that are coming out. And I'm thinking to myself, it's like, "How can I guarantee that when I step off stage, no matter what happens, I feel like I've accomplished, that I've done a good job, that I can look at myself in the mirror and say, 'Good work'?" And when I was younger, I used to have no way to do that. That's 'cause I measured everything on outcomes. But I feel like as I've gotten a little bit more experienced, I do have a way to win now, but it's hard. And the way that I win is when I finish and I say that there's nothing else I could have done. And so that means that, like, the reason that I feel confident about this book that's coming out is I wrote 19 drafts of the book, four full rewrites end to end to make the book. I did six hours a day, my first six hours from 6:00 AM till noon every day for two years to get this book to where it is now. And when I was done with the book, I was like, "There's nothing else I can do to this." Like, I, this is it. There's nothing else. Like, I can't make it simpler, I can't make it shorter, I can't cut it, I can't add in a visual that I should have added. It's done. And so to the same degree with the presentation that I have, I gave myself this framework of like, "Okay, well, if I were to speak in front of 10,000 people, I would probably spend a good amount of time prepping the presentation to make sure it was good." I was like, "Well, I'm gonna speak in front of 500,000." I was like, "So I can, I can rationalize spending 50 times the amount of work and effort and time to make this thing exceptional." Because, I mean, the numbers are hard to fathom, but that is the numbers. Like, if I had a 10,000, that's what I would do. And so it allowed me to take a presentation and, you know, I have 900 slides that I'm gonna get through in 60 minutes. And I have now every single day, I do a full draft of the, you know, I, I, I'd say the, say the presentation in my head, and then I do a second run where I say it out loud and I record it. And then after I record it, I play the recording with the slides up and I fix or add every slide where I stumble or there's something that should be there or visual. And I keep going until now, right now, I'm a week and change out and there's, there's not much else I can do to it. And so I'll still continue to do that from now until the day that it happens. But I probably won't have as many changes 'cause I should just keep nailing it. And then when I get up there, it doesn't matter if the tech doesn't work or if the, you know, the, the book shopping page cart, you know, doesn't, you know, doesn't work or whatever it is, because I'll be able to step off stage and look in the mirror and be like, "You did everything you could." And the thing is, is like no one else will know that. Because I know that, like, I could not do that. And I pro- like, you know, a lot of people are like, "Dude, you have so much goodwill, you could probably just say like, 'Here's, you know, here's the book.'" Um, but I would know. And if I, if I believe what I say I do, which is that I'm the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner of my own self-esteem, then I'm the only person who can say good job or not. And unfortunately, I have incredibly high standards. And so I can either just always feel like a failure because I always fall short on my own standards, or I can create a standard that I, I willingly and consciously accept, which is that I will do enough work that there is nothing left to be done. And that means that I can also do fewer things, which means I have to be more selective about the things that I choose to do. But when I do them, they will be done well and they will be done right.

Chris Williamson 42:09 They say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person that you could have been.

Alex Hormozi 42:12 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:13 And a lot of the time, I

Chris Williamson 42:18 think we look at, uh, sports stars. I'm watching this quarterback on Netflix at the moment.

Alex Hormozi 42:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:22 And is, Patrick Mahomes is just this artist.

Alex Hormozi 42:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:26 You know, he's, he's a halfway between a warrior and a savant and an, and an artist and a musician and, and an everything rolled together, right? The reason that we love seeing behind the scenes with stuff like that is it is somebody at the absolute zenith of their capacity-

Alex Hormozi 42:42 Yep.

Chris Williamson 42:42 And they are putting everything that they can into making this as good as possible. And I think that I sometimes find myself getting... I- I- I certainly did before I had the podcast, I was wistful that I have the raw materials to work very hard at things, and I'd never had a pursuit that I could have applied it to.

Alex Hormozi 42:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:00 There was nothing... I remember the first time I ever heard Peterson say, "Work as hard as you can at one thing for a year and see what happens."

Alex Hormozi 43:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:07 And I'd never had a thing that I could work... I- I could work hard at business-

Alex Hormozi 43:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:11 ... but the line between your inputs and your outcomes is so meandering and messy-

Alex Hormozi 43:16 Yep.

Chris Williamson 43:16 ... that I can always excuse away good or bad performances as not being on me.

Alex Hormozi 43:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:20 And for the most part, I would take responsibility for the bad ones-

Alex Hormozi 43:23 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:23 ... and not take responsibility for the good ones-

Alex Hormozi 43:24 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:24 ... because that's how I'm wired. But I- I never had something that was linear.

Alex Hormozi 43:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:29 Or close to linear.

Alex Hormozi 43:30 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:30 I'm like, I put an hour in, and I get an hour out, or more than an hour out.

Alex Hormozi 43:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:35 And it's direct. And then about three years ago, I had this conversation with Dean, my video guy. I was like, "I wanna turn pro." I read-

Alex Hormozi 43:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:41 ... uh, Steven Pressfield, War of Art, and then I read Turning Pro. I was like, "I wanna turn pro with the show. What's that mean? What would it mean if I treated this pursuit like an athlete does?" So an athlete, they review game tape-

Alex Hormozi 43:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:55 ... and they do mindset work, and they go to sports psychologist-

Alex Hormozi 43:57 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 43:57 ... and they look at what they eat, and they look at what they drink, and they go to bed on time, and they're hanging around with people that are growth-minded, and they're getting the right coaches, and they're-

Alex Hormozi 44:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:05 ... all the rest... Everything is done in order to facilitate performance in the thing that they say they care about.

Alex Hormozi 44:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:11 But everybody has the opportunity to do that. You just need to define what the thing is. I'm never gonna be Patrick Mahomes, right?

Alex Hormozi 44:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:17 I- that- I, no. But I managed to find my thing and then nearly kill myself in dedication toward it. There's a- a photo that I put up on my Instagram a little while ago, uh, two weeks after I ruptured my Achilles.

Alex Hormozi 44:33 Yeah, yeah, I saw that.

Chris Williamson 44:34 And I'm in a boot, and I've got the laptop on my lap.

Alex Hormozi 44:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:38 And we've created this arm that'll bring the mic to me, because I didn't want to stop doing the podcast, 'cause I'd made this commitment, "I'm going to turn pro." And for three years, we haven't missed a single episode three times a week, three times a week, three times a week, for three years now.

Alex Hormozi 44:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:50 And before that, it was two a week for a year. And before that, it was one a week for a year.

Alex Hormozi 44:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:54 And it just keeps on ramping up. And the opportunity to commit yourself fully to something that you care about is beyond a blessing. And when you do it, the way that you feel once you know that you've worked hard is great. And we said before we started, you got this big thing coming up, which I'm super proud of you for managing-

Alex Hormozi 45:12 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:12 ... to achieve, even though it hasn't happened yet.

Alex Hormozi 45:14 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:14 Um, the difference between being nervous and being excited before you do something is your level of preparation in advance of it. If you step out on stage or in front of half a million people on a webinar, which is the craziest sentence I've ever said-

Alex Hormozi 45:26 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:26 ... if you step out on stage in front of half a million people and you've done absolutely everything, there's nothing to fear.

Alex Hormozi 45:34 And that's why it's not about what everyone else will think, because when an- I'm on stage making that presentation, the only person whose voice I'll hear is mine. And I will know if I have done everything in my control to be prepared or not.

Chris Williamson 45:47 And what- what's the best thing that comes out? "I didn't do everything that I could to prepare, and I managed to fluke my performance."

Alex Hormozi 45:53 Right.

Chris Williamson 45:53 "I managed to, like, close my eyes, throw the dart, and oh, wow, it hit the bullseye." You'll even know that. There'll even be guilt. You won't even be able to fully enjoy your success-

Alex Hormozi 46:02 And that's it.

Chris Williamson 46:02 ... because you'll have tarnished it with your lack of input.

Alex Hormozi 46:05 And what's interesting is that when you start defining your own success that way, um, it actually starts to feel under your own control. But the downside is you realize that you can do very few things. And then, all of a sudden, life feels very short, 'cause you're like, "Shoot, there's, like, not that many things I can do before I die-

Chris Williamson 46:20 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 46:20 ... if I'm going to actually do my best." And what was interesting is I was talking to a- a CEO friend of mine, he's a public CEO. Um, and he was like, "I need to start making content, right?" I'm like, "Dude, you're, you're like managing a billion-dollar company." I was like, "You're doing okay, man." But because of that type of person, he's like, "I need to be doing better with my content," right? He's got a few hundred thousand followers. Anyways... And so I was like, "All right, well, how many pieces of content are you putting out a week?" And he was like, "Well, I'm gonna put out one a day." And I was like, "Dude," I was like, "we put out 300 a week." And he just... He didn't even respond. He just took... He just, like, pursed his lips and nodded, and he was like, "Thank you for resetting my minimum standard." It's always, like, "Thank you f-" Like... And I'm sure, like, when you talk to Phil Heath and he talks about the volume that is required in order to gain muscle and how much, how- how dia- how dialed in he is with food and all the other things, um, just the amount of sheer work... Like, the biggest change in... Or I'll say, biggest reason that I've had significantly larger returns or outcomes that have happened later on in my career, and they continue to get bigger and bigger, is because the minimum standard for how much work I know I can do on something has- has multiplied a hundredfold. Like, I look at the first presentations, I was telling Quinn this earlier, I look at the first presentations I ever gave. And I remember thinking to myself when I had this, I was like, "This is a good presentation." And it's like 25 slides, with, like, a heading and, like, three bullets on each slide. And being like, "Man, this is good." I'm like, "This is a... This is- this is a pittance. This is like an afternoon." But in my mind, if I spent a whole day on something, that was, like, a lot of work. Now, it's... I, you know, I like using this term, like, measure in hundreds, which is like, "Measure in hundreds of hours. How many hundreds of hours have you put towards something?" If you do that, I promise you, the thing that you're making will get a lot better. And you'll also see how much more you're capable of, which is e- what I think, like, my undertone of listening to what you were just saying with the podcast is like, the more you do, the more you realize you can do. And so what happens is, you're actually... Even though you're- you're going pro right now, you're like, "Dude, next year, I'm going pro."

Chris Williamson 48:17 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 48:17 Because this is now just a minimum standard. Of course I work out three days a week. Of course I do three podcasts a week. But dude, once we have the r- the reality TV show, and we have the full crew, and we have the headquarter... Like, 'cause then the path gets lit of where you're gonna go, because you're so singularly focused, and you know you have no other distractions. The attention cost isn't... You're not paying that down anymore. And you're just like, "How many times can I repeat this effort?" And then that's when you start unlocking mastery, right? Like-I, I have this process for creating presentations. And before we turned on the mics, uh, we were talking about it. But it's like, I've done a handful of presentations in my life and I've gotten decent at making them. But the, the process now is so refined, which is like, it is game tape. It is, I make the thing, I do the thing in my head, I do it out loud, I watch the recording, I edit the thing, I do it in my head, I do it out loud, I watch the recording, I edit the thing, and I just keep doing it until it's glass.

Chris Williamson 49:10 Dude, I listened to, I listened to every podcast that I did for probably the first-

Alex Hormozi 49:13 Oh, God. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 49:13 ... two and a half years.

Alex Hormozi 49:14 (laughs) You cringe.

Chris Williamson 49:14 I listened back every single, every single time. But at the time, I didn't cringe 'cause I thought that-

Alex Hormozi 49:18 Of course.

Chris Williamson 49:18 Oh, you crushed it.

Alex Hormozi 49:18 Of course.

Chris Williamson 49:19 I mean, anybody can go back and listen to episode one with Stuart Morton in my old office in New- Newcastle upon Tyne, and you'll notice every other sentence that he says, I go, "Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm." It's fucking infuriating.

Alex Hormozi 49:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:32 It's absolutely catastrophic. My accent's terrible. The c- everything, everything, everything about it is, is awful. And yet, at the time, I thought it was great. Here's another interesting thing I've been thinking about recently. Um, when you don't have anything to say no to, it's easy to focus on one thing.

Alex Hormozi 49:49 Mm.

Chris Williamson 49:50 As success begins to get you more opportunities-

Alex Hormozi 49:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:54 ... your ability to say no becomes increasingly important. And that's something that I'm feeling now.

Alex Hormozi 49:58 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:59 Just more attention. There's ... We're hockey sticking quite aggressively.

Alex Hormozi 50:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:03 And I'm not anywhere near, like, even middling Z-list fame.

Alex Hormozi 50:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:08 But it's enough for people to see what they think is a penny stock and decide that they're gonna try and throw their hat in the ring.

Alex Hormozi 50:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:13 Which means that there's, like, 20 things I need to say no to every single week.

Alex Hormozi 50:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:18 From new people that want a, that want t- to do a thing.

Alex Hormozi 50:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:20 They ... "Why don't we try this thing? And why don't we do that thing? And why don't we do the other thing?" It was a piece of piss-

Alex Hormozi 50:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:25 ... five years ago, to say, or three years ago in the middle of COVID to go like, "I'm gonna go pro and I'm just gonna-"

Alex Hormozi 50:29 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:29 "... focus on this one thing." 'Cause what else am I gonna do?

Alex Hormozi 50:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:32 All of my nightclubs have been shut down. I got nothing else to do with my life. Now, "Oh, you said you were gonna go pro? Interesting."

Alex Hormozi 50:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:41 Let's see what happens when you have 30 other things every single week vying for your attention. Now, let's see how committed you are.

Alex Hormozi 50:48 This is my favorite analogy for this, which is the woman in the red dress. But, you know, every ... Many people have seen The Matrix. If you haven't seen The Matrix, you don't need to have seen it to understand the analogy. So, Neo is going through a training program, the protagonist. Morpheus is his, his educator, his, his teacher. And the education program only has one objective. And so he's walking through the city. People are going left and right. He's, he's bumping into people going through, like, crowded New York. And then, all of a sudden, it's kind of a black and white palish look. It's green, black and white, but it's still black and white. And then, all of a sudden, this woman in a, in a red dress enters the frame. And you can't help but stare at this woman in the red dress, and she's a complete knockout. And Morpheus is talking to Neo, trying to teach him something. And as he's talking, he's like, "Neo, were you looking at me or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?" And he says, "Look again." And he looks back, and it's Agent Smith holding a gun to his head. And he says, "Freeze," and then everything freezes in the frame. And he's like, "If you're not one of us, you're one of them." And I see that as the opportunities that we have to say no to every day. It's like another woman in the red dress, and it's become a term that we use internally, right? It's like, "It's a woman in the red dress." And the thing is, is that the, the more successful you become or the more able you become, the hotter the woman in the red dress is, right?

Chris Williamson 52:00 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 52:00 Like, you could... Like, you got a homeless girl that you're walking d- you know, pass on the b- on the street. She's like all dirty, but she's got a red dress on. You're like...

Chris Williamson 52:06 Eh.

Alex Hormozi 52:06 The thing is, is that that homeless girl when you were in your apartment actually looked like-

Chris Williamson 52:10 It's pretty hot. (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 52:10 Yeah, right. She's like, "You know, I'm not ... You know, I, I could." You know? Right? Um, but then the better you get, the, the bigger the opportunities. And that's where you have not your hypothetical 10, but what about your hypothetical 100?

Chris Williamson 52:20 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 52:21 And I had a mentor say this to me right as we sold, uh, Jim Launch. He said, "Alex, that, you know now that if it's not a billion, it's not worth your time." And that was such a single ... A great razor for all decisions. And so people come. They're like, "Hey, we should do this endorsement. Hey, we should partner with this," whatever. I mean, think about it, like, we're in the deal world. So, how many deal (laughs) did we get? So, we have 3,000 companies a month that reach out to us to do a deal. That's 100 a day currently. And we've done 13 deals in two years. And so, like, if you think about it from an acceptance rate, it's like, you know... And I'm not saying you shouldn't apply.

Chris Williamson 52:56 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 52:56 By all means, go to acquisition.com and apply if you have an awesome business.

Chris Williamson 52:58 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 52:58 Um, but, but the point is, is that, like, your no muscle isn't really a no muscle. It's just a yes muscle for the one thing that matters most.

Chris Williamson 53:07 Yep. We'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about the number one e-commerce platform, Shopify. When I was a nightclub promoter in the UK, I started an online apparel brand with no experience, no coding ability, no marketing background, no inventory management. And after a ton of research, I decided on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. You've probably already heard of it. In fact, a lot of your favorite brands still use Shopify, including Gymshark, one of the biggest sports apparel brands on the planet. Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your online business without the struggle. What I loved about Shopify was that as we added in new lines and different verticals, it grew with the business. It required zero experience. Every single time there was a problem, I was able to sort it myself. That's how simple it is. And there is a $1 per month trial period that you can sign up for right now with the link in the description or by going to shopify.com/modernwisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com/modernwisdom to take your business to the next level today. Heroes

Chris Williamson 54:09 and villains always have the same backstory-

Alex Hormozi 54:11 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:11 ... pain. The difference is what they choose to do about it. Villain says, "The world hurt me. I'll hurt it back." The hero says, "The world hurt me. I'm not gonna let it hurt anybody else." Heroes use pain. Villains are used by it.

Alex Hormozi 54:28 And full kudos here. This is a permutation of what, uh, Donald Miller said, um, who's a great writer. And he has a, a number of, of books. And he, he, he talked about the first element. The second element of that quote is the part that I added to it, um, about heroes using pain and villains being used by it. And so-One of the things for people who are not where they wanna be is that they have pain, like oodles of pain. And I remember when I was starting out, I was looking for passion, I was looking for purpose. I was like, "I just wanna find something that I'm motivated by." But it's the, it's the cat and the cheese. It's like we're looking for cheese, but we have all these cat behind us, and all we have to do is look and remember that they're behind us and chasing us. And so... if you have the cat and you're staying in your current situation, you're being used by the cat, right? You're being used by the business owner who, you know, doesn't treat you well and is, you know... and you're in this job that you don't really wanna be in, right? Or you're being used by the situation or the context of the relationship that you're in with the girl that you're, like, not that into, right? Versus saying like, "This is terrible. And because of this terribleness, I now have something that I can run away from." (laughs) And then y- and then, and then like, rather than not looking at the knife or trying to take painkillers to not feel the pain, it's t- like completely sobering up, taking the knife and twisting it in your own heart and being like, "I'm gonna fucking do something about this." And I think that that's, that's what the heroes... Like if we're heroes in our own story, it's not avoiding pain, it's choosing fr- from the very beginning, the alchemy, which is like you have these terrible situations. It's like... and you have the opportunity to turn, turn them into magic, and, and, and skip or shortcut all the growth you're gonna have in a really short period of time simply by twisting the knife and being like, "I'm gonna do something about it."

Chris Williamson 56:15 Yeah, I think because people presume in the beginning that passion and purpose and meaning and joy and, and fulfillment are the things that get people going. But as I've said, of all of the high performers that I've spoken to, the vast, vast, vast majority of them are driven by insufficiency and resentment and terrible parents or terrible upbringings, or a chip on their shoulder about bullies in school. P- pick your poison.

Alex Hormozi 56:43 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:43 They have decided to use that to create the activation energy, right? You can lower your action threshold and increase how many points you have to prove. It's like, "Oh, I want to live a better life." "Eh, yeah, that sounds good." It's like, "I want to prove the bullies that said I was a worthless piece of shit in school wrong." It's like, that's some fucking potent fuel. I do believe that scaled over a long enough time, it's toxic. And I don't think that it's necessarily-

Alex Hormozi 57:10 How long? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 57:11 Well, (laughs) that's the que- that's the question. Like a lifetime, right?

Alex Hormozi 57:14 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 57:15 Like, but ev- I mean, it'll, it'll fuel you for a decade pretty well.

Alex Hormozi 57:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:19 And I think that... I look at me, I look at, you know... I was bullied pretty badly in school, and was an only child, and had expectations from parents.

Alex Hormozi 57:28 Sure.

Chris Williamson 57:29 And, and you know, I combined all of those things together, and I did have a chip on my shoulder, and I did want to prove to the world that I was worthwhile, and I did want people to, to realize that they had doubted the wrong person. Fuck yeah. Yeah, damn right I do.

Alex Hormozi 57:45 I think being really specific about your pain is helpful. So like, er, even being specific about the cheese, really specificity in general is helpful, but like even more so, like what is the twisting the pa- what is twisting the knife? Like what is... how do you operationalize twisting the knife, right? Instead of being like, "I hate my life," right? It's, "I hate the way Andrew makes me feel when he says that I'm a piece of shit and I'm not gonna amount to anything," comma, "because he's right." Like, why does it hurt me? Like if someone says, "Alex, you're a piece of shit, you're not gonna amount to anything-"

Chris Williamson 58:20 If someone accuses you of being poor or fat.

Alex Hormozi 58:22 Right. I, I would have... I'd be like, "I have evidence to the contrary, so this will probably not bother me." But the things that bother us are the ones that you know have an element of truth, or sometimes not an element, are comprised almost entirely of truth, and we just don't wanna look at it. And so I think it's, it's the, the twisting the knife is looking in the mirror and saying, "What if they're right?"

Chris Williamson 58:42 Success is the only revenge. As you expand, they shrink into irrelevance. As you get louder, no one can hear them. You don't beat them, you cast a shadow so big no one can see them to begin with. When people copy, they copy the wrong stuff, because they don't know why it worked to begin with. And when it breaks, they don't know how to fix it, because they didn't build it. So don't sweat it. Copycats will always be behind.

Alex Hormozi 59:09 Good shit. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:11 But success is the only revenge.

Alex Hormozi 59:12 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:12 It is such a lovely... there's that, um-

Alex Hormozi 59:16 Want me to tell you the story behind it?

Chris Williamson 59:17 Damn right.

Alex Hormozi 59:18 Yeah. So I was 15 years old, so this was really early in my life.

Chris Williamson 59:23 Still jacked.

Alex Hormozi 59:25 Still jacked.

Chris Williamson 59:26 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 59:26 Always jacked. Perma-jacked. And I, uh... (laughs) This is gonna sound s- so lame. So I had this teacher. So I'm a freshman in high school, and I might have been 14, whatever the age is, and I'm walking through the hallway and this, this teacher, who's like an admin of some kind, walks out of his office and he's like, he's like, "Son." And I was like... I'm like either s- in trouble, what am I gonna do? And he's like, "You work out?" And I was like, "No." He's like, "Why not?" And I was like, "I don't know how." He's like, "I'll show you." He's like, "You got the genes." And so that teacher, Mr. Givens, um, ended up working out with me every day in high school and sh- showed me how to work out. And he probably saw on some level that I was some angsty teenager that felt angry about whatever, and I, during our workout sessions would be like, "This guy said this to me." Like, "He..." you know, you know, "Wa-wa-wa," or like, "He..." this bull- wa-wa-whatever. And I was like, "Man, I'm gonna come back at our 10-year reunion," and I was like, "I'm gonna show him." I was like, "He's gonna be working for me," like blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And he's like, "No, he's not." And I was like, "What do you mean?" I was like, "Let me just have my moment." (laughs) Right?

Chris Williamson 1:00:33 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 1:00:33 He's like, "No, he's not." He's like, "And you're not gonna do that, not if I have anything to say about it when you come back for that 10-year reunion." And I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Because if you come back at a 10-year reunion and say, 'Hey, s- John..."... like, everything I have. Look at me now. And he's like, "The guy's gonna laugh and be like, 'You did all of this to try and prove me wrong?'" (laughs) Man, I feel sorry for you. And when he said that, when he actually played out what my, like, revenge fantasy was in real life, I realized it looked s- it looked stupid.

Chris Williamson 1:01:03 Petty.

Alex Hormozi 1:01:03 Yeah. I looked like the beta in the fucking (laughs) situation.

Chris Williamson 1:01:06 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 1:01:06 Right?

Chris Williamson 1:01:06 Yeah.

Alex Hormozi 1:01:07 And so, he was like, "The only thing that you can do is win so big that all of them constantly compare themselves to you, and then you'll forget they exist." And he s- and that's when he said, he said, "Success is the only revenge." He's like, "It's not the best revenge." He's like, "It's the only one. There's no other revenge 'cause everything else is petty."

Chris Williamson 1:01:27 Mm-hmm.

Alex Hormozi 1:01:27 "Everything else does show that you were thinking about these people all day long, which means they win by default." He's like, "All you can do is think about your goal and winning." He's like, "And when you win, that's when you become so big that they shrink into irrelevance. You cast a shadow that no one even can see them behind you."

Chris Williamson 1:01:45 This is the nuance, I think, on, on the previous point, when we were talking about the toxicity of that fuel-

Alex Hormozi 1:01:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:51 ... long term.

Alex Hormozi 1:01:52 Yeah, you can see me light up. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:01:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that when you think about, um, the activation energy of using the things that you don't like-

Alex Hormozi 1:02:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:03 ... you have to be careful that you're using them and that they're not using you-

Alex Hormozi 1:02:06 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:02:06 ... still. And a lot of the time, I get this, and, uh, in my more juvenile moments, I, I see myself do this, where I'll know that there's a game that somebody else that I don't like cares about-

Alex Hormozi 1:02:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:20 ... and I'll imagine myself playing that game to beat them so that I can stick it to them-

Alex Hormozi 1:02:26 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:02:27 ... purely for the reason of sticking it to them.

Alex Hormozi 1:02:28 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:02:29 Let's say that there's someone that really cares about being in shape, and I'm not in as good shape as I have been in the past, and I know that with muscle memory, if you give me 18 months and a good amount of testosterone, like-

Alex Hormozi 1:02:38 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:02:38 ... the thing that they care about-

Alex Hormozi 1:02:40 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:02:41 ... I would be able to make them feel really bad about.

Alex Hormozi 1:02:44 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:02:44 Okay, so I would hijack my own direction-

Alex Hormozi 1:02:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:51 ... purely to try and prove somebody else wrong in a desperate... An- and somehow believe that that's me taking control of my life? Are you kidding me? I'm allowing them to ventriloquize me-

Alex Hormozi 1:03:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:04 ... through pain that they didn't even mean to give me.

Alex Hormozi 1:03:07 Yeah. The woman in the black dress.

Chris Williamson 1:03:10 Uh, the black pill equivalent?

Alex Hormozi 1:03:12 Right. Or, like, now y- it's, like, not even a distraction from your main goal. It's like, I'm gonna make a new goal just to wrong this person and then somehow make, make up the story that I'm in control of my life when I'm, I'm really just acting in complete reaction to this person. And so, in so doing, in beating them at their own game, they've already won by default.

Chris Williamson 1:03:30 Yup, because they got me to change the game I was playing.

Alex Hormozi 1:03:33 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:03:33 Forget about who won. It's like, "Dude, you were over there, and now you're over here." I see this with a lot of people. Uh, I, I think that it contributes to a lot more of why and how people adopt societal norms. The, the resentment that they have, it's, it's not just, "Other people want this thing, therefore I mimetically want to do this thing too." It's, "I know that other people will respect me and that my resentment will feel justified and manifest if I win at it." And that's really compelling. That's like a motivational spit roasting-

Alex Hormozi 1:04:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:04 ... coming in from both ends, and it's, it's really, really powerful, and you need to be careful.

Alex Hormozi 1:04:10 I mean, I think, (sighs) you know, one of the really early blessings, and I'll be on it, like, this is where I think I was fortunate, right? Like, I, I realized when I was about 28, right, um, that I had been trying really hard to be... I mean, you'll note as a common theme with a lot of my stories, but I have one central person that I was trying to prove for a very long time, which is my father. Um, and we're on good terms, by the way, 'cause I always get that question. But, uh, this was after I left, and he disapproved of my whole thing, and for five years we didn't talk very much. And so he calls me up, um, to... He says, "Hey, you're gonna wanna sit down for this." And I'm like, "Okay, what? Are you pregnant?" You know? Um...

Chris Williamson 1:04:52 (laughs)

Alex Hormozi 1:04:55 And so, and so he says, "I'm sorry," and, and I was like, "For what?" And he was like, "For everything." Right? Now, mind you, like this is a Middle Eastern father born in Iran to a Middle E- to a Middle Eastern father there who was even more legit. Like, it, uh, when... Where my father was born, women weren't allowed to drive cars. Cars came with drivers with them when you bought them. The driver came with the car. Or like, he was born in a very different world. Like, fathers don't apologize to sons. It just, it was j- it just wasn't that way. And I have a little bit more, a little bit more awareness than I did then, and I can see that now. But for me, I was like, "Pfft, now you apologize?" You know what I mean? Um, and so rather than take it for the olive branch that it was, uh, I said, "I didn't care about your opinion five years ago when I left," and I was like, "And I don't care now." And he was like, "Well, we'll see how long your success lasts." And so, what could've been a really nice (laughs) exchange ended up becoming pretty, pretty ugly. But the, the main point there was that I wanted to, in the beginning, like, make as much as my father, then it was make more than my father, and then it was make more than my father had ever made in his entire life. And once I had achieved that, I realized that, as much as, like, it sounds terrible to say this, but like, I was trying to beat him at his game. And, and this is pretty alive in a lot of cul- a lot of Asian culture, same thing, making money is a big... You know, like, when my dad would introduce somebody, he'd be like, "This is so-and-so. He makes this much a year." Like, it was, so it was just really clear-

Chris Williamson 1:06:18 Thanks, Dad.

Alex Hormozi 1:06:18 ... like, this is how much status someone has-

Chris Williamson 1:06:20 Mm-hmm.

Alex Hormozi 1:06:20 ... and so, like, it was really deep for me. Um, but it was only when I realized that I had won at his game that I realized I'd never even asked the question of like, what game am I trying to win? And I don't know how many people are actually trying to win at a game that they didn't even set the rules up for-

Chris Williamson 1:06:38 So many.

Alex Hormozi 1:06:38 ... when they're in it. And that's why I say, like, I think I was fortunate that I, you know, I hit a, a really tough goal, 'cause my dad was, is,