Alex Hormozi
Appearances
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so whatever your standards are, he's like, you always have to keep pushing that standard because as things grow too, some people grow out of their sphere of competency. They're not as good at this level as they were before. There's nothing wrong with them or with you. It's just seasons. And so my understanding of that has shifted in terms of my role as well.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Like I see myself as lead recruiter for the top people because the absolute best people only want to talk to the CEO because you're not giving them an opportunity to have a career. They already have a career. They're giving you basically everything they know to help grow your vision. And so it's a lot more of you selling them than it is them selling you. They already have a tracker.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
They have offers. They have headhunters that call them every day. You're not giving them anything that they don't already have. And so it's like Sheryl Sandberg with Zuckerberg. He met with her for dinner like once a week for a year before they... before she transitioned and took over Facebook. And so it's a much longer recording process.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And all the people that I'm looking at, they're all killers. And so rather than thinking like, man, we really need someone to fill this role, it's like, I need John to fill this role. And John doesn't currently work for me. He works for somebody else. It might take six months. Exactly. And I have to figure out a way to get John to leave what he's doing and come work with me.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so that has probably been, those have been the two biggest challenges those have been the two biggest changes or shifts, um, that I think have propelled, uh, acquisition.com, um, to just the last few years have just continued to get better and better is focused on the one thing that matters most and be disciplined enough to say, yes, we aren't going to do these things.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And yes, they are problems. And we will get to it as soon as we finish this one thing that matters most. And then in order to execute on that, you need the absolute best and brightest because the arbitrage on, um, Imagine the difference if we had this as engineers, this taxi driver thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If a good engineer costs $250,000 a year and an amazing engineer costs a million dollars a year, but you get 100x return on that guy, it's still a better deal even though it costs more. And I think that's where people get mixed up is that it costs more, but it's a better deal. And so talent is a better deal.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So what we outline is the job of the entrepreneur, risk. The reason that our compensation is outsized to our effort is because we're willing to take on risks that other people aren't. It doesn't always work out. Of course. But the thing is, if you think about it like that, let's say there's a casino, right? And you have a game where you've got a one in five shot at 100x payout.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Well, you should play that game every time knowing you're going to lose four out of five times. Because it's worth it for 100x payout. But you lose more times than you win. And that's the difficulty from the human brain perspective is that we see two, three losses in a row and we're like, oh, this doesn't work or I'm a failure or whatever. But it just may be intrinsic to how the game works.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so... Most volatility comes from lack of volume. And that's all the way down. So me trying to get my side business going, Etsy or whatever, I'm trying to get my little accounting or bookkeeping business started. They're like, clients are kind of sporadic. I'm getting one every other week or so.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But if I took the whole year of the amount of promotional effort you did, and then I crunched it into a week, then you'd actually be able to have predictive metrics that make sense. It's just that you're having 100 conversations over,
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Six months and those hundred conversations create three deals And so it's like okay with what appears sporadic or what appears volatile is actually a function of low volume You're just not doing enough.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
We're not on a on a fast enough time horizon And so I think about this a lot whenever there's inconsistency I said do we just need to do a lot more so it becomes consistent and we have the illusion of inconsistency and But we just need to increase N by a hundredfold. And then all of a sudden it feels very consistent that 3% of conversations turn into customers.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And then all of a sudden now we have a business.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
No, the bonus one is basically my understanding of branding has, I feel like, also developed. So all three of these things are not new concepts. I feel like my understanding of them has evolved. And I look forward to deepening my understanding of them even more in the future. So I had a wonderful conversation with Ben Francis, who's the CEO of Gymshark.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
For those of you who don't know, he's like 32. They do a gazillion dollars a year. They're like number two biggest apparel brand in the UK. Really impressive, awesome guy. And we were talking about basically the ratio of branding versus asks direct response that is the right for a business. Now, everybody who's listened to this is like, I don't even know what he's talking about.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But I'll tell you a story that he told me, and it changed my perspective. It was probably the most influential conversation I had of the year. So the CMO of New Balance got fired because they had 15 years of decline. So the new guy came in and he went to the CEO and said, hey, can I just swing for the fences here? Can I really, can I take a big bet? And the guy said, sure, go for it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so what he did was they had 70% of their advertising budget going towards just, you know, discounts and deals and getting people to directly buy shoes. And then 30% was going towards like influencers, sponsorships, endorsements, more top of funnel awareness, like, you know, cool factor. And so what he did was he flipped it. And he made it 70% influencers and sponsorships and cool factor.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Branding. Branding, exactly. Positive associations for their ideal audience. And then 30% was, you know, hey, come buy the shoes. And so over the next 18 months, they just kept losing more money. And then on month 19, it just went boop. It started going up. And then it just shot up like a gun.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And they're having a complete rebirth right now. They're crushing it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah. You see, it's like it used to be dad shoes and Gen C girls who have like white socks pulled up going to the gym and New Balances. I'm like, what is happening? But there's a number of smaller lessons that I took from that. The first one is that branding happens at a delay. It's like he changed the behavior and it took 18 months in a big company that spends a lot of money.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so when I think about that for myself, it's like I'm living today based on work I did two years ago. And so you want to dig the well before you're thirsty. And so if I'm thinking to myself, what do I want two years from now? It's like I have to start digging for that water today. I need to plant that tree now.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so that was number one is just the delay between how long, basically when you need to start changing your behavior and when you see the result of that behavior. The second thing is founder-led companies tend to do significantly more investment in brand versus the corporate suit-owned guys because they are measured by quarters.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so that's why they tend to destroy companies over the long term because the day that you go shift from branding to 70% direct, hey, buy the shoes, for a period, you do better. You're pulling forward revenue. that's maturing, kind of like a fruit on a tree. It's like you're plucking some fruit a little bit early, but you end up filling the basket faster.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But then there's no more fruit to pick because you haven't been planting new trees. Right. Interesting. And so that dramatically shifted. And it also had a quantifiable metric, too. And what's interesting about the 70-30 is that it's super well-studied. Because, so TV, Facebook, if you look at the ratio of posts to ads on your newsfeed, you look at the ratio of minutes on a show compared to ads.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
They've already studied this. They know how to maximize, okay, how do we put as many ads as possible without getting people to stop watching, right? And so the ratio is about three and a half. of basically good experiences to ads that has to occur. And so when you think 70-30, they're a little bit on the lower side. So for me, I take it as it'll probably be closer to 25-75.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Also, I'm assuming that they're rounding and numbers change. But the fact that it was in parallel with the same ratio that consistently delivers value and allows you to monetize. It corroborated different evidence that I had on different platforms.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
My book. I literally, this quarter, after looking at everything, I was like, because obviously I'm in the business space, and so it's not like I can sign C-Bama like Gymshark can and just get all the athletes and have them promote my thing. I can't get Elon Musk to promote me. As much as Elon, if you feel like it, let me know. I doubt it, and I say that with the most respect.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I was like, within the context of business, there's really only two things that I can do. One is go do big aspirational things, which is what we're doing with our actual portfolio companies. And the other is help other people do those aspirational things, which I can do most effectively with leading with the books, leading with value. And so I'm pushing more into content.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I'm pushing more into the books. The books are free. Unless you want a physical copy, obviously you can buy them. But like, those are big gives. And so I'm like, how do I put, and I'm looking at how much I'm spending on team and what the team is creating. relative to what the give versus ask ratio is. And so I'm going to be putting really heavy, I'm going to be doing more than 75%.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I'm going to be putting like 95% towards it because I'm always happy to plant more trees for the future.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
it's both basically the call to actions I'll likely shift towards will be the book and from a content perspective I I'm using the same concept of the talent piece which is if I had the absolute best people in the world who could help me with the content that I have we could get 10 or 100x improvement in what we do and so I am going to be paying even more and I gave my whole team just massive raises and I also eliminated the people that I thought weren't
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
up to that standard or just weren't as invested, don't like business, things like that, right? Just good objective editors, things like that that didn't mesh with where we're trying to go.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah, I see that as being kind, not nice. As long-term, I want somebody to have the opportunity to be at a company where they have a very long-term trajectory. They're aligned with the mission. And if someone isn't, I think the day that you realize they're not, you owe it to them. It's kind of like being out of a relationship.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If you don't think you're going to marry somebody, I think the day you realize it, you should release them to free agency. Because somebody else will, and they are the right person. There's a company out there that they're best for. And even though those conversations can be trying in the short term, I've seen it work out so many times that I have limited emotional affect when approaching them.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Because I'm like, I know this is going to be better for you. I know this sucks right now. But you will not go homeless and you will not die. Right, right. You'll figure it out. You'll figure it out. You will be okay. Yes. And we obviously, you know, we do our best to try and make recommendations.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And all three of those things are aligned. What's the one big thing? If I can continue to 10X the brand, that's the focus. What do I need for that? I need the absolute best people. And then how do I back that up? With dollars and cents and time, the only resources I have. And so I'm putting all my resources into doubling down on that.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Only think about the actions and not about anything else.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
um ever i mean honestly a lot of it was what other people would say it's so weird because it's so foreign to me at this point but i remember that the most terrifying thing that i ever did was quit my job it was the most terrifying thing was the hardest thing i've ever done for sure bar none not even close the hardest thing i ever did was quit my job i belabored the decision for six months i held every friend i had i wasn't sure i would i remember just pacing in my in my tiny little condo back and forth just on these endless phone calls where i just loop in circles it'd be like how
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I don't know, but I mean, but I really wanted to, but I could fail, but what if I fail? You know, like there's all this nonsense, right? And so the thing that ultimately allowed me to get over the hump was actually playing out the worst case scenario in exquisite detail. Like most of the reason that we're afraid to fail is because we're afraid of dying in an abstract reality.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
we think, oh, we catastrophize. Okay, I'll lose my job and then no one will like me and then I won't be able to get a job again and then I'll be homeless and then I'll die. That's how we go, right? But when I thought through it, I was like, what would actually happen? So if I went there and I failed, what would I do? I was like, well, I'd apply to business school
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
and I'd have this cool story and they like entrepreneurs or people who tried to do things. So this would actually, this would be fine. This would be okay. And I have plenty of friends who would let me sleep on the couch.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If I had to, I could go back to mom and dad's house with my tail between my legs, which I felt it was, was that was honestly the most horrifying thing that I could imagine going back home as a failure. Yes. Um, but the idea, the one that, that got me out of it was I can always get the job back. Mm hmm. So this is actually a significantly lower risk move than I'm perceiving it to be.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I can get the job back. Or I can get another job that's comparable. I have the experience. And me doing all this stuff only makes me more valuable because I'll have a cooler story than somebody who just did four years of this job rather than two and then did two years of things on their own. And so that was actually the one argument The secondary argument was for me, I was young at the time.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I was like, this is extremely hard to do. If you say, cause I used to always tell people like, yeah, and I'd like to own my own business someday. Like, it's almost like you like tag it on to like, what's your, what do you do now? And I'd like to. And so I, I thought to myself, if it's this hard now, when I have no kids, I have no wife, I have no steaks.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
it's gonna be nearly impossible for me to do later. And so I was like, I have to do it now. And so I'm actually a very risk averse person, despite the fact that I am a quote entrepreneur now. I guess they're not quotes, I guess I am an entrepreneur. I think it's just because the influencer was so like, everybody's like, everybody's an entrepreneur.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But those were the two strongest arguments that got me to take the plunge and make the bet.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I don't know what that means.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I don't, So I define everything by actions because it's the only thing that's observable.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah. I mean, at the most basic level, yes. And then, you know, one level above that, I'd be like, money is exchanged for goods and services. And parties, when they make exchange, both parties are better off. The person who sells the goods and services believes they'll be better off if they had the money.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And the person who buys the goods and services feels like they'd be better off if they buy the goods and services. And so it's a mutual exchange. Both people say thank you, which is why capitalism is wonderful. But the point is that You have to look at, and I like people starting out with service-based businesses because when you ask the question, does somebody need to have money?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
No, usually you have time. The first rule of entrepreneurship is you use what you have. First rule.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah. And so that's because everyone focuses on resources rather than resourcefulness. And so every self-made billionaire and millionaire was in the exact same position as you because they were self-made, which means that you have the same exact ingredients they had, which is nothing, but also nothing to lose. And that's what makes you the most dangerous player on the board.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And that's the piece that I think anyone who starts out misses. You're the one, if you lose it all, you're still at zero. You have unlimited shots on goal. It's like life gives you a lottery ticket and you're like, well, what if I lose? It's like, well, the lottery ticket's free and you can keep cashing it in until you win.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so you might start a car detailing business or you might start a lawn care business. And the thing is, is that everyone has this fallacy that the first thing they pick is going to be the last thing they pick. They think that's going to be their business forever. But I've had a lot of businesses over my career. And you learn it each time.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Like every business I've had, I've, I learned lessons from the ones before that, before I moved on. And it took me, it took me nine businesses before I actually had my like first real successful one, uh, with gym launch.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I shy away from things that I can't define. And so I function 100% in the observable reality. And when someone says, I have manifested this, I would say if you have a set of beliefs that you repeated on a regular basis that then changed your behavior, the behavior is what created this outcome, not what you repeat to yourself.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
and so as long as whatever you do translates into changing what you do in reality then then great whatever whatever it takes for you to do there but i just focus ruthlessly on that because how do you how do you know someone's like he's really motivated you can't see if someone's motivated until after they've taken action which means do i need to be motivated at all i actually need to do something right and that makes for me this has made business teaching people training
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
learning so much easier. Because what happens is if someone's good at something, a lot of times getting good at something and then teaching someone else to do that thing are two very different skills. And so people who don't know how to teach or train then add a lot of energy and mindset and all this stuff. But it's like, dude, just do this. Just do this.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so what happens is we have these terms. So people are like, man, I want to be more charismatic, for example, right? Well, if I looked at someone and said, be charismatic, What do you do? You can't do anything with that. And so what happens is we have these, I call them bundled terms. And so it's these words that actually have a laundry list of behavior underneath of them.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So be charismatic really might mean when you walk into a room, stand up straight. When you talk, talk louder. When you shake someone's hand, grip them firmly, look in the eye, try and say their name as many times as possible. When someone's talking, you're doing it right now, nod your head. It shows that you're listening.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And over time, if you do this laundry list, and there's more, people will begin to describe you as charismatic. But if I said, be charismatic, it's useless. But if I said, do all of these things, then all of a sudden, people would then say, charisma has occurred.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so in training people to do things in the companies that we have, and also in trying to train myself to do stuff, because I try to learn all the time, I see the purpose of life as learning, as changing my behavior.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
How can, if someone has a skill that I want, I just, instead of looking at, and I don't even listen to what they say, because a lot of times they don't know why they're that way either. I just try and look at what did they do that was different than what I'm doing and try and compare their reality versus mine and say, oh, I need to do this. Ah, now it works.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And all of a sudden people describe me in that way. And so trying to operationalize as many words as possible that are amorphous is how I've made sense of reality.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Honestly, not really. I like to always know what I make per minute because that so I'll say I'll rewind the clock in terms of the things that I have now, I think, are a result of behaviors that I did in the past that I haven't changed. And it's just I have more time under my belt.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I think one of the big misconceptions of people who are starting out is that the amount of results you get in the beginning for correct behaviors are not indicative of how correct the behavior is. And so the first week you go to the gym, you're not really going to see anything. It doesn't mean that going to the gym is wrong. It just means that your results are going to come out of delay.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so for me, it's like I checked my bank account every single day for years until I had more money that didn't make sense anymore because the volatility of the things I was invested in made it irrelevant. But I call it having a pulse on the money. You need to know where it's going and where it's coming from.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And when you have that pulse, all of a sudden you're like, I know what an expense that costs $500 means to my bank account. And I know what a $1,000 check means to my bank account. And all of a sudden, I started seeing my expenses as bundled time. So I remember the first time I had this realization. I used to work at a minimum wage job at a Smoothie King. I was a blender tender.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So I made $6.75 an hour.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I remember my coworkers, it was like three or four people to a shift. They would go get lunch at Cosi, which was next door. It was like a sandwich shop. And I went with them one day. And I bought a normal meal, and I think it was $12, something like that. And you're like, dang, that's two hours. Exactly. And I was like, wait, I'm only working a five-hour shift.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I'm using post-tax dollars. And I was like, if I do this every time I'm here, I only get credit for three of the hours that I'm working.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so immediately I was like, wait, I'm going to cut my work efficiency in half every time I go to eat lunch out while I'm here. And so I was like, oh, I have to change that.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But then as soon as I realized that, you know, when I go to the mall on the weekend, because that's what you do when you're, you know, 15 or whatever, I would look at, you know, a new shirt from The Gap, which was cool back then. Yeah. And I would look at it and it was like $30.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I was like, man, if someone if my boss came to me at the beginning of the shift and said, hey, work a whole shift and I'll give you this T-shirt, I'd be like,
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
nah I don't want to do that and so in thinking about how much time it took me to pay for things all of a sudden a lot of stuff wasn't worth it and so it shifted so from a my relationship with money is more like what what did it change about how I spent and bought sorry how I spent and and how I acted to make more and so I um I've always been a saver in terms of I always live below my means um I don't if like the first rule of money is spend less than you make
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
First rule of money. You don't need to listen to anything else. You don't need to do any investing. Nothing else. The first rule of money is spend less than you make. The second rule of money is take what's left over and invest it in making more money.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I think the big piece, especially people who are starting out, miss out, is that they expect that they're going to get rich as rich people get richer. And it's a different strategy. when you're starting out, you have to think about how you're going to make money while you're awake, not while you're asleep.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
The only reason that people who are really rich think about how to make money while they're asleep is because they've already maxed out their waking hours. And they can't put more time into investments. And so they have to, by consequence, pick passive things. to make money, but they already maxed out their active. Currently, you haven't maxed out your active.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And the returns on active are significantly higher and lower risk than passive income opportunities. So for example, if I were in a, you know, it's about to be winter time in most of the U.S., If there's snow in the area that you're at, you could probably buy a push snowblower for a couple, I don't know what the rate of snowblower, call it a thousand bucks, right?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And you could use a shovel in the beginning and you might be able to do two, maybe three big driveways in a day. Okay. If you have a snowblower, you might be able to do 20. And if you have that, then you just seven extra earning capacity. And so it's a small, like what $1,000 stock is gonna 7X your pay? Nothing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I think people wildly, wildly undervalue the active investments where you put a little bit of capital and a lot of time and how much that capital multiplies what you make with your time. And so that's obviously in the physical labor where you have a machine that helps you out. But even on knowledge-based work,
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
The one of the highest leverage things I did is I paid a guy who knew how to run Facebook ads. I didn't know how to run them. I had a gym. I knew. OK, because I'd like looked online and stuff. But I knew I was like, I need to get better at this. And so I went to I went to three different agency owners and they all pitched me their services. And I said, honestly, I couldn't afford it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I said, what would it take for you? This is the question. What would it take? for you to teach me how to run ads. And I was like, I'll pay you every hour. He's like, I don't sell my time. And I was like, it's America. Everybody sells their time. Yeah, how much? Yeah, exactly. What would it take? And he said, $750 an hour, which to me was an unbelievable amount of money at the time.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I said, OK, deal. And I said, but the terms are, I have to have my hands on the computer, not you. And you need to tell me what to do, and then I have to do it. And then if you change something, I need to understand the decision making behind it. Why you did that. Exactly. And so it took me eight sessions with this guy. Eight one-hour sessions.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Oh, he asked for $5,000 a month. And I was like, oh, my God, I can't afford that. But every time I would do it, and then I'd record it, and then I'd rewatch it a couple times. I would take notes. And then the next one, I was like the best student ever, right? But by the sixth time, I got it. And by the eighth time, I was like, I don't need this guy anymore. I get it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so that $6,000 investment made me millions of dollars in my life because I knew how to advertise. And I didn't know how to advertise before. I could get leads. I could call them and close them and bring them to my gyms. And then eventually I showed other gyms how to do the same thing that I did. And so... This is the leverage, right? How do you get more of what you put in?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And the biggest and best investment that you can make is in your own skill set. Because skills are the ultimate hedge against inflation. They're the hedge against currency changes. People are like, what's going to happen to the dollar? Doctors are going to get paid in seashells or Bitcoin or US dollars. It doesn't matter. If you have value to exchange, the world will exchange for it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so that's the big thing that I think people who are starting out miss.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
You need to learn to advertise. So if you think about it in sequence, right? If you start a business, what are the contingencies? If no one knows you exist, no one can buy your stuff. And so you have to first let people know you exist. So it begins with advertising. Now, advertising doesn't mean you have to run paid ads. I say advertise. I define that as letting people know about your stuff.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so you can let people know one-on-one via outreach. You can DM. You can email. You can phone call. You can knock on doors. All that's one-on-one. You can make content. You can post on public platforms. You can stand on the sidewalk and shout. It's one to many, right? And the third way you can do it is you can run ads.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
The fourth and kind of like secret or more advanced ways that you can use those, to then go get somebody who already has that audience that you want. So you get an affiliate to then prefer you business. And that's an amazing strategy. But in order to get in touch with those, you reach out one-on-one, you make content, or you run ads.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So those are going to be the core things that you're going to be able to do. And so in the beginning, you have to do that to get the first interest. Now, I think where people make mistakes is, They then double down on that at that stage. Oh, this worked. I should do more, which is a logical thing to think.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But long term, the product is going to be the thing that's going to allow you to scale really, really big. Now, don't get me wrong. You can make a few million dollars a year, $10 million a year being a really good marketer, being a really good promoter. You get limited at a certain point because you burn through a marketplace because people understand the concept of word of mouth.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
They're like, yeah, you want to have word of mouth. But what they fail to realize is that negative word of mouth is significantly stronger and more viral.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so all of a sudden, when their advertising stops working or their cost to our customers doubles and triples, but the cost on the platform hasn't doubled or tripled, it means that you have an invisible hand that's suppressing your results, which is that somebody who would have bought heard that you're not good or heard that you're even mediocre and just decides not to.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And we do this all the time. You're like, I was thinking about checking out that restaurant. It's like, I went. And that's it. It's done. Just like that. And you would have gone if that person hadn't said anything. I was going to go to that movie. How was it? I mean, it was okay. Done. You're not going. That's it. And so people overestimate.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
It's so hard to get positive word of mouth, and it's so easy to get negative word of mouth. And that's what suppresses you long term. So in the beginning, you advertise. then you maintain that level of advertising to continue to iterate the product because you need to get the people in.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And this is the unfortunate part, but you bring people in knowing your product's not that good and you just do the best you can and you keep making it better and better and better until you get people to stick or get people to come back. And so if you have a membership business, it's obvious you want people to not cancel.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If you have a consumer business, like if you sell coffee, you sell Coca-Cola, whatever it is, it's how reoccurring is the revenue. How likely does that person who buys your coffee come back again to buy coffee, whether it's a shop or it's a product, doesn't matter.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so once you know that people are coming back, it means you fixed the product sufficiently, that now you go back to the advertising and then you double down, you go crazy on it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
You know where I'm going with this one. So my favorite ism that I like is don't invest in the S&P 500. It's invest in the S&ME 500. Because you will get so much more on active income by investing the small amount you have into increasing your earning capacity than you ever would. Just think about the dollars here. So let's say that you had $1,000 saved up.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If you invest in Apple, whatever, you'll have a 20% gain this year, a 30% gain this year. Okay, great. So now you have $1,300. But $1,000 can teach you a new lesson or a new skill that can take your earning capacity. Because if you only have $1,000 saved up, you either make very little money or you're not following the first rule, which is you've got to spend way less than you make.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so if you're on the I don't make a lot of money part, by the way, you can still definitely save more, but if you're on the I don't make a lot of money part, then doubling your earning capacity would, by the end of the year, you might have $30,000 saved up rather than one or 1,300 in the alternative scenario. It's not even close. It's an order of magnitude difference. It's not even close.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But everyone's afraid of work, and everyone wants to get rich quick, which is why lotteries continue to make money. And so if you can just get out of that basic fallacy that you're somehow going to get lucky, I would rather get rich for sure. That's for me. Success insurance is extending the time horizon and being willing to learn skills along the way. That's success insurance.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Play out the other scenario. If you actually do hit the lottery, you also lose it because you don't have the skills to keep it. It's true. So the other path is pure fallacious thinking. It's false. It's a false dream. It's never going to result in wealth. If you get rich quick, you get poor even faster.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If you get rich quick, you get poor even faster. Why? Because you don't... So my favorite magic card... Hold on. I'm going to bring it back. My favorite magic card was this card called Burning Wish in Magic the Gathering. And the flavor text on the card said, She wished for a weapon, but not the skill to wield it. And I always loved that text because I thought about that as business, as money.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
It's like we wish for money, but not the skill to wield it. Because money is just a potential for exchange. And so if you don't know how to make it, then everything you have is just a nut that's going to go down. Because you also don't know how to multiply it if you got lucky. Because anybody who wants to get rich quick only is relying on luck. You're relying on chance. You're gambling.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
You're not investing. And so if you want to play the game, and unfortunately, the tweets, the Instagram posts, the whatever, we see someone screenshot when they go from $10,000 to $1.5 million. You just don't see the other 100 people or 1,000 people who put $10,000 and went to $1. And so, the idea is, I wanna get rich for sure.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And the surefire way to get rich, and the reason all these billionaires get up there and they say, hey, just invest in skills, and it's like, sure, it's because that's the only thing that protects you. And I come from a country, or my father comes from a country, rather, where my family, everything we have is taken from us. by the government.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so it's very real that you may have to start over halfway through your life at zero. And if you do lose it all, the only thing you have is what you can do with your brains and your hands. And so my grandfather, who I was very, very close with, used to always say, you have two hands and one brain, use them. And my father came here with $1,000 and he built the life that he has now.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So there have been, I would say, Two really key ones and a third kind of bonus. So the first big one was my understanding of focus has changed. And so if we were to define focus as the quality and quantity of things that we say no to, right? Because the most focused person would do nothing but one thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
He's a doctor. But that was only possible because he had skills. And even though everything was taken, land, houses, everything was taken, you can't take no divorce, no tax, no government can confiscate who you are and what you can do. And I see that as the ultimate freedom and independence of excellence and representation of excellence.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I will, first off, I don't know what money wounds are, but if I can define it the way I would define what you're saying. So it's like bad money beliefs, money wounds, money trauma, bad money energy, all of that I'd bucket into bad behaviors under specific conditions, which is that you don't know how to behave with money. That's all it is.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Well, you just follow very simple rules. The first rule is that you spend less than you make, period. No questions asked. That's it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So I think it's thinking in ratios. So it's like, I will save this percent. I will spend this percent. This percent goes to my house or my lodging. This goes to food. And you just have to stick with it. Now, I think that that process is good to go through. But I agree that when you don't make a lot of money, what feels like a lot of sacrifice results in very low payoff.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And that's why I'm bullish on put as much as you can in increasing your earning capacity.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah. And the thing is, is you don't have to you don't have to buy. So you really only have to have one skill and then you can get everyone every other skill you need in your life. And so when I when I got into the business game, the only real skill I developed quickly was sales. And I even have that skill, but I had to for the gym. So I learned how to sell. I got pretty good at it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I would go to these networking things. I would meet other business owners. And I felt like I was a collector of fine skills. I would find people, and I'd be like, hey, how do you get customers? And somebody would be like, oh, I'm really good at Google PPC. And I'd be like, ooh, I don't know how to do that. That sounds interesting.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so what I would do is I'd go and say, hey, what's your sales process look like? And they'd be like, oh, you know, it's okay. And I'd be like, hey, do you mind if I just like, I'm pretty good at it and I can walk you through what we do because I might help you out. And so then this is the key part.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If they said yes, which plenty of people take free work, I would then treat it as though they had paid me for like a $10,000 like consulting gig. I would do tons of research. I would talk to the team. I would re-script what they had. And then I would train their team on how to manage it. And this is when you know you did it right. I would present it to them as though I was making a presentation.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And they'd be like, dude, this is too much, man. Like, whoa. And then the magic thing comes out. They say, what can I do for you? And I'd be like, it's funny you ask. Can you show me your PPC stuff? And the thing is that they would give me less than I gave them, but it was more than I had. And so it was a net positive gain.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so you only need to develop one skill, and then you can barter for everything else. So in the networking groups that I joined, I got voted the best member of the year in the first year they ever had it. When I was in my fraternity back in the day, I became voted president. When I was in high school, I was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine and vice editor of the newspaper.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I always try to like, how can I trade what I know? How can I just keep trading up? And that's fundamentally what I've done my whole life is just trade up. And the risk here is that let's say you do all this work and the guy says, thanks, and then just gets off the call. Well, there's two possible scenarios. One is you're not as good as you think you are.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
or they don't function with reciprocity. And that's okay. Because again, volatility only appears volatile with low volume. Yeah, you gotta do it a lot of times. If you do it 100 people, you'll get what you want. And if there's three guys who know PPC, you give to all three and maybe one of them helps you out. Absolutely. But you're still better off than you were before.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so this is how I leapfrogged in my earning capacity. Really? Oh, 100%. And then for the people I couldn't, I would do a favor and ask to pay them. You know what I mean? I would do whatever I could. And I would encourage people to... I spend so much money for one-on-one time. And I also think there's something very powerful about being in person.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so anything that's not that thing would make you less focused if that's the definition of what focus is. But I've thought about it like it's almost like wine where like as it ages, there's more nuance and there's more depth to the flavor.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah, I think there's something, I think that you can observe far more behaviors in person. There's so many things that are lost on Zoom.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I spent $350,000 for an hour.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
A guy who was worth $7 billion.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I think that there's something powerful about knowing that someone who is much further ahead says it to you. And it's not that that advice is something you haven't heard before, but it's the advice that you needed to hear right now. And that was what I needed to hear. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
You can only control what you do. And so the Stoic approach to this is that you know the truth. And, you know, there's the whole like, you know, bad, bad news. Lies get out of get around the world before, you know, the truth gets out of bed. But I see lies a lot. So Warren Buffett says this about the stock market. He says in the short term, it's a popularity contest.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
In the long term, it's a weighing system. And I see reputation the same way, which is in the short term, somebody could make some viral thing about you or they make some piece of content, some hit piece, whatever it is. But if you do right by the values that you have on a long enough time horizon, you touch enough people, the surface area of your reputation compounds.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Because it's not just that you do business with one person, but as soon as... Because if you do grow in your reputation, then more people will ask about you to the people who have met you. And then they will give their opinion, just kind of like the movie before or the... The restaurant. Yeah, exactly. And so if every person who has done business with you is like... He's tough but fair.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Or like, he's very ethical. Or like, you know what? I would trust him with money. You know what I mean? If you have that core set of beliefs and you behave consistent with that, those bundled terms, I want people to think these things about me. What are the behaviors I have to do in order to get them to think that? I'll give you a story about this.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I feel like as my entrepreneurial journey has has like progressed, my understanding of what focus means has changed because it's actually like focus from the top. It's literally from the top all the way down, meaning the company needs to focus on one thing, not five.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So when I was in college, I had a bad reputation with women.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
uh in my freshman year i went from high school where it was small you know small pond and i kind of ruined my reputation there and so i went to like a new area where like no one knew me and i was like oh this is like it's like virgin land right um not with the pun intended uh but i went to college and i very quickly got the same reputation in weeks yeah oh wow and so i went home
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
depressed and I went to my dad and I was like man I was like how do I get all these people to stop saying that I'm you know a man whore or whatever and like that I'm just like this guy who just goes around and sleeps with girls uh because it's preventing me from sleeping with And he said, and I had all these ideas of like, maybe I could do this or I could, like I had all these like strategies.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And he said, have you considered not acting like a whore?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah. And I was like, no, no, it can't be that. And so, but it's like as a kid, like you, you know, for the parents, they are listening, right? I dismissed it immediately. But, you know, on the flight back and in thinking when I'm, you know, sitting there alone in my dorm, I was like, maybe I do need to just stop acting this way.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so what ended up happening is I decided, I was like, I'm going to be someone that I want to be proud of. I want to be proud to associate me with me because I want a different caliber of girl. And that caliber of girl is not going to go for this, you know, this guy who's always chatting up. Like, I want a good quality girl. Not just hot, but good character.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And it took basically two full semesters of me acting like a priest, basically, and just like doing well in school, studying hard, just, you know, being a contributing member of society that all of a sudden, like more like the reputation started to change. But like the New Balance reputation, it took time.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so it's like there's this period of time that you have to go through and be willing because right now you are living through consequences of actions you took last year, five years ago. And so you have to be able to split it without getting the reward for it. And that's the hard part. And that's the part that no one's willing to go through.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
This is a really good point. So the reason I think it's so hard for people back home, right? So for anybody who's ever left home and you go back and people treat you a certain way. They knew you for 20 years. Exactly. And what's interesting is imagine over, imagine you went to high school with somebody and middle school. All right.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And if we have five objectives for the year, it's because we, me personally, I haven't done my job because one of those things is the most important. And if I can't tell my team this is the most important, then how am I going to expect them to make that judgment without the context that I have? And so it's like being willing to make the hard call.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So it's like they had eight years with you and they had every single day, they had hours and hours of exposure. You go back and they have two days a year during the holidays to see you. Well, it's like, okay, well, two days out of 10,000 were this way. Yeah, yeah. It's almost never going to outweigh it. I've given a lot of thought to this because I was like, why can't I change everyone's mind?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Because I have changed so much. But the reality was that the exposure required to change their perception of me was greater than the time that I was willing to dedicate to it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Exactly. And then the trade-off is, is it worth it? No, it's not.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I'll make this point to anybody who's in that situation where you're like, man, I don't want to be like these people. I don't want to be like my friends that I have right now.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
is that you have to be willing to accept that you may lose those friends or you probably will lose those friends but you will gain many more with the caliber of person that you want to become and you'll get caliber friends that match it but there is a transition period where you'll have neither it's tough man for about a decade i felt like i didn't have many friends i felt like all my childhood high school college friends
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
yeah and i think um well two parts one is the people who hate it or the people who don't accept the new version of you they downplay your success for being willing to take a risk that they were unwilling to take because like your success makes them feel bad whether they whether they say it or not it does because humans are comparative creatures we look at one another that's i mean we learn through modeling we see what someone else does and if they did something that we aren't willing to do and they have something that we don't have we start not liking them because what does that mean about me
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so the what does that mean about me? It's much easier to say he's changed and he sucks now rather than saying I didn't and I suck. So hard. Because the people who don't know how to say you've grown say you've changed and they say it like it's a bad thing. And I think the simple response to that is and you have it. And I think it's being willing to sit in that and be like, I'm okay with this.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I have lost almost every friend, or rather I could say I have actively cut off every friend that I've had from the beginning. I have one friend that I still have from middle school, one friend. But basically no one else. And that one friend is because he is a champion. Like he's a cheerleader. He has a different life, but he's just like, dude, go get it. He's not criticizing you.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I think a lot of people are afraid of making it. And the more I've doubled down on saying, if I have to choose one thing, you think differently. So like, for example, if I said, you know, Lewis, what one thing, if you could only have one thing happen in 12 months, what would reality need to look like in 12 months for you to hit your goal?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And he's also not a money guy. He's an FBI agent. And so he's exceptional at what he does. It's just not money related. So we have this perfect thing where neither of us, we have no competitive overlap. So I'm like, how many drug rings did you bust this month? He's like, dude, let me tell you, these Syrians, this whole gang I took down. And so I get to hear this whole thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
He's like, what deals have you done? Because we get to kind of live vicariously. But those relationships are rare. And if you find somebody who speaks well of you behind your back and talks to you to your face... Those are the friends that are worth keeping.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And if you can find somebody who can do both of those without flipping every conversation and making it about themselves, I think you have somebody who's worth keeping. But most people don't even meet one of those criteria, let alone all three.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
you have to be willing to trade the things you love right now for the things you want and you may not like the price of what you want but you can't change the price and so there's all this groveling that goes back and forth for younger men of like basically wishing it didn't cost this much time or cost as much failure or cost as much risk in order to get to where they want to go and so they basically stomp their heels and then you know retreat inwards into their basement and video games and whatever else
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
rather than confronting their own inadequacy because the first thing you have to do is say it's my fault everything that i have in my life is my fault but if it's your fault it's also under your control to change because you cannot change what you do not control and so to me it's taking full accountability so that's number one um the the second thing is
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
if you want to change your behavior, change your conditions. And so one of the most powerful things that you can do is change who you surround yourself with and where you live. And so if you have an environment of people around you who speak ill of you or like basically reinforce the wrong traits and the wrong actions, there's a reason I left Baltimore. And there's a reason you left, right?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
As I went to where I thought, I was like, I want to get into fitness. And so I was between Miami and Southern California. I was like, those are kind of the fitness capitals. I'm going to go to one of those places because I want to do fitness and I want to be around the best. And so Baltimore is not the capital of fitness.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so me changing my environment allowed me basically a blank slate to start behaving the way that I wanted without interference. Because a lot of people have interference in their surroundings. And so I think it's a lot of times you have to, well, I think this leads to the third thing. So you change your environment. That's number two. The third is delete everything.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
That is not getting you closer to your goals. And so I have used that. This razor has not changed in my life, which is my probably the two most often asked questions that I have that I like mentally think I probably think of 10 times, 20 times a day is number one. Does this action, this person, this decision increase or decrease the likelihood that I achieve my goals? Yes or no.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Like what one thing, if that only thing happened, the rest of your goals would either be accomplished or become irrelevant as a consequence, which is the more common one. And so in thinking about that, like this was four years ago, the big thing that I had was like, if I just built a big business brand, then I don't need to be the best picker of investments. I don't need to be the best negotiator.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Does it increase or decrease? Does this friend who always wants to go out, does you playing fantasy football increase or decrease the likelihood that you hit your goals? And then it's just, it's black and white. It's pretty, like, you know, it's pretty, like, you know. Now you can make the whole, like, but shouldn't I have a, I'm talking about winning.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If you want to talk about fulfillment and all the joy and all that stuff, I'm not the guy for that.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I like looking back and enjoy it because memories pay dividends in the future. And so suffering lasts only for a moment, but the memory of the achievement lasts forever. And for me, I love looking back on what I've done only insofar as it excites me about what's to come. And so delete everything using that question. And the second question, which is my prop, it might be my favorite question.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
It might be my favorite question in general, which is what would it take? And the reason I love that question is because it assumes success. So if you go up to some girl who's way out of your league and you're like, what would it take? it assumes that she's going to go out with you.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Fine, right.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Either you don't like the shoes or you don't like the price. You gotta pay it if you want it. And so what would it take? And it's like, hey, if we have a deal that we're working on, what would it take? Now you can make the decision whether the price tag's worth it, but at least you learn the price.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And what I have found in my life is that when I try to answer those questions, like what would it take for me to be number one in this field? What would it take for us to lead this market? What would it take for me to be the best salesman in this company? The answers are not as crazy as you'd think. And so a lot of people spend most of their time answering questions not worth answering.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
It's playing games that aren't worth playing. It's like if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. And so no one asks the question before they play the game, is this game worth it? And so when you ask the question of what is the big goal and what would it take then you just get to solve for it. And to me, it's just great.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If I know what it is, then either I have those resources or I have to use my resourcefulness to get them. But it's under my control. And these are how the big leaps in my life have occurred. When I wanted to get in the gym business, I was like, okay, what would make it the highest likelihood that I hit my goals? So what I did was I joined, I said, I'd say $50,000, 23 years old. I lived on nothing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I said $50,000 and I traveled to California because I was like, all the best fitness people are here. Then I joined a gym mastermind of all gym owners. I didn't own a gym. I joined a gym mastermind without owning a gym. And he was like, you sure? And I was like, yeah. He's like, why? I was like, well, I think I'll learn from everyone else's mistakes before I start. Smart.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Right, so the first thing I said, I was like, where do you guys open? One guy's like, oh, I have a terrible location. I wouldn't have done this. Another guy's like, oh, I, my, and then the guys who had the best location, it's like, what was it? Okay, well, how many square feet should I have? Oh, how should I organize the gym? What equipment? Oh, no. Should I buy or lease my equipment? Exactly.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I thought I was going to, they're like, oh, don't buy those. They're really expensive. I thought I was going to use them. No one uses them. Oh, yeah, girls trip on those. Don't use them. And so I was like, uh-huh, uh-huh. I was just taking all these notes.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
because I'll have more proprietary deal flow. So people will want to, they'll just want to come invest with me or have me invest in them. And I'll be able to pick the best company because I'll get more at bats than anyone. And I don't need to be a pro negotiator because people want to do a deal rather than just like auctioning off between me and 10 other parties.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so then I was like, okay, if I'm around the best gym owners and I'm learning from them, then I can be at year 10 in my career on my first year because if I do what the best people did, I will get what the best people got. And so I've always just focused on what did they do? Forget the energy, forget the manifestation, forget the vibrations and the frequency. Like, what did they do?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I will do that. And not only will I do that, I'll do way more of it because I don't wanna just pace them, I wanna beat them. And so, like Kobe, it's like if he's working out, if the best guys are working out twice a day, he's like, well, I gotta work out three times a day because they're already ahead of me.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So if I'm working out twice a day and they're working out twice a day, then we're gonna advance at the same pace. But I gotta work out three times a day. If this guy's doing $100 a day ad spend, I gotta spend $500 a day. If this guy's doing one piece of content, I gotta make 10 because he's better at it than I am. So I have to make 10 just to make up for my skill deficiency.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so again, this volatility is a consequence of volume, is that you're typically just not doing enough. And the people who outwork you, they out output you. And I'll give you a really simple example that will demonstrate this, that it's very real. So in a company, so I just took over operating one of the divisions. on the media side.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And the first, you know, day I came in, I was like, okay, so, you know, what are we going to do? And so they're like this. I was like, okay, what are we going to get done by? And they're like, you know, next meeting, which is like the next Monday is a weekly meeting. And I was like, okay, how many hours does that take? They were like, I don't know, probably like four hours to do this thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Exactly. And then I was like, okay, well, it's noon. Let's meet at four. I'll give you an extra hour. And show me what you did. And then we met four hours later. It was done. And then I was like, okay, well, what can you do tonight so that we can do tomorrow morning? And he said this thing. So we just moved the buck along. And in three days, we did three months of work.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Because if you think there was 12 actions that had happened and you had a one-week cadence, in a very real way, we moved forward at 20 times the pace. And so a lot of people think that it's not speed of activity, it's elimination of waste. There's all these other things that people are distracting themselves with.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so if you were that young man, you have to recognize the trade-offs that you have to be willing to make. You have to change your environment so you can change your behavior. And you have to delete everything that's not the thing that you want most. And if you can't decide what you want most, then that's what you need to do first. But once you know what you want, then go get it. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So if we define traits as bundled terms, right, which means that there's just series of behaviors that bundle into one word, convenient for communication, hard for training, is that you know what, there's actually just a hundred small skills that you need. And I think demystifying this makes it easier. So it's like, I want to be confident.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so it's like, if I can just, what's that one thing for this year? And I think where kind of strategy comes into things is by forcing that focus and saying no to the other things, you get really, really selective. And that's at the top level.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Well, confident is an approximation of how statistically likely something is to occur. So in statistics, you have a confidence metric. How likely is this thing to occur? And so if you... want to be more confident, it means you need to do enough repetitions that you can make a statistical prediction that it's likely.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If I go up on stage a hundred times in a row, I do the same presentation and I get up there like, how are you so confident? I'm like, because I've done this a hundred times and I know how this is going to go because I've done it before. And so people want the confidence before the reps. But especially in confidence, the proof comes before the pudding.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
You have to do the reps before people are like, wow. Because you can't fake, I mean, you can fake confidence, but not to yourself. You'll know. And as far as I'm concerned in life, I'm the only one I'm trying to impress. And so if I know I'm fake, I'm the one who in the middle of the night is looking up being like, I can't believe I'm so full. I would hate that. It's an empty life.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
It's also living for other people. And so... If the toxic trade is people wanting the outcome without the repetition, right? It's without the price. That's how I say that's number one. Let me see, what are they saying? I'm trying to think of like a really specific thing. Well, the second one is, has everything to do, it's offshoot, but it's entitlement, right?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Is fundamentally believing you deserve things and that the world must accommodate you.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I think parenting in the school system has made it so that you can have a safe room and you can have a cry corner. And if you think that one plus one is five, this is emotionally safe for you. I don't want you to feel... The thing is you can't change reality.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so you can believe whatever you want, but if your actions aren't aligned with how the world works, you're not going to get what you want. And you're going to be very upset for a long time until you figure out that the universe doesn't bend to your will.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
No.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I play within the realm of reality.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I think that the universe anthropomorphizes it so I don't humanize it and say it wants anything.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yes, based on reality. And if I had said I want to become the best business guy and then sung songs every day, that's not going to be a line. Now, I can manifest all I want, but that's not going to be the thing that makes me the best businessman. And so I don't get to set those rules, but I can play by them.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
For this next year.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I think a lot of men specifically waste a tremendous amount of time stomping their feet, demanding that the world be different than it is. And so to me, that's a loser's mentality. And they then spend more time defending their excuses than defending their ambitions.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so if you put all of the effort into how do I make this thing into reality rather than how do I excuse my behavior up to this point? Winners think about... what they can make happen, and losers think about what happened to them. And it's one flip of a switch, which is I will judge myself on what I do and what I make happen, not what occurred.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I think that divorcing those things is like, and this is a freeing thought for me, it's a little bit heady, so maybe your audience will like it. The past doesn't exist except for in your mind. It's gone. It's gone. We only have this moment, and then this will be gone, right? And it only exists in our memory.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So this year was actually developing like a farm system for the portfolio.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I have this mental idea where, what if I woke up one day, I got hit with a shovel, and all these things, I forgot about them. What does it change? And so a lot of people are like, I need to process my trauma. I'm going to get into this, because I think there's somebody who's listening to this, and this could change their life.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I define trauma as a permanent change in behavior from an aversive experience, from a bad thing that happened. Now, does that mean that trauma is inherently good or bad? To me, the answer is no. If I'm a child and I touch a stove and it burns me, that's traumatic. If I never touch a hot stove again, it permanently changed my behavior from a negative experience.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Is me not touching hot stoves a bad thing? No, it's just a matter of learning. And so if you have PTSD, you had a traumatic experience, which is fundamentally rapid learning. That's what trauma is. You learn, you have an accelerated rate of learning.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah. So basically what we figured out was We looked at our number one. So we looked at our whole portfolio. And right before we were talking about this, I was saying how we had kind of pruned things. And so I'm a big believer in deleting as much as possible because you only have fixed bandwidth. And if strategy is limited resources against unlimited opportunities.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Bombs go off, loud noises, your friend dies in front of you, and then a car honks really loud and you're in, basically you take the same condition and then you repeat the same behavior because you learned it, which might be ducked down or whatever it is, right? And so this idea that people espouse that trauma is stored in our body, it's in our banks, it's in our DNA now. I'm like, where?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Where is this compartment in our physical biology? No, you learned a different way to behave under circumstances. And so we just need to behave differently. I had a young guy who got on my, who was on my team in one of the portfolio companies and I wanted everybody because he was sales manager. And he said, you know, I have some demons that I need to like, you know, slay.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I was like, what does that even mean? He's like, you know, I just, I tend to like self-sabotage sometimes. And I just said, you don't know how to behave. Period. Period. In certain conditions, you don't know how to act. Great. So we'll expose you to those conditions and then we'll teach you how to act the right way. That's it. That's all it is. That's it.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yes, and that's how you change behavior. Same condition, new behavior. That's learning. And so I bring this up because I think so many people are chained by the idea of trauma rather than thinking, okay, this thing occurred. I learned a behavior that is aversive to my goals, makes it less likely that I achieve my goals. And here's the key point. This is the thing that you ask yourself.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
What can I do instead? And so, for example, if you give feedback to someone, The reason no one can or very few people are good at giving feedback is that oftentimes they insult rather than criticize. So if you say you suck at that or you're a dick, right, that's insulting, but it doesn't tell someone what to do instead. Yes. And so criticism is the difference between desired and actual.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Now, that can be very non-emotional. You can say, hey, you said you were going to show up every day, and you've been late. Great. Okay, so desired action. Now, if I said, and because of that, you're lazy, that's an insult. Me saying this is reality is just looking at what we can observe.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And the reason I come back to this over and over again is like, what can I observe is because these are the only things that affect the world, is what you do. And so... in trying to, quote, conquer trauma, like, I could say, like, I can create a narrative around whatever.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So it's like, if you were to say, hey, Alex, what do you think happened in your childhood that made you, you know, driven or whatever, right? I could make up something, but no one knows. I can't run a split test on my life. I know that I do these things, and I've been rewarded in the past for doing so. I repeat them. That's about the only thing I could probably say.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But if I said, I treated women that way because I had a broken relationship with my mother. Okay, fine. And all I needed to do. You still have to change the actions. Right. It's like, all it is is it acts as a defense for maintaining behavior that we know doesn't help us hit our goals. And so every ounce of effort that goes into defending trauma or a negative behavior from a negative experience
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
is waste. And so using that head in the shovel, like got hit, you have amnesia, you don't remember that that thing happened, great, but you can do that today. And you can just say, okay, under the next time this happens, when my husband comes home drunk again, what can I change about my behavior? Now it might be leave. It might be telling him, hey, don't do this or I'll leave.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so your prioritization of that limited amount of stuff against the things you can do like that is strategy. Yes. And so we had 24 portfolio companies. And so I trimmed that to 10 within the last 12 months. On top of that, I did no new deals.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
That's a consequence, not a threat, it's a consequence. And so this has massively simplified my life and I have this belief that Billionaires see the world more clearly than everyone else. Why? Because they've been able to predict what's going to happen better. And so my only goal is to be able to see more clearly how reality works.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And my hypothesis is that the more clearly I understand how things work, the better I will be able to execute within that realm and predict what's going to happen. And make better decisions.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And that's what I would define as good decision making. A high likelihood of getting the thing that you want.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Whenever I have a big decision. Okay.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Five? Yeah, that's actually about it. Probably about five is probably what I would say.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I think about this a lot. And I think that most people have deathbed regrets because it's easy to make them under deathbed.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so basically we wish we could have lived six lives. And so the, the concept of regret basically is like, I wish I could have had it's, I wish I could have had my cake and eaten it, eaten it too. Right. I wish I could have lived the life as a musician and as the perfect husband and as the best businessman and as a professional health, whatever. And I think it, um, skews, uh,
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
the idea of trade-offs, which is what life is more realistically about, which is that you make trades given the information you had. And for me to wish for a different outcome would mean that I would wish for a different decision-making algorithm, which would then massively change my life in general.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah, you just got them out. Yeah, I basically got rid of them at a loss or whatever you want to call it. But the thing is that the portfolio as a whole still outperformed the previous year by focusing on the stallions. And so, on top of that, over the last year, we only did one deal. Which, before that, we'd done 12 deals the year before.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Because saying, oh, I wish I had spent more time with my wife or whatever, if that meant it would have... People say, I wish I would have done this, but they don't accept the cost
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
of that would you actually because the thing is is that if you play all that all the way the other side they might say I wish I would have done this right so I see this as fundamentally we want to have everything and we can't and for me and that's okay what's the biggest regret that most billionaires have that you've talked to um I don't talk to them about regrets.
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I talk about business with them to be really real. The real answer is if I have an hour with a billionaire, I'm talking about money stuff. That's about it. I mean, if I think about my younger self, right?
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Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
i'll play this out for you so let's say today i'm not 85 but i'm in a very different time in my life than i was when i was 23 when i started 22 when i started my first gym um i know what that young man was going through and i know how hard he worked and how hard he wanted it and if i were to look back at that young man and tell him what to do differently if i were to go back i would look at him and i would smile and i would say nothing why
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Because I love the life I have. And I wouldn't want to change anything. Right now you do. Yeah, you'd be like, whatever you're doing, whatever you're going to do, do it. I wouldn't want to mess with it. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So I've already played it. If a time machine ever exists and an old version of me comes back and he says nothing and smiles, I'd be like, all right.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Right, exactly. And so I think the regrets only happen if you dislike the present. Like that is where regret comes from. There's some part of the present. In this moment, yeah. Right. But I spend all of my time doing the thing that I enjoy most. And I have to the criticism of the vast majority of people in my life, past, present, and probably future.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Like we were talking at the very beginning, like I worked the first hundred days of this year, I didn't take a day off. and I've probably taken 11 days off since the halfway point or whatever of the year. And I went on a vacation that was a two day vacation and I left one day in. I got to this beautiful resort, very expensive, crazy, 22 villas, that's all it is, super high end, whatever.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
There's like a three to one person who works there to you ratio, like it's crazy. And I remember we had this beautiful view of this mountain, you know, and there's this lawn chair. I'm sitting on, you know, fancy lawn chair, but I'm sitting there and I look out and I say to myself, this is beautiful. And I don't give a shit.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I don't care. And the thing is that there's this expectation of myself that I should care. Like I should take a vacation. But I think about like how recent is the five-day work week? It's a 50, 60-year-old concept. It's not something that happened for hundreds of years, for thousands of years for humans. This is a new thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah. It's just life. That's what they call it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Your name was literally what you did. Carpenter, butler, tailor, like all of these were names because what he was like, oh, John the tailor, John the butler, John, like, and then eventually they just became names that we have now. The Smith, like it's the same thing. And so I spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to remove every should from my life. Why should I go on vacation?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Why should I go home for the holidays? Why should I call my mom once a week? Right? Now, some people may disagree with me, and that's fine. Live your life differently. That's okay. Do your thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
No, and so I think about output in terms of net output over a long period of time. So if I said, okay, you have to work as hard as you can for 24 hours, then of course you take every stimulant in the world and you don't sleep because you only have 24 hours. But if I said do the most work you can in a month, then it doesn't really make sense to do that, right?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Oh, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Because you really just want to maximize your effective time. And so that also means that you're going to have periods of rest and maybe it isn't working, you know, 18 hours every day. Maybe you're good on 14 hours a day or maybe you're good on 12. That's going to be dependent on you. But I also think that your ability to work itself improves.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so, like, in the fitness world, there's something called work capacity, which is basically your ability to recover. But I think there's work capacity and work as well. Like, my ability to do work. So, like, I have, like, you know, if you speak on stage, right, and you do these, you know this.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So, people are, if I were to say, hey, I'm going to go do 100 of these in a quarter, people might be like, that's insane. You did 100 speaking events, right? But if I were to say, I'm a university professor, and I do eight of those a day because I have lecture halls that I give presentations to, why is this different? It's only different for people to say that it should be different.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
You should be tired. You shouldn't travel that much. You should feel exhausted. Whatever. And I'm like, why? And is there another alternative reality that I can ask like the thousand years ago or the teacher that would make the current struggle that I have just par for course? And if I can do that, then why don't I do it now? Yeah. And so if if my priorities change, I'll change my behavior.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I think that's a great point because it's very much like, okay, if I want to be rich, I should just fly private planes. It's like, it doesn't work. If I want to be tall, I should play basketball. It's like people conflate what you're doing now versus what it took to get there. And so those are kind of two separate things.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
If in if tomorrow I wake up and I say, you know what, I have enough money and my achievement goals no longer matter to me, then fine. But I believe that we're a whisper in the wind anyways. And so I think we just I think life is hard. Then you die.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And it's just what what type of hard you want. This has already been talked to tears, but like in the business context, like growth is stressful. stagnation is stressful decline is stressful so disease is stressful yeah life is stressful and so to wish that life weren't stressful is to live is to wish to not be alive like stress is just an indication that you are alive
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
yes that you exist congratulations so that would actually be a positive thing again all of these are just shoulds that people tell us and so i just i really push back on that a lot and try and keep my space and say like i'm going to do the things that i think increase the likelihood that i get what i'm going to have and if someone has a problem with that then they can they can they can not be in my life and that's okay because there's eight billion other people
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Just acquisition.com forward slash training. We just released it. I spent so I probably spent I spent so many hours on this. Wow. I vetted it with three other billionaires and I walked through each of the stages and they're like, dude, I can't like this is so accurate. And so basically break down every stage of business across all functions. going from zero to 100 million plus.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
So what does sales look like? What does marketing look like? What does customer service look like? What does product look like? What does IT look like? What does HR look like? What does recruiting look like? What does finance look like? Across zero, which would be you don't even have a business yet. Next stage is you graduate by making your first dollar. Next stage, you get your first employee.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And then you basically scale all the way up from there. And so I got all the way to 500 employees, which for most businesses will be over 100 million a year. I scaled it by headcount because headcount is more similar in terms of structure of business rather than revenue. Like a software company can have 20 guys and do 100 million a year, and then a restaurant has 20 and does, right?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But back to the focus piece, if strategy is prioritization of the resources, then having focus is part of strategy. And then all the way down, because I've just hopped, I recently hopped into the media side of the business. back into operating, which I haven't done in years.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But the structure of the organization is more similar by headcount. And so basically walk through each of these as functions, what must occur to move to the next level. And so basically you can take the roadmap assessment. It'll tell you where to go. It's all free. And it'll give you a personalized plan of like, this is what you need to do your sales at this point.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
This is what you need to do advertising at this point. And then there's videos that go with it if you're more of a video learner.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Yeah, just training. I think roadmap, it's forward slash, backslash, whatever the slash is. Roadmap, one word. I'm pretty sure that's what the URL is. Worst case, if you're going to Amazon.com, you'll find it. You'll be up there somewhere. Yeah, you'll find it. Or I will have failed as an advertiser if you get to the page.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Sixty-five.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And it's been really fun for me, because I have a better skill set now than I did five years ago, which was really the last time I really operated stuff. And just ruthlessly focusing the team on what one thing, if we did in media, would change everything.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so to the question that you had, this whole year has been dedicated to the farm system, which was like when we looked at the portfolio, we saw that our number one, number two and number four highest performing portfolio company were companies that we had met prior to doing deals.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so we'd work with them for a little bit, just like me helping them out, hopping on phone calls, meeting in person, whatever. And I was like, oh, OK, there's something interesting there. How can I recreate that process on purpose rather than by accident?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
After you started doing this, right? So number one, number two, and number four, those happened by accident. Before. Just for me, yeah, me doing normal deals, you know, meeting people, whatever. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
but now i was like okay how do i create that and so that's why we started running these little workshops at our headquarters so there's i mean it's just what we can fit in our office so it's not huge um but we invite entrepreneurs out and that way we can we can meet them my team meets them we say hey this is what i would do like a lot of them aren't necessarily portfolio revenue ready but if we've helped somebody go from call it 5 million to 20 million a year interesting then when they want to get a growth partner or they want to exit our hope is that they call us first
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Exactly. Because I don't have the resources to do that. And I don't want to take my eye off the ball. But it felt like it. So that was basically this year. That was the big thing that we did this year.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I want to say we probably did like 14. Okay. This year. So probably a little bit more than one. Like basically one-ish a month. Sure, sure. And it's like, you know, if we're busy, then it pushes out. And then we can do, hey, we're kind of free. Let's do two as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that was the big thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And then focus all the way down because it's just been more and more ruthless in terms of being able to say no. Like I talk to somebody on my team and I say, your job, if you just did this one thing, it would make your job the most valuable version of your job. And then they say something to the degree of like, well, I have all this other stuff. And I'd be like, cool, don't do it.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And they just look at me and I'm like, yeah, don't do it. I'm the boss here. I'm the one who pays you. Don't worry about it. It's fine. If you just do this. And so the feedback I'm getting back is like, dude, it's so much easier. If I just have to do this one thing, I can totally crush this. And so... Everybody needs focus.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I see the job of the boss at every level, entrepreneur or division head or department leader, manager, whatever, as constantly assessing the things that are on the people who report to use plate. It's like, what do they have in front of them? And how can I prune that tree? How can I strip things away from them so that they can put all their resources into one thing?
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And to me, acquisition.com, like our little logo here, is the two main forces of business as I understand them. You've got supply and demand. And the reason that it's a fulcrum is for leverage. And so leverage is getting more for what you put in. And so the people who move fastest in life don't do more than other people. They get more for each rep.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so I think about that within, across all the organizations that we have. Like we spent a full day with our largest portfolio company, and I'm sure we'll transition off of like hardcore business, but this is what's top of mind for me. We spent a full day with all the executives from our large portfolio company, which this year will probably close out at $110 million. That's a software business.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And we grew from $2 million. So we've been very integral in the growth of the company. And what they came in with the day was five objectives, and each objective had five sub-tasks. So there's 25 things that we had to do for, quote, this year. And I was just kind of sitting a little bit more quietly throughout the day, just taking it in. Something felt wrong.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
It's a lot of stuff. And so at the very end of the day, I ended up going to the whiteboard that was on the side of the wall. And I wrote one, two, three. And I wrote the three things that I thought we needed to do. And I said, and we don't do number two until number one is done. And it was this really clarifying moment. Because I was like, if we don't do this one, nothing else matters.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And if we do this one, then this one will be worth more. And so it's like this will multiply the second thing. And I think there's this big fallacy of concurrent tasks. A lot of people, it's been super well studied that if you switch between tasks, you're way less effective.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
You're like 75% less effective when you switch between two things, let alone like five, and your phone, and your kids, and your whatever, right? And so I think there's this big fallacy that I've changed in terms of how I operate, which is that we actually do things in sequence. We do things in an order.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
Meaning, although you might have five people on your team, we need to deploy all resources towards solving this one problem. And then once that problem is solved, what happens is the fact that the other four fires exist, because let's be real, there's always gonna be problems. But the fact that the other four fires exist gives you urgency to solving the first one.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
and so you actually get five things done faster when you do them in order than trying to do all five at once and yet for some reason we don't we don't regularly remind ourselves of that and so this has been like i'd say like that has been the the single largest shift in my entrepreneurial like career and the reason that like at gym launch which was the company that i sold for those you were listening um the biggest mistake i made in that business was that when it was crushing
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
I then started another basically another company rather than doubling down on what worked. And basically the year that I started the second company, revenue didn't go down, but my growth rate went down a lot. So, you know, we added maybe like 30% in revenue when we probably could have doubled because I put all my attention to this other thing.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And so things are going really well at acquisition.com. And I had this inkling to do the same thing, just repeat the same mistake. And I was like, I cannot learn this again. It'll be more painful. Right, I can't. So much more painful. The stakes are higher. So focus has been the biggest thing so far. Number one.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
The second one has been my understanding of talent has also kind of developed like a fine wine in terms of like... how there's so much leverage with good talent. So, for example, Steve Jobs gives this great, great analogy. He says, you know, in New York, there's a ton of taxi drivers.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And the worst taxi driver, if he had to get you across town, would maybe take you twice as long as the best taxi driver. Maybe he'd take you a third of the time of the bad guy, right? But that's the difference between the absolute best and the absolute worst.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
But in a knowledge-based business like mine, like yours, the absolute best could get 100 times more return than somebody who's even just good. And compared to bad, obviously, it wouldn't even ever happen. They couldn't even succeed. And so in thinking about that, I've doubled down on the arbitrage of intelligent, hardworking people, which is like, it's worth paying someone
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
millions of dollars a year if they can make you tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And I think that it's one of the great opportunities that will always exist because there will always be cheap entrepreneurs and who will not recognize the outsized value of talent.
The School of Greatness
Alex Hormozi: How To Invest In YOURSELF To Become A Self-Made Millionaire
And I think that as I've as the longer I've been in the game, to be fair, the more the more exposed to higher level talent I've become, and the more I know what's out there. And one of my great mentors, he told me, the best talent is always in the future.