The Game with Alex Hormozi
15 Brutally Honest Truths You Have To Understand To Succeed | Ep 855
Fri, 21 Mar 2025
Wanna scale your business? Click here.Welcome to The Game w/ Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition Mentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap
Chapter 1: What is the foundational truth for success?
Hey guys, a lot of the business game comes down to what is between your ears. Because if you cannot stay in the game, you cannot win the game. Because in an infant game, the only way you win is by continuing to play. And so over the last few weeks, I've done a handful of podcasts and I've had a couple of hard conversations with friends that made this top of mind.
And so these are 15 rules of engagement that make the hard life a little bit less hard and at least get me through the difficulties I am going through that may be valuable for you. Enjoy. These are brutally honest truths you should know before it's too late.
Chapter 2: How can pain lead to progress?
I'm Alex Ramosi, I own acquisition.com, a portfolio of companies that makes all the dollars, so many dollars, in fact, that I have these very fancy screens behind me that do nothing but show my logo. Right. Anyways, let's start with number one. Pain is the price of progress. Man, I wrote that real fast. The fastest growth periods are often the most miserable.
If you want to progress, get used to pain. And so if you think about what actually occurs when you grow, you stretch past your point of comfort. So even if you're growing a muscle, like you stretch it, you break it down, it's painful. If you have growing pains, like as a kid, it's like you grew too fast and your joints are in a lot of pain.
If you're a company and you expand, this is technically supposed to be good stuff, but it doesn't make it any less painful. And so elite athletes don't get stronger during easy workouts. And so if we want progress, we must accept the price of pain that's attached to it. You cannot both want progress and live an easy life. These two things conflict. Number two, happy but not satisfied.
Chapter 3: What does it mean to be happy but not satisfied?
So let me explain this. So you're allowed to be happy before you hit your goal, just not satisfied. And so there's a very big difference between being content with your life, content with your work and complacent, meaning you're not going to take any more action. There's this great Haitian proverb, which is, behind mountains are more mountains.
It's kind of like after every peak, you can just see more peaks ahead of you, right? And so the work works on you more than you work on it. And so for me, I remember I had a year that I basically went into retirement trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And the thesis that I came out with was that hard work is the goal.
And so the fact that there's something that happens as a result of hard work is really just a secondary effect. It's a consequence. But the goal is the work itself. And so I had a friend this morning who messaged me and they're like, why do you still work? And I was like, because it's the thing that I enjoy doing most.
And when I looked back on my life, when I didn't work, I was bored and felt depressed. And when I do work, I am stressed, but I do have moments that I really enjoy as well. And so basically, I took this as a kind of a foundational truth for me, not for everyone. that there is misery on both sides, so I might as well be productive and useful.
And the only way to be productive and useful is to be happy about the process, but not satisfied, so you can continue to provide value to the world. Now, number three, ignore critics. Now, this is probably easy to say, hard to do. So let me break this down a little bit more. So...
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Chapter 4: How can ignoring critics help you succeed?
Friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor, pansies, and don't listen to them when they try to deter you from doing whatever it takes to succeed. So the average person will always try to keep you average. It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that an ordinary person would see as extra.
And so a lot of people, and this is the really hard part that I had to come to terms with, is that a lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risk that they chose not to take. And so we always have to think about listening to the people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us. And if you want a more violent version of this, your critics are going to eventually die.
And their opinion isn't going to matter then, which means it probably also doesn't matter now. So might as well do what you wanted to do originally. Number four, selective productivity. Productivity comes from all the things that you choose not to do. So I'm going to define two more terms for you because I think it's important. I see commitment as the elimination of alternatives.
So if I get married, then I eliminate all alternatives to the person that I'm married to, right? That is commitment, right? Which is very similar to focus. And so focus, if you think about the hypothetical extreme of focus, is that somebody does literally nothing but one thing.
So they don't eat, they don't sleep, they would eventually die, but they would be 100% focused during the time that they were alive. And so obviously we have to put a couple of things in, you have to eat food, you have to sleep. But the most focused person does the fewest things outside of the thing they're focused on. And so focus is about the number of things that you say no to.
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Chapter 5: What is selective productivity?
And having this framework is, in my opinion, more powerful for productivity than just about anything else. People are always trying to figure out productivity hacks, but they want to add things to their lives to become more productive, which is completely counter to what focus even means. It's getting rid of everything that's not the thing is how you focus.
Now, part of that also means environmentally, right? So if you like have a window that you look outside of and you've got people who walk past your office and people can knock on the door and you've got Slack notifications, of course you're not focused because all of those things are not the work. So I'm gonna give you an analogy here.
So imagine there's a wall that you have to get over, all right? You have to get a critical mass to get above this wall, right? And so you start putting up these ladders against the wall to try and climb over the wall, all right? This should make some sense.
But as you try to build up the little rungs of the ladder, you only have enough time to put, let's say, five rungs on the ladder, or rather four rungs, because I only have four ladders on this thing, all right? So you put four rungs up. Well, you're not going to get the critical mass required to get over the hump to actually get the success you want.
But the idea, the fallacy is that, oh, I'll just do all three or four of these things and I'll see which one works. When the reality is that any of them work, but none of them will work unless you work on one. And so we have to take these four rungs that we're able to build and say, you know what? We're not going to do that.
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Chapter 6: How do fear and regret shape our decisions?
We're going to put that rung here because I'm going to take that time that I'm putting for my second opportunity to put it here. I'm going to take this rung and put it right here. And then I'm going to take this rung. And what do you know?
I can get over this hump on top and I can get to the other side of the wall, which of course is where all the money and all the happiness and all the, you know, the girls with, you know, beautiful, beautiful hair. Look at this beautiful hair, right? This beautiful hair. Now she looks like a bug. Anyways. There you go. And so you have to hit critical mass.
And so right now, if you are, and this, what's crazy is that this literally happens at all levels of business. Like people who are starting out, trying to start five things, people who are like their second or fifth year. I talked to a guy last night who has a really good business, really good margin, 50% margins, has great revenue retention. He was in cyber security.
And so people stay with him, people pay. He has no problem getting customers. He has no problem delivering on them. I was like, what's the problem? He's like, me. He said, I just, I get bored. He's like, I just want to start more things. And I'm like, yeah, you got to stop that. It's like, the thing is, is think about how much more successful you'd be. So zoom all the way out.
Think of somebody who gets better every single year and works on the same project for 20 years. You'd be like, my God, that guy's probably really fucking good. And what's interesting about this is that it doesn't matter what project the person works on. You do 20 years of reps and you do nothing else, you're gonna be good.
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Chapter 7: Why is persistence crucial for timing?
And so if you know that that's a fact, that's a certainty that you're going to be good with 20 years of practice, then the objective is to just get 20 years of practice in one thing and stick with it. So like your plans aren't working because the plans are wrong. The plans aren't working because you're not working on the plan.
The hard part about the plan is not creating the plan or even following the plan. It's sticking with the plan. That's the hard part. All right. Number five, fear versus regret. Let me get some wild, let me get some stuff. All right. So change is scary, but so is regret. And so the life you live depends on the one you fear most.
And so the thing is, is that the people who, who the more successful version of yourself also has fear is that, that your fear of regret is greater than your fear of rejection. Think about that for a second. I'm must supersede, must be bigger, must be greater than your fear of rejection. And so I remember when I quit my management consulting job, which took me six months.
So I'm not saying this from a pedestal. It took me six months. I decided I wanted to quit. It took me six months before I actually quit. By the way, you can measure how powerful someone is by the distance between when they make a decision and what happens in reality.
So if you want to feel impotent, then take as long as you possibly can between when you make a decision and when you act on that decision. Now, for me, it was six months. And all I did was I called my friends up every night. I was like, I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to start a business. And we'd talk every night, literally every night.
And I would be pacing in my condo like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. And I wouldn't do it. I was too afraid. I was too much of a scaredy cat. But the thing that got me over the hump was this. Number one, I knew that when I looked back on my life, if I never took the jump, I would have been ashamed of myself. and I would have felt like I was a pansy. And I was like, I can't die a pansy.
I have to be able to make a jump. Number two, I played out plan B, which is, okay, let's say I actually completely fail. What happens? I was like, well, I'm not really going to be homeless. I know enough people that I can get food, right? And I was like, okay. So I would probably just couch surf. I'd have a little bit of shame. But at the end of the day, what would I really do?
Well, I could always apply to get the job that I had back. Or I could just go to another place with an experience or a story that would set me up for something cooler later, right? And so all of a sudden I was like, wait, so my plan B is that I just have a cool experience that I could talk about at a job interview or to go to business school? Okay, that doesn't actually sound that bad.
And so there's just this huge amorphous fear. But I've just noticed in my life that fear only exists in the vague. It doesn't exist in the specific. And so if you're afraid of something, try and break it into pieces and spell it out. Play out the next two or three steps. Because all of a sudden, if you're in the developed Western world, the downside risk is not really real.
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Chapter 8: How do hard conversations create opportunities?
But I do remember that my final straw was the realization that I had at the time, no girlfriend, no kids, and I had no real financial responsibilities besides eating and having a place to live. And I said, if I can't make the decision now because it feels too risky, I will never be able to make the decision.
Because if other people rely on me, now some of you are in a position where people do rely on you. And you're like, well, Alex, you know, I've got people who rely on me. Yeah, I would say that it makes it harder. And what now? Harder and so what? But for me, that was the thing that got me over the hump. It was like, if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it.
I'm never going to have fewer responsibilities. And to play this out a little bit more, if you have people who depend on you, they're probably going to keep depending on you for a while. Or their dependencies on you might increase. And so if you can't do it now, you still might as well do it, right? Because it's only going to go one way. Number six, persistence creates timing.
So you can time everything perfectly if your intention is to never stop. I'm going to say this one more time. You can time everything perfectly if your intention is to never stop. So think about this visually. So let's imagine that this line right here is your lifeline. It's life as time passes.
Let's say that you have some special thing that's going to happen here, and some special opportunity that happens here, and some special opportunity that happens here. What most people try and do is they don't want to work at all, and then they're like, oh, I'm just going to work here, and then I'm going to work here, and then I'm going to work here.
But the likelihood that you're there in these three moments is very low if you're trying to time it. But if you work the whole time, then the timing will always be perfect because you will be ready. And so perfect timing is a complete myth, but perfect preparation isn't. And that on a long enough time horizon, your opportunity will come.
And so people think that they need perfect conditions to start when in reality, starting is the perfect condition. It creates the perfect condition for opportunity to be capitalized on. And I can tell you this from firsthand experience with me, like the more you do, the more you see you can do. And so opportunities multiply with skill.
And so the better you get at doing stuff, the more things you know you would be able to do and win at. And so the goal is to gain as many skills as possible so that you have access to the maximum number of potential opportunities. So a lot of people are thinking that, oh, I'm going to wait for the right moment. But when you have unlimited skills, like Elon can go do whatever he wants.
He can go build a floating spaceship if you like. I mean, he literally does that. So like I was going to be my extreme example, but he literally does that. So he could build a city in the middle of the ocean. There you go. All right. And so he could do that. He has the skills because the world of opportunity is open to him.
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