The Game with Alex Hormozi
My Framework For Knowing When To Quit (on DOAC with Steven Bartlett Pt. 1)
Wed, 02 Apr 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
Chapter 1: What are the key decision points for making career pivots?
Welcome back to the game. This is a guest spot on Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett. This is going to be a two parter. And so part one is a little bit more on the what are the key decision points for making pivots in a career? Number two is what kind of fuel you use in order to make, basically to continue to drive on after you've seen success.
Chapter 2: How do you get others to comply with your requests?
Number three, how to get other people to do stuff for you, either within the business or if you were the entrepreneur running the business. Some things that we found that increased the likelihood of compliance with requests, which is just the fancy way of saying the same thing I just said, which is get people to do stuff that you want them to do. Enjoy.
Chapter 3: What is the entrepreneur life cycle and where do most people get stuck?
If you want to make more money, you might want to consider doing this. So number one is hold that thought for just a second, because the thing that comes before that is misgraphy. Oh, God. This is the entrepreneur life cycle. And there are six stages. Now, the vast majority of people get stuck on stage three. That means one of the biggest career mistakes at this point.
And you end up living the same six months for 20 straight years suffering until you learn how to break free from it.
I want to go through the whole thing.
This is going to be f***ing awesome.
Alex Hormozy is the master of business strategy. An artist in scaling companies into the millions and a leading voice in how to craft your way to success.
He's an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Whether you're starting out or want to go from 1 million to 10 million, there are certain behaviors and actions that will increase the likelihood of success that we're going to go through. But here's the really hard truth that a lot of people don't like talking about.
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Chapter 4: How do fear and shame affect entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurs must be willing to make impossible choices, have the courage to be willing to be wrong, have shame by failing at things in front of people whose opinions they care about. And that fear keeps people stuck in a job and a life they don't want for years. And that was my path. I had a white-collar job, a condo overlooking the city. Everything was according to plan.
And I remember thinking, like, I didn't want to be alive. Because I was so afraid. But once you get over the fear, it unleashes this whole new realm of possibility of being able to do what you want. And that is when you can learn the real game of entrepreneurship, such as knowing that business ideas typically come from one of three Ps. And you only need one of those three.
And then there's the four Rs for customer success, how to learn new skills quickly, how to stand out in a competitive market, the winning strategy for 2025, and so much more.
So where should I start? If someone's just clicked on this conversation and they're considering listening for the next couple of hours, based on everything that you do for the millions of entrepreneurs that follow you, that read your books, can you tell me exactly why you believe they should stay and listen and who should stay and listen?
At acquisition.com, we scale businesses. The content that I generate that we put out, conversations like this, helps people who are going from zero to one, just getting off the ground, to helping people go from 1 million to 10 million, to helping the entrepreneurs going from 10 to 100 either get there or exit along the way.
And there are frameworks that cross all three of those that I consider both deep and wide. that help any business navigate whatever strategic decision is in front of them to get the highest potential return for their time.
And so if you're listening or watching, then if one of those frameworks applies immediately to your business and allows you to pull five years forward in your career, I would say that's a pretty good return on time.
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Chapter 5: What frameworks help entrepreneurs make better decisions?
For the people that are at zero, what is it that they're typically coming to you to help them with? So if you were one of them, what is it that they want from Alex or Mosey?
I think there's what they think they want and what they actually need, which are two different things. And so I think what they think they want is some tactic that's going to immediately help them start a business. What they typically actually need is... the courage to be willing to be wrong and to be willing to have shame by failing at things in front of people whose opinions they care about.
And I think that's, if I rewind the clock for me, it was probably one of the hardest things that I had to get over. And so I think that's why maybe my message resonates with a lot of people is because it was so hard for me to get over. And what's interesting is basically anybody who's listening,
The harder it is for you to break free of whatever kind of mental prison you've made for yourself, whether that's real or just in your head, the more compelling your story will be when you break through it. Because it will resonate with even more people. For the people that it was easy, that... Their story doesn't have a lot of, like, I was immediately an entrepreneur. Like, I wasn't like that.
I had a job when I was in high school. I had a job immediately out of college. Some people were like, I was selling lemonade out of the back of my, you know, thing when I was 13. I didn't do any of that. Like, school failed me. I actually was pretty good at school. Yeah. I didn't have any of those issues. You know what I mean? And so I had a pretty clear career path.
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Chapter 6: What are the essential elements for success in business?
And so I had what many would consider like I had a real opportunity cost. So I had a white collar job and I had a GMAT score above Harvard's mid score. And so I had a really clear path of what my life could look like in the next 20, 30 years. And it was fairly well defined. Like I'll go to Harvard or Stanford or one of the top business schools.
And then I will either go back into management consulting or I'll go into investment banking and then eventually end up in private equity. And that would be the path, right? And then all the flowers would be set at my feet and everyone would say, we approve of you, you're an excellent person. But when I saw the people who were 20 years ahead of me, I really didn't want their life.
And then it started making me look at my life and I was like, I don't even know if I really want my life. And so the big decisions that I've made in my life, unfortunately, have almost always come at the doorstep of apparent death. And I think maybe in some ways that makes me a coward for having needed death to make decisions.
And so operationalizing that has been something that has helped me move faster to make decisions that I know I need to make but don't. And so the first big kind of like... what felt like a death decision was I was a consultant, 22-ish years old. I had a paid for, you know, condo that I bought overlooking the city. And I remember thinking like, I really hope I don't wake up tomorrow.
And that, and I don't mean that to be melodramatic. I just, for a period of time, I just always just like hoped every night. I was like, I just really hope I don't wake up tomorrow. Like, I just don't want to do this. And what was difficult about that was that at that time was when my father was most proud of me. Uh, because I was doing everything that was according to plan.
You know, he could talk about like his son who graduated in three years from Vanderbilt had the, had the good job, like everything was, we're following the plan. Um, and it was upon realizing that, uh, My ultimate expression of living out his dream was me feeling like I didn't want to be alive. And so in, and it took me time to get to that point to even articulate that.
Because obviously you never want to kind of like admit failure of like, I have really messed something up here. But I was living my life to win someone else's game. And when I realized that, I realized that one of our dreams had to die. either his or mine.
And when I realized that his dream must die in order for mine to live was a statement that I kind of crystallized when I was at that point in my life. Like I had to keep repeating that, like his dream has to die in order for mine to live.
And so to put this in perspective of how afraid of my father's judgment I was, I left the state and drove across the country halfway through before calling him to tell him that I was gone. And so I bring this up because I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but I'm saying that if you feel a lot of pressure, I get it.
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Chapter 7: How can personal experiences drive business ideas?
Number two is that you have started something, because nowadays in the digital age, you can begin a business on the side that can generate income. And that income in the small amount of time that you're not working replaces or at least matches the existing income you have from your current job. And you've been able to do that or demonstrate that income for like three to six months.
If you do that, that's a very like math way of approaching it. That also is basically never the reason that people aren't quitting their job. That's a really – I have backlog. I have matched my current income with my part-time work. And if I just put my full-time work, I would probably make more. Very reasonable, but never actually the reason that people don't do it.
I was thinking about the two sort of reasons why someone might quit something or feel like they want to quit. And one of them is clearly because it's hard. And that's obviously not reason enough to quit. And then there's another one which you were speaking to there, which is it's not moving me towards a meaningful goal, irrespective of how hard it is.
Like a marathon, you're raising money for a charity you care about. It's hard, but you don't quit. And then there's maybe if you're running a marathon for no apparent reason... you know, there was no charity, there was no one watching, there was no, like, fitness benefit, then that's a good, I guess, moment to consider quitting. My story mimics yours in a way that I didn't realise.
I didn't realise you went through a similar thing in terms of parents' disownership. No real great option to flee to, but feeling like the current path that would have led me to be, I don't know, a business management student was significantly worse on balance than... taking the risk. But I think maybe a point of distinction is I was so naive that it didn't feel like a risk. Yeah.
So what's really interesting about that is the guarantee. And so a lot of times we don't look at what I call the don't, which is like the alternate path. And so if I had played out my existing path, I had a guarantee of outcome I didn't want. It was just added delay. Whereas here, there's a chance that I can make it.
And so one of the final kind of frameworks for making the decision was guarantee bad, chance at good. And I was like, well, I might as well take a chance. And I strongly encourage thinking about playing it out. And so what I mean by that is like, I think fear exists in the vague, not in the specific.
And so when you say, I'm gonna quit my job and then what if this doesn't work, I'm gonna failure, tons of fear. If I say, I'm gonna quit my job and then I'm gonna try and start a business. And if the business doesn't work, I'll probably have a compelling story that I could tell for business school if I wanted to, to show that I had some entrepreneurial slant.
In the meantime, I could use that experience plus my job experience to probably get another or maybe even better job in the meantime and match or supersede my existing income. And the actual loss would be maybe the savings that I had saved up.
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Chapter 8: What is the winning strategy for personal branding in 2025?
And so, but I think that deep understanding, and if you look at all of these, the passion things, you'll have deep understanding because you're spending all of your discretionary time pursuing this passion. The pain, you have a deep understanding of the problem and the prospects going through it because you've experienced it probably for years.
Now, the professional one, I would say is a bit of a shortcut. Because if you're quitting the job because you don't like it, and then you say, I'm now going to do this for myself, well, you're okay. I mean, well, the one proven point about that is that that one is proven to work from an economic perspective. You will be able to make money doing that because you already have made money doing it.
These other two are less proven, but sometimes have a significantly more upside.
When you were talking about the breathing example with your nose, It's funny because if you had sat down and said to me, Steve, I've made these like breathing nose strips. They are better. They're 20% more durable. They expand your nostrils by 20%.
It is multiples less compelling than you telling me that story you just said about being a kid, having breathing problems, trying to solve this problem for yourself. And it's funny because that story you told versus the sort of rational logical approach or the benefits approach. Yeah. is your marketing campaign for the next five years on TikTok and Instagram. It's, I had a problem.
I tried everything and solved it for myself. There's almost like nothing more compelling and believable. We see that in Dragon's Den. We'll be sat there listening to these pictures all day. Then someone will come in and say, I had ADHD. I tried energy products. They all made me crash. So I went out and solved this problem for myself.
And we're on edge because we almost can't argue with it at that point, you know?
Yeah. So Bezos has this great framework where he talks about missionaries and mercenaries. And so it's kind of like you have the guy who says, okay, I looked at market trends and this is a growing category. And, you know, I surveyed people and this was the, you know, the result that came back.
And so I believe that if we time this product right at this point in the market, we'll achieve huge, you know, a mass adoption, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like lodging your way through. And to be fair, some people do make it work.
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