In this throwback episode of The Game, Alex (@AlexHormozi) dismantles the illusion of legacy, sharing how accepting your own insignificance can actually free you to make better decisions and live with less stress.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.Wanna scale your business? Click here.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: Why is the idea of legacy unsettling?
No one will remember you. And that's a statement that bothers a lot of people. And if that does bug you, then you probably should look away from the rest of this. And my team was going back and forth on even posting this because they're like, dude, there's so many people that are going to disagree with this. And I'm okay with that.
And this is not me in any way saying that my beliefs should be your beliefs or that your beliefs are wrong. I am simply explaining my beliefs. And the reason I'm doing that is because I think one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship is managing emotions and managing anxiety and managing stress so that you can make higher quality decisions.
And high quality decisions are one of those things that compound over a long period of time because we make hundreds and hundreds of decisions every single day, every single week for our business. And it's many small micros that can go all the way up 1% better every day compounded for 365 days is 37x what you started. And 10% or 0.1% worse goes down to zero at the end of the year.
And so managing my mental state has been a continuous learning experience for me. And the set of beliefs that sits at the core of that is what I would consider Optimistic nihilism. And to be clear here, there's a lot of people who feel like nihilism is a really negative thing.
And that's because they ascribe some sort of meaning to the word, but it really is just that you don't think that things have inherent meaning. It doesn't mean that there isn't any meaning in the world. It doesn't mean that there is a global meaning that we all have to agree to. As a result of that, there are downstream implications that affect my behavior.
and I think have positioned me to be less stressed about things that come up and as a result, make better business decisions. And so this is why I show this. And if only some of these things make sense for you, awesome. None of it makes sense for you, awesome. If it all makes sense for you, Awesome.
So the big picture for me was a lot of people take a lot of work and stress a lot about what other people think about them. And I'm not going to say that I'm here like I don't care what anyone else thinks. That's not true at all. I think I use these frameworks to try and remind myself that other people's opinions don't matter as much as I think they do.
And for me, reminding myself that I'm insignificant and in the long and eventual universal scale am irrelevant allows me to look at my failures and laugh a little bit. And so rather than say, oh my God, this is the end of the world, it's really on a 500 million year time horizon, I am a being that exists for a blip of time and then will disappear from existence.
And one of the things I was telling a friend of mine, as he was telling me all the things that were stressing him out, said, you know, if you zoom out far enough, you can't even see the earth. And he started laughing and we both started laughing together because it's like, we like to exaggerate these things in our mind because that's what our brain's trained to do.
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Chapter 2: How can accepting insignificance improve decision-making?
The only thing that has happened is just a circumstance or a condition, and then we ascribe meaning to that thing. And so if we can control what that meaning is, then it means we can influence our own emotional response to it. And if the whole idea of being a good decision maker is controlling our emotional response, then having tools like this can be really helpful.
The next one is that a lot of people like to say, if it's not going to matter in five years, it shouldn't matter for five seconds or whatever it is. I like to take that a bit further and say, if it's not going to matter in 500 million years, it shouldn't matter for five seconds. Now, some people take that and think, wow, then you don't think anything has meaning.
And the answer is yes, that is the point. And so for you, it might be a bad day, but it's like, we're all going to eventually be forgotten. And as much as that bothers people, it's like, do you know who your great, great grandparent is? You probably don't even know their name. Like really, you probably don't even know their name. Let alone anything about them.
You probably don't even know their name. And we have this, because we're so self-centered, think that everyone around us is gonna sing our praises and hang our pictures on the wall and just sing Kumbaya to us every single night after we're gone. And the real real is why do we give a shit if we claim to not care about what other people think?
Why would we care what they do and talk about us after we're dead, right? Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages
and across all eight functions of the business so you've got marketing you've got sales you've got product you've got customer success you've got it you've got recruiting hr you've got finance and we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level it's all free and you can get it personalized to you so it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages once you enter the questions it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow
It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap. And so I'm going to talk to you about a lovely lady named Betty White.
So Betty White was somebody who was really early on race integration. She was a golden gal, a huge, huge personality. She lived to 99, didn't make it to 100, which is sad. You probably haven't thought about her until I brought this up. And she died about a year ago.
And the thing is, is that she lived an amazing life, an incredibly public life, very financially successful, the top of her skill, beloved by all. And A, you either forgot about her or B, you didn't even know her name to begin with. And so how arrogant are we to think that now everyone on earth is going to remember us?
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Chapter 3: What does optimistic nihilism mean for entrepreneurs?
And then I remembered the frame of the veteran, and I was like, okay, what if every time I washed a flannel, it always became like this, and every flannel I had was this way, and this is just how flannels were? What would I think? And I was like, I wouldn't think this was a big deal. And just like that, it was gone. Something that would have been an annoyance just wasn't anymore.
If like you're stuck in traffic and you're not normally stuck in traffic, but every time in this hypothetical world, the frame of the veteran, every single time you got into a car, you get stuck in traffic. Would you be bothered by it? Probably not. Why? Because you're accustomed to it. You expected it.
And so what it means is we can basically retroactively alter our expectations and project a fictitious past onto our present so that we can alter how we respond to it. And so for me, the frame of the veteran has been very valuable.
If you've been broken up with and it feels heartbreaking, but if you figured every single time you meet somebody, you're going to have a heartbreak on the thousandth time, how would you feel? Probably not that big of a deal, which means it can be not that big of a deal right now if you choose for it not to be.
So a lot of us wish that we don't have problems, but problems are constant and sometimes they're a sign of progress. Because if you solve a problem, then you create another problem. So if you solve your marketing problem, what do you create? A sales problem. If you solve your sales problem, what do you create? A customer success problem.
And so it's called the never ending cycle of problems and solutions. And so the idea is that we're wishing for something that will literally never happen. We want to live a problem-free life. But instead, in my opinion, we should try to choose which problems would you prefer, because there absolutely are better and worse problems.
And so for us, let's just see if we can do better problems that we can solve. But wishing to eliminate problems is in and of itself something that will create a permanent problem in your life. So number eight, I think, is an exercise called a failure resume. And I'm going to make a separate about my failure resume I'll share with you guys.
But a lot of people like to make their resumes about their accomplishments. But what I think that does is it gives us an inflated mental image of ourselves. And so if you make yourself a failure resume, I think it creates the equal opposite situation, which is you're like, man, I have really messed up a lot of times over and over again. And there's a lot of valuable things you can take from that.
Number one is that, and probably the most important, I am still here. And I think if there's one big takeaway from that, it's like you have survived. And this actually leads to a frame in and of itself, which is If it kills you, whatever this problem is, it won't matter because you'll be dead. And if it doesn't kill you, it means you can handle it. And so either way, you win.
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