← Build with Leila Hormozi
Build with Leila Hormozi
I've Been Arrested 6 Times (and I'm Not a Failure) | Spotify Video Exclusive
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I'm in the living room with all my friends. Everybody, including myself, is covered in mud. And my friend's car has, like, a ginormous dent in it. My friend wakes up and finds a note in his pocket. Do not damage this tree. We hit a tree. We were like. And then we got out of the car and it was a swamp. But I remember being like, how did we survive? I got arrested six times in a span of 18 months when I was 18. Now I am 32, and I run a very successful company. And this video is for anybody who feels like they don't want their past to define their future. I'm no different than anybody watching this. I'm not made of different. Pull me open, same. So, like, if I can do it, then you can do it. So if you're watching this and you feel like you're in a place where you're stuck, you want to change your behavior, you want to change your life, and it just feels really hard. I want you to remember that the reason that you are not changing is because the cost of remaining the same is not yet higher than the cost of change. So what you want to do is figure out how to engineer your environment to make staying the same more painful than changing. And if you do that, you will move. If I look back to what caused the situation, my environment made it very easy for me to not be the person I wanted to be. Not having a high level of responsibility that I had to rise to the occasion on a daily basis. Living on your own where there were no rules, living with people who did a lot of partying and drinking and were not very responsible. It's funny, I don't vividly remember being arrested the first time because I was so drunk and I didn't think it was a big deal because my environment made it normal. It wasn't abnormal. A lot of people are not achieving their goals, and they're doing things that are not good for them because it's acceptable in the environment they're in. In a way, it's completely accepted, and it is entertainment for people around you. They think it's funny. They talk about it. It becomes something you joke about next week when you go to the bar and there's some sort of reinforcement that people get for that is like, people find you interesting. Now, depending on what type of school you go to, what type of town you're in, and what type of college you're at, that's going to dictate also what type of people go to that place and live in that area, the moment that my dad took told me that he thought I was going to die. It felt the cost of remaining the same was higher than the cost of change. And in that moment, I agreed with him that that could happen. And I also felt incredibly ashamed. So much so that that became one of the biggest negatives. And it no longer becomes like, oh, Layla's just off as a teenager. To my parents, it's like, no, you're going down the wrong path in life. And the pain of remaining who I was was greater than the fear of changing. And a lot of people, unfortunately, never hit that because others around them maintain order for them so they don't have to experience all the negatives. And so I remember thinking, I need to change my environment. I need to get around different people. I need to have more responsibility. If I change everything around me, it will change me. And so I did it. And I think it was generally good direction. And now I understand why it works. Back then, I didn't know why. I just knew people smarter than me with lives that seem much more appealing than mine said to do this, and so I will do it, because I have nothing to lose at this point. So I moved out, stopped hanging out with my friends. I got a different job on campus at a place where, like, people weren't off all the time. They were students. Those were the three main things I did. And then I filled my time that I normally would have been partying and doing drugs and hanging out with these people, with working out, with studying. I think a lot of people, they do is they just stop doing all this. The key is to replace it with something else. Because if you're just sitting there doing nothing, suddenly eating the cookie is much more tempting. Desire comes from lack. You take away all of these things that were providing you with reinforcement, and you put in no other reinforcement, you're going to want to do those things, and the likelihood that you give in is going to be much higher than if you replace them with something else. I basically sent out this message on Facebook, like, I'm going dark. I have. I need to do by weird. I would never do that. Now I think it's okay. But that's what I did, is I essentially was like, my words mean nothing at this point, so I need to go build evidence for everyone around me that when I say something, I actually do it. And that's been very important to me since then. I don't ever want my actions and my words to be misaligned because they were back then. I Had a lot of friends that were very unsupportive. You know, talk about, you know, me and say, oh, she thinks she's too good for us now. Why can't you just, like, relax, chill? When you're trying to get your together, you don't need more chill. You need to go hard in the other direction. And so I think being a little extreme when you're in a period where you're really trying to change, I think it's good because momentum works in both directions. I had momentum in the wrong way. I needed to build momentum in this direction. In the long term, that's not sustainable, Right? But, like, for six months of doing that, I think that was the best thing I could have ever done for myself. People were like, wow, you've really changed. Then I realized that things were working. Oh, it was so lonely. But being lonely is not a problem. I didn't have anybody for a while. Why? Because I was in a weird transitional period. I wasn't relating to these people, and I didn't yet relate to these people. And I think being able to be alone and to forge your path by yourself is something that very few people can do. And it is a very unfair advantage when it comes to life. You learn to rely on yourself and you. You learn to instill the skills in yourself. And I was like, eventually, I will attract the friends I want. And I did. But it's the same thing as attracting a spouse. You know, like, you want some dime piece and you look like and have nothing going for you, you're just never gonna get them. Same goes for friendships. It's like, if you're a dirtbag, you're not gonna be friends with all these successful people. I literally moved out to California because I read in a Tony Robbins book that he bought a house in Corona del Mar. And I had the dream that I wanted to one day be able to afford to buy a house on the cliffs of Corona del Mar. So I went there and I moved to Costa Mesa because I couldn't afford to live in Corona del Mar. And I would drive to that beach and I would walk around, and I would lay on that beach, and I would look at the cliffs. And I was like, one day I will be able to afford that. At least when I'm around this, I have the inspiration. I can see that it's possible versus when I'm living somewhere where there's not even houses even close to that price range. It felt like the vision was limited. We like to repeat behaviors that we see other people do. So we want to be really careful as to the people that we are around. Every time that you face something in life and you've dug yourself into this hole that's so deep, and you're like, how do I make my way out? But most people never even take the first step to know that they're capable of doing it. Having that confidence that I can experience some of the most painful times in life and I know I have my own back is, I think, more powerful than anything because then it allows me to go into situations where that's a risk. Maybe there's a lot at stake here, and I could feel a lot of really bad feelings, but, like, I know when I feel really bad feelings, I've got my own back. I like to share this stuff because I don't feel like when I was going through this and trying to pull my life together after getting arrested so many times, I didn't have many people that I could look up to because I felt like nobody had up as badly as I had.