Build with Leila Hormozi — Ep 334
Title: My Top 5 Lessons from 2025
Host: Leila Hormozi
Date: December 30, 2025
Overview
In this reflective year-end episode, Leila Hormozi shares her top five personal and business lessons from 2025. Known for her candidness and practical wisdom, Leila discusses the powerful and painful experiences that shaped her year, from serious health struggles and rapid business growth to hard-won insights on sustainable leadership. The episode offers profound lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders who wish to build resilient organizations while maintaining personal well-being.
Key Lessons & Discussion Points
1. Most People Quit When They Just Need to Rest
- Timestamp: 02:45 – 17:40
- Leila candidly recounts her toughest adult year, marked by severe health problems, surgery, business “exploding,” lawsuits, IVF cycles, new executive hires, and overwhelming stress.
- She describes a period of deep physical and emotional pain, losing weight, feeling helpless, and wanting to give up.
- Lesson: The urge to quit is often just exhaustion or overwhelm distorting judgment.
- “Most people quit when they just need to rest.” (15:30)
- Entrepreneurs (and high performers) are taught to view rest as laziness, not as a necessity for sustainable output.
- Physical overtraining is widely recognized, but cognitive and emotional overtraining is often mislabeled as weakness.
- Rest can renew perspective and prevent costly, regrettable decisions.
- “Quitting when you’re depleted is not a way to gain clarity. It’s letting exhaustion make a decision for you, which has a high chance of regret.” (16:42)
- Advice: Rest before you quit. High performers rest to return with better decisions, not to avoid work.
- “The most expensive mistake in business is not slowing down; it’s walking away. Quitting, when recovery would have changed the outcome for you.” (17:18)
2. Design the System—Don’t Become the System
- Timestamp: 17:45 – 28:50
- Reflecting on managing a rapidly scaling company while ill, Leila learned that being the go-to problem-solver is unsustainable and ultimately limits growth.
- “You have to design the system, not be the system.” (19:34)
- Hiring proactively ("with cushion") allows the organization to function without the founder’s constant presence, creating resiliency.
- “Not overshooting [on hiring] means that I might have to overextend myself time after time again. And I can’t keep doing that to myself, to my health, to my body.” (23:40)
- The founder’s proximity and heroism can become growth constraints.
- Distance reveals system flaws and gives space for others to step up.
- “If your organization depends on your presence, judgment, and energy—it is fragile. Durable companies are the ones that are built when systems work without the founder in the room.” (25:01)
- “You have to step back far enough to objectively see the issues with the system. If you’re too close, you’re not going to know where it’s coming from.” (26:14)
- Lesson: Step back regularly for real perspective, build governance and clarity into the organization, and “build the machine so speed compounds instead of collapses it.” (28:41)
3. The Right Cadence Beats Constant Availability
- Timestamp: 28:55 – 38:55
- Health-mandated absence forced Leila to dramatically cut meetings and be ruthless with her availability.
- Constant availability, she realized, undermines team capability and breeds dependence.
- “Constant availability just creates dependence on you. I think a good cadence creates capability in others.” (31:16)
- A predictable communication and decision cadence creates strong, independent teams and better-quality decisions.
- “Availability scales poorly. Cadence scales leadership. Availability creates bottlenecks. The others build leaders.” (34:22)
- Leila stopped allowing “messy, sloppy thinking” or unprepared questions to reach her by default, freeing her time for higher-quality work.
- “Strong leaders aren’t hard to reach—but they are predictable, prepared, and decisive at the right moments.” (36:58)
- Lesson: Protect your cadence, not your constant responsiveness. It builds better organizations and leaders.
4. Be Kind, Not Just Nice
- Timestamp: 39:00 – 48:33
- Leila distinguishes true kindness from empty “niceness.”
- “The goal is to be a kind leader, not a nice leader.” (39:10)
- Niceness avoids discomfort and truth, causing long-term dysfunction, while kindness delivers honest feedback and protects standards.
- Cites a former leader who built a culture on niceness, leading to lingering negative effects:
- “Overextension of niceness… withholding clarity to spare people’s feelings, which feels compassionate in the moment, but it erodes trust over time.” (42:17)
- “Kindness is respect, right? Niceness is the worst thing you can do for people because you’re telling them you can’t handle the truth.” (44:53)
- Culture at scale is shaped by what leaders consistently say out loud, not by good intentions.
- “The kindest leaders I know… don’t protect people’s comfort. They protect clarity, dignity, respect, and the future of the team.” (46:21)
- Lesson: Avoidance creates instability; authentic kindness builds resilient, honest teams and companies.
5. The Quality of Your Judgment Beats the Quantity of Your Effort
- Timestamp: 48:35 – 57:30
- As businesses scale, the founder’s main leverage shifts from effort to judgment.
- “My job has changed so vastly—I must change as a person to fit into it.” (49:01)
- “My company now depends on my discernment, not my stamina.” (51:43)
- Good decision-making (not more hours) is the leader’s new edge—especially as the organization grows.
- Emotional regulation, clear thinking, and communication become business-critical “soft skills.”
- “I cannot risk showing up to a meeting not emotionally regulated. It is a soft skill that you must have to scale. … If I’m exhausted…is that a smart idea that I’m making that decision?” (53:41)
- The analogy: steering the Titanic vs. rowing a rowboat.
- “There’s a reason you don’t need a license to row a rowboat but you need a license to drive the Titanic… judgment is more valuable than your work ethic.” (55:14)
- Lesson: Leaders at scale must prioritize self-care and time for strategic thinking; making the right decisions far outweighs working longer hours.
Memorable Quotes & Moments
- “Rest before you quit. The most expensive mistake in business is not slowing down; it’s walking away.” (16:45)
- “You have to design the system, not be the system.” (19:34)
- “If your organization depends on your presence, judgment, and energy—it is fragile.” (25:01)
- “Availability scales poorly. Cadence scales leadership.” (34:22)
- “Be kind, not nice.” (39:10)
- “My company depends on my discernment, not my stamina.” (51:43)
- “Judgment is more valuable than your work ethic.” (55:14)
Episode Structure & Timestamps
- 00:02 – 02:40 | Show intro and context for annual lessons episode
- 02:45 – 17:40 | Lesson 1: Rest > Quitting (mental and physical exhaustion)
- 17:45 – 28:50 | Lesson 2: Build scalable systems, not founder dependency
- 28:55 – 38:55 | Lesson 3: Cadence and quality of leadership over constant accessibility
- 39:00 – 48:33 | Lesson 4: The long-term power of kindness over surface-level niceness
- 48:35 – 57:30 | Lesson 5: Judgment and strategic thinking as the leader’s lever
- 57:31 – End | Closing thoughts; embracing identity shifts; hopeful send-off to 2026
Final Notes
Leila closes by reflecting that 2025 brought profound changes to her identity and leadership style, but she is embracing the "new" even if it's still undefined. She encourages listeners (whether founders or leaders) to integrate these lessons, especially when facing their own metaphorical "hardest years."
“My identity has shifted quite a bit. I’m in a place where I have let go of the old and recognized I cannot go back. But I still have yet to understand exactly what the new looks like. It’s kind of uncomfortable, but I’m okay with it.” (58:11)
A must-listen for founders and executives seeking real talk on scaling, resilience, and becoming the leader your next chapter of business demands.