← The Game with Alex Hormozi
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42 recession proof money secrets. And if you don't know, I am. My name is Alex ramosi. I sold two of my companies last year for 46.2 million. And my current portfolio@acquition.com is over $200 million a year. And I want to take 10 years of money secrets that worked in both boom and bust economies so that you can save the decade and apply them today. Number one, he who gives the money has the power. So a lot of times poor people, they're always trying to get money. I was trying to get money. The person who gives the money is the one who's in control. Like if you think about the biggest institutions in the world, what are they? Banks? What do they do all day? They give money. When you give someone money, you get to dictate the terms. You actually now own them. Number two, never trade reputation for money because you can get money back, but you can't get reputation back. If you think about reputation as something that compounds over time, the longer you have it, the more you build it, the more it compounds unto itself. It is your brand which allows you to do more deals, do bigger deals, do them faster. The moment you lose the rep because you traded it for money in the short, you cut the compounding and that's where all of the gains in life come from. Number three, money loves speed. Wealth love loves time. Poverty loves indecision. Micro money loves speed. You want to move quickly, on fast to customers, follow up with your leads, et cetera. When you think about building wealth, it's not about transacting, it's about letting that compounding happen. And that takes time and it takes not interrupting it. Most people never achieve either of those things because they sit indecision. 4. We can always make more money than we need. This is a belief that has served my wife and I really, really well. We look back on our lives and we've never not been able to eat, not had shelter, and, and we've continued to increase our skill set. A lot of times we have this desire or you know, our animal brain wants to make us make decisions out of scarcity, out of fear. We don't need any of the money that's coming because we have always had enough. Fortunes are made by taking a lot of risk with a little bit of money. And fortunes are maintained by taking a little bit of risk with a lot of money. Somebody who's self made had nothing and so they risked everything in order to make it big. But the thing is, when you have nothing, you're not risking A lot. You have nothing to lose, which makes you dangerous, which is one of the biggest advantages of having nothing. But if you continue to do that, when you do have something to lose, you can lose your fortune. And so you have to change the behavior. Once you have the castle, once you have the empire. 6. Money flows where attention goes. If you spend time thinking about fashion all day, your attention is going towards buying clothes. If you think about cars all day it's going towards your car. If you're thinking about your business all day, it should be going towards your business. Pick one thing, go all in because you only have so much juju. Think about it like a magnifying glass and you are the sun in this instance. And you've got to burn a hole to get through to the next level. If you're spread across too thin of an area, you never get enough concentrated heat. Most people have the potential, but they don't have the focus, which is why they can never break through. 7. Your home life and your business life have to be aligned money wise. So you can't try to grow a business and like reinvest everything here while you're living a super lavish lifestyle trying to flex like it has to be aligned. All of our business rules around money are also our home rules around money. And so if we don't live with any debt within our personal lives, we do the same thing within our business lives. 8. Ignore money advice from poor people. This may sound ridiculous, but let me say it differently. Ignore money advice from your dad or mom who are poorer than you want to be, from your good friends who are poorer than you want to be, from people who have smaller dreams for your life than you do. The reason that rich people can lose everything and then recreate it is because they see reality more accurately. The reason people can't make money is because they don't see reality the way it actually is. Most of life is trying to pull these rocks out of our vision so that we can see more clearly. 9. It's always easier to buy than to sell. You want to get into a stuff stock, you want to get into something, you can buy it instantly. You want to get into a real estate deal, you want to get into a business, you have to be extra careful. You want to put all the slow on the buy and you want to put all the lubricant on the sell. 10. Money is fickle. Money is jealous. It sticks and goes to the person who pays it the most attention. Money comes into the system, but there are these grooves in the Ground where it all eventually flows up to the few people who pay it the most attention. Someone gets paid, they go buy their groceries. The grocery person has to go buy for the supplier, supplier buys it from whatever. But the person who has the access is the one who pays it the most attention, is the one who it sticks to at the end. 11. We stay poor until we've learned all the lessons that poverty has to teach. People stay in poverty but they're not trying to pay attention to. Like what lesson do I need to be learning that I'm not actually taking action? Learning how to save money at a basic level. Personal finance. What's up guys? It's Graham here. These are the lessons that we have to learn in poverty to get out of poverty. And until you do that, you don't beat the level. 12. Frugality drives innovation Even when you have money, one of the best things to do in my opinion is constrain your resources, constrain time. It'll force you to think creatively to solve problems without using money as the solution. And if you have constraints right now on time and or money, don't see it as a disadvantage because it's what people who do have money try to get into to solve problems. And the only thing that's the disadvantage is thinking it is. 13. Think once before investing, Think twice before spending. Investing is something that you're putting money into that is going to give you a return of some kind. It's either going to give you a skill that's going to increase your earning capacity or it's going to be something that's going to quite literally give you a return in terms it's going to be yield or worth more in the future. Spending is something that's going to never be worth more in the future and it's going to be consumed. 14. Money flows to the person who needs it the least. The rich get richer because they don't need it. And because they don't need it, they have leverage. You have to sell not from your own wallet, but from the person in front of you. Come to the table with other options. It's the person who needs nothing, who's the person who has the most power. And that's where the money will go. Fifteen. We make money. Our money does not make us. You start tying your self worth to your net worth, then your net worth itself becomes a liability to your own self esteem. It is my ability to make money which is what creates my value, not the money itself. Because the money itself can be taken my Family was in the Iranian revolution and everything they had was taken. All it takes is one government saying, oh, all that land, all those cars, all those homes, those are ours now and that's it. And so a lot of people have this idea of legacy and permanence that's just an illusion, which is why we make our money. Our money doesn't make us. 16. It may be an amazing opportunity, but not our amazing opportunity. One of the things that I needed early on was permission to not do things. Because in the beginning you don't know how to do anything. Your analysis, paralysis. And you just get scared. And once you get over that, the problem is that your yes muscle becomes too flexed. You start saying yes to everything. We should do this thing and we should do this thing together. You say, dude, I think it's amazing opportunity. I just don't think it's my amazing opportunity. And it's gotten me out of so many situations that I know long term wouldn't have been good for me. 17. We control the money flow wherever possible. People who have a lot of control payment processors, everybody thinks they're amazing until the day you can't process money. And so the idea is the further upstream you can go, the more leverage and control you have over the money. Banks get the money and then they give it back later. The person who's furthest upstream the money has the most power over it. 18. Always have a no shit fund. Me knowing that I can take whatever risk I want and I am still protected and everything that I have for the rest of my life is taken care of, gives me a lot of peace, which allows me to be more aggressive, be more offensive. As soon as you can have your oh shit fund, whether it's three months, whether it's six months, start putting that away, that nut, so that you can go more on the offensive. 19. The biggest eroder of wealth is ignorance. Not knowing how to make a million dollars is costing you whatever you make every year minus $1 million. And so if you make 50 grand a year, it costs you $950,000 a year to not know how to make a million dollars. Which is why I put so much money into paying down hand that's been suppressing my income my whole life and yours too. 20. You get paid for the value create times your ability to negotiate divided by how hard you are to replace. If you provide something that's very valuable and you're very good at negotiating, but somebody else can provide the exact same thing as you for a tenth of the price, you still don't have that good of a negotiating position. Making money is capturing a percentage of the value that you create for other people. 21. Mistakes love a rush decision. I've trained myself now enough that, like, when I feel fomo, I pause. FOMO means slow go. Mistakes love a rush decision. And so it's just one of those easy beliefs that has slowed me down and has saved me so much money. 22. Leverage comes from not needing the other person. And more specifically, leverage comes from needing nothing. You can't control somebody who needs nothing. Right? Someone needs nothing. You have no influence over them. How do I become that person? The monks do it by relinquishing everything and needing nothing. And the rich man does it by satisfying all of his needs and not needing the deal on the other side of the table. In both of those situations, you create leverage. 23. Markets take longer to adjust than you expect, and then they move faster than you can imagine. The big short. If you saw that movie, the guy was shorting for like four years and he's like, the math doesn't make sense. The bubble kept going, bubble kept going, bubble kept going. And then it happened faster than people imagine. We have to be comfortable with the fact that we might have to sit in discomfort for an extended period of time before what we believe to be reality is reflected. 24. Money is a game treated as such. You can't win the game if you don't know you're playing one. The wealthiest people in the world see money as a game. They don't even use money to satisfy material needs because they already have it. How can I adopt that perspective earlier on in my career, thinking about things in terms of personal bests, bank account PRs. What gets measured gets improved. You can get someone to lose weight just by simply getting them to weigh themselves every day without giving them any advice at all. Just if you pay attention to it, it will start sticking to you. 25. Don't bet the empire for a pot of gold. Even though you might have this opportunity here, it's never worth risking the whole pie. And I can't tell you the amount of times where I'm like, man, if I went all in on this thing, money wise. So the thing is that you can go all in on your attention, but I wouldn't go all in on your money. 26. Always do a starter deal with new faces. So this is a hard one. One of your friends comes to you and it's like, dude, I want to do this airbnb thing. Or, hey, I've got this. Do a starter deal first. You got to see how these people are. Everything should still look great on paper, everything should still make sense, they should still be amazing character, etc. You still mitigate your risk by saying, first deal I'm going to do with you is a small deal. 27. Trust is worth more than a bigger return. Trust lubricates deal velocity. Trust compounds. You don't want to take all the meat on the bone because you want to have a long term relationship. When I talk to partners, when I talk to business owners, how they talk about the people that they do business with tells you a lot about them and how they do business. When I talk to somebody and I'm like, hey, why didn't you do this? They're like, hey, these guys have been good to us for a very long time. We've had a very good relationship for 10 years. That is something I respect a lot. And that is what people who have money act like. Poor people always trying to won over everyone over and over again. And they never get any trust from anybody. Which means they have no compounding relationships. 28. Money is not a zero sum game. The older I've gotten, the more I'm like, how can I get onto their side of the table and both make money together? Why don't we both take a big piece of this upside rather than slice up a pie that's in front of us? 29. Never take a standard deal. There's always a better one. There's always a better deal. And a lot of times you just have to ask for it. Hey, this term and this term and this term are things that are concerning to me. Is there anything we do about these? Remember, earlier leverage comes from not needing the deal. You have to be willing to walk away. And I can't tell you the amount of times that I've walked away from a deal. And the person comes back after saying, well, I can't do a deal. And I'm like, cool, no worries. And they come back three or four days later and they're like, all right man, I'll do the deal. And then I might be like, hey, well the terms have changed. You know, I'm getting 30 expect low risk, amazing returns. The wealthiest friends that I have who are billionaire plus, they're just not interested in 10, 20% returns. They're looking for 50% plus annualized returns. Most people expect 10% because that's what the S and P does. It doesn't mean that that has to be your personal standard thinking through that way has changed how I saw investing in general. 31. Don't think in IRR, which means internal rate of return. Instead think in how long will this take to double? How long will this take to triple? It's hard to say this is going to grow by 25% a year. What is easier to say is this is going to double in three. Changing how you ask the question changes how you'll find the answer. 32. This is a buffet ism, but diversification is a hedge against ignorance and it's risky if you don't know what you're doing. There's a million games and all of them make tons of money. And so it's really about taking one game and taking it to its natural conclusion, which is learning every single aspect of that game. Rather than saying, I want to be in stocks, I want to be in real estate, I want to be in crypto, I want to also have my side hustles. I want to like, you can't get good at any of them because you're competing against people who are all in. Play one game and play it well. 34. I skipped 33 because I covered it in that last one. Returns are in the terms everybody who's watching this, if you make money doing anything that's a side of salt. I'll pay you $1 billion for your business, but it's on my terms. And I can make that deal every time and not lose money understanding the terms of the agreement and how many different ways you can make terms. And the only way you do that is through having the conversations and trying to structure it from learning from other people. 35. Whenever possible, use house money. If you have the opportunity to recoup your principal and still have money in the game, do that. Then you can get super aggressive with the investments and things like that that you're making, but you're doing it on house money. You're doing it with no chance of losing principal. 36. Always know how to get your money back. You have to know the exact way of doing it. Not just like, oh yeah, I can get my money back. It's like, no, but, but how would I do it? Walk me through each of the steps so that I have full understanding of how this would work. If they actually don't mean it, then they won't have a way to do it. You'll be able to sniff something out immediately. 37. Cash flow is king, alright? And that's both on a personal level and on a business level. So for you, your cash Flow is going to be dictated by your income minus your expenses. It's really your savings flow. If there's one thing that you get from Money Rules is that you'd be switching your metric towards what am I saving every month rather than what am I making every month? 38. Buy for Forever. This is a Warren Buffet and Charlie Mungerism. Charlie said, the money isn't made in the buy or the sell, it's made in the wait. If you could never sell anything you buy when you are buying, you could never get out of it. Then you buy differently and you buy super long. And then ultimately that's what doesn't interrupt the compounding process and that's what unlocks huge wealth later. 39. You heard me say it earlier, but FOMO means go slow. You feel fomo. It means slow down. It means take a second, give a breather, put some space between you and the decision. The only reason you feel FOMO is because your time rises too short. 40. If you can't afford to lose the money, then don't use the money. If you're like, this is my last dollar, then it's probably not a good idea to risk it, right? Which is why we always have the oh, shit fund. 41. Peace of mind can be bought and it can be sold. If there are situations where you're like, man, this is going to keep me up at night, don't do it. Peace of mind can very much be bought and sold. And I can tell you make much better decisions when you've got it. 42 and final. A lot of people think about diversification in terms of industry, but they don't think about it in terms of capital stack. A bank, for example, is at the top. It's a preferred creditor. There's a reason a lot of banks don't lose money, and it's because they're the first creditors. So you can think about diversification between, like, stocks, crypto, businesses, whatever. You can also think about it vertically.