← The Game with Alex Hormozi
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
If people have to treat you a certain way for you to be happy, then it means that your happiness is in their hands. I get asked about Mindset a lot on podcasts. They're like, when you're building a business or you're building your career, there are stressors that come into play. How we manage the circumstances or the conditions that come to us dictates how our life turns out. Everybody has bad stuff happen. You probably believed and nodded your head like, yeah, everyone has stuff happen, and then we choose to make it bad or good. Imagine for a second two children that are playing. One child tells the other child, your nose is really big or fat. Interesting is that the child who hears it is unaffected, and the child who says it is unaffected. They're like, you're fat. And he's like, huh? Parent comes in and overhears it, and she's like, oh, my God. Takes the child that was called fat, comforts them, gives them the expectation that they should be upset, and then tells the other one that that was bad. And in a moment, there was something that is now traumatic that otherwise wouldn't have been. And so when we're kids, we. We walk into the world with no meaning. All we do is we observe. And then whatever the adults around us tell us and say, this means that we take as fact and it's not true. It's their interpretation of the world, and we inherit them. And then we spend the rest of our life trying to undo and examine these beliefs that we have been told by people that we probably don't agree with. When something bothers you, pull it out and look at it and say, what happened? And why is this bad? And what would it look like if it were good? And so the two tools that I use are time and volume. The volume example is thinking, okay, I'm in traffic. If this happened every day, would I be upset? If it happened every day, I'd probably expect it, which means that I would not be upset about it, because it's just how things always are. If you want to make it positive, you say, well, what if every time I got in a car, normally it would take an hour and today it took 30? I'd be pretty excited about it. And so all we did is just change the volume on the circumstance to recalibrate the meaning that we're choosing to ascribe to it. Good or bad. I like to think of circumstances a lot, like weather, which is like, you've got sunny days and you've got rainy days. And the problem in my Opinion is that people, any day that rains, they say is bad. And any day that's sunny they say is good. When in reality it just is. It's just the weather contrast is what create the quote, good and bad. When reality, there's just a middle line and half of it's above and half of it's below. Then what we can do is artificially move the line in our minds by saying, whatever this circumstance is, what would it look like if it were worse? And. And what would it look like if it were worse all the time? And if so, then maybe today's a good thing. The second frame that I like to use is time. 100 years out, but 10,000 years out. How much is this going to matter? The reason something affects you is because you have deemed it meaningful. You've said it matters. It's my worldview that nothing matters with a capital M. Like nothing matters in the universe. It doesn't matter. There's this statue of a head that's in the sands of Egypt, all right? And it's bigger than this whole room. And it's just the head, it's worn out. And then inscripted along the forehead says, here lies crazy name who owned everything that the eye could see, the immortal so and so. And the only thing that was left was a worn out statue head that no one knew who he was and it was 5,000 years old. If that guy who ruled the known world, to him, wealth probably mattered, right? But does it matter? No, probably not. I've relieved a lot of the pressure in my life so that I could make better decisions by zooming way out and thinking, 10,000 years from now, will this matter? And if the answer is no, does it matter to me? And then if I can make the decision of like, good or bad, based on my new context that I created, then I can live life a lot easier. And so for me, that helped me decrease anxiety, it helped me decrease sadness around certain circumstances. And I'll give you the last example of this. So I had a cat named Bill. Chill Bill, rest in peace, homie. Love the cat. He died. It's like some freak heart thing or something. So he died in like two years. When he died, I was buffed. I was like, this sucks. Then I thought to myself, what if cats only normally lived 6 months? How stoked would I be that he lived 4 times the normal length of a normal cat? I was like, I'd probably be really stoked. I'd be like, dude, he lived a long life. I can't believe we had him this long and all of a sudden my perspective around the death completely changed. I was like, I was so grateful that I got to have him as long as I did. When you play with time and you play with volume, first off, we have to be aware of the levers of meaning that exist. And then once you're aware of them, you can start moving them in your favor and then looking at your current conditions through different lenses and say, what would this mean if it were amazing? What would the conditions have to be in order for this to be an awesome thing? And then all of a sudden you just exit the game of happy sad and get to be your own game maker. At least that's what I tried to do. When I get upset, look at it, pull it apart, think like, is this real? Is this true? Is anyone doing this perfectly? No, but simply being aware of the fact gives you a lot more control.