← The Game with Alex Hormozi
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Now some people have said that my approach or view on friendships is transactional, extreme, whatever, And I'll say, sure, you're right. And I don't see friendship as a binary term meaning it's not that we are friends or not friends, it's how good of friends are we to define friendship? The opposite of friend would be an enemy or a rival. Someone who doesn't root for me. They actively try and destroy my efforts. They try and get me to be emotional rather than make logical decisions and they try and distract me from my ultimate goal. And for many of you, some of your friends fit that description. Now I understand that people are human and people make mistakes, but if you want the one strike, not three strike, one way ticket out of my friendship, you only have to do one thing. You have to not root for me. Meaning you actively resent, either explicitly or implicitly, when I win. If you resent me winning, why are you here? Like, the reason they're still there is because there's a chance that your success will benefit them. But while you're succeeding, they'll still try and destroy it in case they can bring you down. It's fucked up, but it's true. So the reverse of that would be somebody who roots for you, in front of you and most specifically behind your back. Real talk, that's one of the hardest things out there, especially amongst guys where it's very alpha competitive. As soon as your status starts to raise within the group, you by comparison make everyone else worse. So it's in their best interest to make you less of a threat to them by diminishing your status. The things like talking behind your back, trying to distract you, make you emotional, make you feel guilty about the things that you're doing, take you away, try and label you with old labels that are your old identity not aligned with the things that you want to do later. And the thing is, is like, I don't think these are bad people. To be clear, I don't even think there's good or bad people anyways. The question is just, are they going to help me towards my long term goal? Are they not if it's more likely they've earned a spot, they're paying their rent for my time and attention. If they're not more likely to help me hit my goal, then for me the question is, is the relationship more important than my goal? And that's a decision for you. I made my goal my most important thing because I believe that if I achieve that goal, I would feel better about myself. My identity associated with it. And I think that there would be a new level of friends who would unlock as I got to that new level. And for me, up to this point, that has been true. I'm not trying to achieve a common life goal. And so it would make sense that my views would be more extreme than other people's. I also think that some of these views become compounded when you have increasing demands for your time. If that's not real for you right now, if you don't have people vying for every minute of your day right now, then what I'm saying might not be relevant for you. But for the people who do have people vying for every minute of their day, it might make more sense. There's a reason LeBron says no new friends. That's LeBron right there. Hey, LeBron. Hey, LeBron. How are you, LeBron? He's decided, like, he doesn't need any friends. He doesn't trust anyone new, and that's fine. That works for him. He has a rare life. It would make sense that he has rare rules. You can't really give a fuck about what people say no more, because everybody gonna fucking critique everything that you do, no matter what you do. That shit will creep into your mind. The biggest issue that I've had with friendships in general is that people project what they believe friendships should look like in their minds onto our relationship. For me, I am transactional. This is gonna probably piss a lot of people off. The pros of this relationship should outweigh the cons. And if people are like, I can't believe you'd say that, we probably wouldn't be friends. And that's okay. You'll probably be friends with people who don't have that definition. But for me, that means that, like, my life is better off with you in it. You help me achieve my goal. You root for me along the way. If you think about everything you do as an investor, you invest time and energy into a relationship with the hopes of getting some sort of positive return. You spend that time no matter what. And the people who build the best relationships, the best networks, are the ones who invest in relationships that yield the highest returns in terms of exchange. I believe in abundant exchange, which is, if both of us feel like we're getting the better end of the deal, then this relationship will continue ad infinitum. It's going to keep going. You would have no reason to end it. Where you get into trouble is the types of relationships that you're wondering, should I keep these? You probably already know you shouldn't. And I love this little framework for decision making. When you're faced between a hard thing and the easy thing and you're not sure what to do, you should do the hard thing. Because if the easy thing were the right thing to do, you would have already done it. One of the hardest things about pursuing your dreams and pursuing your goals is that a lot of the people that are in your life right now will not support the future version of you that you need to become in order to accomplish those goals. People don't actually want the best for you. They want the version of you that best serves them. Now, the closer they are to you in terms of long term alignment, the more likely those two versions of you will intersect, which is often why often, not always why. Family and your spouse should hopefully be the most aligned with you, because long term, their best interest is often aligned with your best interest. I think the spouse is like the nth degree of what the most extreme friend should look like. That is the best friend you have for life, which means they should root for you harder than anyone else. They should never resent your success. The biggest, strongest ally you have, and then the friends you have are just non sexualized versions of that core ally you have. There's a lot of statements that friends will make to try and keep you where you're at. They'll say you've changed and they'll phrase it in a way that makes it feel like you're doing something wrong by changing. All you have to do is look back at them and say you're right and you haven't. That carries almost an equal weight back to them. Because some people want to stay the same, comma, and that's okay. That's been my recurring theme with friendships is just accepting them for what they are and saying, that's okay, things have changed. Good. That's what growth is. You can't grow and stay the same. And if we want to grow as entrepreneurs, then we have to expect change. And I think Tupac embodies this transition in between friends really well. And he said, just because you lost me as a friend doesn't mean you gained me as an enemy. I'm bigger than that. I still want to see you eat, just not at my table. I don't wish you ill. I want you to succeed and I want you to do all the things you want to do in your life. It's just that your vision for your life doesn't merge with my vision for my life. It's the same thing as having an ex girlfriend or an ex boyfriend. You had a season together, it doesn't mean you don't honor the season and all of a sudden start destroying the memory. Appreciate the fact that you had a season. Understand that seasons by their very nature end. We both contributed to another. And then we found out that we wanted different things, which is great. That's the whole point of learning. The thing is, is a lot of people have these precepts of what a friend should be. We're going to be friends for Life. How many 85 year olds do you know who are friends with the same people their whole lives? Not many. And if they are, they've got like one. It's not common, but it is okay, in my opinion, to have seasons of friends. We're friends for the season and then we had train tracks that aligned, and then we found out we had train tracks that diverted, comma, and that's okay. Have you ever had somebody who's like, I was just trying to help and that person just like made your life 10 times harder? That is not help. That is destruction. But true help comes from someone who comes into your life and all of a sudden everything gets easier. That is help. That is a friend. That is somebody who's an ally. Let me give you a little frame shift around burning bridges, because people love using that for it's like you don't want to burn bridges. Remember where you came from. You can consider it burning a bridge, but you could also consider it pruning a tree. In order for the tree to grow, you only have certain amount of sunlight, water and minerals in the soil. The healthiest thing for the tree is to prune it, cut the branch off. And that may seem uncomfortable for many of you, but again, there's the hard thing and the easy thing. And if you're making the decision you already know the right thing is probably the hard one. So if you encounter somebody that's not aligned with the vision of your life and it used to be your old life, they want to go to clubs every night, they want to drink on Sundays, do the bar crawls. And now it's coming in conflict. They're losing a friend, so they want to keep you there. And that's okay. Like, don't hate them for wanting that. It's just that it no longer aligns anymore. I think there's really two directions for these types of friendships. Number one is that if you decrease the frequency of communication with someone over time, you get fewer and fewer invites. And then it Kind of fizzles. That's how most friendships or loose acquaintances end. The very hand select few of times where you have family or like super close homies, whatever you want to call it. I have one framework for having really hard conversations, which I stole from Layla. Keep the other person as a human being at the forefront of the conversation rather than being right. If I remind myself every time I go into hard conversations that way, it's amazing how much better of a conversation I have and accepting responsibility for the fact that like, hey, I've changed and that's not on you, that's on me. If it means that we're not hanging out as much anymore again, it doesn't mean that you have me as an enemy comma, and that's okay. I think that you can have friends who aren't necessarily pursuing greatness as long as they're helping you pursue yours. That's the bridge, in my opinion. I like to be inspired by the people that I'm around. I want to admire something in every friend that I have. I have a very close friend of mine who is an FBI agent. Every time I talk to him, he's got like new stories of things that he's doing. And for me, the benefit I get from the relationship is that it gives me an escape from the day to day business stuff that I'm dealing with. He benefits in no way from the status from the followers because he has no way to financially benefit. He's an FBI agent. But what we both mutually appreciate about one another is that we've both been committed to being excellent at our craft. I just want people who are as passionate about their art as I am, who root for me to make the best painting possible. That's what I'm really going for. At the end of the day, it's just like, does this person make me better? If they don't, then why are you here?