← The Game with Alex Hormozi
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- [00:00]
A
And so I think what a lot of people need to do is figure out the games they need to play in the meantime. And so experts at things don't really have more impulse control. I think it's a fallacy. They figure out more ways to win in the meantime.
- [00:14]
B
So grateful and honored for you to join me today because we spent so much time together. So it's only right that we actually sit across from each other face to.
- [00:21]
A
Face, just for the audience sake. How. How have we spent time together, Danny?
- [00:29]
B
Dude, so many podcasts, so many YouTube videos, like, a disgusting amount. Like, I'm like, are you kidding? Like, I've spent so much time with you because you're such an incredible communicator, because you are able to. To have 10 years of knowledge into three. A three second clip. I'm just like, what is going on? And so I'm learning so much about business, about communication, about life, all from you. So thank you so much for being you. And, and that's why we spend so much time together, because I continually get value from the things you say.
- [01:04]
A
Well, I will do my very best to continue that trend, even though that is big shoes to, to fill.
- [01:09]
B
Well, I mean, it was so funny because one guy, I remember just not being able to talk to one guy because he's like, oh, Alex Horosi. I. I don't get any value from him. I'm like, all right, well, we're just not going to be friends. So that's. Yeah, that's. But this interview is about you, not my spending time with you. And that is. I would love to start with a psychology assignment you had at 19 years old when you had to pick someone who had a psychological disorder and tell the story of how they went down that path. Will you tell that story, please?
- [01:43]
A
Yeah, sure. So I, like many young men, had lots of angst and felt like the world was not fair and that I had not gotten what I, quote, deserved, and that I thought that my parents could have done a, quote, better job of parenting me in general. And I resented them for that. And so I had an Intro to Psychology course, and the assignment was, as you said, pick somebody who had any pathology that we had, you know, studied over the whole semester and then write the story from their perspective of how that pathology might have developed. Right. And what happened through. Through the course of going through that assignment was not what I expected because as I went through it and I picked my mother, and she's, you know, she's been public about suffering from, you know, depression and Add and things like that, that I picked that. And in kind of inhabiting her shoes as an immigrant who came here not speaking the language and having a Serbian father who is very authoritative, rightfully so. We're talking 1950s, you know what I mean? Just different. Different times. And what her upbringing must have been like. And having a split life between being an American at school and getting beat up for not being able to speak, because back then it was almost expected and. And normalized to beat up the foreigners to then being the first person to first female class at Hopkins to be in that as a doctor. And so thinking about that trajectory, I all of a sudden realized the amount of pressures that she had put on externally that other people had put on her externally throughout her whole life. And what happened was I felt like I understood. And Blaise Pascal, who's, you know, Pascal's triangle, some people remember him, he was a mathematician and also a theologian. He had this quote that I love, which is, to understand is to forgive. And I believe that you cannot both hate someone and understand them at the same time. And so, like, if I am very angry with someone, it's become a check for me where I'm like, oh, I must not understand something. Like, there's something about them or something about their experience that has made me not understand why they do what they do. And then you have the secondary statement of most people. If you were born with the same genetics and live the same life as that person, you would see the world the same way as they do. And so carried within that is this very jarring idea that what if our viewpoint of the world is something that someone else hates entirely, and in their mind we are wrong, but in their mind, like, hard to even really get into that and, like, empathize with someone else's point of view to that degree. But me going through that process has actually been one that I've repeated multiple times in my life. When I was extremely angry with someone, it's usually around loyalty or betrayals or things like that that happen to all humans. But when I started writing narratives around how someone experienced life that would make it reasonable that they would act or behave or believe what they believe, all of a sudden, I felt like I understood. And so in a matter of a few weeks, what felt like a decade of hate and anger directed towards my mother, I went back from school to complete the story. And I remember she picked a fight about something. I can't remember what it was. And she, you know, we had. You have your normal routine of getting into A fight with someone. Right. And I just remember having no, like emotional. I had no adrenaline spike and I just felt very like. It felt like she had hit a button, but the button wasn't hitting the normal trigger path that it was supposed to. And so I just remember looking at her and being like, I understand and I'm sorry. And she, of course, you know, burst out into tears and it was, you know, you know, a huge emotional moment. But like at the end of the day it was like, I, I get it. Like you went through a lot and I'm sorry that you've had to deal with these demons and it wasn't about me. And I think it's a lot of us, we have these self centered viewpoint because we are the center of our own universes and therefore expect that everything that has ever happened is because of us. When we're children, we just expect our parents got divorced. It must be my fault because you think that way. It's at a base level. And so realizing that it wasn't my fault necessarily that she felt that way and I guess in some way giving her permission to just be who she was and not constantly tell her why she shouldn't be this way or why basically her basic existence was insulting to me. Unpacking that made for a less contentious relationship because then the triggers were somewhat removed. Because if you understand why someone doesn't speak English and they keep looking at you and making noises at you, it's hard to get upset because, you know, they don't speak the language. And so even you can just replace like speaking English with speaking Alex and it works the same way. So that's, that's how that little Intro to Psychology assignment both changed my life with my mother, but then also helped me unpack anger driven situations that I had with other close people throughout the rest of my life.
- [07:04]
B
It's really interesting that your normal reaction to her wasn't the same and thus her reaction was different to you breaking down. Because it almost reminds me of how Layla, your wife, sometimes acts when you get angry. She meets it with love. And then you're like, oh, I see what this is. Which is very fascinating to speak to human beings in our nature of when we meet fear with love in some respect, like the fear dissipates. So cool to like make that realization.
- [07:38]
A
I think it's just very hard to step out of the emotion in the moment.
- [07:42]
B
Yeah.
- [07:42]
A
And sidestep it and try and get outside or above whatever analogy you want to try and say, like, okay, what do I not Understand? And then it becomes a question to solve rather than a person to attack.
- [07:53]
B
Hmm. Have you, do you have any other examples, frameworks, mental models that help you do that in a quicker way?
- [08:05]
A
I mean with, with something that's like super deep, like anger, stuff like that? I mean that was years and years. Like I think it takes more, more work to do that. But in terms of frames around decreasing the stakes of a situation, I have lots of them. So like for example, one of them is, you know, if you zoom out far enough you realize that you can't even see the earth. And so when I'm really upset about like Wi fi or something, I'm like okay, maybe this isn't as big of a deal, you know, and if you, if you go back, you know, let's go back 20 years, like what thing really bothered me 20 years ago? I probably can't even tell you what really bothered me 20 years ago. And so I can probably expect that what's bothering me today, I'll feel the same way 20 years from now. And so if it's not going to matter then it probably shouldn't matter now. And a different frame would be like okay, well look at the ancient X ends. And when I say that I mean like the Romans, the Babylonians, the Sumerians and in 5,000 years we will be the ancient Americans. Um, and we'll look back on this and we probably won't remember maybe even just the leaders names, let alone the day to day strikes that we deal with. And again if it's not going to matter then, then it's not going to matter now or shouldn't matter now. Another one is the frame of the veteran, which I like a lot, which I got from Dr. Kashi, which is imagine whatever this bad circumstance is happening once a day, mult once an hour, every day for the next year. Okay, so that's, you know, let's say it's 12 times a day, times 365 a lot of times. Right. Well how would you feel on the 2000th time of that happening? Well by that point if you really thought about it, you'd be like, well this is probably, you'd probably just be like well this is just how this is, this is how life is. And then you wouldn't be upset by it because you just adjusted your expectations. Which meant if I could change my expectations on my 2000th time of my mates putting the spoons in the wrong drawer, then I can readjust and I say that it's somewhat tongue in Cheek. But you can replace that with whatever, you know what I mean? With somebody double parking you, with your boss being short with you. Like if your boss was always short with you once an hour, every hour of every day in a year, it wouldn't upset you because you would expect that. And so a lot of the, like, the angst that we experience, the anxiety, the sadness, the anger, whatever it is, it comes from the fact that our expectations are unmet. And so either we can demand that an uncaring universe changes to meet us, or we can change our expectations. And I think that if it's you versus the universe, unlike what most of the Americana propaganda will put out, the universe will win. And so I think that that is one where you surrender to reality through acceptance. And you say like this is period and it's not good or bad, which is probably, probably the sixth frame, which is that we have this situation, let's say the spoons one, because it's ridiculous, right? Where I say I have this problem, right? And so one of my favorite ways to solve a problem is to stop defining it as a problem to begin with. And so it's the least effortful way to actually solve stuff. It's like, is this really a problem? What if this was good? And here's a weird one, is that most short term problems are actually long term benefits. So think about this. It's like you've probably heard the story of the man and the boy and the horse. So you know, kid gets a horse, everyone says this is amazing. Kid falls off the horse, people are like, oh, that's terrible because he broke his foot. And then army comes to recruit, but he can't go to the war because his foot was broken. People said that was amazing. And so like, you keep going through this cycle and that it's only within the time period that you measure. But over a long period of time, we don't know whether the thing was, quote, good or bad. And if we don't know if something's going to be good or bad, then why even bother ascribing a label to it? Because the only thing we actually know is that it happened. And so I see it a lot like the weather where you say, like people will ascribe a situation like sunny days or rainy days. And they say sunny days like they're good days and rainy days like they're bad days. But if you're in a drought, rainy day comes from heaven and another sunny day comes from hell. And on the flip side, if you have a wedding, the Next day, a rainy day sounds horrible, and a sunny day sounds amazing. And the crazy thing is that there's two people praying for the same thing at the same time. One's going to be upset and the other person isn't. And I remember when early, you know, dealings with Christianity and I was thinking about just having a God. I remember praying for good weather because I had some outdoor event. And then I thought to myself, man, there's a farmer who's really praying for rain right now. And I was like, shit, maybe this is flawed. Not to say that praying in general is flawed, but just that construct of this, it being my way is therefore good. And I think getting used to not getting my way, comma, and saying that that's okay has been one of the big psychological hacks that I've had in my life that have decreased my anxiety levels and my anger levels around responding to stimuli that I wouldn't, at the onset say was what I wanted, because I might not know. And maybe today's rainy day is tomorrow's sunny day. And maybe sun is neither good nor bad. It just is.
- [13:11]
B
It's beautiful. It. What I love so much about what you talk about is like, there's a surrender there to the moment, whatever it is, but that doesn't negate hard work either. And. And a huge part of who you are and what you present is like, you just need to do more reps for the thing. So it's like, maybe you want it to be your way. Just do more of the thing. And so, I mean, I think the best example to me that really hit it home was with the. The flyers on the cars. So could you tell that story for people who might not know?
- [13:43]
A
Yeah. So I had a mentor way back when, when I was starting my gyms, and he was like, yeah, we do flyers. That's how we get customers. I was like, okay, so I'll do some of those. You say, you should try that. So, you know, print out 300 flyers. And, you know, advertising was expensive, and I was broke, and so 300 was. Was the appropriate amount of advertising that I could stomach. And so we put out 300 flyers, and I waited. And then the next day I got a call. I was really excited. And as soon as I pick up the phone, I was like, oh, hey. It's like, I got one of your flyers. I was so excited. And he says, yeah, you dinged my Mercedes. And I just immediately panicked and hung up the phone. I didn't even say. Thankfully, he never called back, but that was the Only call I got from my 300 flyers. And so I called the. The mentor back and I was like, hey, you. You told me to do, you know, think, you know, a decade plus ago and way more entitlement. I was like, hey, you told me this was gonna work, right? And. And I'm. And. And he didn't even respond to that. He was like, well, how many. How many did you put out for your test size? And I was like, what do you mean by test size? He's like, well, what was the first batch that you tested on so that you could then scale it? And I was like, well, I mean, I put out 300 in total. And he just started laughing. And I was like, why? I'm like, I'm having this very serious moment. You know what I mean? I was like, what are you laughing at? He's like, hard to know if anything works with 300. He's like, well, we test with 5,000. He's like, and then if we get a half a percent back, he's like, then we're okay, 1%. I'm scaling to the moon. One and a half. He's like, I'm singing. Singing praises. He's like, if you had a half percent on that, he's like, you'd get one and a half people. He's like, and that's tough to see with 300. Can't really know if anything's working. And I remember thinking that moment, like, I might have been doing the right thing, but I was not doing nearly enough of it. And I think that there's a lot of early. And like, I think that story can apply to a lot of things, to early entrepreneurship. It's like we can get disheartened by our first month of making content that we haven't made money yet from it. But it's like, not that you're doing the wrong thing, you just might not have been doing it either long enough or enough of it, which time is really just also a proxy for doing enough of it. And so I. And I think what a lot of people don't get, myself included when I was earlier starting, is people don't get the amount of volume that it takes to be successful. Right. Like, I actually, I'll tell you, I had a different conversation the other day, so good friend of mine, very successful and. And like, to the. To the B level successful. Right. And so he's. He had a conversation with me. He's trying. He's wanted to start building a personal brand just cause he wants to give Back. And he was like, dude, why? He's like, your stuff just crushes compared to mine. Like, what am I doing wrong here? And I gave him a couple tips. And then he was like, well, how much content are you guys putting out a week? And I was like, I think we're at like 350 pieces a week. And he just, like, he looked at me and he was like, thank you for resetting my minimum standard. And because he's an experienced entrepreneur, and so he could immediately translate that into what he needed to hear, because he was like, me with my one a day. He's like, I think it's significantly less reasonable that I expect to have your outcome with 1/30 of the level of volume that you're putting out. But here's the context. Is that back to that flyer story. He was saying 5000, and then he said he would go to 5000 per day after that. Meaning that in 30 days, he put out 150,000 flyers. In that same 30 days, I put out 300. Right? So I was doing 15 times. Whatever. 5 times 1 1500th divided by 1 4. 500th of the level of effort that he was. And so a lot of times people think in doubles and triples when it's the level of effort. But just like the example I gave with the guy who's successful already, it wasn't him doing twice the work. He needed to do, like 30 times the work to get that level of outcome. And I will tell you this, is that across super successful people, independent of how they advertise. And this is just specific to advertising, but it works with product iteration. It works with editing for videos. Two editors. I can imagine I'm looking at my own chief of brand behind me. If you have two editors and you say, hey, how much time did you put into this video? The new guy says, oh, I put a ton of time into this video. I put like two hours into this. And the experience editor laughs. And he's like, so that was the first round of edits that you did. And they were like, no, that was like the whole thing. He's like, well, hard to edit anything in two hours, right? In terms of, like, if you had a video, right? And so the huge discrepancy between someone coming in who's new and someone who's experienced in terms of how much work they expect to do to get an outcome is the difference between mediocre and. And world class. And, like, the context here. And I'll give you, I'm going To keep giving examples because I think it'll maybe drive it home. But like my book, the book that's coming out, I put 2,000 hours personally into that book. So six hours a day for almost two years. Every first six hours of every day was writing and rewriting and rewriting. I wrote 19 drafts of the book before it will now come out, right? And people see the last book and that book sells 25,000 copies a month with word of mouth alone. There's no paid ads. It just. And it grows more every month, meaning people who buy the book, read the book, tell more than one person about the book, and it keeps growing. And so I have a bunch of other friends who are business people who are like, oh, I'll go write a book. And I, they'll text me and they're like, dude, I'm already halfway through. Started two weeks ago. I don't, I don't even need to know. I can tell you right now, the book's not going to be good because like nothing exceptional takes little time. Like great, great work takes great struggle. Because if it were easy, then it means it's low hanging fruit. And if it's low hanging fruit, other people have already done it. And it's the high fruit that take the ladder, that take the climbing, that take getting cut by thistles and leaves and whatever, that's still there for the picking. And the thing is that most of the big wins in life come from the hard to attain fruit. And the key to most of those treasure chests is actually right in front of most people. It's just that there's just a time clock on the treasure chest, the key sitting on top of it, it says wait five years and then you can unlock. It's in plain sight. It's not a secret. It's just the thing that makes it hard is not the complexity, is the consistency.
- [20:02]
B
How do you know when something like the book is, is ready to go? After 19 drafts, why not 20? Why not 27? Why not 127?
- [20:12]
A
Because at that point there's was nothing else that I could think of that I could do to improve it. So most people will ship something and be like, well, because all like, I'll give you the editing example. So someone says this video, I just edited it and I say, cool, if I give you two more hours, what would you do? They'd be like, well, I'd probably do this better. I'd probably do this better. Probably do this better. I'd be like, okay, do that. Come back, come back in Two hours. Be like, okay, if I give you two more hours, what would you do? Well, I would probably do this, this, and this. Okay, cool. Come back. Now, here's the trick one. If I give you 20 hours, what would you do? Well, I would probably restructure the story entirely to make it really flow. Not just like the surface level edits, but I'd really structure, like, really just rearrange the entire thing to make it, like, way better. Okay, do that. And then that clip gets a million views. And so it's like, there's. Sure, there's duct tape and there's lipstick that you can put on stuff, but, like, why go from version 18 to version 19, right? Because probably version 18, given the audience I've had, would probably still be a bestseller, right? But in my opinion, the difference between great and world class is so much more effort on the front end, but so much more output on the back end. Meaning I could spend half as much time on this book, right? And I'd probably sell close to the amount of books that I'll probably sell, like, from the event and all that stuff. Like, people will buy it, right? But it's the second wave that won't happen. It's. People will say this book was good, but they won't be. They won't. It won't blow their minds, right? Because it'll have just been, like, enough stuff that wasn't totally broken down all the way. The hard work of digesting a concept that takes four days to break down one paragraph. Like, my team laughed about this. Actually, my CEO of Jim launch, I sent him. There's one page in the book that's special. I'll just leave it at that. All right? And I sent him a draft of that page, and I read it to him out loud and offhandedly. I was like, yeah, I spent the last 20 hours on this. Over the last two days on this one page. And he didn't say anything about it, but he then made a clip about that because to me, that's how long it took me to write every page. If you do the Math, I spent 10 hours basically on every single page in the book. And so for him, he was like, thank you for resetting my minimum standard. And so a lot of times, I think if you looked at the book and what it'll probably do afterwards, it seems significantly. Michelangelo used to say, my buddy Michelangelos, he said, if people saw how much work I put into my art, they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is. And so A lot of the exceptionalism is that people see the output, not the input. And so people said, if I said, hey, I spent 2,000 hours on this book, maybe it's not that exceptional when you think about it like that. Right? But it is exceptional compared to people who put 50 or 100. And so if I put 20 times the work into a book and it becomes three times better than other books, my output to input ratio on the front end is way worse than theirs. But I would rather spend two years building an exceptional product and then let all the customers of that book spend the rest of their lives promoting it for me, then spend two months making a decent book and then have to spend the rest of my life promoting it because no one else wants to do it for me. Real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this, and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the word so we can help more entrepreneurs make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I asked you to do is you can just leave review. It'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world or someone else.
- [24:16]
B
Yeah, it reminds me of how Steve Jobs thought of the iPhone. You're thinking about the same thing for writing a book, which to me is a revolutionary concept, but makes sense. Another thing that I love about what you discuss is, like, how your own bar for excellence continues to rise year over year. How what you would have accepted as great work a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, was much lower. And that gave me some peace for some reason. Could you talk a little bit about that?
- [24:45]
A
The more you do, the more you realize you can do. And so it's like you prove to yourself in some way you get a positive reinforcement loop that, like, if I spend an extra 50% longer on this, I get even more positive feedback. And so in some ways, you could say that I've just become addicted to that loop, which is that the more obsessive I become about anything, the more positive feedback I get on a longer time horizon. And that's the part that most people struggle with, which is like, think about this for a second. I spent two years writing and editing this book. Years. And it could also flop. It could you never know. It could flop.
- [25:27]
B
No, I'm going to be tweeting it every second.
- [25:28]
A
It won't flop, but it could flop. But most. And I think this is like, this is a muscle, it's a skill, right, that you develop over time. And so I don't. If you had asked me 10 years ago, there is no way. And I, and I mean, this, this isn't me, like trying to, trying to posture on this. Like, there is no way, and I can say this confidently that I would wait for two years for anything. I wouldn't have waited two years for anything. Just I couldn't do it. There's no way I could do it. And so you know the marshmallow test that people talk about with the kid, One marshmallow, two marshmallows. Right. Well, what's interesting about that is that I would love like a third test of this and maybe somebody can send it to me if they've, if they've done this. But, but it's. How long can you make the kid wait for the marshmallow? Because we have a binary of, okay, wait 15 minutes or wait 30 minutes. And if they eat the marshmallow in the 30, they're not long term thinkers. And if. Or they have some level of impulse control, and if they wait 30 minutes, they get, they get the second marshmallow. But what if you said you have to wait a day? Hey, guys, real quick. This podcast only grows from word of mouth, quite literally. There's no other way to grow podcasts than word of mouth. If there's some element of this that you think somebody else should hear or, or would be relevant to them, it would mean the world to me. If you shared this via text, via Instagram, via dm, via whatever way you like to share stuff with people you love. Thank you. To get the second marshmallow. What if they said you would have to wait a month to get the second marshmallow? How many kids wait now and it's certain at some point the kid starves to death? So like the, the analogy breaks, right? Or it's no, you know, they'll eat their foot off. But the idea. But like, you can still take the concept and apply it, which is. I can, I can almost guarantee that the kid that can wait a month to get the second marshmallow will win no matter what, whatever he does. And it's because the amount of input that they're willing to do before getting a result far exceeds everyone else's.
- [27:23]
B
You said before that, you know, you couldn't it would be impossible for you to wait two years for anything 10 years ago. That implies that you were able to increase the amount of time that it you were. You became more of a long term thinker over time. How can somebody listening to this become more of a long term thinker intentionally?
- [27:43]
A
You have to figure out what to do in the meantime. Like patience isn't actually active. And this is a big finding for me was that people are like, be patient. It's a terrible directive because no one knows what to do when you say be patient. Right now I'm being patient for every other thing in my entire life except for this podcast because time is elapsing and other things are going in progress. I have long term, 10 year goals that right now I'm being patient for by being on this podcast with you. And so I think what a lot of people need to do is figure out the games they need to play in the meantime. And so experts at things don't really have more impulse control. I think it's a fallacy. They figure out more ways to win in the meantime. So if you've been on a treadmill and and you see 30 minutes, right? And then you, and then you're like, you get five minutes in and you're like, okay, only five more five minute chunks, right? That is in a nutshell, what an expert does when they approach a project. They don't try and think, I'm going to run 26 miles, right? If they're running the marathon, they say, how do I break this into a chunk that I can manage, right? And then what they do is they create more ways to win. And so in those two years, it wasn't like I just sat and suffered for two years and then the book's gonna come out, right? I was, I would have many, many victories along the way that would happen. Oh, we just destructed this whole, this chapter. I just rewrote it again and it's killer. Or I just got this beautiful visual that just completely explains this thing with three, three shapes. And it just, you know, it explains the whole concept, right? And so you get these little mini reinforcers and then you have the long loop of reinforcement that is for me that I have now learned over and over again is that the longer, the more time I put into something, not necessarily longer, but the more time I put into something, the fact that time elapses is secondary. The more time I put into something, the better it is. And what happens too is when you're working on projects, you're Working on anything is that if you work on it over a longer period of time, you have more time for creative solutions to come to you to the problems that you're thinking through. Like, the best launch I ever did in my life so far was actually of Prestige Labs, my sophomore company. And it was because we actually planned it for a year. Other companies and other projects. I, because I was impatient, was like, let's do this in 12 weeks, right? And I hear, I know I can quote the contrepreneurs, you got to break shit and move. You got to, you know, I mean, I do all that. But you know what worked really well? When we had thought through every contingency and every scenario and we were completely staffed up, and we had done a beta test, and we had done a five times bigger beta test, and we had ran processing through, we made sure payouts were on time. We made, we made sure we had inventory tracking that was automated. We made sure that we had the right ratio between customer service people and the number of tickets that were going to get bought. We knew we had supply chain lined up so that we could ramp up at a 10x or 20x month over month type of scaling because we were going to thousands of locations, right? Like, that doesn't happen in a week. And so like, great, great triumph takes great sacrifice just is what it like. There's a quote in B.F. skinner, who's a behavioral psychologist, and he starts one of his books. He says, many variables exist and therefore many variables must be studied. And it's just about the context of human behavior. And so a lot of people want to make these idioms or these truisms that are like one plus one equals two. He's like, but human behavior has a lot of variables, and so everyone wants to have the shortcut. And he just was like, many variables must be studied. It just like, you can't shortcut the work. The work has to be done. And so I think kind of like that level of acceptance to go full circle with what we were talking about earlier is like, we have this expectation that we want this amazing big outcome, and we aren't willing to put in the level of work required to make that outcome. And so interesting, like, corollary around this is like, if you want to double, like if you want a double output outcome, you might have to work five times harder. And if you want like a triple output, you might have to work 10 times harder. And you're like, wait, there's, there's an inefficiency there. And it's like, the answer is yes, but there's also an asymptote on the other side. So let me give you an example. So if I said Olympic sprinting, right, these guys trained for four years to shave a tenth of a second off their runtime. And let's say one guy works twice as hard as everybody else, and he just gets one tenth of a second faster than the second place guy, right? So he wins the gold, the other guy wins the silver. What is the material difference between first and second? Everything. Everything. And so even though the results, there's a diminishing return of the results that you get from the input that you put in in terms of work, there's an outsized return on each diminishing increment of improvement. Because teaching a high school kid how to run with good form, they probably, in one training session will make more improvements on their running than an Olympic caliber runner will make in the last four years of their running. But which one matters more? The last four years, right? And so I see the same thing there. It's like, if I want to create or write one of the best business books of all time that people will put into the canon, which is my ultimate goal, like, my team knows that. It's like, when people make the list of, like, these are the five books you have to read. I want all of them to be books that I've. That I've written. Not because it's a me thing, but just because I want that to be the level of quality that, that we put out. Right? And in order for that to happen, I might have to run for four years every single day to get this much better. But so that the first book, not the third book that someone says is the book that I wrote, that makes sense.
- [33:16]
B
Yeah, it does. What have you learned about yourself from writing this most recent book?
- [33:23]
A
The work needs doing. It's just like, there's no way around it. Like, it just has to be confronted. And I think it just, like it just comes down to that, is you just have to confront the work. And a lot of people put a lot of extra things between them and the work that they try and romanticize, they try and create superstitions around it. They have all these fancy rain dances that they do. But, like, at the end of the day, the work doesn't care who you are. It just cares that it gets done. And I think in some way that's one of the great equalizers about product, is that, like, in a lot of ways, and this will probably be triggering to some people. But, like, it doesn't matter who you are. Like, in a fitness example, 500 pounds is 500 pounds. It doesn't care who you are. Like, anyone like Arthur can pull the sword from the stone if you're strong enough. Right? And so, like, there's a level of work that has to get put in to learn how to run ads. Level of work that has to get put in to learn how to. To do cold calls. A level of work that has to get put in to learn how to be patient when someone's angry with you. Right. Or how to run a team or how to stick your projects in asana or whatever it is. Right. And it doesn't matter whether you're old, you're young, you're male, you're female, you're black, white, Asian, whatever. Right, Right. It just needs doing. And I think that a lot of people waste a lot of time not starting. And so I've told this analogy before. We've probably heard it. But I'll say for your audience, there's a study, there's probably a lot of studies been done with this, but you can become proficient in any skill in about 20 hours. So playing the piano, you know, riding a bike, whatever. 20 hours of concentrated effort gets you proficient. It's the largest gain in Skill improvement is 20 hours of concentrated effort. The problem is, is that people will wait a decade to start their first hour. And so you'd be amazed at how much progress you can make if you cut down the time between when you acknowledge the work and when you start doing the work. And I think that over time in my career, what has happened is just that my. My delay between when I realize I need to do something and when I start doing it has just shrunk so that I can get to the gain and proficiency that much faster. And then if you think about that over 10 years, right, where one guy goes nothing and then he starts, another guy does 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 Hours and 20 hours and 20 hours. By the end of that decade, they're not even recognizable. They're not even the same. They're not even the same stratosphere.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah. When you think about a good writer or a great writer, an unstoppable writer, what comes to mind and what separates the amazing writers versus everyone else other than the work? Saying the work people do thousand put 2000 hours into a book. What makes for an unstoppable, incredible writer?
- [36:09]
A
I don't think there is something else I'll qualify this which is that the work needs feedback. So you gain proficiency with expert eyes giving you feedback on the work you do. Because if I, I'll give you the content example. If I post a short every day for, for 10 years and I don't change what I'm doing and I just post the same thing, I might not make any progress. And I know people who've been doing, who've done made content for 10 years and they have the same size following, right? Because they don't learn, they don't improve. Like, I'm going to rewind real quick on this is that the work is required for you, not for the output. Somebody who naturally gets it on the first try, who really just understands it. And this is an easy example. If Mr. Beast's account got canceled tomorrow he can start another one and get it to millions and millions of dollars because he has the skill. And so it's not that the output requires him to go work for five years in order to build the following. His skill required him to work for five years to get the skill, but then the output does the work after that. And so like the, the time delay that people talk about, like myself included when I'm trying, like, this is where nuance of advice comes in, right? Where it's like I tell people, hey, I want you to do 100 reps every day. I don't want you to do the same hundred reps every day. I want you to get better with all the reps. And if you haven't looked at the end of the day and said, what could I do better? How could I improve? And if you don't have somebody on the outside eyes being like, hey, you stumbled here on this call, or hey, when they said this, let's drill this, let's, let's do this a couple times, that's how you get better, right? So you have to be willing to do the work and get the feedback to improve. Like, the work works on you more than you work on it. And I think that's the piece that people miss. Like my prescription, like, of doctor Money of working is for the, for the person's skills. Not because I care about the fact that you made 10,000 phone calls. I care about the fact that you got better 10,000 times.
- [38:08]
B
How many sales calls do you think you've been on in your life?
- [38:10]
A
I've closed over 4,000.
- [38:12]
B
Oh my God. So what? At what close rate?
- [38:16]
A
Well, mine were in person before the days of the telephone. Not really. Like I was I all myself, almost all my cells were in person, but from a, from a volume perspective, do.
- [38:25]
B
You think that that is a major contributor for why you are such a good communicator? An incredible communicator, I would say.
- [38:35]
A
I think it's part of it, things part of it. But you know, it's funny, A friend of mine saw some of my old Jim Lodge content and they were like, dude, have you, like, taken speech lessons? They're like, I saw an interview with you, like in your garage and you were like, yeah, I mean, I don't know, just do shit, make money and go away if you don't want to work, whatever. And, and so, and so. And at that point, I'd already closed 4,000 sales. Right. But I'll give you something that will probably just, you know, discourage some people. I don't think that the sales skill that I had necessarily translated into the content skill. I had to get 4000 reps here. And so when I say that we make 350 pieces of content every week, I have a lot of reps. And here's the beautiful part about content, in my opinion, is that you get such fast feedback cycles, you can immediately see what happens and what worked and what didn't, right? And then you can learn, you can get better. And not to get in the nuances of like, don't be an algorithm chaser and things like that, but at least from a skill perspective, content is one of those games that you can get really good at really quickly. Sales, you have really fast feedback cycles. You know, if the person buys, you can see if they change their body language, whatever, like, oh, I shouldn't say that next time, or ooh, that worked. Like, I'll say that again, right, where the problem actually gets in. In this learning cycle, sometimes you learn the wrong things. Sometimes the person was ready to buy because their friend Sandy preferred them. And then you do something fancy and then she says, yes, and it wasn't because of you, she bought despite you. Right? And so then you get false status. And this is where like, skill acquisition gets really interesting. But overall, I think the reason that I became, quote, more articulate is because I have just committed time to doing this.
- [40:14]
B
Yeah, that, that seems to be a recurring theme.
- [40:17]
A
I have six years of podcasts. Yeah, the first four years that, like, I just looked at a graph. At like yesterday I looked at a graph and the day that we sold gym launch is like the day it's. It's like a straight line because I stopped. So I started taking all the excess attention that I had from Going to the business and taking a portion of that and being like, I'm going to learn this skill. And so it's straight line grew after that, but it was like four years of flat. Ish, nothing. Because realistically I don't think I took any feedback from my podcast. I just consistently made the podcast. So there's an element there where I'm like, I say this and I'm not saying it to preach. I'm saying because I lived it, right? Like I made a podcast for four years and didn't grow. Right. I did like 400 episodes before it actually like started growing. I got the same 2,000 people who listened every month. That's monthly listens, not daily monthly listens of 2,000. Right. And then I was like, I'm going to try and learn this. And then I started trying to learn it and trying to get better.
- [41:22]
B
Yeah. And one of your core skills is being a good learner. I feel as well.
- [41:28]
A
So this is, this, this is a good. I appreciate that. And. But I'm going to segue into this for the audience is that I think there are skills, like, there are meta skills. So meta skills are skills that help you learn skills, right? And so like being a good writer is a meta skill for communication in general. So if I'm a good writer, I'll be good at writing copy, be good at writing emails, I'll be good at writing captions, I'll be good at scripting tweets, I'll be good at making short. Like all of those come from one skill. But it's a meta skill, right? If you're good at reading, it's like, well, then I can absorb a lot of information, so I can then learn how to write copy, I can learn how to make ads, I can learn how to all of those things faster. And so in my opinion, the education system should only be on meta skills so that you become like a, a stem cell for knowledge. Is that how do we get the person so that they can become anything? Right? Like, we don't need to teach 17th century Aztec literature. We should do is teach people how to learn and then let them learn whatever they want to learn. Because people all get interested in something and just. And then when they have the skills, then they can get good at it and then they can make a living doing it.
- [42:33]
B
Okay, $100 million learner. What are some of the chapters here?
- [42:40]
A
Repeat successful actions. Get feedback from people who are further ahead than you. Expand the time horizon that you measure your output on, but shrink the time Horizon that you measure your inputs on. So measure what you do today faster, but measure what happens from what you did today longer. That's it. Like find people ahead of you, figure out what they did. If that's what you want to learn, do the inputs and measure them quickly. Short term, get feedback and then don't. And then wait a long time until you get the outcome that you want. But I would say instead of optimizing for the outcome, I optimize for progress. And so a lot of my team knows this. Is that, like, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a quick story. So when I got into, when I decided to start making content, I hired a, a YouTube agency or whatever because I didn't know anything about any of this stuff, right? Like nothing. It's kind of, it's funny because people are like, ask me to talk about content and like, I didn't do this two years ago. And so anyways, I get on the phone and I said, hey, just so you know, I'm committed to doing this for 10 years. And he was like, what? I was like, yeah. I was like, I will, I will follow the system that you outline for 10 years before I need to see an ROI. He was like, that is the weirdest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. He's like, and, and, and that was the first conversation. It was fine or whatever, right? And I told him after that, I was like, to be clear, I was like, I want to make progress. I want to see that our videos are doing better, you know, month over month over month in general, not this video to the next video, but month over month, I want to see that. Like if I'm putting attention to this, that we're getting better, that's all I want to see. And so six months in, things started really cranking, right? And I think nine months in, I ended up saying, I'm going to bring the whole team in house. And we had an amicable, amicable party, right? And on the last call that I had with him, he said, I just want to share something with you that has changed my life. And I was like, what? He said that first call, he said, I have never had anyone in my entire life, friends, family, mentors, ever talk to me about a 10 year time horizon for anything. He's like, every client I sign up is like, I need to ROI in 90 days or I'm not going to pay you or, or like if this doesn't make me money in a month, like I'm out, right? And he's like, and it completely shifted the way that I have approached my business just seeing how you approached YouTube. And I have been in the business game longer than I've been in the content game. And so some of those lessons have carried over for me. And so I'm like, of course it's going to take a while. I'm competing against, you know, Mr. Beast. And I'm not saying competing against him, he's, he's, he's amazing, right? But like I'm competing against guys. I've been doing it for 10 years. Of course they're better than I am. Why would I expect to beat those guys, right? But I'd like to be better in a month or two than I am now. And as long as I have a path towards that, I'm satisfied and I will continue on that path because if I can draw the line between now and in 20 years from now, then it is a good outcome. And I think that, that being able to draw the line and say, like, I just want to see that I'm getting better. That's all that people, in my opinion, should focus on. Now. If you're not getting better and you're doing the inputs and you're putting the real time into the thing, then it means you need somebody to give you better feedback because you don't, like, if you don't know why you're not not doing better. Like if I say, hey editor, make this video better. And they're like, I don't know what to do, that's when you need someone to say like, here's six things that you can do better. And then they're like, oh, so you need the awareness, you need someone to be able to get to bridge that knowledge gap so that then you can bridge the effort gap.
- [46:13]
B
When was the first time you realized the importance of putting in progress leading to a long term result? I mean, what comes to mind for me initially is the, the gym teacher who took you under his wing with lifting weights. But is, is there something else that comes to mind for you?
- [46:31]
A
I, I, if I, if I gave you an answer, I'd be making it up. I think I've always measured progress, you know, I just want to know I'm getting better.
- [46:38]
B
Yeah, makes sense. Which of your earliest jobs are playing the biggest role in your current day to day?
- [46:50]
A
I mean, realistically, none of them. Like, you know what I mean? Like I, I cherish my time as a blended tender at Smoothie King and you know, as a, as an orthodox Jewish caterer and as a, you know, fur coat brusher in a warehouse. But you know, none of those things realistically taught me any skills. Now I learned through observation to see what some of them were doing. But I would honestly, when I tell stories about even the fur coat dealer, some of those things I actually had to learn business later. And then retroactively looked back at that situation was like, oh, that's what they were doing. Like I didn't even have the context to make the judgment at the time. And like I remember like in the Smoothie King, I was like, we would do the sale tally at the end of the day and it was like 2,000, $3,000 every day. And it never even registered for me. Like it, like I never even thought of it as money. It was just like the number. And there was a certain amount that I had to write that was cash and I put that in the safe. And then a certain amount that I was like credit cards and you put it in you to tally it up with the cup count or whatever at the end of the day. And I, and but like I didn't think about that being a million dollar business or what the revenue run rate was or what the margins were. Like I didn't think about any of that stuff. I was just trying to, I was just trying to like make smoothies. And so I'll do a tiny segue for the audience here is that like I reject the concept of being a born entrepreneur. I think that we get better at things that we are reinforced for doing, period. And the natural born entrepreneurs are just typically people who got reinforced for doing entrepreneurial type behaviors earlier. So like I was a very security driven person for most of my life. So like I just had jobs and then I went to college and then I got a white collar job that had prestige around it. And the most terrifying thing in the entire world for me was quitting that job. It took me six months to quit a job and I was 22 or 23 and I had $50,000 saved up and I was petrified and to this day was still the most afraid I've ever been in my entire life was quitting that job. Which is ridiculous to me now in retrospect, but it was because I'd never been rewarded for that. So it was such a huge change in behavior for me from following the trodden path because I'd been rewarded over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for doing what I was told. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast, Laila and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling Roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got it, you've got recruiting, hr, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30ish pages for each of the stages. Once you enter the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com roadmap R O A D map Roadmap.