Transcript
Alex Hormozi (0:00)
Welcome back to the game. Today is a guest spot on David Perel's podcast, How I Write. And so this is a super deep dive on writing, and I would say probably about 30 to 40% of it's on copywriting. And so the book and the books that I've written, the process, how I think through it. If you write for a living in any way, so you write emails, you write blogs, you write books, you write webinars, you write video sales letters, you write slack messages. If you write words, then you might get value from this. I weirdly am not considered a writer, but it's the thing that I probably enjoy most in the world. And I actually got a full scholarship to college for writing. I decided not to take the scholarship and go to Vanderbilt instead. But writing has been a part of my life for as long as I've had a brain and hands. I don't get to talk about it often, and I think you might find some value from it. Enjoy it.
David Perel (0:54)
Alex Hormozi has written two killer business books that together have sold more than 1 million copies. And all that obsessive writing has gotten him to 9 million followers across social media platforms. And this is the first interview he's ever done. That's all about the writing process. One of the things that super distinguishes you is you just, like, go into Hermosi Cave every morning and you just write, write, write. So tell me about how you do that.
Alex Hormozi (1:24)
I wake up and then I caffeinate, and then I put earplugs and headphones on. I close all the windows, and I really only write on days that I know have at least, like, six hours or more uninterrupted, sometimes eight. Like, I definitely suffer from, like, Zigarnik effect, which is open loop, right? The idea of, like, if you have something later on in the day, like, messes with me a little bit, because I feel like I want to be able to lose myself in the writing and then, like, come up for air whenever I want to come up for air, rather than think, like, I have to be done by this time so that I can prep for this meeting or take this call or do this thing. And so I almost exclusively write on days where I have nothing on my whole calendar. And so I optimize a lot of my calendar around when I'm in a heavy writing season, around not having anything at all on my on.
David Perel (2:17)
And then when you sit down to write and say, it's 6:00am Are you like, I want to write for six hours. These are the things I Want to get done, I'm going to get to do list. How do you think about that?
Alex Hormozi (2:27)
Man, I feel like I'm incredibly unstructured with the writing besides just, like, violent effort, but that's about it. Like, I. I write what I write. I never had writer's block in my life. I usually have a game plan of what I'm going to write. So, like, I would say from a writing process perspective, I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. I think we were talking about that before this started. Like, the table content's the hardest thing that I spend my time on. Once I have that, that's, like, basically the game plan. And so each of the chapters, I tend to have the same structure because I write the way I would like to read. And so I like to have some sort of narrative or story that kind of puts context to what I'm talking about. I also write, obviously, nonfiction, and so this just gives color to that. I give a very short description of what this thing is that I'm going to be talking about. And then usually plentiful examples. And then I will basically put all of my Alex notes, basically, as the end. And I pretty much stuck with that setup for all of the books that I've written. And I think that that setup has just gotten cleaner and clearer between the books because they fundamentally are like my notes brought to life in a book format. But the hardest part for me is usually picking what story I want to tell in each chapter that best embodies whatever the principle is or whatever the core message of the chapter is and what visual framework I can tie to that that melts everything together or, like, ties it all together in a really clear way. That's what I spend, like. And I usually do words first. And I'll then put these highlighted caps marks where I'll say, like, a picture that looks like this. And then I'll move on. So I basically do words first. Then I'll go back through. I'll keep cleaning words, and then I'll put rough doodles in. And then only at the very end will I come in and put the final doodles. Because sometimes, like, my orders change, and I'll put numbers in a doodle that I'll find, move the paragraph around, and, like, I have to redo it. But that's been my. My overall process for writing. But I just. I just write, and I write as much as I can until I can't write anymore. Where I feel like my words per unit of time starts to, like, Drop pretty precipitously.