← The Game with Alex Hormozi
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I have shed friends every season of my life. My close circle has always been very, very small. Very, very small. Very, very small, very small. I also feel like I grow really quickly because I don't hold on to things long. The moment something doesn't provide me value, I shed it. I think about my life in three to five year seasons. First, I was a high school womanizer for the most part. And then I was also like really deeply angry. I had high school friends that when I left high school, I basically stop contact with them. And then I had my come to Jesus where my dad was like, you suck as a human. You have a terrible reputation. Maybe you should stop being who you are. Cleaned up my act. I stopped drinking nearly as much as I was. I started going to school and studying 12 hours a day. Present the fraternity. And that was my college season and I had college friends. And then when I left college, I pretty much stopped being in contact with anyone that I went to college with. Most people suck at most things and aren't bound for greatness because of who they are and the choices they're willing to make. The stories about friends leaving the hometown and no longer remember where they're from is one that is told by society. Because society is the majority. The majority of people get left behind. If you look at the things that you want to get in life, there's a price for them. You don't buy everything you see in the mall. Why not? Because you don't want to pay the price. Just because you might think that a shirt or jacket is cool. Just because you think an outcome is awesome, you might not be willing to make the trade. Winners and losers have the same goals. The goal doesn't make you unique. It's the willingness to pay the price that makes you unique. I'm like, everyone wants to be rich. One of the reasons that I cut people out sooner than most is because I do not like the labels. They speak over me. One of the big things with identity is the labels that we say about ourselves. I am X, I am impatient. I am angry. I am whatever. Right? I am poor. I don't like saying it. People in your past have the identity that they know you as. And then they will speak and they will beat that label into you because you're not matching their pattern. Why have you changed? You are X, you are Y. And. And you're trying to not be that because you're doing something different than changing. You're growing. But they see it as change. And that's why the best response in the world to someone who says, hey, you've changed, is to say, yeah, you haven't. The amount you like or love someone is directly proportional to what you're willing to give up to maintain the relationship. For example, if there's a piece of shit car, right, and you work on it all the time, you might say, that guy must really love it because of how much time he puts into that thing. This guy must really love his country because he's willing to give his life for it. What are you willing to give in exchange to maintain the relationship? If you're not willing to give up basically anything to maintain their relationship, then how much do you love them? I think it's been a very helpful filter for me to say, not do I love my friends? But which friends do I love the most? Which friends am I willing to sacrifice the most to keep the relationship? And I am a big believer in utility. There is an exchange in every relationship. You get something and they get something back. People don't like the idea that relationships are transactional, but they are transactional. Just has a commercial vibe to it. But if we just think about it as, from a behavior standpoint, you've got two things that can happen. A behavior is reinforced or it is punished. That's it. When you have exchanges, quite literally with people, those exchanges are either reinforced or they're punished. Part of the strength of the relationship is how long you're willing to wait for the next time that relationship is reinforced. If you have a long history of positive experiences with a person, you're willing to wait a longer period of time. If they're going through a breakup, they're having a hard time to keep the relationship going. But at some point, even if you've been friends with somebody for 10 years, if there's just not any positive reinforcement, at some point, you do cut it off. The people who are surrounded with, when we grow up, it's very unlikely, just from a population standpoint, that they're going to be great. Statistically, that they're going to be the top 1% or 0.1% is unlikely. So it would make sense that you change your friends over time. Why do people get so weird about keeping relationships that don't serve them? I think it's just because we have a societal story around it that you're a bad friend. But I could also think of me being as a good friend to my next friend that I just made room for. There's going to be a friend who's going to move in to my spot. On my buddy's calendar, who does want to do fantasy football? Who does want to drink with him on Sunday? So it's not this, like, all right, I'll go to the game with you, but I'm not drinking. Oh, dude, you're not going to. Come on, man. Because the other guy's like, yeah, shots all around and they're going to have a blast. They would better be served with people who want the same things as them. Just because I'm not seeing them anymore doesn't mean that I don't wish them well. But if someone only tells you the stories when you got fucked up and why you did that stupid thing, they're encouraging and retelling the story of who you used used to be. And you want people around you who don't believe the lies you used to tell about yourself. The character trait shift is not a binary. It's how patient are you, how kind are you, how loyal are you, how honest are you? And so you want people who encourage you in the behaviors that you want to be like. And this is why, like, shedding identities is such a core part of entrepreneurship, is that you have to be willing to say, I am no longer this way. I will no longer behave in this way. And I don't accept that reality as truth. Many of the people I had around me a weren't willing to pay the price that I was willing to pay for the things that I wanted, but also wanted me to give them more than I was willing to. And so I'll give you a story that will paint me in a bad light, and that's fine. There was a teacher that I grew up with in high school, and he's the one who stayed with me after school for a year and worked out with me two hours a day. And he taught me how to work out. I got in shape, got more confidence, better at school. From there, that snowballed into me getting into fitness. Huge catalyst snowball. Somebody heard that story and then found the teacher and they linked us. He was like, hey, man, I'm not asking for a lot. I would love to just have like a two hour call with you every week. I was like, two hour call every week. I was like, I don't even talk to my mother that much. I don't talk to anybody that much. Talk to my wife. That's it. The value of the relationship was in the past. You may be like, alex, you're a horrible person. And that's possible. Maybe I am. I was not willing to give two hours a week, 100 hours a year for the rest of my life to pay a debt for somebody who worked out with me. Because we only have so much juju, we only have so much time, we have so much focus, so much energy that we can pour into things. And if you're not putting all your energy in one direction, it's scattered, and then you don't move as fast. My closest friend, I spend one hour a week with every week. My closest friend. Like clockwork. It's my highest priority meeting. It is something that brings me joy, and we get lots of exchange with one another. He's the one who helps me write my books. Dr. Kashi. Dr. Kashi here. I get a lot from that. Now, if I didn't get anything from that over time, slow down the communication between us. I would make it every other week, once a month. If you slow down your communication cadence with someone, how frequently you see them, and when you accept invitations, it naturally fizzles. But if it gets to a point where if someone's, like, so close that it would be obvious and a conversation needs to be had, I encourage you to just have it. You want to be a kind person, and the way you are kind is that you tell the truth and you just be honest. And the easiest way that I can tell you to be honest is, you know, when you talk about somebody behind their back, just say it to them. It's like, yeah, Sandra's been, like, all over the place lately. And she's like, I don't know, drinking a little bit too much. Sandra, you've been all over the place lately. You've been drinking a little bit too much. I'm just not sure if I want to associate with that right now. People just don't have the balls to do that. But if you do that, I promise you, you either have better relationships or you'll be done with this Mickey Mouse bullshit of not even being in a real relationship and not wanting to confront reality. Because you may have a shot at getting them to realize that they're not on the path that they wanted to be on because you were friends with them at some point. And so either your goals have changed or theirs have. If you listen to Kobe's interviews where he talks about his friends, he says very explicitly that he's willing to put everything on the altar for his dream. Now, some people make make the argument that's not, quote, healthy. The question that we're answering here is not how do we do healthy stuff. The question is, how do we become the greatest people will judge you on how you spend time. And their judgments are simply expressions that they would not spend their time the same way you do. Hey, you work a lot. And I could say, hey, you don't to the same degree. It's like you spend so much time with your kids, right? If I say it like that, people like, wait, no, I'm supposed to. It's only the supposed to. That's the thing that gives all the emotional charge to these conversations. Otherwise, it's just observing reality. You can't expect to do the same thing everyone else is doing and then somehow achieve a different outcome. Once you have the vacuum of friends, because you'll probably have weeded people out, then the best thing to do is join communities. And then you'll make friends with people in those communities who have the same goals as you. And then if you crush it because you understand that volume is the answer and time is the ingredient, you're going to rise in that community and you'll gain more status and you'll start hanging out with people who are at the top of that community, and then you can leapfrog into other communities. It's just lunch tables on steroids. I've wanted to live a rare life, and so I will have to be surrounded by rare people. And rare people are, by definition rare. They're not common. My hope is that the people that I meet now are trying to go all the way with me. I want to do epic shit. If I die and don't do epic shit, I will be bummed. How much am I willing to endure or sacrifice in order to maintain that relationship that I have with my dream? If I have many, many friends over different seasons, I'm totally cool with that. Thank you for that season. It was awesome. I don't believe things need to be forever to be good.